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)