The Kingdom which is to come—the cause and archetype of the Church
Metropolitan John Zizioulas
Amidst the wealth of patristic evidence for a connection between the Eucharist and the Kingdom, we may single out one truly important passage from St. Maximus the Confessor which, so far as we know, has not yet received the attention it deserves from our theologians. This passage indicates not only the unbreakable connection between the Eucharist and the Kingdom, but also the radical overturning of the ancient Greek notion of causality. Apart from anything else, this demonstrates how unjust and far from the reality is the very prevalent notion that Maximus was influenced by ancient Greek philosophy, Platonic and Aristotelian. First we shall set out this passage in its entirety, so that we can go on to comment on it in relation to our theme. In his Scholia on Dionysius the Areopagite’s work On the Church Hierarchy, Maximus writes:
“[The Areopagite] calls images (εἰκόνες) of what is true the rites that are now performed in the synaxis. . . . For these things are symbols, not the truth. . . . From the effects. That is, from what is accomplished visibly to the things that are unseen and secret, which are the causes and archetypes of things perceptible. For those things are called causes which in no way owe the cause of their being to anything else. Or from the effects to the causes, that is, from the perceptible symbols to what is noetic and spiritual. Or from the imperfect to the more perfect, from the type to the image; and from the image to the truth. For the things of the Old Testament are the shadow; those of the New Testament are the image. The truth is the state of things to come.”[1]
In this passage, St. Maximus interprets in his own way the concept of the Eucharist as image and symbol in relation to the concept of causality. What takes place in the Divine Eucharist is an “image” and “symbol” of what is “true.” Reading this passage up to a certain point, one seems to be moving in an atmosphere of Platonism. The things “accomplished visibly” are images and symbols of the “unseen” and “secret”: perceptible symbols are images of what is “noetic and spiritual.” In accordance with the Platonic view, the perceptible and visible world is an image of a stable and eternal world which, being noetic and spiritual, is the truth, the true world. In consequence, one would say that what is accomplished in the Divine Liturgy is an image and reflection of the heavenly Liturgy which is accomplished eternally and which is the “archetype” of the earthly Eucharist. That would indeed be a typically Platonic understanding of the Eucharist.
But Maximus has a surprise in store for us at the end of this passage. The Divine Eucharist is for him an image of the true Eucharist which is nothing other than “the state of things to come.” The “truth of what is now accomplished in the synaxis” is to be found not in a Platonic type of ideal reality but in a “reality of the future,” in the Kingdom which is to come. The crucial element which overturns the Platonic relationship between archetype and image is the category of time. To get from the image to the prototype we do not have to go outside time, but we certainly have to pass through the expectation of an “event” or state which lies in the future. This changes the whole mentality from a Platonic to a biblical one. For while it is impossible in Platonic thought to pass from the image to the archetype through time, as if the archetype were to be found at the end of history, in the biblical understanding it is essential. On the biblical understanding, as in that of St. Maximus, what is represented in the Eucharist is what is to come, He who comes, and the Kingdom which He will establish.
But this passage is important also because it poses the problem of causality, thus overturning not only Platonic but also Aristotelian notions of “entelechy” and causality. Causes, says Maximus, are those which do not in any way owe their cause to anything else. In ancient Greek and Western thought, as in common sense, a cause is logically but also chronologically prior to its effect. In the thought of St. Maximus, however, the further back we go in time, the further we get away from the archetype, from the cause: the Old Testament is “shadow,” the New Testament is “image,” and the “state of things to come” is truth. In other words the archetype, the cause of “what is accomplished in the synaxis,” lies in the future. The Eucharist is the result of the Kingdom which is to come. The Kingdom which is to come, a future event (the state of things to come), being the cause of the Eucharist, gives it its true being.
This is what comes out of a careful reading of Maximus. Later on we shall look at its existential significance—because this is what concerns theology in the final analysis, and not the historical or philosophical curiosity in which the theologians of our own day usually expend all their energies. For the time being, we note that the biblical connection between Eucharist and Kingdom, far from losing its force in the Patristic period, was securely established on an ontological basis: the Eucharist is not simply connected with the Kingdom which is to come, it draws from it its being and its truth. Liturgical practice formed, and continues to form, the language in which the Church expresses this thesis. And we should pay attention to it.
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