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12 comments:
This is out of the blue, but what do Orthodox think of Eucharistic adoration? I was discussing the topic with someone, and would like to learn more.
We don't practice it, if that's what you mean, but, then again, we don't really have a problem with it either. Except that it might have [had] some Nestorian tendencies. Especially given that they had a problem with adoptionism at around the time of the schism and afterwards (which is when the practice of adoring the Eucharist began in the West).
Thanks, Lvka.
This is out of the blue, but...
It's not: you were predestined to ask this question.
Another couple questions I was "predestined" to ask:
Do you understand what Aquinas is saying here? Specifically, is giving latria to icons of Christ and to the Cross in line with Second Nicaea?
As I said, honor and worship belong to persons, not to natures. This honor and worship takes on material forms (kissing, bowing, and kneeling) because we're flesh and blood and matter, and so are the persons we honor and worship, yet it is not to their natures that honor and worship is ascribed, but to their personhood. The Eucharist is, in the end, Christ's body and blood, NOT His Person, nor His "body, blood, soul and divinity" (that these things are unseparated is something else, and doesn't annul the fact that they are distinct realities). If the West would honor the Eucharist (in relationship to Christ) like the Saints' relics (bodily remains) are also honored in relationship to the respective Saints to whom they belong, then there's NO problem. But, as I said, if this honor is done in a Nestorian, semi-Nestorian, or crypto-Nestorian fashion, then we have a HUGE problem.
Agreed, it's right and proper for honor and worship to be expressed in physical ways. I'm not an iconoclast; I believe the east is correct to distinguish latreia and proskynesis.
My question is, is Aquinas in line with Second Nicaea when he says we give latria to the cross and to icons of Christ? I thought the icons and the cross are venerated, not adored.
ps What prompts the question is that Bellarmine seems to build on Aquinas's understanding of latria when he says this:
We say that Christ is by Himself and properly to be adored with the worship of latria; and that that adoration belongs also the the symbols of Bread and Wine, so far as they are apprehended as a something that is one with Christ Himself, whom they contain. As they who adored Christ clothed on earth, did not adore Him only, but even His garments in some sort (for they did not bid Him be stripped of clothing before they adored Him, or in mind and thought separated Him from His garments, when they adored), but simply adored Christ as He then was, although the ground of their adoration was not His clothing, nay, not His humanity itself, but His Divinity alone.
In order to count to 7, one must first get past number 3. Before arriving at Second Nicaea, one must first get past Ephesus. Honor and worship belong to persons, NOT natures: that's what both Aquinas and Bellarmine, like the whole West, for that matter, either don't get, or get wrong. The problem is not that they sort of left-handedly end up ascribing worship to matter(!), but that they confuse categories: we don't honor icons or crosses, but Christ and His Saints: that this has a physical component and manifests itself in bowing, kissing and kneeling before their icons, crosses, and relics is something else altogether.
It's Christ we adore, and we show this by reverential gestures before what is associated with him. What should Aquinas and Bellarmine have said then? That we don't direct latria to the cross or to the icon or to the sacrament, but that we adore Christ with latria and show this outwardly by appropriate actions before the cross and the icon and sacrament of his body and blood?
I don't know what they "should" have said: all I know is that from all possible wor(l)ds, they chose the worse, LOL! :-)
Ha! Thanks much