Autor: Sokolowski, Robert

Buch: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Titel: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Stichwort: Person und Politik; politische Phiilosopie im jüngsten katholischen Denken: eher Angelegenheit d. Theologie (u. Politikwissenschaft) als d. Philosophie

Kurzinhalt: ... but it is interesting to note that all these persons were or are academically "housed" not in philosophy but in departments of politics, or, in the case of Fortin, in theology.

Textausschnitt: [12] THE HUMAN PERSON AND POLITICAL LIFE

179a I wish to discuss the relationship between the human person and political life, with some reference to the way this relationship has been understood by Catholic thinkers. My remarks will be a venture into political philosophy, but it would be appropriate to begin with a few comments about our present historical situation. (Fs)

Political philosophy in recent Catholic thought

179b Political philosophy has been short-changed in Catholic thought in the past century, during the Thomistic revival following the encyclical Aeterni Patris of Pope Leo XIII in 1879. In the departmental structure and the philosophical curricula that prevailed in many Catholic colleges and universities during the first two thirds of the twentieth century, political philosophy would usually be located not in philosophy departments but in political science. In seminary programs, there was effectively no political philosophy whatsoever. The philosophy manuals of the early and middle part of the century covered political philosophy, if they treated it at all, as a division of ethics. In the great manual written by Joseph Gredt, O.S.B., for example, which was entitled Elementa Philosophiae Aristotelico-Thomisticae,1 one finds extensive treatments of logic, epistemology, philosophy of nature, philosophical psychology, metaphysics, theodicy, and ethics, but in the nearly one thousand pages of the two volumes, there are only some twenty pages, at the very end of the second volume, devoted to "civil society," and this brief section terminates with a two-page treatment de hello, on war. This long philosophical work, therefore, does not end peacefully, and it clearly does not offer a solution to the political problem. (Fs)

180a It is true that some of the most important twentieth-century Catholic philosophers devoted much of their work to political philosophy: Jacques Maritain wrote such books as Man and the State, The Person and the Common Good, Things That Are Not Caesar's, Integral Humanism, Freedom in the Modern World (the French title was Du régime temporel et de la liberté), and Scholasticism and Politics (Principes d'une politique humaniste), all of which deal with politics, and Yves R. Simon wrote The Philosophy of Democratic Government, among other titles in political thought, but these two authors were the exception rather than the rule. At Louvain's Higher Institute for Philosophy, for example, there was no representation of political philosophy. Jacques LeClercq wrote in social ethics and social philosophy, but not political thought as such. What was done in political philosophy added up to a relatively small achievement in this field, compared, say, with the work that was done in metaphysics, philosophy of science, ethics, and the philosophy of man. This lack of interest is rather strange, since political life originally provided the context for philosophy, in the life of Socrates and in the writings of both Plato and Aristotle. The lack of concern with political philosophy should provoke our curiosity and perhaps even our wonder. (Fs)

180b Recently, at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, a number of important Catholic thinkers in Paris have addressed issues in political philosophy. Pierre Manent is the most conspicuous of these, but one must also mention Rémi Brague, Alain Besançon, and Terence Marshall. Their work has been influenced by Raymond Aron and Leo Strauss. We should also call to mind the work, in the United States, of Ernest Fortin, A.A. (Boston College), James Schall, SJ. (Georgetown), Francis Canavan, S.J. (Fordham), and Charles N. R. McCoy (Catholic University), but it is interesting to note that all these persons were or are academically "housed" not in philosophy but in departments of politics, or, in the case of Fortin, in theology. There were other thinkers who approached social and political problems, such as John Courtney Murray, S.J., and John A. Ryan in the United States and Denis Fahey and Edward Cahill in Ireland, but again they tended to discuss these issues in terms of Church-State relations and moral theology, and did so in a somewhat more deductive manner than would be appropriate for political philosophy.2 (Fs)

181a I should add that Pope John Paul II, in his philosophical writings on the human person, does address the phenomenon of community in his article "The Person: Subject and Community,"3 and in the last chapter of his book The Acting Person.4 That chapter is entitled "Intersubjectivity by Participation" and is found under the more general heading of "Participation." This general discussion of community, however, does not develop a specifically political philosophy, although it certainly points the way to it. The Holy Father's work in inspiring and promoting the Solidarity movement in Poland, and the great contribution he made in bringing down one of the worst tyrannies in the history of humanity, are further reasons why philosophical and theological reflection on political life should occur in a cultural center dedicated to his name.5 I would also like to commemorate the work of Jude P. Dougherty, who is being honored by this conference, and to note the keen interest he has had in political life and political thought, an interest that has been expressed in his activities and many of his writings. (Fs)

Autor: Sokolowski, Robert

Buch: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Titel: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Stichwort: Person und Politik: Aristoteles; natürliche - politische Gesellschaft (Vernunft, Gründer); Spannung: Arme - Reiche (Demokratie - Oligarchie); Aristokratie, Tyrannei; Republik (politeia), gemischte Herrschaft; Mensch als politisches Wesen

Kurzinhalt: In a republic, a large middle class—middle in both an economic and an ethical sense—is established between the rich and the poor, and the laws and not men rule, and they do so for the benefit of the whole city, not for any particular part.

Textausschnitt: The human person and politics in Aristotle

181b The classical and unsurpassable definition of the person was given by Boethius early in the sixth century: a person is an individual substance of a rational nature. This definition highlights rationality as the specifying feature of persons; a person is an individual being that is endowed with reason.1 According to this definition, there may be persons—divine or angelic—who are not human beings; they too could be individual entities invested with a rational nature, but of course such persons would not enter into politics. Political life requires body and soul as well as personhood. (Fs)

182a Persons, in Boethius's definition, are individual entities that possess reason. It is the power of reason, with all that it implies, that makes us to be persons. Even when we use the word person in a less technical way, simply to highlight the fact that the individual in question is a human being and should be treated as such, we imply that the dignity he has and the respect he deserves follow from his rationality and not his feelings. It is because he is rational, an agent of truth, that he must be "treated as a person and not a thing." (Fs)

182b Now, human reason and hence human personality are exercised in speech, in science and the search for wisdom, in ethical conduct, in friendship, and in religion, and they are also exercised in a distinctive manner in political life. Political societies are communities specifically made up of human persons. If we are to speak about the human person, our discussion would be sorely deficient if we did not treat the domain of human political conduct and if we did not specify how human reason, in thought and in action, is at work in it. (Fs)

182c It is not just that human beings live together; men live together in families and the kind of extended families we could call villages or tribes. Such communities come about by natural inclination and do not need founders. They are not the outcome of deliberation, reasoning, and argument, as political societies are. They do not have to be conceived in thought before they come into being. Political societies need to be established by acts of reason, and people who succeed in this enterprise bring about a great good for others: Aristotle says that "the one who first established [such a community] is the cause of the greatest goods,"2 because founders make possible for man a civilized and virtuous life, a life lived in view of the noble, the good, and the just, a life in which human excellence can be achieved and the worst in man can be controlled: "For man, when perfected, is the best of all animals, but when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all."3 Think of the benefits that millions of people have enjoyed because of the acts of reason hat achieved the founding of the United States of America, most conspicuously, the acts of thinking that took place during the Constitutional Convention in 1787, in the debates during the years that followed, in the ratification of the Constitution by individual states from 1787 to 1789, and at the inauguration of George Washington as the first president in 1789. All these events were exercises of reason, and they in turn followed upon the American Revolution itself, as well as the colonial period that preceded it, when the habits of free political life were established among the people. (Fs)

183a It is an act of reason, and therefore an eminently personal action, to establish a political society. To underline this point, consider the fact that animals also live together, but their association is not the outcome of an exercise of reason on their part. There are no founders in animal societies; Richard Hassing has asked, ironically, "Would Aristotle say that the first founder of chimpanzee society was responsible for the greatest of chimpanzee goods?"4 The question simply does not apply. There are no founders of animal societies. Also, there are no Washington Monuments or Jefferson Monuments in ape or elephant society, because there are among apes and elephants no founders who exercise their reason to establish a society in which reason flourishes. One of the things that reason does when it prospers in a civilization is to acknowledge, by the building of monuments, the founding acts of reason that established the space within which the monuments could be built. This is not to demean ape or chimpanzee or elephant or dolphin society, but to highlight the human difference and the rational character, hence the specifically personal character, of human political association. Political society is established by a determination of the noble, the good, and the just, which is expressed and then desired by reason. (Fs)

183b It is important to note, furthermore, that although political life needs to be established by an act of reasoning, it is not therefore a purely conventional thing. It still remains part of human nature, but of human nature in its teleological understanding, when human life is seen at its best; it is not part of human nature in the genetic, biological sense.5 I doubt that researchers in biology will find a gene that programs for political constitutions or a cluster of neurons that generates them. (Fs)

184a Political life is not only founded by an act of reason; it is also sustained and justified by reason. It is carried on by public discussion, in which reason itself is elevated into a higher kind of life than it can reach in familial and tribal community. In the Politics, Aristotle describes political society as the culmination of human communities. In cities, he says, there are two irreducible parts, the wealthy and the poor, and the shape that political life takes on results from the perennial struggle between these two groups to rule over the whole.6 The tension between the richer and the poorer parts of a society makes up the perpetuum mobile for politics. When the wealthy rule for their own benefit, the city is an oligarchy; when the poor rule for their own benefit, the city is literally a democracy, a rule by the people or the many, since there normally are more poorer than wealthier members of society. Aristotle says that the best outcome for most people in most places at most times, the practically best form of the city generally, is the republic, the politeia, which is intermediate between oligarchy and democracy. In a republic, a large middle class—middle in both an economic and an ethical sense—is established between the rich and the poor, and the laws and not men rule, and they do so for the benefit of the whole city, not for any particular part.7 To live this way is a great human accomplishment. It is a truly exalted exercise of reason for citizens to allow the laws to rule, to have the strength of reason and character to subordinate themselves to the laws, which they allow to rule for the benefit of the whole. Not all people have the civic habits and public vision to let the laws and not their own partisan interests rule over the whole; not all people are immediately capable of being citizens. (Fs)

185a This triad of oligarchy, democracy, and republic is the core of Aristotle's Politics; the entire work pivots around this triangle. I would also make the stronger claim that what Aristotle is describing here is the truth of human political life, and not just his opinion or a description proper to his time and place. He is presenting the "mobilities" of political life, and the various solutions and deviations that are proper to it. What he describes goes on even now, so long as we continue to have a political life. Aristotle is describing politics as a human thing, as a human possibility, not just as a historical fact. If we fail to see this, it is because we ourselves have become incapable of recognizing human nature and have fallen into historical story-telling instead. (Fs) (notabene)

185b Aristotle also discusses monarchy and aristocracy, in which one man or a few virtuous men rule for the good of the whole, and these two forms serve as a kind of norm for what all cities can be.8 Because they admit only a few people to rule, however, they may not be possible once societies become very large (Aristotle admits this limitation),9 but they must be kept in mind as part of how we design and live our politics: when the laws are made to govern, they should rule as virtuous agents would rule. Also, there is an important qualification in his definition of aristocracy. Aristotle says that aristocracy can be defined in two ways. You have an aristocracy, first, when the virtuous rule because of their virtue (the virtuous become the establishment, the politeuma), or second, when whoever is ruling exercises his or their rule for the sake of what is best for the city and its members.10 Because of this second definition of aristocracy, there can be an aristocratic component to every form of constitution, including a republic. (Fs) (notabene)

186a On the margin of all these forms of political life stands tyranny, the catastrophic disaster that is always there lurking as the threat to political life. It is the ever-present sinkhole on the margin of politics. It will always be there; nothing we can do can definitively exclude it as a possibility. In tyranny there is no longer any political life, but only servile subjection to a ruler or rulers who rule for their benefit alone, without any virtuous guidance or purpose. To be ruled tyrannically is incompatible with human nature.11 (Fs)

186b In Aristotle's view, the best kind of political community will be made up of elements from all the good regimes: there will be monarchic, aristocratic, and popular elements in the various parts of the government. This variety will provide a kind of tensile strength for the city. Each type of city has its own proper political virtue: even the deviant regimes, such as the oligarchic and the democratic, try to shape the people in the city to fit the constitution, and for this reason every city is concerned not only with economic matters, public safety, and defense, but also with the virtue of its people.12 This conformity of the upbringing with the constitution will happen as a matter of course in every political society, but all the regimes have to be measured by the standard of the virtuous man, and the more closely the virtue of the city approximates that of the good man, the agent of moral truth, the better the city will be as a human achievement. (Fs) (notabene)

186c And what is common to all cities in which there is a political life—in opposition, for example, to tyranny, where there is none—is the fact that people do argue about who should rule, that is, they argue about what kind of virtue will set the tone for the city. People who claim that they should rule are trying to do more than just get themselves into the public offices; first and foremost they are also trying to establish a certain way of life, one that they embody, in the community that they want to rule. There always are "culture wars" in political life. Oligarchs, for example, want to live according to the principle that if we are different in one respect, that is, in regard to wealth, we are different absolutely and should be treated as such. The "virtue" in oligarchy is measured by the possession of wealth. Democrats, on the other hand, want to live by the principle that if we are equal in one respect, that is, in regard to liberty, we should be considered equal absolutely, and "virtue" for the extreme democrats is the ability to do whatever you wish, the liberty to satisfy any impulse; that is the kind of life they promote.13 When people argue that they should rule, they are exercising their reason; this particular exercise of it is higher than the exercise one finds within the family or the village, where such argument about rule does not take place, just as foundings do not take place. Because it is reason that makes us persons, the people engaged in political life are acting more fully as persons than they are able to do in their families and villages. They strive to project and embody a form of human life; they do not just deal with the necessities of life. (Fs) (notabene)

187a It is also the case that there is no one form of the city that is the best absolutely everywhere. Much depends on the population, the circumstances, the lay of the land, the history of the people, and other things. Aristotle distinguishes four senses of the best in politics: first, the best "as we might pray for it," when all the circumstances are favorable (we may not be able to implement this best form, but we must keep it in mind); second, the best in particular circumstances; third, the best that we can achieve when are faced with a city that is already established; and fourth, the best for most people in most circumstances (effectively, this is the republic).14 Political excellence for Aristotle is therefore flexible, adaptable, and analogous, not univocal. It is the outcome of prudential, not mathematical, reason. (Fs) (notabene)
187b Aristotle's description of political life is not relativized by history. It expresses the political possibilities of human nature, and it is as true now as it always was. Aristotle's Politics formulates the substance, the ousia of political life better than any other work that has ever been written.15 (Fs)

Autor: Sokolowski, Robert

Buch: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Titel: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Stichwort: Person und Politik: Moderne; gemischte Herrschaft auch heute, dennoch: Verwechslung: Republik (politeia, Herrschaft unparteiischer Gesetze) - moderner Staat (Produnkt einer Philosophie; endgültige Lösung politischer Probleme, Höhepunkt d. Geschichte)

Kurzinhalt: To the extent, however, that the word democracy means the modern state, the one described by Hobbes and glorified by Hegel, it presents a great human problem and an ominous threat to the human person.... Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist totalitarian regimes ...

Textausschnitt: The modern situation

188a I wish to claim that in our contemporary exercise of political life, in our practice, we do conform to Aristode's analysis, to the extent that we still have a political life. For example, in the United States the richer and the poorer are clearly appealed to, respectively, by the Republicans and the Democrats, at least as these parties were defined for most of the twentieth century, and the problem is to fashion a republic, with an inclusive middle class. There are monarchic and aristocratic elements in our political life, and there is always the danger of tyranny. The major difficulty in our modern situation, of course, is the scale of society and the technology that makes such a scale possible. How can anyone survey the common good? How can any political form be embodied in tens or hundreds of millions of people? This is the great challenge to political prudence in our time. (Fs) (notabene)

188b But although we conform in practice with Aristotle, the idea we have of political life in our present day is quite different from what we find in his teachings. In our public discussion of political life, we tend to think that there is one form of government that ought to be installed everywhere. We call it democracy, and we are impatient if we find places in which it has not been realized; we call such places undeveloped countries, implying that they are politically either childish or stunted. (Fs) (notabene)

188c When we speak this way, our speech is, I believe, caught up in an ambiguity. I think we confuse two things: the republic and the modern state. The republic is the political form in which laws, not partial, one-sided, self-interested men rule; it is Aristotle's politeia, the constitution that is generally the best that can be attained by most people in most places. The modern state, on the other hand, is something that arose through modern political philosophy. It claims to be something radically new and radically different from earlier forms of government. It is meant to be a definitive solution to the human political problem, not a solution for this time and place. It was initially visualized by Machiavelli and baptized by Jean Bodin with the name sovereignty.1 It was comprehensively described by Hobbes, and worked out and adjusted by subsequent thinkers like Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel.2 (Fs) (notabene)

189a When we speak of democracy, we tend more or less to think that we are speaking of a community in which the laws rule, not men, but usually we are really speaking about a modern state, the one informed by sovereignty, not a society informed by one of the political constitutions described by Aristotle. We also tend to think that the modern state, modern democracy, has arisen as a perfect, culminating development in human history. It is not seen as one of the forms of political life among many, the form that we may be able to achieve if we are lucky and intelligent enough. (Fs) (notabene)

189b Let me express my own value judgment at this point. To the extent that the word democracy means a republic, it presents a good thing, a form of political life to which one can properly dedicate oneself, one that can be in conformity with human nature and human virtue. The political problem is to determine, by practical wisdom, how the rule of laws ordered toward human excellence can be implemented in our day and age, in whatever part of the world we inhabit. To the extent, however, that the word democracy means the modern state, the one described by Hobbes and glorified by Hegel, it presents a great human problem and an ominous threat to the human person. It is a formula for organizing deracinated human beings. (Fs)

189c The modern Hobbesian state was nurtured in absolute monarchies in the early modern period, it showed its face in the French Revolution, and it came into full view in the National Socialist and the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century. In this conference, we commemorate the work of Pope John Paul II, a man who experienced both these horrors, the Nazi and the Stalinist. He reacted to them, in his actions and words, with a courageous defense of the human person in its dignity before God. His defense of the human person, furthermore, is based essentially on truth, on the human person's ability to hear and discover the truth about the world, about himself, and about God. Pope John Paul II reminds us that human beings are individual substances of a rational nature, and that through their reason they can respond to the splendor of truth, even in the face of powers that do their best to extinguish the truth and annihilate the human dignity that flows from it. They truly are powers of darkness, for whom will triumphs over intelligence, power over reason, and choice over life. The problem of the modern state, furthermore, was not resolved by victory in the Second World War and the end of the Cold War. It continues in the development of the therapeutic and managerial state, and much of the human drama in regard to the modern state is going on in this very city and its suburbs. What will we have: a genuine republic or a Leviathan masquerading as a republic? The question is still open, and human success, in the short term at least, is by no means assured, but it is possible. As this struggle continues into the future, it is quite appropriate that there be in this city an embodied presence of John Paul II, shepherd and stubborn reminder of the dignity of man.3 (Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Sokolowski, Robert

Buch: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Titel: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Stichwort: Person und Politik, Unterschied 1 (moderner Staat - Republik): Gebrauch d. Vernunft; Gesellschaftsvertrag: Ergebnis kalkulierender Vernunft

Kurzinhalt: The modern state, in contrast, as described by Hobbes and embodied in totalitarian forms of rule, denies the domain of truth. For it, reason is a tool.... The citizens or subjects are not agents of truth in any way; when they express their opinions ...

Textausschnitt: Contrasts between republics and the modern state

190a Let us speak further about the choice between a republic and Leviathan. I would like to bring out three ways in which these two forms of political life differ. To be more accurate, I should not call them two forms of political life, but the form of political life and the form of mass subjection and individualism. (Fs) (notabene)

190b First of all, in the republic, and in all good political constitutions, reason can be exercised. Men can think and express themselves. The republic is not possible without active human reason. Such reason is exercised in the founding of the city, in the deliberations that go on to determine courses of action, and in specifying the laws of the city and adjudicating the application of the laws. All those who are citizens are able to enter into such exercises of reason; that is what it means to be a citizen, to be able to enter into political reasoning. But besides these political or prudential exercises of reason, there is also in the republic the recognition of the power of theoretical reason, of understanding for its own sake. Besides the ethical and political life of reason, there is a life of simple understanding. Aristotle recognizes this in book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics, where he says that the highest human happiness is found in the theoretic life, but he also acknowledges it in a very dramatic way in book 7 of the Politics, chapters 2 and 3.1 He says that the life of thinking is higher than the political, and he implies that if one does not acknowledge the excellence of the life of thinking, one will try to satisfy one's thirst for the infinite by ruling over others, and one will therefore try to magnify this domination over as many people as possible, at home and abroad, even over one's neighbors and parents and children and friends.2 In other words, the life of ruling is not the simply highest life; we have to take our bearings from something higher. This also means that there is something in us that transcends political life, and only when political life acknowledges such transcendence can it find its proper place in human affairs. Only then will there be limited government. What this means is that a true republic, a city limited by laws, will have respect for the person as an agent of truth, both in the practical and in the theoretical order. The reason of the human person has its own directedness and its own appetite for truth; it is not just a tool in the service of subrational desires. (Fs) (notabene)

191a The modern state, in contrast, as described by Hobbes and embodied in totalitarian forms of rule, denies the domain of truth. For it, reason is a tool. The modern state is constituted as a new reality, as the sovereign, by an act of sheer will by men in the state of nature, and it exercises its own power simply for its survival and to prevent the state of nature from returning. The sovereign state is separate from the people and it lords over them. For Hobbes, the metaphysical reality of the state is made up of its own power and its own decisions. There is no truth of human nature by which it must be measured and to which it must be subordinated. The state determines even the kind of religion—the grasp of transcendence—that it will tolerate. The citizens or subjects are not agents of truth in any way; when they express their opinions, they are, according to Hobbes, engaged in vain posturing, not true deliberation: "For there is no reason why every man should not naturally mind his own private, than the public business, but that here he sees a means to declare his eloquence, whereby he may gain the reputation of being ingenious and wise, and returning home to his friends, to his parents, to his wife and children, rejoice and triumph in the applause of his dexterous behavior."3 For Hobbes, the sovereign's will alone should determine public affairs, and even the religious opinions of people have to be segregated into privacy. Such religious beliefs have no public standing as possible truths and cannot be presented as such.4 George Orwell was not wrong when in 1984 he has the totalitarian O'Brien controlling not only what you should do, but also how and what you should think, even what you should think in mathematics.5 There is nothing to transcend the sovereign; as Hobbes's predecessor and guide, Niccolò Machiavelli, put it, any ideal or best kingdoms, whether Christian or Greek, are figments of the imagination, imaginary kingdoms, that bring about ruin rather than preservation.6 (Fs)

192a In this political viewpoint, intelligence becomes merely calculation and pragmatic coping with the material needs of life. Even the social contract is just the work of calculating reason. Reason is not insight into truth, because there are no natures or forms of things to be understood. There is only the calculation of consequences. The epistemological skepticism of modernity is not unrelated to its metaphysics and political philosophy. Indeed, Hobbes's understanding of men as machines and thinking as mechanical motion, which is presented at the beginning of Leviathan,7is also not unrelated to his political philosophy: this is how human beings must understand themselves if they are to subject themselves to Leviathan. It is how the philosophical spokesman for Leviathan wants them to understand themselves. The mechanistic interpretation of human beings offered to us by reductive forms of cognitive science, in which mind is replaced by brain and human beings are not seen as agents of truth, is teleologically ordered toward the modern state in its pure form. (Fs) (notabene)

193a This then is the first contrast I wish to draw between classical and modern political philosophy: modern thought subtracts the issue of truth from the domain of politics, but a republic acknowledges both practical and theoretical truth and the human person's ability to attain it. We might ask ourselves which of these two options is characteristic of our own political culture. (Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Sokolowski, Robert

Buch: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Titel: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Stichwort: Person und Politik, Unterschied 2 (moderner Staat - Republik): Natur vs Geschichte; Staat als Höhepunkt d. Geschichte (Kojève, Fukuyama); Philosophie nicht bloß Produkt d. Geschichte

Kurzinhalt: The state is a necessary thing—generated by historical if not cosmic necessity— ... Nature has been overcome by history ... In contrast with this view of modern politics, I would claim that human nature has not changed

Textausschnitt: 193b The second point I wish to make is that modern political thought considers the state to be an inevitable development in the history of humanity. For Aristotle, the various constitutions come and go as events move along and people respond to them. There is no necessary destiny driving them on and nothing is definitive; circumstances and choices permit now this form, now that to prevail, and sometimes the political society falls into tyranny. Aristotle encourages us to do the best we can in the situations in which we find ourselves. Political life is an exercise of prudence. (Fs)

193c In the modern understanding, and especially in the twist that German idealism and Hegel have given it, the modern state is a definitive achievement. No further prudential and philosophical reflection is necessary concerning political society, because the final answer has been reached in the evolution of world history. This is why we take it for granted that what we call democracy should be installed everywhere, and why we call countries in which it does not exist "undeveloped" countries, or, more hopefully, countries "on the way to development." This belief in the historical necessity of the modern state might also explain why political philosophy has been studied in departments of political science, not in departments of philosophy, in Catholic and non-Catholic institutions alike. The political question is not open any longer. The state is a necessary thing—generated by historical if not cosmic necessity—and hence it is an object of social science, not of fundamental philosophical reflection. Nature has been overcome by history, and the unsettled arguments about who should rule and what form of government should prevail, the disputes among parties, can now be put to rest. The declarations of the end of history proposed by Alexandre Kojève and Francis Fukuyama are related to this understanding of the modern state. (Fs) (notabene)

194a In contrast with this view of modern politics, I would claim that human nature has not changed, and that political life is the same now as it always has been, and that what is truly civic and political in modern states is precisely what is still functioning as a republic, as a rule of laws, in which people are citizens and not subjects, in which it is still possible to deliberate and voice opinions about how we should live, where we can still express ourselves about the noble and the just, and can ask whether the laws we live under are or are not in conformity with the ends of human nature and the truth about man. (Fs)

194b In order to foster true political life, it is necessary for us to change our understanding of the history of philosophy. It is necessary for us to overcome the segmentation of philosophy into ancient, medieval, and modern. We must avoid thinking that we can only understand philosophers as the products of their historical circumstances, the products of their epoch. We must recover the idea that philosophy is a perennial thing, that there are philosophical truths that persist throughout all the periods and ages, and that there is a truth about human nature and about political life that has been there all along. Human nature does not change, and the nature of political life does not change either. The only thing we have to relativize historically is the modern state, not the political life that we find described in Aristotle. The modern state can be explained by its historical circumstances and it can be transcended. Aristotle has brought to light the nature of political life, while Machiavelli, Hobbes, and their followers have described and fabricated a construct, one that is not in keeping with human nature, human reason, or the human person, one that can be explained by the historical circumstances of its emergence. (Fs)

Autor: Sokolowski, Robert

Buch: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Titel: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Stichwort: Person und Politik, Unterschied 3 (moderner Staat - Republik); Verhältnis d. Staates zu anderen Institutionen u. vorpolitischen Gemeinschaften (Familie usw); Rousseau: Veränderung d. menschlichen Natur

Kurzinhalt: Rousseau .... : "The man who makes bold to undertake the founding of a people should feel within himself the capacity to—if I may put it so—change human nature: to transform each individual ... into a part of a larger whole ...

Textausschnitt: 194c We have contrasted the republic and the modern state in regard to the issue of truth and in regard to the issue of historical inevitability. The third contrast I wish to draw between the republic and the modern state concerns the relationship each of these forms of rule has toward other social authorities and other communities, such as the family, the Church, private associations, unions, businesses, educational institutions, and the like. The republic presupposes prepolitical societies. It does not claim to fabricate men or to make men human. It assumes that families and neighborhoods, churches and private associations, can all do their irreplaceable work in forming human beings, and it facilitates and crowns their work by its own, by establishing the city under laws, the city that both presupposes such prepolitical societies and brings them to their own perfection. This assumption of prepolitical societies is expressed in Aristotle's Politics by the fact that the household is treated in book I as a presupposition of political life, and in that book Aristotle says, "For the political art does not make men."1 The city makes citizens, but it does not make human beings. (Fs) (notabene)

195a The sovereign state, in contrast, the Leviathan, levels all prepolitical communities and authorities. It makes a clean sweep. The only private societies that it tolerates are those that it permits to exist for its own purposes. Instead of assuming prepolitical societies and bringing them to a higher perfection, the modern state is related to individuals, which it takes out of the state of nature and transforms into a human condition. This change is vividly expressed by Rousseau, who in On The Social Contract, describes the legislator or the founder as follows: "The man who makes bold to undertake the founding of a people should feel within himself the capacity to—if I may put it so—change human nature: to transform each individual ... into a part of a larger whole, from which he in a sense draws his life and being.... "2 We have seen attempts in twentieth-century regimes to displace and replace the family itself, as well as neighborhoods, educational institutions, and charitable entities such as hospitals, by massive governmental bureaucracies and mobilizations. The homo sovieticus was only the most extreme form of this titanic totalitarian effort, and we can see what it did to people who lived under it and were its targets. Human cloning and the artificial conception of human life may be a Western scientific version of the same thing. But a coherent society is not possible in a Hobbesian state, because such a state is not in keeping with the nature of man. (Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Sokolowski, Robert

Buch: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Titel: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Stichwort: Person und Politik, Unterschied 4 (moderner Staat - Republik): liberaler Individualismus: zersetzende Wirkung (Kollektivismus, Faschismus; Aufgabe d. Kirche

Kurzinhalt: Modern individualism—what is called liberal individualism—harms the person slowly and silently through a notion of freedom as absence of any and all constraints on the individual's choice; liberal individualism thus undermines its own moral ...

Textausschnitt: Concluding practical remarks

196a I have discussed both classical political philosophy—which I would characterize not as classical but as perennial—and the modern state, and I have tried to draw some contrasts between them. We have discussed them in regard to three issues; first, whether or not they acknowledge truth and human reason; second, whether they are the outcome of prudential achievement or historical inevitability; and third, whether or not they acknowledge prepolitical human beings, societies, and authorities. It should be obvious that the issues we are discussing are of great human importance. Human life can be terribly tortured by forms of association that destroy political life, and political life can be destroyed by rampant individualism no less than by totalitarian regimes. Modern individualism—what is called liberal individualism—harms the person slowly and silently through a notion of freedom as absence of any and all constraints on the individual's choice; liberal individualism thus undermines its own moral preconditions of self-control, self-governance, and internal, moral freedom. At the other extreme, the collectivism of communism and fascism harms the person suddenly and directly and loudly, through a violent abuse of power that destroys freedom, both external and internal. Thus the two seemingly different modern regimes both destroy the person, although in different ways. (Fs) (notabene)

196b The central question of the last part of my paper is, In what way can the human person be protected, preserved, and enhanced in our modern political context? Can we draw up some agenda items for academic life, for the Catholic Church, and for ourselves? (Fs)

196c The practical task is for the Church to continue to be active in her defense of the human person. She has in fact done so in things like the Solidarity movement, pro-life causes both in particular countries and internationally, in her educational system, and in her health-care institutions. In other words, the Church herself should continue to act in the public domain. Precisely by defending and exercising her own right to be independent, she creates a wider space for political life for others as well. Political liberty can be preserved only by being exercised. (Fs)

196d In a more theoretical domain, the Church can pay greater attention to issues of political philosophy in her academic institution and even in her seminaries and centers that train people for ministry. It is important to educate people for citizenship, and this does not just mean informing them about the procedures of voting and the mechanisms of government. If men and women are to be citizens, they must be educated about what is at stake in political life, and they must be made better aware of how civic life can be lost. They need a vocabulary for political matters, and the Church can help them acquire it. The clergy and religious should also be helped to understand the nature of political life, lest they become unwitting collaborators in the triumph of the modern sovereign state.1 (Fs)

197a In particular, the Church should insist on the role of truth in human life and the relevance of truth to political society. In this domain there are a whole cluster of issues of great personal and political significance. It is important to teach both students and parishioners about them, but it is also important to deepen our theoretical understanding of these concepts, and to make room for them in the contemporary cultural and theological conversation. To be more specific about these theoretical issues, it would be important, first, to validate the fact that truth is obtainable, to show that the human mind is able to discover truth, and to spell out the various kinds of truth and the force and extent of each. To do this is not a mere exercise in epistemology, but a defense of the human person as an agent of truth. To defend the possibility of truth is to defend human dignity. The encyclicals Fides et Ratio and Veritatis Splendor, as well as the apostolic constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae, are a marvelous charter for this effort. Second, it would be essential to clarify what is meant by human nature and to show how we can speak about human nature. One of the central concepts that needs to be clarified and defended in this respect is the concept of teleology, not only in regard to human nature but in regard to things like life, politics, and religion. Things have ends built into them, and natural ends, the natural perfections of things, are not overridden by the purposes we might have, purposes that we might impose on things. We cannot understand anything unless we know what its end is, that is, unless we know what it is when it is acting at its best.2 (Fs)

198a These issues of truth, human nature, and teleology lie very deeply hidden within contemporary political life. They are at the heart of many current controversies. If the Church were able to formulate them well, and use her educational institutions to develop and teach them, she would be engaged in politics in the best and most appropriate way: not in particular, partisan political activity, but in what we could call the higher politics, the understanding of human life in its principles and in its excellence, the definition of the good human life. The Church in her teaching and in her educational institutions should not measure herself simply by the norms set by the secular world. She should set her own agenda, drawing on her own tradition and inspiration. Through her tradition of natural law, the Church has the resources to redefine the contemporary political conversation in terms of the ends of human nature. By witnessing to the truth the Church would be defending the human person, and would thus make a unique contribution to our contemporary culture and civic life. She would also continue the spirit and teaching of one of her greatest figures, Pope John Paul II. (Fs)

Autor: Sokolowski, Robert

Buch: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Titel: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Stichwort: Eucharistie und Kirche; Tat Gottes, Christi und d. Kirche; Schöpfung (Schaffung aus Nichts) - Erlösung (Leben aus Sünde und Tod); Eucharistie: tiefste Offenbarung Gottes; Aufbau d. Kirche ("Verlängerung" d. Inkarnation)

Kurzinhalt: "In the pierced heart of the Crucified, God's own heart is opened ... Heaven is no longer locked up. God has stepped out of his hiddenness." ... the Resurrection brings being and life not out of nothingness but out of the deeper nihilism of sin and death.

Textausschnitt: [5] PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE EUCHARIST

69a The Eucharist calls for two kinds of response from us. It calls for the piety of prayer and the piety of thinking, of theological reflection. It is obvious why the Eucharist makes these demands. In our Christian faith, the Eucharist reenacts the central action that God performed in the world, the redemptive Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. This action was performed not only through the power of the divine nature but also through the human nature that the Word of God had assumed in the Incarnation. Redemption was the work of both God and man, a divine and a human accomplishment. This saving event of the Death and Resurrection of Christ is made present again in the Eucharist; it is the substance of the eucharistie celebration. Nothing could deserve our devotion and our contemplation more than this. (Fs)

The Eucharist and the Church

69b The Eucharist is the central action performed by the Church. In the Eucharist, the Church accomplishes what she has been established to do; she enters into Christ's offering of himself to the Father and she makes Christ present to the world. She joins with him before God the Father, and she manifests him to the world in his most perfect act of obedience and charity. The Church is completed in the Eucharist. More precisely, however, the Eucharist is not just the moment during which the Church acts; it is also the moment when Christ accomplishes what he was sent to do, the moment at which he fulfills the mission given him by the Father. The Eucharist is not just the action of the Church but the action of Christ himself. And still more precisely, the Eucharist is the moment during which God acts, the moment at which the Creator achieves his second, more perfect creation and reveals to believers and to all the world who and what he is. The Eucharist is the definitive action of the Church, of Christ, and of God. Everything else the Christian does takes its bearings from this decisive sacrament and sacrifice. (Fs) (notabene)

70a The Eucharist tells us about God. It speaks more eloquently to us about God than do the heavens and the earth. The heavens and the earth are the visible signature of God's creative power, but the Eucharist speaks to us about the internal life of God in the Holy Trinity and about the charity that exists in God before and beyond Creation. The Eucharist does this because it represents the redemptive Death and Resurrection of Christ. Speaking about our redemption, Joseph Ratzinger says, "In the pierced heart of the Crucified, God's own heart is opened—here we see who God is and what he is like. Heaven is no longer locked up. God has stepped out of his hiddenness."1 The created universe, in all its splendor, is no longer the ultimate witness to God's goodness; it is no longer the final expression of his wisdom and power; the created universe now becomes merely the stage where God, in the person of the Son, became part of what he had created, and where he accomplished a new Creation through the redemptive Death and Resurrection of the Incarnate Word. To quote Cardinal Ratzinger again,"... Creation exists to be a place for the covenant that God wants to make with man."2 One reason why the Resurrection is more powerful than the Creation narrated in the book of Genesis is that the Resurrection brings being and life not out of nothingness but out of the deeper nihilism of sin and death. This saving action of God, this recreation of the world, brings with it the promise that the resurrected and living Christ will come again at the end of time. It is this redemptive action that is reenacted in the celebration of the Eucharist. (Fs) (notabene)

70b According to the faith of the Church, the Eucharist presents the Death and Resurrection of Jesus, and in performing this action the Eucharist builds up the community of the Church, the Body of Christ. It is not the case that we are faced with an alternative, that in the Mass we have either a sacred action or the establishment of a community. The Church is not just any kind of community; she is the society that was born on the cross, through the action of Christ, the action of God, that is embodied again in the Eucharist. When the Church celebrates the Eucharist, she both reenacts the Death and Resurrection of Jesus and confirms herself as the community established by this event. (Fs) (notabene)

71a Furthermore, through the Eucharist, the members of this community are enabled to participate actively in the Death and Resurrection of Christ. They become able to do so because they are adopted into the sonship of Christ and hence into the action that he performs. They form a community because they are incorporated into Christ through the Eucharist as his Mystical Body. This community of the Church, therefore, could not be established except through the real presence of the Lord in the Eucharist and through the identification of the Eucharist with his saving Death and Resurrection.3 The mystery of the Incarnation is prolonged in human history, not only in the words of Scripture, but also in the action of the Eucharist, and consequently in the witness, the martyrion, given by those who participate in the Eucharist. The Church would be a very different thing if she were built up merely through the use of words, without the central action of Christ that gives the words their substance, and without the imitation of Christ in the lives of those who are her members. (Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Sokolowski, Robert

Buch: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Titel: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Stichwort: Eucharistie und Inkarnation; Folgerichtigkeit in frühen Häresien: Arius, Nestorius, Monophysiten, Monotheletismus, ikonoklasmus; Konzile (Nizäa, Ephesos, Chalcedon, Konstantinopel); Berengarius v. Tours

Kurzinhalt: There is a single trajectory in the controversies concerning the Incarnation. At first, in Arianism, you deny that the Logos is fully divine and that Christ is fully human; ... the controversies about the Eucharist ... were the way in which the ...

Textausschnitt: The Eucharist and the Incarnation

71b The Eucharist, together with the Church that is built up around it and provides the context for it, is the prolongation of the Incarnation. The Word of God, the eternal Son of the Father, became man; God became part of what he created. But this work of God was not an event that occurred once and then receded into the past; the Incarnation was meant to change creation and to change history, and to do so in such a way that the change remained palpably present. As St. Leo the Great says in speaking about the Ascension of our Lord, "The visible presence of our Redeemer has passed over into sacraments... ."1 The sacramental presence of the Incarnate Word succeeds the physical presence. The Eucharist is not merely an afterthought to the Incarnation and Redemption; there is a kind of teleology and completion in the eucharistie continuation of the presence of Christ in the world. The Eucharist is the sacramental extension of the Incarnation. (Fs) (notabene)

72a To help show how the Eucharist and the Incarnation are related, I will describe a certain trajectory in the many controversies that have surrounded the mystery of the Incarnation. The Incarnation has been greatly disputed since the earliest centuries of the Church. The human mind seems to recoil from the truth that God became man and suffered a humiliating death; the denial of the Incarnation of the transcendent God seems to be the paradigmatic heresy in the life of the Church. People have repeatedly tried to interpret Christ in ways that dilute this mystery. It was the Incarnation and not, for example, the transcendence or the unicity of God that was the subject of the initial controversies in the Church. (Fs)

72b Thus the first two general councils, Nicaea in A.D. 325 and Constantinople in 381, addressed the Arian heresy and its variations, which claimed that Christ was less divine than the Father and not a complete human being; the Logos was not fully God and Christ was not fully man. Arius said, therefore, that the true God did not really become man at all, and the councils condemned his teaching and its variants. The next general council, Ephesus in 431, dealt with the heresy of Nestorius, who accepted the earlier definitions and admitted that Christ was truly both God and man, but said that the two natures really did not make up one being; rather, the divine nature was merely joined to the human; it dwelt in the human as in its perfect temple. Once again, God did not really become man; once again, the stark reality of the Incarnation, of God's truly becoming a human being, was denied. The Church condemned the teaching of Nestorius and insisted that Christ was truly one person, one being. The next step was the monophysite heresy, which admitted that God took on a human nature in Christ but said that this human being was completely transformed into the divine nature and did not continue to exist along with the divinity. This teaching was treated in the fourth general council, that of Chalcedon in 451. (Fs) (notabene)

73a The Council of Chalcedon is often taken to be the last of the great Christological councils, and certainly it provided the most definitive teaching on the Incarnation. However, further issues arose in the Church that continued to threaten the integrity of this mystery. In the seventh century a heresy arose that admitted the two natures in Christ, divine and human, but claimed that there was only one will and one mode of activity, the divine. Because this teaching claimed that there was only the divine will and no human will in Christ, it was called the heresy of monothelitism. This position was something like a rear-guard action still being waged by the human mind in its resistance to the "scandal" of the Incarnation; it was condemned by the sixth general council, which was held at Constantinople in 680—681. (Fs)

73b But even at this point, the controversies did not come to a halt. In the next century, the eighth, there occurred in the Eastern Christian Church the great and important movement of iconoclasm. It was the next expression of this persistent inability of the mind to take in the truth that God became a human being. It dealt not with Christ himself, but with the images that we might make of him. It spoke not only about Christ's own being but also about his representation in an icon. The controversy arose in a public and dramatic way in 726, when the emperor Leo III issued an edict condemning icons; he subsequently removed and destroyed the icon of Christ that had been placed over the gate to the imperial palace in Constantinople.2 The next emperor, Constantine V, argued for the destruction of icons of Christ by saying that the person of Christ was divine and therefore could not be circumscribed or captured in a physical, visible manner. In 754 an iconoclastic synod called by the emperor claimed that the Church had fallen back into idolatry by making images of Christ, and it condemned St. John Damascene and others who defended the icons. The controversy lasted about 120 years, and almost all the icons in the Eastern Church were destroyed. Only in 843 did the conflict end, with the restoration of icons on the first Sunday of Lent that year. Iconoclasm was an offshoot of the monophysite heresy. In a subtle and indirect but important way, it denied the full truth of the Incarnation. It admitted that Christ had a divine and a human nature, but when it denied that an icon could represent Christ, the Son of God, it also denied, by implication, that the divine nature and the divine person were so embodied in the human being of Christ that the further embodiment in an image could represent the God who had become man. The connection between the Incarnation and the icon is expressed by Cardinal Schönborn in his book God's Human Face: "In Christ, our human existence is to be made divine, while it does not cease to be 'human flesh and blood.' The icon, depicting Christ in his human likeness, serves as a final assurance, a kind of imprinted seal, of this belief."3 (Fs)

74a Iconoclasm was a heresy in the Eastern Church. Some 200 years after the iconoclastic crisis in the East, a controversy arose in the West concerning the Eucharist. It was provoked by the ideas of Berengarius of Tours, who lived in the first century of the new millennium; he died in 1088. There had been earlier controversies about the Eucharist in the ninth century, and Berengarius revived them. He claimed that the presence of Christ in the bread and wine of the Eucharist was only symbolic or figurative; the words of Christ in the institution of the Eucharist were to be taken metaphorically, not literally. The teachings of Berengarius did not find a following and were rejected by theologians and by the Church, but they can be seen as precursors of disputes about the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist that came to the fore during the Reformation. One could say, perhaps, that the controversies about the Eucharist—and hence about the Church that is established around the Eucharist—were the way in which the resistance to the Incarnation was carried on throughout the second millennium of the Church's history. (Fs) (notabene)

74b There is a single trajectory in the controversies concerning the Incarnation. At first, in Arianism, you deny that the Logos is fully divine and that Christ is fully human; once the Church asserts the full divinity and humanity of Christ, you say, with Nestorius, that the divine and the human natures do not make up one being, one person; once the Church says that they do make up one person and one being, you say that the divine nature absorbs the human; once the Church says that both natures remain intact, you deny that the human nature has its own will and activity; once the Church says that there is a human will in Christ, you deny that there can be an image or icon of the Incarnate God; once the Church says that Christ can be imaged, you deny that he is truly present in the Eucharist, you deny that the Eucharist extends the Incarnation in a sacramental way. Controversy about the Eucharist is thus related to controversy about the Incarnation, and I would add that disputes about the Church and about the Blessed Virgin are so related as well. (Fs) (notabene)

75a It would follow, then, that a loss of faith in the Eucharist—a loss of belief in the real presence of Christ in the sacrament, and a loss of the belief in the identity of the Eucharistie sacrifice and that of Calvary—leads to a loss of faith in the Resurrection, which leads to a loss of faith in the Incarnation, which leads to a loss of belief in the Holy Trinity. If you deny the truth of the Eucharist, you begin the drift toward Unitarianism. I wonder also if the trace of iconoclasm in the Church in recent decades—the removal of statues and pictures, the movement toward abstraction in architecture and decoration, the antipathy toward the Holy Father and the Vatican, the "anti-Roman affect," as it has been called—does not also raise difficulties in regard to faith in the Incarnation.4 The human mind seems persistently unwilling to accept the intense nearness of God incarnate, which confirms Creation and makes everything truly real.5 (Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Sokolowski, Robert

Buch: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Titel: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Stichwort: Eucharistie und Inkarnation; Phänomenologie d. Eu.; Verschränkung: geschichtliches Ereignis - Opfer Christi ewig gegenwärtig dem Vater (Vater als Adressat d. Kanons); Abendmahl: Vorwegnahme d. Todes; Sanctus, Epiklese

Kurzinhalt: The reenactment of Calvary in the Eucharist enters into the presence of Calvary to the Father, and the real presence of Christ in the sacrament is that of his glorified Body and Blood eternally presented to the Father.1 It is because God is so ...

Textausschnitt: Phenomenology of the Eucharist

79b Phenomenology can also be used in a theological reflection on the Eucharist, where it can help us clarify how the Eucharist, and the redemptive action that is performed in the Eucharist, appear to us. I would like to use the term "theology of disclosure" to name this kind of reflection, because the more obvious term, "phenomenological theology," is so cumbersome. This theology would bring out the appearances that are proper and specific to the Eucharist and to Christian things generally. It would bring out the patterns and structures of appearance that are essential to the sacramental presence that follows in the wake of the Incarnation. Two particular themes deserve investigation. (Fs)

80a First, according to the faith of the Church, the sacrifice that occurs in the celebration of the Eucharist is the same sacrifice that was achieved by Christ on the cross. There was only one sacrifice that redeemed the human race and made it possible for man to become adopted into the Sonship of Christ; it was the sacrifice on Calvary. Each Mass is also a sacrifice, but it is so not by being a separate, independent action. Rather, it reenacts, it makes present again, the one sacrifice of Christ. But how can this occur if the death of Christ occurred centuries in the past? How can a past event, in its individuality, be made present again? Worldly historical events are fixed at their moment in history. They can be commemorated but they cannot truly be made to happen again. We can publicly remember and celebrate the founding of our nation, but we cannot make that founding occur once again here and now; we cannot truly reenact it. Time is relentless and inescapable, and it leaves events behind. (Fs) (notabene)

80b The sacrifice of Christ, however, was not merely a worldly historical event. It was such a worldly event, it happened in human history, but its true meaning, its substance, what happened when it occurred, was not just a worldly occurrence. It was a transaction, an exchange, between Christ and the Father. Although it took place in time, it touched eternity as did no other event in history. It did so because of the person who achieved it and also because of what was done. It was the perfect sacrifice offered to the Father, the perfect act of obedience of the Son, different from all the other actions he performed in his life on earth. Because the sacrifice of Christ touched eternity in this way, it was not just a historical event: it took on the kind of presence that marks the eternal moment, the moment out of time: "For Christ did not enter into a sanctuary made by hands ... but heaven itself, that he might now appear before God on our behalf" (Hebrews 9:24).1 The sacrifice of Christ is eternally present to the Father; the Lamb in the Apocalypse appears as having been slain (Revelation 5:6—12) and the wounds of the passion remain in the Risen Lord. (Fs) (notabene)

81a When the Eucharist is celebrated now, it is not turned merely to the historical past. Its primary focus is not on the past but on the eternal present of God. The entire Eucharistie Prayer, the Canon of the Mass, is directed toward God the Father. This setting is established by the Preface and the Sanctus, in which the congregation, the Church assembled at this particular time and place, enters into the company of the angels and saints in heaven and sings God's praise with them, in words taken from the beginning of the book of the prophet Isaiah. The Eucharistie prayer then continues to be directed toward God the Father, and it enters into the redemptive sacrifice of Christ as it is being presented to the Father in that eternal moment. The reenactment of Calvary in the Eucharist enters into the presence of Calvary to the Father, and the real presence of Christ in the sacrament is that of his glorified Body and Blood eternally presented to the Father.2 It is because God is so transcendent, because he is so radically beyond time and beyond Creation, that the Eucharist can be the reenactment of the redeeming Death and Resurrection of Christ. The Eucharist can reenact an event from the past because it joins with that event in the eternal present of God. This contact with the eternal moment is expressed in the Eucharist by the fact that the eucharistie prayer is addressed to God the Father. (Fs) (notabene)

81b The second thing I wish to do in this brief theology of the Eucharist is to study more closely the words of consecration. The Eucharist reenacts the redemptive Death and Resurrection of Jesus, but it does so in a manner that is very complicated. It does not immediately refer to Calvary, it does not relate to Calvary in a straight line, so to speak; the Eucharist is not like a Passion Play that depicts or directly recalls that event. Rather, it approaches the death of Christ by a kind of detour, if I may use the term, by first reen-acting the Last Supper. At the Last Supper, of course, Christ anticipated his own death. He preenacted his sacrificial offering; he looked ahead to it and accomplished its substance as he instituted the sacrament of the Eucharist. Because Christ anticipated and preenacted his Death and Resurrection, the Church can reenact it afterward. The Eucharist looks back to the sacrifice on Calvary by going still further back to the Last Supper and looking forward with Christ to the sacrifice on the cross. The consecration in the Mass weaves together these forms of presence and absence; it composes the past, the present, and the future, as well as the moment of eternity, into an intricate and highly sophisticated structure, one that elevates the mind as well as the heart. These complexities in presentation help make the Eucharist into what the first eucharistie prayer calls an oblatio rationabilis, a rational sacrifice. (Fs) (notabene)

82a The Last Supper is called up, of course, in the brief narrative, the institutional narrative, that introduces the words of consecration. This narrative in turn is embedded in the eucharistie prayer. Consider how the narrative and consecration are placed within the entire eucharistie prayer. (Fs)

82b The eucharistie prayer begins with the Preface and continues after the Sanctus. As the prayer proceeds, it gives way to the epiclesis, when the celebrant, in the name of the Church, calls on the Holy Spirit to descend on the gifts. The epiclesis gives way to the institutional narrative: "The day before he suffered, he took bread into his sacred hands.... He broke the bread, gave it to his disciples, and said." This narrative, in turn, gives way to the words of consecration: "Take this, all of you, and eat it: this is my body, which will be given up for you." There is an elegant sequence in the forms of speech spoken by the celebrant: we begin with prayer, the prayer gives way to epiclesis, which gives way to narrative, which gives way to the words of consecration. As this sequence unfolds, there is a striking change in the personal pronouns that are used by the priest. The first three of these forms, the prayer, epiclesis, and narrative, explicitly or implicitly, all use the first-person plural. The priest says "we" or "us" or "our," because he speaks as a representative of the Church. He speaks in the name of the Church, both the Church as a whole and the Church assembled here and now in this place. But in the words of consecration, the priest begins to use the first-person singular: he says, "my body" and "my blood," and "do this in memory of me." (Fs)

83a At this moment and in these words the priest speaks no longer simply in the name of the Church, but in the name of Christ, in the person of Christ. Both grammatically and spiritually, he speaks in the person of Christ. To put it another way, he now lets Christ become the speaker and the agent. He lets Christ take over the action that is being performed. At this central part of its most central action, the Church recedes and no longer speaks in her own name; she lets Christ take over and accomplish what he accomplished at the Last Supper. She lets him do whatever he did there, by simply allowing him to speak in his name, not her own. It is by virtue of the literary form of a quotation that the Church allows Christ palpably to take control of her liturgy. Of course, it is somewhat inappropriate to say that the priest or the Church "lets" Christ speak, as though he or she gave him permission to do so; rather, the entire liturgy is being performed under the guidance of Christ. The priest and the Church merely provide the bodily vehicle by which Christ reenacts what he did at the Last Supper, and thereby reenacts his own offering to the Father. And yet, Christ does need and use the Church and the voice and gestures of the priest to become present sacramentally in the world, as he once used the words and the body of the Blessed Virgin Mary to become present in the humility of the Incarnation. (Fs)

83b When the priest recites the words of consecration, he quotes the words of Christ. Moreover, not only the words of consecration but also the gestures associated with them—taking up the bread, looking up to heaven, bowing to show thanks and praise—are also quotational. The words and the gestures are quotations; they are not part of a drama. The priest does not suddenly perform a little play that depicts the Last Supper before the congregation. The words and gestures are quotational and not dramatic. This is an important phenomenological difference, a distinction in the mode of presentation. Quotation is a distinct form of manifestation. In quotation, we allow our voice to be the vehicle for the thinking and the display that have been performed by someone else. We allow another person to articulate the world through our voice. We subordinate our speech to the authority of someone else, to his authority as an agent of truth. This is precisely what happens at the consecration: the authority of Christ comes into play explicitly, as he becomes the grammatical speaker of the words, and he achieves what is being done. He is the person speaking. The Church expresses herself in a palpable way as the Mystical Body of Christ when she enables him to speak and to act at this central point of the Eucharist. Christ offers himself not only to us but to the Father at that moment. (Fs)

84a The presence and authority of Christ would not come to the fore in this powerful way if the priest were to understand himself as an actor in a drama, as someone who is depicting Christ at the Last Supper. If the priest were to take himself as an actor, he would assume a greater authority than he should, and he would not be as transparent as he ought to be. It would be the priest's interpretation of the drama that came to the fore, not the action of Christ. To consider the priest as engaged in a drama would also, I think, detract from the fact that even in the consecration the primary focus of the Eucharist is still toward the Father. To see the action as a drama would turn the focus toward the congregation as the audience or the participants in this drama. In the traditional liturgy, when the altar did not face the congregation, there was no tendency to take the words of consecration as a theatrical reenactment of the Last Supper. It is true, of course, that the words of consecration do also address the community at the Eucharist; the body of Christ will be given up and the blood will be shed "for you," but this is not the primary and exclusive focus, and it should not be made to override the presentation of these actions to God the Father. One could say that the priest celebrating the Eucharist continues to address God the Father, but that Christ speaking through the priest addresses the community, as he did at the Last Supper. The complexities of quotation permit these two forms of address. (Fs) (notabene)

Concluding remarks

84b Our discussion of the Eucharist has made use of many themes in phenomenology: the temporal patterns of present, past, and future, profiled against the background God's eternity; the presence and absence of the one action of Christ in these various temporal and presentational contexts; the contrast between words and pictures. We have made extensive use of the phenomenon of quotation and we have distinguished it, phenomenologically from drama. Our remarks do not counteract anything in patristic or scholastic theology, but they do add a dimension that may have been underplayed in them, one that is especially appropriate for theology in the cultural situation in which it finds itself now, whether that situation be called modern or postmodern. (Fs)

84c Finally, the fact that God became man in Christ, that he took on the weakness and suffering of the human condition, and that he even becomes our food in the Eucharist, does not diminish his transcendence and power. In fact, these acts of humility enhance his majesty. They show that God can do these things and still remain the all-powerful Creator of the world, the one who creates not because of necessity or any kind of need, but out of sheer generosity. The generosity of Creation is made more evident to us precisely by the majesty of the new Creation, which was accomplished by God in humility and suffering when he became the servant of those he created, the one who took upon himself the most painful and degrading of all human tasks. In this action of Death and Resurrection, it is not only God's power and glory that are manifested to us, but also the generosity of his own divine life, the life of the Holy Trinity. The Eucharist brings us into this action and into this life, and it displays, until the end of time, the one saving, action that is the point of the created world. (Fs)

Autor: Sokolowski, Robert

Buch: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Titel: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Stichwort: Eucharistie; Kanon d. Messe (Präfation -> Sanctus, Struktur d. Konsekration, Zitat, Erzählung); Priester in persona Christi; Zitat - dramatische Schilderung

Kurzinhalt: The one sacrifice of Christ was primarily an action by the incarnate Son before the Father and it is eternally present to the Father, transcending the temporal limitations of worldly time ... The Mass would be seen as a sacred meal and not a sacrifice

Textausschnitt: [6] PRAYING THE CANON OF THE MASS

86a The priest celebrating Mass should try to fit his thoughts and sentiments to the words that he says. His internal dispositions should match the external expressions of the liturgy. In addition to the words, however, the structure of the Eucharist also provides a pattern to which the priest's thoughts and sentiments can be conformed. In this essay we will discuss several structural elements in the Canon of the Mass that should be kept in mind, by both the priest and the people, during the celebration of the Eucharist. (Fs)
The Preface and Sanctus

86b The Eucharistie Prayer begins with the Preface. The celebrant addresses the congregation and invites them to lift up their hearts and give thanks to the Lord our God. From that exchange onward, until its close at the Great Amen, the Eucharistie Prayer is addressed to God the Father. It is important for the priest and the people to keep this focus in mind. (Fs)
86c The Preface recalls the saving action of God and emphasizes some aspect of it that is appropriate for the feast of the day: Advent or Lent, the Christmas or Easter season, a commemoration of the Blessed Virgin or one of the saints. Then, the final sentences of the Preface place us, even while we remain here on earth, in the company of the angels and saints. It is with them that we recite the Sanctus, the prayer derived from the vision of the prophet Isaiah. In chapter 6 of the Book of Isaiah the song of praise, "Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of hosts," is chanted by the seraphim; in the Preface it is presented as being sung by the heavenly host, by the angels and saints, and we join our voices with theirs. The Sanctus ends with a reference to the Messiah: "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord," drawing from the words of Christ in Matthew 23:39, which in turn are drawn from Psalm 118:26.The celestial glory of God has been brought to earth in the Incarnation, and God is manifest not only in the heavens but also on earth. (Fs) (notabene)

87a Thus, the Preface and especially the Sanctus draw us into the divine presence in heaven, in company with the angels and saints. The Sanctus should be said deliberately and its impact should remain with us throughout the Eucharistie Prayer. It provides the setting within which the entire Eucharist is to be celebrated. The Mass is our participation in the celestial liturgy. (Fs) (notabene)

Structure of the consecration

87b After the Sanctus, the Eucharistie Prayer continues with praise and petitions made to the Father. When the time comes for the consecration, however, the structure of the prayer changes in two ways. First, there is a change in literary form: the prayer gives way to the epiclesis, the calling down of the Holy Spirit, which in turn gives way to the institutional narrative, which in turn gives way to the words of consecration, the quoted words of Christ. The literary form changes from petition to invocation to narrative to quotation. Each of these steps should be distinctly registered when they are made, not only for the devotion of the celebrant but also for that of the congregation. They should not be rushed through or blurred into one another. (Fs)
87c Second, the grammatical form of the words being said by the priest changes. The we, the first-person plural of the prayers and epiclesis and narrative, gives way to the I, the first-person singular of the quoted words of Jesus during the words of institution. The two changes in linguistic structure, in the literary form and in the grammar of the pronouns, are expressions of deep theological aspects of the Eucharist. (Fs)

87d In both the faith of the Church and the structure of the rite, the Eucharist reenacts the Last Supper. The priest repeats the words of Christ over the bread: "Take this, all of you, and eat it: for this is my body, which will be given up for you." He also repeats the words of Christ over the wine: "Take this, all of you, and drink from it: for this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven." Then, as a closure to these words, he says, "Do this in memory of me." In these words, and in the gestures he makes as he takes up the bread and the chalice, the priest reenacts the words and gestures of Christ at the Last Supper. (Fs)

88a However, the Last Supper was not just an event enclosed in itself. At the Last Supper, Jesus anticipated his passion and death, and in the faith of the Church the Eucharist ultimately reenacts not the Last Supper but the redemptive death of Christ. The Church sacramentally reenacts the sacrifice of the cross because Christ preenacted that sacrifice at the Last Supper. When the Church identifies her present action with that of Christ at the Last Supper, she also identifies her action with the sacrifice of the cross, because the Last Supper anticipated that sacrifice. The one sacrifice of Christ is presented through a structured manifold of appearances: as anticipated by Jesus and as remembered and reenacted by the Church. (Fs) (notabene)
88b This action of the Church, however, is carried on before the eternal Father in the setting provided by the Preface and Sanctus. The one sacrifice of Christ was primarily an action by the incarnate Son before the Father and it is eternally present to the Father, transcending the temporal limitations of worldly time and history: "But [Jesus], because he remains forever, has a priesthood that does not pass away. Therefore, he is always able to save those who approach God through him, since he lives forever to make intercession for them" (Hebrews 7:24—25). The Mass too is achieved before the eternal Father, and for that reason the Church's sacrifice can blend with that of Calvary. It is by virtue of its presence before God's eternity that the Mass overcomes the exclusions of "now" and "then" and present, past, and future that occur in respect to all historical events. In the Mass we enter into the same sacrifice achieved once and for all by Christ. The identity of the sacrifice achieved before the Father permits such a sacramental identity for us here on earth. (Fs)

Grammatical changes

88c The priest says the prayers of the Canon of the Mass in the first-person plural. In doing this he prays in the name of the Church. He says that "we" ask God to accept and bless the gifts we bring, that "we" offer these gifts for the holy catholic Church, and he asks that God remember all of "us" gathered before Him. The epiclesis, the invocation of the Holy Spirit on the gifts, is also expressed in the same grammatical form: the priest asks that God bless and approve "our" offering, and that he let it become for "us" the body and blood of the Lord. The institutional narrative is also said under the aegis of what "we" say, even though the pronoun is not explicitly used in it. (Fs)

89a In the words of institution, however, in "this is my body" and "this is the cup of my blood," the priest speaks in the first-person singular because he speaks no longer in the name of the Church but in the name of Christ. He allows Christ to be the speaker of the words; or, to put it more appropriately, Christ elevates the voice of the priest, through sacramental quotation, to become the vehicle for his own speech; the priest is enabled to speak in persona Christi. At this central point of her sacred liturgy, the Church renounces any verbal initiative of her own and lets the words of Christ himself achieve the sacred action, the reenactment of his own redemptive death. (Fs)

89b The priest does this while remaining within his own historical context, in his own world and time, with the cares and needs of the Church and the people around him; but while focused on the sacrifice of Calvary, he echoes the words and actions of the Last Supper, and he also stands within the celestial liturgy in which the Son, the Lamb of God slain for our sins, is eternally present to the Father. All these temporal and eternal dimensions are engaged in the words that are said and the gestures that are made during the institutional narrative and consecration. All these dimensions can be present to the minds of the priest and the people at this point in the liturgy. (Fs)

Quotation and not dramatic depiction

89c There is an interpretation of the Eucharistie Prayer that would draw us away from the context in which the liturgy is performed before God the Father: we may be inclined to think that the consecration is rather like a drama, a play performed before the congregation. We may even tend to think that the congregation is involved in the play, as depicting the disciples at the Last Supper: the priest takes the role of Christ and the congregation the role of the apostles. To this way of thinking, the words and gestures of the priest are seen as dramatic depictions of what Christ did and said at the Last Supper. (Fs) (notabene)

89d Such a dramatic interpretation of the Mass would not be appropriate. It is more fitting to think of the words and gestures of the priest as quotational, not dramatic. The priest quotes the words and gestures of Christ; he does not perform them in the manner of an actor. There are several reasons why quotation is a more fitting presentational form for the consecration than drama. (Fs)

90a First, to see the consecration as a drama would shift the focus of the liturgy from its relationship to God the Father to an axis between the priest and the people. The liturgy would cut away from its presence before God, which had been established in the Preface and Sanctus, and it would be centered on the dramatic impact of the priest acting before the congregation as audience or participants. Second, such an interpretation would highlight the Mass as representing the Last Supper, but would diminish its reenactment of the redemptive death of Christ. The Mass would be seen as a sacred meal and not a sacrifice. Third, this interpretation would place the liturgical emphasis on the person of the priest as the performer; drama highlights the present actor, whereas quotation takes us away from our present context and lets someone else speak through us. If Lawrence Olivier is depicting Hamlet, we think of Olivier, not primarily Hamlet, as taking center stage; but if we quote what someone says we subordinate our voice and especially the content of our speech to that other person. We let someone else speak through us and we subject our responsibility to his. Christ is more palpably the speaker when we take his words as being quoted than if we were to take the priest as dramatically representing him. Christ, the one who is quoted, speaks with the authority of the incarnate Son of God, as one who has the power to bring about what he declares in his words. Fourth, in the old rite the possibility did not arise that the priest was dramatically depicting the Last Supper before the congregation; the focus was entirely toward God the Father. (Fs)

90b The difference between quotation and dramatic depiction is also relevant to the prayerful attitude of the priest. If the priest sees his words and his gestures as quoting those of Christ, he can more appropriately see himself as the servant of both Christ and the Church, the person who is there to hand on to others the message and the achievement of Christ the Lord. If the priest were to see himself as a dramatic actor, his own persona and style would come to the fore in an inappropriate and probably intrusive way. His would be the primary agency. Quotation affords a salutary anonymity to the priest in his sacramental ministry. It also relieves the priest of a burden that actors have, that of finding ever new ways of making their performance interesting to their audience. The priest is not there to perform; he is there to accomplish the liturgy as it is written in the Roman Missal. He is there as the servant of Christ and the Church, a servant who becomes quotationally transparent in the words and gestures of the consecration. Christ is the ultimate minister of the Eucharist, and his activity is perceptibly manifest when his words and gestures are quoted at the center of the Church's offering. (Fs)

91a The Church's quotation of the words and gestures of Christ is done primarily before God the Father. Christ's speech comes to life in an address before the eternal Father, expressing the eucharistie action of the Son toward the Father. However, at the Last Supper the words of Christ were directed toward the disciples ("Take this, all of you, and eat it: for this is my body, which will be given up for you"). Certainly an overtone of such an address spoken by Christ, now directed toward the people, remains in the words of consecration, but the primary focus of the celebrant toward God the Father is never interrupted. When the priest recites the words of consecration, he will quite naturally tend to take them as being spoken to the faithful, but he should not let the theocentric focus of the Church's prayer be lost. (Fs)

Autor: Sokolowski, Robert

Buch: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Titel: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Stichwort: Eucharistie; Kanon d. Messe (Elevation, Akklamation im Kontext d. Trinität); Präsentation von Brot u. Wein (konsekriert) zum Vater;

Kurzinhalt:

Textausschnitt: The elevation and acclamation

92a We have emphasized the fact that the Eucharistie Prayer is recited, in the company of the angels and saints, before God the Father. The elevation of the host and the chalice can also be seen in this context. It is true that historically the elevation was introduced to allow the people to see and worship the consecrated species. This reverence toward the presence of Christ, however, can take on a deeper meaning if the elevation is seen also as a presentation of the consecrated bread and wine to the eternal Father. We worship Christ not only as the Incarnate Word come down among us, but also as the eternal Son, as present within the Holy Trinity. The bread and wine are profiled against the eternal Eucharist between the Son and the Father, and we are allowed to glorify and participate in that sacred exchange. The consecrated bread and wine are presented to the people, but in conjunction with their presentation by the Church to the Father. (Fs)

92b The acclamation following the consecration, which is usually addressed to Christ in the sacrament ("Lord, by your cross and resurrection, you have set us free"; "We proclaim your death, Lord Jesus"), can also be seen in this setting; we address Christ in glory, not only present in the bread and wine but as eternally present to the Father. Thus, the trinitarian and celestial setting remains in force during the elevation and acclamation; we do not turn away from it simply to what is present before us at the altar. (Fs) (notabene)

92c To see the elevation and acclamation in this trinitarian context would avoid a difficulty that many liturgists have raised. The claim has been made that both the elevation and the acclamation, with their focus on Christ, disrupt the continuity of the Eucharist Prayer, which is directed toward God the Father. No disruption would occur, however, if in the elevation and acclamation the priest and people were directed toward the Redeemer in the life of the Holy Trinity, in the presence of the eternal Father. On the contrary, the focus of the prayer toward the Father would acquire a deeper dimension as it moved through Christ the Savior in the Father's presence. (Fs)

93a Thus, the three points that punctuate the Eucharistic Prayer—the Sanctus, the consecration and its elevation, and the doxology and its "minor" elevation before the Great Amen—can be seen as variations within the prayer addressed by the Church to God the Father. In the Sanctus the Church addresses the Father and anticipates the coming of the Son when she prays, "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord." In the concluding doxology the Church expresses the honor and glory due to the Father and presents the Son, who is now sacramentally part of the creation that was achieved through him, the eternal Word of God. The Son is no longer anticipated; he has come among us, and now through him, with him, and in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor is given to the Father. In the elevation and acclamation after the consecration, the Church addresses the Son, in both his sacramental presence and his presence before the Father, in sinu Patris. (Fs) (notabene)

93b This focus of attention toward the Father and the Holy Trinity does not detract from the attention due to the congregation in the liturgy. The Mass is for the people, but it is not done by the priest toward the people. Both priest and people are directed toward God in the Eucharistie Prayer. The people join their offering of the sacrifice to that of the priest, to that of Christ who speaks through the priest, and as they do so they are turned toward God the Father, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Their share in this sacred action, their "active participation," as the Second Vatican Council expresses it (Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy §11, §14, §27, §30), elevates them sacramentally to the eternal life and presence of God. The focus of their attention is not on the priest himself but on the Father and the Son their Redeemer. (Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Sokolowski, Robert

Buch: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Titel: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Stichwort: Eucharistie; Kanon d. Messe (Gebete davor und danach);

Kurzinhalt:

Textausschnitt: Prayers before and after the Eucharistie Canon

93c After the Canon of the Mass has been concluded at the Great Amen, the priest and the people pray the Our Father. The Our Father is also said from within a special context, one that is different from the context of the Eucharistie Prayer. The setting for the Eucharistie Prayer was provided by the Preface and Sanctus, which placed us among the angels and saints. The context for the Our Father is set by the sacramental presence of Christ in the community of the Church on earth. Now that Christ has become present among us in the sacrament, we are able—we are emboldened—to call God our Father; the previous uses of the term Father, in the Preface and Canon, would have referred primarily to him as Father within the Holy Trinity and as the origin of all things. The context for the Our Father, set by the presence of Christ among us as our savior and brother, is contrasted with the celestial context set earlier by the Preface and Sanctus. After the Great Amen we return to earth, so to speak, to the place of the Incarnation, with Christ now sacramentally present with us, and we begin to prepare for our individual communion with him by reciting the prayer he taught us to say. (Fs) (notabene)
94a If the Our Father follows the Eucharistie Prayer, the offertory prayers precede it. In them we take bread and wine out of their normal usage and dedicate them to God as our offering of the fruits of the earth, to be transformed by him into the presence of Christ. In the traditional liturgy it was customary to sing a Marian hymn at the offertory, a practice that was highly appropriate, since the Blessed Virgin is the supreme instance of the dedication of our own nature to the service of God, to become the instrument of his presence among us. Mary's fiat is echoed in the offertory of the Mass. (Fs) (notabene)
94b I would like to close these reflections on the prayers of the priest by making a suggestion for thanksgiving after Mass. In the old rite, the prayer called the Placeat and the Prologue to St. John s Gospel were said toward the end of Mass, before and after the final blessing and dismissal. This prayer and gospel are not used in the new rite, but they can well be recommended as private prayers of the priest after Mass is over. In the Placeat the priest prays that the sacrifice he has just offered be pleasing to the Holy Trinity and that it be beneficial for himself and those for whom it was offered. In the Prologue to St. John's Gospel we recall the preexistence of the Word as God with God, the coming of the Word as life and light for men, the acceptance and rejection of the Word, the contrast between John the Baptist and Jesus, and the Incarnation of the Word among us. These prayerful and biblical thoughts are appropriate as part of the priest's thanksgiving after the sacrifice of the Mass and the reception of communion. The fact that they were included in the Mass in the old rite shows that their suitability for the Eucharist was recognized in earlier ages. Using them as prayers of thanksgiving will remind us of the continuity between the old rite of the Mass and the new. (Fs)

Autor: Sokolowski, Robert

Buch: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Titel: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Stichwort: Eucharistie u. Transsubstantiation;

Kurzinhalt:

Textausschnitt: [7] THE EUCHARIST AND TRANSUBSTANTIATION

95a Christian theology is reflection on the faith of the Church. The Church, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, receives and teaches her faith and when necessary defines it. Theology reflects on this faith, in a manner analogous to the way in which philosophy reflects on prephilosophical life and conversation. Theology is the exercise of reason within faith, and scholastic theology is reason's self-discovery within faith. (Fs)
95b Theology helps bring out the intelligibility of the deposit of faith. The intelligibility is already there in faith and revelation, and theology helps to make it manifest. It performs this service for the benefit of the Church and the faithful, and also simply for the distinctive understanding that faith can bring. (Fs; tblStw: Theologie)
Two theological issues regarding the Eucharist
95c When we reflect on what the Church believes concerning the Eucharist, two theological issues come into prominence: the identity of the sacrifice between Calvary and the Mass, and Transubstantiation or the Real Presence of Christ in the sacrament. (Fs)
95d Regarding the identity of the sacrifice, the Church holds that one and the same sacrifice is offered on Calvary and in the Eucharist, first in a bloody and then in a sacramental manner. The two ways in which the sacrifice is offered do not mean that two sacrifices are offered; rather, a single sacrifice is offered by the incarnate Son of God to God the Father. As regards the temporal structure of this mystery, we can formulate the identity between Calvary and the Eucharist in two ways. We can begin with the sacrifice of Calvary and say that it is reenacted when the Church offers the sacrifice of the Eucharist (that is, we can say that the past sacrifice is brought forward to the present moment). Conversely, we can begin with the present liturgy and say that in the sacrifice of the Mass the participants are brought into the presence of Calvary (that is, the present community is brought back to the past moment). We can say either that the past becomes present or that the present is brought to the past. Both ways of speaking are equivalent, but both obviously are paradoxical or "beyond belief" when viewed within the horizon of human history. Clearly, the belief in the singularity of the sacrifice does raise a problem, since the temporal distance between the two historical events (the death of Christ and the celebration of the Eucharist) seems at first glance to exclude the possibility of a single action. We will have more to say later concerning this topic. (Fs) (notabene)
96a The second theological issue in the Church's eucharistic faith is that of the Real Presence of Christ in the sacrament. This is the issue of Transubstantiation, according to which the bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ, while retaining the appearances and the natural characteristics of bread and wine. (Fs)
96b The identity of the sacrifice and the question of Transubstantiation are two different issues, but they are closely related: how could the Eucharist be the same sacrifice as that of Calvary if Christ were not truly present to offer himself to the Father? Without the Real Presence of Christ, the same event or the same action could not take place. (Fs) (notabene)
96c Both issues are present in St. Thomas Aquinas s treatment of the Eucharist, but in his work by far the greater emphasis is placed on the theme of the Real Presence. Most of Thomas's discussion in Questions 73—83 of Part III of the Summa Theologiae is concerned with the question of how the matter of the sacrament is changed: how the substance of the bread and of the wine become the body and blood of the Lord, while continuing to appear and to react as bread and wine. Thomas also gives much attention to the effect the sacrament has on those who receive it. He gives relatively little space, however, to the question of the identity between the sacrifice of the Eucharist and the sacrifice of Calvary. Indeed, when he addresses this topic, he says simply that "the celebration of this sacrament is a certain representative image of the passion of Christ, which is the true immolation of him," and this representative function of the Eucharist is compared with the representation provided by the figures of the Old Testament.1 It is even compared with the altar as representing the cross on which Christ was sacrificed.2 Thomas insists that there is only one sacrifice, that of Christ himself,3 but he speaks of the Mass more as an image of that sacrifice than as identified with it. (Fs) (notabene)
97a We find a contrasting emphasis in the eucharistie theology of the twentieth century, in the type of thinking begun by Dom Odo Casel, O.S.B. Here, the issue of the identity of the sacrifice comes to the fore. The event of the Eucharist is seen to be somehow the same event that took place in the redemptive Death and Resurrection of Jesus. When this theme becomes prominent, however, the issue of the Real Presence seems to fall into the background. We may insist that the Eucharist reenacts the death of Jesus, but then what are we to say about the Real Presence, apart from the event of the Eucharistie celebration? In this perspective, does Transubstantiation have any role? (Fs) (notabene)
97b I would claim that the two issues are closely related, and that we cannot have the one without the other: no Transubstantiation without identity of sacrifice, and no identity of sacrifice without Transubstantiation. Both issues are essential, but emphasis will be placed on the one or the other depending on the theological approach we use. It may be that a more ontological approach will emphasize Transubstantiation, while a more phenomenological approach will emphasize the identity of the sacrifice. (Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Sokolowski, Robert

Buch: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Titel: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Stichwort: Eucharistie u. Transsubstantiation (himmlischer Aspekt);

Kurzinhalt:

Textausschnitt: The celestial focus of the eucharistie action

97c A feature of the Eucharist that is important for both issues is the focus of the central prayer of the Eucharist, the Eucharistie Canon, which extends from the Preface to the Great Amen. This entire prayer is directed toward God the Father. The Preface speaks to the Father and recalls his saving actions in a manner appropriate to the feast of the day. The Sanctus is especially important for determining the direction of the prayer. It places us among the choirs of angels, as we repeat the song of the Seraphim cited in chapter 6 of Isaiah. The last part of the Preface, which leads into the Sanctus, often mentions the articulated ranks of angels and it also mentions the saints. As we say the Eucharistic Canon, we join the angels and saints and take part in the celestial Eucharist, the glory given to the Father by the Son who redeemed the world, the Lamb presented in heaven as slain, the Mystic Lamb, so profoundly depicted by Jan van Eyck in the Ghent Altarpiece. Our worldly Eucharist joins with the celestial. Dr. Eric Perl, who is a member of the Orthodox Church, once said that he was asked by a student in a religion class whether there would be a Eucharist in heaven; he said that he answered, "There won't be anything else." The angels and saints in heaven participate in the action of the Son toward the Father, and we now in our Eucharist join in their participation; in the Roman Canon we pray to Almighty God, "that your angel may take this sacrifice to your altar in heaven." This celestial focus, established by the Preface and Sanctus, continues till the Great Amen, where Christ, now present on the altar, reconciles the entire created world in a return to the Father: "Through him, with him, in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor is yours, almighty Father, forever and ever. Amen." The Sanctus and the Great Amen should be taken as directing us toward the celestial Eucharist and associating us with it. This focus and direction are somewhat masked when the priest faces the congregation, because it then appears that his words are being directed toward the people and not toward God the Father, and care must be taken to make this focus clear in the celebration of the Eucharist. (Fs) (notabene)

98a This participation in the heavenly Eucharist is of great importance for both the identity of the sacrifice and Transubstantiation. The celestial Eucharist is beyond time and world history. It touches history because the saving action of the Son of God took place in time, but his action was not just a temporal event. His obedience to the Father, his acceptance of the cross for our redemption, was an action in time that was related to the eternal Father. It occurred in time but touched eternity. It changed the relationship between creation and the Father. The celestial Eucharist is the eternal aspect of the death of Christ; it is not just a memorial or reminder of that event.1 His Resurrection witnesses to the eternal aspect of this action; the Risen Lord bears forever the wounds of his passion. In our present Eucharist, we join with the action of Christ not simply as a past historical action, but as the transaction between Jesus and the eternal Father, the transaction and exchange, the commercium, between time and eternity, which subsists in the celestial Eucharist. It is because of this action that we can join in the Great Amen, in which the created universe is brought back to the Father through the Son, who was the point of creation, the Word through whom the universe was created. (Fs) (notabene)

99a Only because the action of Christ touched eternity can it be reenacted as the very same action now. The identity of the sacrifice, the fact that the Eucharist reenacts an event from the past, the fact that we now are made present to a past event, is made possible because of the nature of that original and singular action. We cannot recover events in worldly and human history. Once done and past, they cannot be redone in the present; they can only be remembered or commemorated. But the action of Christ was not just an action in worldly and human history; it was an action before and toward the eternal Father, it had an eternal aspect, and so it can be reenacted now. (Fs)

99b This celestial focus helps us understand the possibility of the Church's faith in the sameness of the sacrifice in the Eucharist and on Calvary. However, we can look at the same state of affairs from another perspective. The Church's faith in the sameness of the sacrifice is itself a witness to the celestial character of the Eucharist. Our belief that the Eucharist reenacts something from the past implies that the action of Christ was not finished once and for all, but that it is alive now and always. Our belief in the identity of the sacrifice implies that the sacrifice was not just a historical event. The Eucharist does not just remind us of what happened in the past—the Death and Resurrection of the Lord—but proclaims the eternal aspect of that event. It proclaims the fact that Christ, the incarnate Son of God, with his glorified body and blood, lives eternally before the Father. (Fs) (notabene)

99c It seems clear, then, that the celestial focus of the liturgy clarifies for us the sameness of the sacrifice. It helps us bring out the intelligibility of that sameness. But what does this focus have to do with the issue of Transubstantiation? (Fs)

99d The bread and wine of the Eucharist become the body and blood of the Lord, but they become specifically his resurrected and glorified body and blood. Transubstantiation should not be taken as a mere substantial change in the natural order of things. It is not as though we were to claim that a tree became a leopard but continued to look and react like a tree, or that a piece of cloth became a cat but still seemed to be cloth. I think some of the objections to Transubstantiation come from an implicit belief that such a worldly change of substance is what is being claimed. Rather, it is not simply the worldly substance of the body and blood of the Lord that are present in the Eucharist, but his glorified body and blood, which share in the eternity of the celestial Eucharist. The bread and wine are now the vehicles for the presence of the eternal Christ, the eternal Son who became incarnate for us, died and rose from the dead, and is eternally present to the Father. The ontology of the Holy Trinity is part of the Church's faith in Transubstantiation. (Fs) (notabene)

100a In fact, does not the glorified Christ need something like the eucharistie presence in order to allow his death to be present to the world? The teleology of the Incarnation moves not only to the sacrificial Death and Resurrection, but also toward the Eucharist, in both its celestial and its worldly forms; the Incarnation finds its end and completion in the Eucharist, which allows the risen Christ to be "scattered" throughout the world even while he subsists within the Holy Trinity. The glorified body of Christ is present to the Father and to the angels and saints, and it is this body and blood that are the substance of the bread and wine in the sacrament of the Eucharist. Through the eucharistie continuance of the Son's act of obedience, glory is given to the Father not only in the heavens but also on the earth. We might suggest that this eucharistic presence of Christ is in fact a more fitting expression to the world of his glorified life than continued resurrection appearances would have been. (Fs)

100b I would even venture to raise the following question: Does not the denial of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist bring in its train a dilution of our trinitarian faith? Does it not make us drift toward a Unitarian understanding of divinity? If we question whether the Son is truly present in the Eucharist, are we not led to question whether he was truly present in the Incarnation, and then whether he is truly distinguished from the Father? If we begin to think this way, do we not begin to take the sacraments as images and metaphors of a single divine principle? It is true that there are other presences of Christ—in the Church, as his mystical body, in the words of Scripture, in the believer, the confessor, and the martyr—but all these depend on his primary presence, achieved by his own action and through his own words, in the Eucharist. (Fs) (notabene)

101a The Christian tradition of the East, with its strong focus on the celestial liturgy, encounters less difficulty with the true presence of Christ in the sacrament than does the West, precisely because of this focus and the correlative belief in the eucharistic presence of the glorified Christ. We in the West tend to think primarily in terms of human psychology and worldly history, and these concerns make us raise problems that may be less likely to arise in the East. (Fs) (notabene)

101b I have one more point to make concerning the manner in which the Eucharist represents and reenacts the Death and Resurrection of the Lord. The issue is often formulated in the following way: we ask how the celebration of the Eucharist can represent the death of Christ to us. But to pose the question this way is to begin at a derivative stage, not at the true beginning. First and foremost, the Eucharist represents and reenacts the death of the Lord before the eternal Father. The Eucharistie Canon is directed toward the Father, and even the representation of the Last Supper, in the institutional narrative and words of consecration, is directed first and foremost to him. Now, can we truly think that this representation before the Father of the death of the Lord is only an image, only a commemoration, only a human remembrance? God does not remember in the way we do, and the past is not lost to him the way it is to us. The redemptive action of the Son is eternally present to the Father, and this action is carried out by the person of the Son in the Eucharist. The identity of the Eucharist and Calvary before the Father secures its identity before us. The Mass and Calvary are the same before the Father, and therefore they can be the same for us. (Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Sokolowski, Robert

Buch: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Titel: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Stichwort: Eucharistie u. Transsubstantiation (Materie u. Geist);

Kurzinhalt:

Textausschnitt: Matter and spirit

101c I would like to develop more fully the idea that the Eucharist embodies and presents the glorified body of Christ. To do this, I must comment on how matter and spirit are related in the world. I will distinguish three different points of view. (Fs)

101d In the first viewpoint, one that is typified by a darwinian understanding, what we call spirit is an epiphenomenon of matter. All we have in the universe is matter in motion. Matter may be very mysterious, and in its development it gives rise to marvelous kinds of bodies, such as plants, animals, and even human beings, but all these apparently "higher" things are really congelations of matter and material forces. Most of the writers in cognitive science, those who try to reduce consciousness and rational processes to the activities of the brain and nervous system, would subscribe to this understanding. In this viewpoint, of course, spirit and personality are simply complex forms of matter. I have recently seen this reductionist viewpoint expressed in the following way: it is not that God has created the heavens and the earth, but the heavens and the earth have created God, because through evolution they have brought about the human organism, which in turn projects the idea of a divine being. (Fs) (notabene)
102a The second viewpoint is an Aristotelian or Stoic understanding, one that is a rather spontaneous, natural way of looking at the world. It is not reductive, but holds that matter and spirit are mixed in the universe. There are purely material levels of being, but there are also more spiritual and rational levels of being, and each interacts with the other. The spiritual dimension shapes matter and brings about complexities and intelligibilities that sheer matter could not. The existence of life and thinking beings bears the imprint of spirit. Most attempts to refute the Darwinian, reductive point of view aim at reestablishing this kind of understanding of the complementarity of matter and spirit. (Fs)
102b The third viewpoint, which is biblical and creationist, holds that the spiritual or the personal dimension of being precedes the material. Matter exists, but it has come into being through a personal action of God. "Before" there was matter, there was and is God, who is spirit and life. The personal dimension, in this viewpoint, does not arise from matter, nor does it merely accompany the impersonal and the material, but rather it brings it into being. Matter and all created being might not have been, and they exist because of something like a personal choice. The eternal in some sense "precedes" the temporal and causes it to be. In this biblical understanding, the divine choice to create was carried out in sheer generosity or charity, under no pressure and under no need for improvement. The generosity of Creation is the backdrop for the humility of the Incarnation and the charity of the Eucharist. In this third viewpoint, then, the personal or spiritual dimension precedes and causes the material. (Fs) (notabene)
102c Faith in the Eucharist as embodying and presenting the glorified Christ clearly can be held only against the background of the third understanding of matter and spirit. It would not be possible in the first two viewpoints, not even in the one that mixes matter and spirit as two necessary components of the world. The Eucharist must be seen against the setting of Creation, which in turn becomes a context for the Incarnation, in which the eternal and almighty Creator enters into what he has made and becomes a part of it. He then continues his presence in this creation in a eucharistic and sacramental manner. The time and the space of the Eucharist are established by the entry of the eternal and transcendent into the created world. The Eucharist itself, because it would not be possible except against the background of this understanding of spirit and matter, is a perpetual reminder of the transcendence and power of God, which manifested themselves most fully not by spectacular cosmic effects but by the life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus the Lord. (Fs) (notabene)
103a The Real Presence in the Eucharist is therefore not just the concealed presence of one worldly substance under the appearances of another, but the presence of the full mystery of God's being and his work, the mystery hidden from all ages and now made manifest to us, the point of the universe and of creation. It is this presence, this glory, that is the substance of the Eucharist and the core of the doctrine of Transubstantiation. Furthermore, the presence of eternity and transcendence in the Eucharist are not merely a presentation of abstract divine attributes, but the presence of the eternal Son, the Logos, who accomplishes two things in the sacrament: he gives glory to the Father and shares his life with us. (Fs) (notabene)
103b Perhaps some of the difficulties that arise in regard to the Real Presence stem from the way we understand spirit and matter in the world. We may unconsciously subscribe to the first or the second understanding that we have listed above: that of reductive materialism or of a Stoic or Aristotelian mixture of matter and spirit. If these two ways of understanding the world remain in the background for us, we will not be able to accept the idea of Transubstantiation. If we propose to interpret the Eucharist in a manner that will speak to a culture that accepts the Darwinian universe, one that accepts only a materialist and technological sense of being, it will be impossible for us to conform to the Church's faith in this mystery. (Fs) (notabene)
103c But we should not think that it is inevitable that a materialist view of nature will triumph; we ought not fear that the studies of life and cognition will reduce life, consciousness, and thinking to mechanical processes. Instead, we should look at the issue in the other way: we have every reason to marvel at the fact that matter enters into life and rationality, that it is assumed into living organisms and into human consciousness and human exchanges, such as moral actions. Matter enters into the realm of spirit and reason. Matter is already spiritualized when it is elevated into life and rationality. (Fs)
104a The Eucharist extends this trajectory into a still greater spiritualization of matter, one that could not have been anticipated by our study of natural phenomena. The Logos through whom the world was created becomes part of creation, not only in the Incarnation, when he became united with a human nature, but also in the Eucharist, under the appearances of bread and wine. Matter is elevated into a new condition in the Eucharist, in a way that expresses its exaltation in the glorified body and blood of Christ. (Fs)
104b I believe that the Gospel of St. John, and especially the Prologue to the Gospel of St. John, provides an admirable context for the eucharistie celebration and for eucharistie devotion. The Real Presence in the Eucharist calls to mind our belief in the God who was in the beginning and the Word who was with God, who was God, even in that beginning, "before" there was matter. The Eucharist steers us in that direction and into that context; it is a perpetual reminder of the transcendence of God, both when it is celebrated and overcomes the confinements of time and history by reenacting in the present the sacrifice of Christ, and in the tabernacle, where the saving event is not immediately reenacted, but where Christ is present for our contemplation and prayer. St. Thomas expresses this dimension of the Eucharist when he draws on Aristotle and says, "It is the law of friendship that friends should live together." He goes on to say that Christ "has not left us without his bodily presence in this our pilgrimage, but he joins us to himself in this sacrament in the reality of his body and blood."1

Autor: Sokolowski, Robert

Buch: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Titel: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Stichwort: Eucharistie u. Transsubstantiation (Transformation d. Materie);

Kurzinhalt:

Textausschnitt: Transformation of matter

104c In the Blessed Sacrament, matter becomes a vehicle for the presence of the transcendent God. Can we reflect on how this occurs? (Fs)

105a One of the points made repeatedly by St. Thomas in his discussion of the Eucharist is the contrast he draws between the Eucharist and the other sacraments. In the other sacraments, the material element—the water in baptism, the oils used in anointing—is set apart or consecrated simply for the use that is made of it. These sacraments terminate in the application made of the matter (for example, water is used in baptizing). In the Eucharist, in contrast, the matter itself is transformed: the sacrament finds its completion in the change of the material element.1 The bread is not only used to nourish us but is changed in its substance. The Eucharist involves Transubstantiation while the other sacraments do not. The baptismal water and the oils used in anointing remain water and oil. (Fs) (notabene)

105b To bring out the meaning of such a change in matter, let us examine another way in which matter is elevated into a higher use. Consider the kind of elevation of matter that occurs when something material is made into a human symbol. A piece of cloth is made into a flag. When this occurs, the cloth becomes more than cloth. Within the human context, the cloth truly is a flag and certain responses become appropriate while others are inappropriate and even provocative. No one cares if you burn a piece of cloth or stomp on it, but people do care if you burn a flag or trample upon it. Would this paradigm be helpful in speaking about the Eucharist? To make the case stronger, suppose we said that the Eucharist is a more substantial symbol than a flag, because the transformation is brought about not simply by human agreement but by the declaration made by Christ, with divine authority. The bread is the body of Christ not simply by human convention but by divine assertion, and therefore it would remain so even apart from the continued agreement of believers. The bread and wine of the Eucharist would take on a new sense, a paradigmatic sense, within a community of shared meaning. (Fs)

105c But this model fails, because the logic and the being of such symbols is not adequate to the Church's eucharistie faith. Even though a flag truly is a flag, it also remains cloth, while the bread does not remain bread. This fact is brought out by a remarkable comment of St. Thomas, who observes that in the Eucharistie Prayer Christ is quoted not as saying,"This bread is my body," but " This is my body." If Christ had said "this bread" was his body, then the thing referred to would still be bread, but the simple demonstrative pronoun "this" without a noun implies that it is not bread any longer.2 (Fs) (notabene)

106a Furthermore, to say that in the Eucharist the bread and wine remain what they are but acquire a new signification would contradict the logic of the Incarnation. Christ was not simply a prophet who pointed out the way to the Father; he was the way to the Father. He did not just communicate the truth about God, he was the Word of God. The believer comes to the Father not by the way and the truth that are signified by Christ, but through Christ himself, who is the way, the truth, and the life. Analogously, if the bread and wine were to remain bread and wine, they would point us toward the Death and Resurrection of Christ and toward the Son of God, they would signify him and what he did, but they would not be his presence and the presence of his action among us. The Eucharist would fail to continue, sacramentally, the form of the Incarnation, and we would be deprived of the presence, the bodily presence, of the way, the truth, and the life. The Incarnation would have been withdrawn from the world. (Fs) (notabene)

106b The Eucharist continues the Incarnation, but there are important differences between the two mysteries. In the Incarnation, when the Word became flesh, the divine nature did not transubstantiate the human nature. It did not take the place of the human being. To say that it did would fall into a monophysite interpretation of the mystery. To understand the Incarnation as a transubstantiation would imply that the human nature ceased to be but only appeared to be when united with the divine. Instead, the human substance, soul and body, is integrally present in the Incarnation. In this respect, the human substance in the Incarnation is different from the substance of bread in the Eucharist. The human substance, soul and body, remains intact, but the substance of the bread does not. (Fs) (notabene)

106c Indeed, it is the very material and bodily quality of the Incarnation that calls for Transubstantiation in the Eucharist. If Christ is to be present in the sacrament, he must be present in his divine and human natures; if his human nature is to be present, it must be present in both soul and body. And if his body is to be present, the bread cannot be. The one thing cannot be two material substances, both bread and a human body, not even the glorified human body of Christ. If it is the one it cannot be the other. The two bodily natures exclude one another, and it is the bodily presence of Christ that is specifically emphasized in the words of consecration. The body of Christ is not with the bread but takes the place of the bread in the change we call Transubstantiation. If we deny this change, we deny the bodily presence of the glorified Christ, and hence we deny the presence of Christ. Without Transubstantiation the sacramental presence of Christ would not occur. (Fs) (notabene)

107a In the Eucharist, therefore, it is the radical worldliness of the Incarnation, its materiality, that calls for Transubstantiation in the Eucharist. It is the incarnate divinity, the Word made flesh and not simply the divine nature, that is present in the Eucharist. If I may use the terms, the body of Christ, because it is material, "displaces" or "dislodges" the bread. Whatever matter may be, it takes place, it is located. Through Transubstantiation, the bodily presence of the transcendent divinity, in the person of the Son, takes its place among us in a manner that follows upon the Incarnation, and it does so by replacing the substance of bread and wine. (Fs)

107b However, not everything of the bread ceases to exist in the Eucharist. As St. Thomas says, "the accidents, which are the proper object for the senses, are genuinely there."3 The accidents and natural characteristics of bread are truly there; we should not think of the species of bread and wine as merely images in our minds. They are part of the world and they provide the place where Christ is present. St. Thomas says that these accidents serve as a kind of subject for the presence of Christ: "Strictly speaking, there is no subject in this change ... All the same, the accidents which remain do bear a certain resemblance to a subject."4 The sacramental presence of the Word occurs here in this place and at this time, and it thus bears the signature of the Incarnation. The visible and tangible forms of bread and wine, the forms present to the senses, remain as they are, but the substantial form, the form present to the understanding, does not: the body of Christ is now present to the understanding, but to an understanding enlightened by faith, an intelligence guided not by vision, touch, or taste, but by hearing. We recall also that the Eucharist directs us toward the celestial liturgy and our future participation in it, where no sacramental presence, no appearance of bread and wine, will be needed, and where the same God who is now an object of faith will be present to vision. In that celestial liturgy the bread and wine are no longer required for the presence of Christ, but his human being, the fruit of the Incarnation, does remain. For our present state, however, the bread and wine are a worldly expression of the glorified body of Christ that is present to the Father, a worldly expression that we return to the Father in the Great Amen of our Eucharistie Prayer. (Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Sokolowski, Robert

Buch: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Titel: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Stichwort: Eucharistie u. Transsubstantiation (Inkarnation u. Schöpfung vs. Pantheismus); Brot u. Wein (Notwendigkeit ihrer "Entleerung"; himmlische Liturgie); Eu.: Gegenwart d. transzendenten Gottes: erlösender Tod, Auferstehung; Maria - Christus

Kurzinhalt: If the Eucharist is truly the action of God, the bread and wine cannot remain in their substance. However, if one were to claim that the Eucharist is primarily the action of the community ... then the bread and wine would remain what they are.

Textausschnitt: Transubstantiation, Incarnation, and Creation

108a We have discussed the way in which the logic of the Incarnation leads on to Transubstantiation, but more can be said about the interplay between these two mysteries. They should not be seen as separate truths; they are interrelated, and the two should be profiled theologically against one another. The intelligibility of each is clarified by bringing out the identities and the differences between them. (Fs)
108b In the Incarnation, both the divine and the human substances are present, and the actions of the incarnate Word are theandric, the actions of God and man. As many of the Church Fathers claim, if the actions of Christ were not those of both God and man, our salvation could not have been achieved. We had to be saved by one like us if we were to be saved, but we had to be saved by one greater than us, by God himself, if we were to be reconciled with God and allowed to share in his life. The act of salvation sheds light on the agent who accomplishes it. (Fs)

108c The Eucharist reenacts the same theandric action, the action of God and man, but the substance of the bread does not enter into this action. It is not the case that in the Eucharist there is the sacramental action of God, man, and also bread. If this were the case, the eucharistic action would not be the same as that of Calvary; it would be something new and different. The bread and wine must give way and not enter into the substantial action. The bread and wine do not act, and so sacramentally they are not there to act. It is true that the bread and wine are consumed and nourish our bodies, but this physical achievement belongs to the species of the Eucharist, not to its substance. It is fitting that we receive the bread and wine as an expression of the life that is given in the sacrament, but their effect on our person, though necessary as a condition, is accidental to the sacramental action. The bread and wine do not enter into the action in the way that the human substance of Christ enters into the action of the incarnate Word. Furthermore, they are not present in the celestial liturgy, while the human nature of Christ is present and effective there. They are simply the worldly expression of that liturgy. (Fs)

109a The term substance does not name a merely passive substrate. It expresses what a thing is, not only as a being but also as a source of action. We say that the substance of the Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ because the action being reenacted is that which occurred in the separation of his body and blood, in his redemptive death, and this action was defined by being the achievement of his divine and human natures. Both natures are present in the act of salvation and in its eucharistic reenactment. This divine nature, furthermore, is the one nature of the Holy Trinity, even though it is present, in the Incarnation and the Eucharist, in the person of the Son. The divine substance is the power by which the world was created; it entered into creation when the Word became man, and in the Eucharist we worship it as the origin of all things and the source of our Redemption. In the Eucharist the Creator becomes immanent in his creation not just by his causal power but also by his localized presence. (Fs) (notabene)

109b This presence of the divine nature in the Eucharist is such as to exclude the danger of pantheism from Christian belief. The concentrated presence of the Creator in the Eucharist makes it clear, by way of contrast, that God is not present in the world as the universal force and highest entity, as the Stoics understood the divine nature to be. If God becomes part of the world, he does so in the manner of the Incarnation and the Eucharist, not as a spirit or intelligence that is the governing part of the world. The Eucharist bears witness to the radical transcendence of the Christian God. (Fs) (notabene)

109c We have seen earlier that the bodily aspect of the Incarnation makes Transubstantiation necessary; because the body and blood of Christ become present, the substance of bread and wine cannot remain. While the material character of the Incarnation makes Transubstantiation necessary, it is the divine aspect of the Incarnation, the presence of the divine nature in the Incarnation, that makes Transubstantiation possible (and the possibility is prior to the necessity). Only because the divine substance becomes present in the Eucharist, as the ultimate source of the action being reenacted there, can Transubstantiation occur. (Fs) (notabene)

109d When we claim that the presence of the divine nature is a condition for the possibility of the Eucharist, we do not appeal simply to the omnipotence of God; it is not just that God as Creator is all-powerful and could bring about the kind of change that occurs in the Eucharist. Rather, the point is that the Eucharist represents the action of the transcendent God: the redemptive Death and Resurrection of Jesus is the work of God (his primary work, greater even than Creation, revealing more profoundly who and what he is), and hence the reenactment of that action is the work of the same divine nature, the work of the transcendent Creator who recreates the world he has made. The risen Christ reveals the kind of life that is given by God and the kind of life that is lived by him. If this is the work being done, and if the divine nature is there to do it, the natural substance by which this action is represented dare not remain, even though the human nature with which the action was accomplished must remain. The bread and wine are substantially emptied out to clear a place for the action of God. If the bread and wine were still there they would continue to act and so would intervene in the single divine performance. We would not be drawn by the Eucharist toward the one action achieved on Calvary, but would partake of something simply happening now. (Fs)

110a If the Eucharist is truly the action of God, the bread and wine cannot remain in their substance. However, if one were to claim that the Eucharist is primarily the action of the community (and not of the priest speaking in the person of Christ), then the bread and wine would remain what they are. Transubstantiation would not occur; instead, the bread and wine would become symbols of the gifts the people offer. In such an interpretation, it would not be Christ who speaks the words of consecration but the community, whether the assembly gathered here and now or the one that is said to have originally compiled the ritual and the words. Transubstantiation depends on whose action the Eucharist represents. (Fs) (notabene)

110b Both the Incarnation and Creation provide the background for the Eucharist. This relationship can be clarified by a contrast between Christ and the Blessed Virgin. The glorified body of Christ is present in the Eucharist, but the sanctified body of the Blessed Virgin could not become present in a worldly substance. The reason for the difference is that the Eucharist expresses the action of salvation, while the Blessed Virgin was and is its primary and paradigmatic recipient. It is true that her action in the fiat was part of her salvation and ours, but it was so in a manner different from the way the active obedience of the man Jesus was part of our salvation. Christ redeemed but was not redeemed, while Mary was the first of those who were redeemed. The Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin express her perfect receptivity to grace, while the glorification of Christ expresses his action and victory, which is ultimately the action and victory of God himself, the work of the divine nature. It is this action that is present in the Eucharist, in such a manner that the bread and wine that are its expression cannot remain as a part of the achievement. (Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Sokolowski, Robert

Buch: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Titel: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Stichwort: Eucharistie u. Transsubstantiation (Offenbarung); Eu. als Vollendung von Schrift und Lehre; Eu. im Schnittpunkt von Transformationen: von Gott (Schöpfung, Inkarnation, Erlösung) -- von der Welt (Brot usw ...); Maria; Eu. als Umkehr d. Transfiguration

Kurzinhalt: By revealing the risen Christ, the Eucharist discloses the Incarnation, since the Resurrection confirms the presence of God in Christ. Through the Incarnation, the Eucharist discloses the mystery of Creation ...

Textausschnitt: The revelation that occurs in the Eucharist

111a As the central action in the life of the Church, the Eucharist continuously discloses the mysteries of Christian faith. The action of the Eucharist complements the words of Scripture and the teaching of the Church. It reveals the Resurrection, bearing witness to the fact that Christ is alive now and a source of life and light for us. By revealing the risen Christ, the Eucharist discloses the Incarnation, since the Resurrection confirms the presence of God in Christ. Through the Incarnation, the Eucharist discloses the mystery of Creation, the fact that the God who became incarnate was also the one who created the world out of the sheer generosity we call charity. By revealing the mystery of Creation, the Eucharist reveals the divine nature as transcendent to the world and yet acting in it, both giving it being and recreating it through the mystery of Christ. Finally, the Eucharist reveals the truth that the divine nature is present to us in the person of the Son, and that therefore the life of God is trinitarian. (Fs) (notabene)

111b The Eucharist is at the center of a series of transformations that converge from two directions, from God and from the world. God, in his infinite charity and in his wisdom and art, created the world and transformed elements of it into man, into a body that lives a rational and spiritual life. God then assumed a human substance and entered into his creation in the hypostatic union. This transformation was perfected by the Death and Resurrection of Jesus, the action that reconciled the whole of creation to the Creator. God sanctified his creation by becoming united with part of it, and he redeemed it and gave it a new form by what he accomplished in that union: "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come. All this is from God" (II Corinthians 5:17-18). These transformations, from Creation to Redemption, were accomplished by God. From the other extreme, from the created world, material substances, wheat and grapes, become transformed by human art into bread and wine. These substances are again transformed in the Eucharist, when they become involved in the reenactment of God's redemptive action, the continued representation of his presence and activity in the world. The bread and wine, the work of human hands, are our humble gift to God. As Mary offered the human body to the Word, we offer him our bread and wine. He becomes united with them, but in a manner different from his union with a human substance in the Incarnation. In the Eucharist, the transformation is a Transubstantiation, in which the bread and wine give way entirely, except in appearance, to the presence of God, the Creator and Redeemer. The Eucharist in turn is the pledge of future glory for those who partake of it, transforming them into the image of the Son: "Beloved, we are God's children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is" (I John 3:2). (Fs)

112a The logic of the Incarnation leads to the change of substance in the Eucharist. Let us conclude by turning to a particular moment of the Incarnation, to the Transfiguration, the transformation of Christ that took place, on the mountain, before Peter, James, and John. The Eucharist is a reversal of the Transfiguration. When Christ was transfigured, his substance remained the same but his appearance changed. In the Eucharist the opposite occurs. The appearances of bread and wine remain the same, but what they are has changed. They look no different, but they are now understood to be the presence of Christ and his act of Redemption. Both the Transfiguration and Transubstantiation express Christ's glory, the one to the eye and the other to faith, the one before his Passion, the other afterward. The splendor of the vision is contrasted with the humility of the bread and wine. These differences notwithstanding, it is fitting for us, as we participate in the Eucharist, to respond as did Peter, James, and John: to be moved by gratitude and fear of the Lord, and to sense the meaning of his Passion and Resurrection, the meaning they have before the Father and for us. (Fs) (notabene)