As I shared in the last issue, participation in the Eucharist was defined by the Fathers in Christological terms – as being “in Christ”. Being “in Christ” however, does not involve personal or “hypostatic” identification with the Logos, because the person is that which is always unique. It involves a sharing, through the power of the Spirit, in Christ’s glorified humanity – a humanity that remains fully human even after its glorification.

In debates with iconoclasts, who claimed that Christ was deified in His resurrection and became “indescribable” and therefore impossible to be imaged, Theodore of Studios objected: “If Christ were uncircumscribed after His resurrection, we also, who are one body with Him, would have to be uncircumscribed.”

The iconoclastic controversy directly involved not only the doctrine of the incarnation and, in general, human relations with God, but also and particularly the Eucharistic doctrine. The iconoclasts – and more precisely, Emperor Constantine V – affirmed the Eucharist to be the only legitimate and biblically established image of God. For their true-believing adversaries, as we learned from Theodore of Studios, the Eucharist was, on the contrary, a true and real identification of the faithful with the risen Lord – not simply a vision of his image. In the theological and Christological categories developed by the true-believing spokesmen of the iconoclastic period, the Eucharist was never the object of a vision: only the icons were to be seen. It is this general conception of the Eucharistic assembly that justified the extraordinary development of the iconostasis – the system of icons covering the screen that separates the altar area from the nave of a Byzantine church. The Eucharistic mystery performed behind it is not an object of visual contemplation but a meal, eventually distributed to the faithful, who otherwise communicate with God by contemplating and venerating icons.

As you can tell and as I have been trying to suggest, everything we say that we believe is interconnected. The Fathers looked at all that we believe and saw a real connection between all of our beliefs. They are all about the God in which we believe and how He has manifested Himself to us. One belief leads to another. God is truly Triune because Jesus is both God and Man. The Eucharist and icons are directly connected to these beliefs.