One Bread, One Cup, One Altar

The Church Is in the One Eucharist

The first chapter answered what the Church is. Now we must ask what holds this Body together, and the answer decides everything else in this book.

THE APOSTLE POINTS AT THE CHALICE

Men speak of communion as though it named a mood of goodwill, a general friendliness among believers. The Apostle will not allow it. When Paul wished to say what communion is, he did not reach for a theory. He pointed at the chalice.

Read the sentence until its order sinks in, for the whole doctrine of the Church is in the order. Paul does not say that we, being already one body by agreement, therefore share a meal as its symbol. He says the reverse: we are one body because we all partake of the one bread. The cup is not a picture of a communion that exists somewhere else. The cup is the communion. The one loaf makes the one Body.

The Church, then, is not first an organization which happens also to have sacraments. She is the communion which the one Eucharist creates, the Body of Christ gathered into being around the Body of Christ. Saint John Chrysostom pressed the verse to its limit: what is the bread? the Body of Christ; and what do they become who partake of it? the Body of Christ, not many bodies, but one body. And the Church prayed this before she defined it, in her most ancient eucharistic prayer: as this bread was scattered upon the mountains and, being gathered together, became one, so let Thy Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into Thy kingdom. Grain by grain into one loaf; soul by soul into one Body. The loaf is not a metaphor the Church chose. It is the mechanism God chose.¹⁰

In the same breath the Apostle teaches what an altar is, and what it does to those who eat from it. Behold Israel after the flesh: are not they which eat of the sacrifices partakers of the altar? To eat from an altar is to be made a partaker of that altar, bound into the fellowship of everything the altar stands for and confesses. From this, a few lines later, Paul draws a terrible conclusion which the next chapter will set out in full. Hold, for now, the truth our private minded age most needs: communion is never a private act. No one ever receives the chalice alone, however alone he kneels. In receiving it he is joined, whether he thinks of it or not, to every soul who partakes of that altar, to the confession that altar proclaims, and to the bishop whose name that altar bears. The cup is a covenant with everything it belongs to. That is its glory, and that is its danger.

ONE ALTAR, AS THERE IS ONE BISHOP

From this the first generations after the Apostles drew the teaching that stands at the heart of Orthodox ecclesiology, and they compressed it into three words: there is one altar. Saint Ignatius the God-bearer, writing on the road to his martyrdom while men who had seen the Apostles still lived, gave it as the rule of the Church's being:

One flesh, one cup, one altar: the martyr simply repeats the Apostle's arithmetic. Saint Cyprian, in the century that followed, drew the boundary that guards it: God is one, and Christ is one, and His Church is one; another altar cannot be set up, nor a new priesthood made, besides the one altar and the one priesthood. Mark how exactly this defines the sin of schism. The schismatic is precisely the man who raises a second altar against the one; and the ancient canons condemn him in those very words. The one altar is not a poetic flourish. It is the given form of the Church's existence, and the whole canonical tradition is a fence built around it.

TEN THOUSAND TABLES, ONE ALTAR

But now the question that unlocks the mystery: how can the altar be one, when the altars are ten thousand? There is a holy table in every Orthodox church from the rising of the sun to its setting. In what sense are they one?

The Liturgy itself answers, at the fraction, when the priest divides the Lamb: Broken and distributed is the Lamb of God: broken, yet not divided; ever eaten, yet never consumed. Christ is not parcelled out among the churches, a portion here and a portion there. Upon every true altar lies the whole Christ, the same, entire, undivided. Therefore the ten thousand tables are not ten thousand altars, but one altar standing in ten thousand places, as the one sun stands whole in ten thousand windows. Geography multiplies the tables; it cannot multiply the Body. The village chapel and the patriarchal cathedral hold one and the same Lamb, and the child who communes in the one communes at the very altar of the other.

And the one altar is one across time as well as space. It is the altar of the Apostles and the martyrs and all the ages, the same Mystical Supper, from the night in which He was betrayed until He comes. It is one across the last frontier also: we have an altar, says the Scripture, and the Church has always known her table below and the altar above to be one worship, one offering, one communion of angels and men. This, and nothing less, is what the title of this book means by Heavenly Communion.¹²

THE VISIBLE NETWORK

This oneness is not invisible. The Church wears it openly, in the fabric of her order, so that it can be seen and tested.

No priest may celebrate except upon the antimension, the consecrated cloth signed by the hand of his bishop and laid upon the holy table. The altar itself, in its material form, bears the name of the hierarch who binds it into the episcopate. At every Liturgy the bishop is named aloud; and the bishops name one another in the diptychs, church answering to church across the earth. And the condition of all this naming is the one shared confession of the one faith. The Liturgy binds the two together in a single petition, asking the unity of the faith and the communion of the Holy Spirit in one breath, because the second does not exist without the first.

So the one altar is joined, link by link, name by name, confession by confession, into a single visible communion embracing every true confessing Orthodox soul on earth. This network of the one altar is the Church's visible unity, and there is no other: not an administration, not a headquarters, but the one Eucharist, guarded by the one faith, on the one altar in all its ten thousand places.

The Apostle gathered the whole chapter, before it was written, into one ladder of unities. Let it stand as the seal of everything said here:

WHAT THE ONE ALTAR ASKS OF US

Let the weight of this settle, and every question in this book stands in its true proportions. If the Church is in the one Eucharist, then whom I commune with, whose name my priest proclaims, and whose confession my amen seals at the chalice are not details at the edge of the spiritual life. They are the very place where my membership in the Body of Christ is enacted.

This is the unspeakable joy of Orthodoxy: in one spoonful the believer is united to Christ whole and entire, and in Him to the whole Church of every land and age, and to the altar of heaven itself. And it is, at the same time, the exact measure of what is at stake when the confession at an altar is falsified. The cup that unites me to all the altar confesses cannot unite me to truth and to its denial at once. The wall, when this book comes to it, will be seen for what it is: not a departure from the one altar, but a refusal to let the one altar be exchanged, before our eyes, for another.