Eucharistic Logic

On the “Rational Mystery” of Communion

St. Pavel Florensky’s Pillar and Ground of the Truth begins with a critique of “rationality.” While I think Florensky’s critique is, by and large, true, I disagree with his terminology. In truth, the first chapters of his magnum opus are not a critique of rationality as such but of fallen rationality, i.e. rationality that has yet to be transfigured by faith (faith is the humility of rationality, the openness of self-enclosed thought to divine otherness). 

In the Divine Liturgy, the priest prays the following during the Anaphora: "Again we offer to Thee this rational and bloodless Worship, and we beseech Thee, and pray, and supplicate Thee: send down Thy Holy Spirit upon us, and upon these Gifts here presented.” The use of the term “rational” has always been particularly striking to me. The Eucharist is, in fact, the supreme mystery of the Church, the most concrete realization of the union of divinity and humanity in the body of Christ–in what sense is it “rational”?

In a previous post, I talked about the Eucharist as the “overcoming” of the abstract law of identity. I should note that “abstract” is an essential qualification in this case (for the same reason I’d qualify Florensky’s use of “rationality” with “fallen”), as the law of identity (A=A) is not false. Rather, what is false is the notion that “A=A” in its bare, abstract formulation expresses the inner life of identity. As I attempted to explain in our podcast on the communal ontology, “communal logic” begins with the recognition that any identity is only intelligible in light of an other (and, as we covered in the podcast, a “third” is also necessary). It is true, of course, that A=A, but to say A=A is to say that A =/= B. If A not being B is immanent to the truth of A’s self-identity, then relation to B is immanent to A. Since we are speaking of abstract, logical identities, there is no “positive” relation here to speak of (since “A” and “B” are just empty placeholders signifying abstract self-identities; they have no positive content). But does this conception of self-identity not seem to account for our actual experience of the world (which does have positive content) much more satisfactorily than self-relational logic? All beings exist within a reciprocal relationship with their environment, yet they are not reducible to it. The individual is not reducible to his/her environment (A=A), yet the individual’s self-identity is unintelligible without reference to this otherness (B is immanent to A). Phenomenal experience is itself patterned upon this same communal (triune) structure: the irreducible subject experiences the irreducible other within some commonly shared “space.” By contrast, the phenomenal experience implied by the abstract law of identity is solipsism. 

So, contrary to what Florensky’s language implies, rationality as such is not the problem. In fact, rationality “as such” is a divine energy, that is, a way of speaking of the Triune God. “Rationality” is only meaningful in light of the notion of a proper pattern of activity with a reason. What else is rationality other than the capacity to perceive the inner “reasons” (logoi) of beings? The eternal “proper pattern of activity with a reason” is the Triune communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: the Father eternally begets the Son through the Spirit and the Son returns the love of the Father back (timelessly) through the same Spirit. The being of each of the divine persons is being-for-another; the “purpose” of God (the Father) is to glorify the Son through the Spirit (this is not, of course, an extrinsic purpose binding on God from without). The “laws of logic” are simply ways of expressing the inner rationality of the Triune divine mind, and this is precisely why they express the truth of being as being-in-communion. 

Therefore, the Eucharist is both a mystery and rational, and these two truths are mutually explained. The Eucharist is a mystery not because it is anti-rational (this is a common misconception of the meaning of “mystery,” which is a topic for another day) but precisely because it is supremely rational; it is the fullest realization of the “rational” union of divinity and humanity which was the reason for creation in the first place. The Eucharist transfigures fallen rationality. In the Eucharist, A does not equal A in the abstract sense, but A (God) fully “enters into” “B” (bread and wine) and completely realizes the essential relation that constitutes created being. Since created being is defined exclusively as participation in God, the Eucharist, as the full realization of created being’s participation in God, does not signify some radical alterity utterly incomprehensible to our minds but the supremely rational realization of the very truth of our being. We can, therefore, “understand” the Eucharist not in the sense of comprehending “how” God does what he does, but in seeing that it is, in truth, the most fully “reasonable” and “proper” reality that is perfectly intelligible in light of a revelation-based ontology, epistemology, logic, etc.

In the Eucharist, we see that beyond the mystery of rationality, there is the rationality of the Mystery.