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THE ECCLESIAL WE AND THE EUCHARIST In dialogue with the theo -logic of Heribert Muhlen

Rev. Dr. Alessandro Clemenzia Sophia University Institute, Loppiano, Italy

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The actuality of the category of we in its ecclesial reference, has confirmation

not only in the academic field: it is enough to look at the numerous studies on the communional dimension of the Church, showing the value of relationships founded upon reciprocity, a visible expression of how the Trinity manifests itself; but also in the sociocultural context in which the challenges rising from the process of globalization have imposed a serious rethinking of the value of the other and of the question of unity; that is to say, what is meant by unum, the goal toward which we tend whether in a conscious way or not (and it is the same strategy of communication which verifies it). In the face of these realities which initiate in the socio-cultural context and which are seen even today under the guise of challenges, can the Church, or rather, the ecclesial we still offer a proposal that makes sense? The theologian Heribert Mhlen has tried to answer that question in all of his research, in the various theological fields he studied.

2.

To enter into the ecclesiological dynamics of the ecclesial-we it is important first

of all to understand what is meant by we. Mhlen tries to explain its significance starting with Trinitarian Theology, interpreted in the light of personological categories. He starts with the personal pronoun I, which on the one hand indicates the identity of the person as incommunicable existence, unrepeatable and unique (in saying I the subject is

identified as being totally distinct and distinguishable from every other). While on the other hand, the personal pronoun I indicates its being-in-relation: to say I is a declaration of ones own being before a you or better yet, before another I. The meeting between I and you creates a twofold situation that is fundamental for a Trinitarian and ecclesiological reflection: a) a relationship of opposition: the more I and you become closer, the more the specifics which distinguish one from the other emerge, and thus the distinction between them; b) an intentio unitiva in which I, even though discovering to be other than you, enters into a relationship of intentional reception of the other so much so as to generate reciprocal recognition. The twofold reality which is formed realizes the union I-you, a unity that is composed simultaneously of a relation of opposition
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and a relation of reciprocal reception. This, however, is not yet the we (as is often said in the Italian language, we two, or us both) but rather, the union I-you. So when can we talk about a we, since it is not the same as the result of the relationship between an I and a you? We are at the heart of the personological method of Mhlen, who after having presented and argued the fundamental structure of the meeting of the I-you, introduces another union, the union-of-we (Wir-Vereinigung) which is formed in the moment when the I and the you do not relate to each other in a relation of opposition but fulfill a common action, as if they were a single subject, towards a third. It is this third that trans-forms the union-I-you into the union-of-we.

3.

Mhlen rereads Trinitarian theology in the light of the personological method

just described, albeit in a simplified way. Basing the discussion on An Jhwh, as a formula of revelation in the Old Testament, and n eg eimi in the New Testament, whereby the Father presents Himself as the I-in-person, and the Son, as the You-in-person, Mhlen uses the personological method as a hermeneutical criterion for a reexamination of the Trinity-in-itself (or the Trinitarian life of God in Himself). What distinguishes the Father is His being the origin without beginning, the paternity and the active spiration. According to Mhlen, the Father uses the I-expression, in the Old Testament, so as not to allow for the presence of other gods next to him, and in the New Testament, to emphasize His being the origin of both the Son and the Holy Spirit. The absoluteness of the Father, His being without origin, cannot be separated from His paternity, that is from his relation to the Son. The Father thus manifests Himself as the Iintra-Trinitarian. The Son, on His part, presents Himself as an I who finds the sense of His being in relation to that You, the Father, who constitutes him as I. He is the You-in-person, because His I while having all the specifics that distinguish him as I with respect to the Father, is nonetheless only in respect to the You of the Father, in truth, to the I of the Father. The Son is therefore the You-intra-Trinitarian in reference both to his response to the I of the Father and to the being-You-of-the-Father, in the establishment of the dialogue in which he does not lose his being without a beginning. And where is the Trinitarian or intraTrinitarian We realized? On the basis of what has been affirmed through the personological method, that is that the we is not identified with the union-I-you, there needs to be a Third. It is here that Mhlen introduces the discussion of the Holy Spirit, the Third Person who is neither external nor extraneous but within the
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relationship between Father and Son. He is the same Divine we-ness, the We-in-person, the relationship-We-intra-Trinitarian. But how can a single person be the We, which by itself is an indication of plurality? The Holy Spirit, within the Divine life is the nexus Patris et Filii, and the same communication between Father and Son and, we might add, their perichoresis in-Person, since He personalizes the intra-Trinitarian dynamics and all that can be attributed to the Divine Nature. The third Person of the Trinity is the most complex because of its anonymity. It is sufficient to look at His name, Holy and Spirit, terms which can both be said of each Person of the Trinity and of their Divine Nature. The anonymity of the Divine Pneuma has been confirmed by the fact that in the Scriptures, on the contrary to the Father or the Son, He never reveals Himself as an I or as a You. He never speaks about Himself to the people of God even though He is the condition of the possibility of the act of faith in the Father and in the Son on behalf of the individual believer and the faithful community.

4.

I would now like to more thoroughly examine the question of the

epistemological statute of we, starting with the suggestive intuitions of Mhlen to discover the fundamental characteristics of the ecclesial we. To more completely understand Mhlens reflections on the We, it is necessary to introduce a category used by him which was not given a great importance in the Theological field nor was it studied deeply by the scholars who studied his ideas but which, however, seems to emphasize the specificity of his proposal: the we-a-priori. This category is used here in a twofold significance - the we-ness intended as Divine nature and the We-in-person, that is, the Holy Spirit. Of the few scholars who expounded on this category, most have dealt almost exclusively with the pneumatological aspect which shows a certain disregard, especially in the last decades, for a deeper speculation of the concept of Divine nature. The a priori indicates a condition of possibility because a reality is in a certain way. It is the horizon which interprets; it is through which and thanks to which one is or has something. If the a priori is considered then in relation to the communion of we, that is, to the Divine Nature, then it is possible to identify the characteristics of the latter by recuperating the syntactical function of the ablative such as quo and in quo. Talking about the Divine we-ness as a fundamental logic of the distinctions of the Persons, it is possible to see in Mhlen an appreciation for a classical approach, most of all in reference to St. Thomas and to St. Anselm. Mhlen, as he affirms repeatedly,
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avoids considering the Divine We in the prospective of a tri-theism or an accidental or collective unity a posterior ( the we cannot be intended as the result of the sum of an I and of a you, just because it is a priori). Starting from this reference to the Divine Nature, the we appears, not so much in its personological meaning in relation to an I or to a you, but as an originating space and Divine background that shows the interpersonal dynamics of the being of God. The category of the we-a priori is used also in reference to the We-inPerson, to the Holy Spirit. Through the recovery of the neutral gender (which does not mean non-personal) His action can be expressed as space and force both in the creative activity and in reference to the believer, as the force which makes the experience of faith possible. In all these meanings the Spirit is shown as the between-in-person.

5.

What are the ecclesiological implications for Mhlen? We are here at the

ecclesial we, presented by Mhlen in his ecclesiological work entitled Una Mystica Persona. His intention was not to write a manual of ecclesiology but to find a fundamental formula for the Church that could express the characteristics found in Scripture and in Tradition. As Trinitarian Theology developed the formula one nature in three Persons and Christology coined the phrase two natures in one Person, likewise for ecclesiology an adequate expression is to be found that remains open while accounting for what is essential. In this perspective, the Church is understood as one Person (the Spirit) in many persons (in Christ and in us). Mhlen writes: The expression one person means the Holy Spirit and the expression many persons means Christ and us. Christ binds us to Himself and binds Himself to us by means of the mission of His Spirit; and thus the Spirit, while He unites himself to us and unites us to himself, achieves our union with Christ. He is, therefore, the vinculum, the bond of unity, He then is the numerically one person in Christ and in us1. The biblical foundation of this ecclesiological proposal moves from the biblical category of the corporative personality, included in the concept of Great-I, in which there is evidence of a continual oscillation from the collective to the individual, from the I to the we in mutual implication. In addition to this internal return, the corporative personality presupposes a kind of irradiation of a great personality passed on in his descendents, whereby a population seems to identify itself with the ancestor who continues to live throughout time. As far as the Church is concerned, the reference is specifically Christological since it is the I of Christ who shines forth in the ecclesial community.
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H. MHLEN, Una Mystica Persona. La Chiesa come mistero dello Spirito Santo in Cristo e nei cristiani: una Persona in molte persone, Roma 1968, 21. 4

Recuperating the Augustinian category of Christus totus, and the Aquinian one of Una Mystica Persona, Mhlen introduces the ecclesiological formula developed by him: One Person in many persons. He reaches that by asking himself in what way the I of Christ (as the ancestor/individual) is extended in the Great-I of the Church (people/collective). The Divine Pneuma, the We-in-person is the condition of possibility for the ecclesial we, in that He is the One in whom and by means of whom the I of Christ is extended and spreads in Christians through unction. The Church is the historical continuation of the unction of Christ. As at the intra-Trinitarian level the Spirit manifests the Divine we-ness, in His being of both the Father and the Son, so too, on the ecclesial level He achieves the we of the Church in His being one and the same in Christ and in Christians. The Pneuma, in the life of Jesus, has rendered public and ecclesial this event: the grace of the unction conferred on Christ was ordered a priori to a multitude of persons, such that what seemed to have the characteristic of singularity, that of the I-ness has instead a plural finality, a reference to the we-ness. The Church, or rather, the ecclesial we thus finds its origin in Christ, and its condition of possibility in the We-in-Person, the Divine Pneuma. In fact, the ecclesial we is such only as the Spirit of Christ taking place in it. The Holy Spirit is the communion and the mediation by whose power the I of Christ finds itself in front of the you of the Church in an oppositio relationis.

6.

Personological categories are the interpretive horizons of the whole theological

system of Heribert Mhlen. Through this what emerges above all is the importance that the relational dimension has in a discourse about the person, expressed both in the relationship I-You and in the union of We. At the same time every personal-word expresses, together with the dynamics of reciprocity also the individuality and the particularity of every single person. Therefore everyone is in his being from-with-for-in the other-than-himself; being and relations in the Divine Persons coincide perfectly so much so that it is not possible to think of one without the other. To speak of God in personal terms has implications also in the realm of creation. Mhlen, in fact, through the personological categories that describe how every person is who he is only by entering into dialogue with those who other-than-himself, illustrates how such a logic can have its equivalent both in the theological area and in the anthropological one. While the human person is such by engaging in dialogue with others, the Divine Persons Themselves are dialogue: the I, the You and the We are who they are in their individuality each in reference to the other-than5

himself. The distinction between the relationship I-you and the communion of the we is central to the theologic of Mhlen: the I of the Spirit arises from the common gift of the mutual love of the Father and of the Son; as an initiative of the Father (as the primordial I) love does not enrich ones own I but raises a You in front of himself, in which he finds himself as in another self. The opening of the reciprocal relationship between the I and the You radiates beyond the two and generates a Third who makes the two collaborators in a common action: from the love that is in ecstasy a new I is formed. A problem that in my opinion emerges in Mhlens theo -logic concerns the Trinitarian dynamics; he talks about an I, a You and a We within God, who are who they are in their reciprocal relationship, without showing the various ontological implications of such reciprocity: he adheres to the Latin tradition which bases the communional reality of the Divine Persons upon their common nature and upon the relationship, by which each Person is in his own relating to the other-than-himself, but the dynamics of reciprocity by which each is in relation to the other are not developed. That Trinitarian omission in Mhlen has repercussions also in his reflections upon the Church. It is the recovery of the Eucharistic logic that brings forth what has been defined as the limits of Mhlens thesis. But what does the Eucharistic logic consist of? A Russian author, S.N. Bulgakov writes about it as follows:

The we is not only a grammatical form, but it is a true and proper revelation of the language concerning the nature of I that exists only in the acceptance of with-I. [] We is the ontological love in the I, which lives not only in itself, but also in the you and in the he, in the measure in which love is truly life in and through the other 2.

The intuitions of Heribert Mhlen regarding the personological categories, and particularly the We, are certainly correct, but to understand the specifics, especially in the Divine area, one cannot disregard the dynamics that make up the intra-Trinitarian relationships and which are expressed by three simple prepositions (mentioned in the quote from Bulgakov): with, for and in. The multiple relational dynamics between Father, Son and Holy Spirit are all expressed, in the theological reflection always keeping in mind the inadequacies of human language , by various simple prepositions: of, to, from, with, for and in which indicate the different movements that each Divine Person performs in relation to the Others.

S.N. BULGAKOV, Capitoli sulla Trinitariet, in P. CODA, Sergej Bulgakov, Brescia 2004, pp. 67-171, p. 77. 6

If the Church is that space where the Christological and pneumatological event occurs, that is to say the Trinitarian We, then beyond these relational modalities, expressed by the cited prepositions, one could not even understand the sense of the ecclesial we. Without lingering on each of these, I would like to point out at least one aspect which emerges, starting from the Eucharist, and which requires the discussion to recuperate the Christological reference. The giving of Jesus, the Christ, takes on a fundamental characteristic: the open gratuity. What is meant by this? The gift that the Incarnate Word makes of Himself to others is in itself gratuitous and open. First of all gratuitous in that the freedom of the gesture of the donor does not ask for any required response or any reciprocity from the donee. Rather, for the gift to be gift,, it is necessary at least in the intentions of the donor that the act of giving not be closed within the logic of exchange. Jesus indicated this expressly in His reminder not to invite to dinner those who are can reciprocate the invitation (cf. Luke 14:12-14), or, in one of the most difficult moments of His existence, in the Garden of the Gethsemene. At the moment of his arrest, Jesus, with the words, I am brings the soldiers attention only to Himself, asking that H is followers be left free from any accusation (John 18:4-9). This is the confirmation that Jesus giving of Himself to His followers does not require restitution of their lives to Him. On this level the measure of love, for it to truly be gift, must be without limits, that is to say, a measure without measure. We can thus say that the gratuity of gift is a first moment of Eucharistic logic. This gratuity, however, is not closed within in itself but open; it is not, as we have seen, a giving to receive and not even a giving just for the sake of giving. The openness, in that sense, does not concern an interior predisposition of the giver, but the vital and fertile energy contained in the donation itself which also invests the donee with those same characteristics. The receiver of the gift, in fact, at the moment that he accepts, is called not so much to respond in a direct (or symmetrical) way to the donor, but to make the dynamics received his own towards others. The acceptance of the gift (which is not a thing but an essential energy) calls for a fecundity that is not expressed in restitution to the donor but in the rebounding of the gift itself. In other words the receiver of the gift is called to respond to the donor by giving in turn to others. This moment of the Eucharistic logic is also clearly expressed by Jesus when He asks His followers, in restitution of the agape received from Him, to give their lives for each other. The Son of God gave His life, asking each to give their own life for their brothers. More than a relationship without a
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relationship3 (as the philosopher Petrosino has affirmed, which would express only the first moment of Eucharistic logic, meaning a gratuity that does not expect a return), this asymmetrical relationship can be defined as a reciprocating reciprocity, to use an expression of Piero Coda in his latest book From the Trinity4. This means a form of relationship that is actuated not only in the dia-logicality but also in the opening towards others, as a fecundity of the initial gratuity and the primordial communion. This open gratuity in-forms the intra-ecclesial relationships, as con-formation to Divine life and, through the mediation of Eucharistic logic, becomes a per-formative announcement of the ecclesial we. On this overall level, the Eucharist is the hermeneutical foundation of the Church, not only because the ecclesial we is the given body of the I of Christ, such that both become a corporative personality (in which, while maintaining the necessary distinction between human and divine, the profound interaction between the two is emphasized), but also because the relationships which characterize the ecclesial res, to make it be what it is, must enter within the same Christ-logic (here called Eucharistic logic) which we have tried to explain here briefly. At this point it is necessary, in ecclesiology, to recuperate and study more deeply the mystical character of the Church, founded upon the relational-Trinitarian rhythm and mediated in Christological-sacramental form. The we, therefore, is not only a sign of identity and belonging to the Church but an open space through which the Divine We enters in humanity to lead it to Himself. In this descending and ascending dynamic, the we of the Church is called to realize itself, accomplishing its mission, through the Eucharistic dynamic of Christification in the Spirit, the Christus totus, a mystical Person, who gathers all of humanity within Himself, turning to the Father in the Spirit with the same invocation of the Son: Abb-Father!

S. PETROSINO, Il Figlio ovvero Del Padre. Sul dono ricevuto, in P. GILBERT S. PETROSINO, Il dono, il Melangolo, Genova 2001, pp. 49-86, p. 52. 4 Cf. P. CODA, Dalla Trinit. Lavvento di Dio tra storia e profezia, Roma 2011, pp. 566-567. 8

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