Is There an Equivalent in the Byzantine Rite?

Happily preserved in Divine Worship: The Missal and the #Ordinariate communities. pic.twitter.com/cdbl9lRo0T

— Fr James Bradley (@FrJamesBradley) January 30, 2021

Septuagesima Sunday tomorrow. A pre-Lent that was known by St Gregory the Great in 590s AD. Still kept in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. (Abolished in the modern Roman Rite in 1970.) A time to prepare for our observance of Lent. pic.twitter.com/u6ZZdOBXzZ

— Fr Timothy Finigan (@FatherTF) January 30, 2021

Eucharistia and Prayer

Is receiving God through Holy Communion greater than receiving God through prayer? https://t.co/TwA1jepeoX

— OCN (@MyOCN) December 17, 2020

Question: Is receiving God through Holy Communion greater than receiving God through prayer?

Answer: We receive God through grace and grace comes to us in many ways. It comes when we invoke His Name with reverence and humility; when we pray and live by the word of God; when we receive Holy Communion with the testimony of a good conscience. We accumulate grace in every instant of our life, if we meet our fellows with a good heart, respect and honour. There are many means of acquiring the grace of God in order to preserve our heart alive with the sensation of God, and this is essential: for as long as our heart is warmed up by the grace of God, no alien thought can approach us and we are unassailable by the enemy.

We are able to invoke His Name with reverence and humility thanks to God's grace. The following answer has a more exact elucidation of our total dependence on God.

Question: I have a philosophical proud mind. How can we acquire stillness if we are proud?

Answer: Pride seems to accompany every our attempt to present ourselves before God in prayer and come close to Him. The most practical way to acquire humility is continual thanksgiving. The Spirit of God always inspires gratitude (1 Cor. 2:12). Father Sophrony makes a distinction between spiritual humility and ascetical humility. Ascetical humility consists of always reproaching and considering ourselves as worse than all, as we are commanded in the Gospel: ‘When ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do’ (Luke 17:10). As for spiritual humility, it is indescribable. It is granted to those who have already contemplated the beauty of the Risen Lord, the Light of His Face, which wounds them with the deep conviction that they are unworthy of such a loving God as Christ is.

I do note that he doesn't really answer the first question.

Fr. Blankenhorn on Spiritual Communion

The Exodus took Israel through a long period of profound physical penance and spiritual purification: the two seem to be inseparable in the spiritual life. The desert became the only way for Israel to reach the Promised Land, and by God’s saving will, the people could only traverse this barren place by turning to the Lord each day for manna and quail. Israel had to learn radical trust in God, to recognize her utter dependence on him for everything: the direction of travel, the way to order the community’s life, and, of course, the reception of sufficient food and water.

Related:


Updated (4/9):

An essay touching upon the same topic, but much shorter. Still, it refers to the same two sources, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.

St. Augustine's Journey to Easter by C. C. Pecknold

Yet it is precisely in this exile that we must find our way to Calvary this year. We may be weary pilgrims, spiritually gaunt for so much sacramental fasting, but we are still pilgrims who must press our lips to the Cross. We cannot enter into the Paschal Triduum through Skype or Zoom. So what are we to do, we poor banished children of pandemic?

St. Thomas Aquinas gives us a hint: “the reality of the sacrament can be had through the very desire of receiving the sacrament.” He makes a distinction here between the signum and the res—the sacrament and the reality that the sacrament communicates. It is a distinction that goes back to St. Augustine.

There is at least one objection to this in the combox, concluding that if it is true, it renders going to Church superfluous. (Actually, it would render receiving the Sacraments superfluous.) I would think that desire is not enough -- one needs to ask God for the gift of life and trust in His goodness and mercy.

Αἰτεῖτε καὶ δοθήσεται ὑμῖν. -- Matthew 7:7 (cf. Luke 11:9)

The Latin Distinction Between Divine Mercy and Divine Justice

Another instance where it is used.

Church Life Journal: Does the Mass Say Christmas Is About Justice? by John O’Callaghan

And yet, Christ is called the "Sun of Justice" or better, the "Sun of Righteousness" (Malachi 4:2). And that is the solution to the Latin difficulty...

Hebrews 12:29 For our God is a consuming fire.

Some reject the idea of hell as a fiery punishment, maintaining that hell is primary a spiritual state, the sinner's own rejection of God (and thus the beatitude that consists of communion with Him). If God is all-loving and good, then why would He need to inflict an additional punishment to this misery that the unrepentant sinner will experience? But if we accept that there is a sensible component to the Divine glory and love that we can experience, and that those who are in beatitude will experience this as a pleasant sensation (the warmth of the sun, to which the warmth of feeling loved by another is compared), then conversely, those who are in hell because they have turned away from God, might they not they also experience the warmth of this Divine Love as something painful, as they have rejected it? Hellfire then would not be a separate punishment, but the sensible consequence of their rejection of God, an unquenchable fire because the sinner has rejected it and the transformation that it would bring to him.

As for purgatory, even if purgatory will end on the Last Day with the resurrection of all who have died, followed by Judgment, perhaps the soul too will somehow experience the Divine Love as a "fire" as a part the purgation process, the removal of any lingering imperfections, which are burned off, while he is heated and transformed in the Divine Love.

Purgatory

If the "fire" or "heat" of purgatory is God's love purifying those who live in Christ from all remaining perfection, then why might hell not be that same love experienced as a form of torture by those who have rejected God?

(The glory of God, the light of those who have been perfectly transformed or deified is in contrast pleasant.)

An Orthodox Perspective on Justification

How to pray the “Cursing Psalms” against our enemies

Rather than talking about "Divine Justice" (as an analogue to human retributive justice) as Pius Parsch does in his introduction to the breviary, wouldn't it be better to talk about punishments/chastisements/etc. in relation to Divine Mercy or Righteousness?

Can God will an evil (or punishment) to a sinner for its own sake, without willing the further good of conversion or penitence, or just as a means to maintaining good order or discipline or to prevent them from doing greater evil, for the sake of others only? Or does sin suffice as its own punishment?

Justification and Righteousness

Pravoslavie: Those Whom He Justified He Glorified: Paul’s Argument in Romans 1:17-3:31 by Seraphim Hamilton (original)

Notes on Divine Righteousness, Satisfaction and Atonement

St. Thomas, ST III 46, 2 obj. 3

Further, God's justice required that Christ should satisfy by the Passion in order that man might be delivered from sin. But Christ cannot let His justice pass; for it is written (2 Timothy 2:13): "If we believe not, He continueth faithful, He cannot deny Himself." But He would deny Himself were He to deny His justice, since He is justice itself. It seems impossible, then, for man to be delivered otherwise than by Christ's Passion.

ST III 46, 2 ad 3:

Even this justice depends on the Divine will, requiring satisfaction for sin from the human race. But if He had willed to free man from sin without any satisfaction, He would not have acted against justice. For a judge, while preserving justice, cannot pardon fault without penalty, if he must visit fault committed against another--for instance, against another man, or against the State, or any Prince in higher authority. But God has no one higher than Himself, for He is the sovereign and common good of the whole universe. Consequently, if He forgive sin, which has the formality of fault in that it is committed against Himself, He wrongs no one: just as anyone else, overlooking a personal trespass, without satisfaction, acts mercifully and not unjustly. And so David exclaimed when he sought mercy: "To Thee only have I sinned" (Psalm 50:6), as if to say: "Thou canst pardon me without injustice."

One can say that Christ's human acts are meritorious and that His life, that in which we participate through the holy mysteries/the sacraments, provides the template for our deification. This much can be harmonized with Christus Victor theories .

Beyond this, the problem arises when Aquinas writes (ST III 48, 2): "He properly satisfies for an offense who offers something which the offended one loves equally, or even more than he detested the offense."

Usually it is understood as a form of quantitative equalizing, the "accounting ledger." It might be possible to make Aquinas here verbally agree with a Christus Victor theory of atonement, Christ satisfies Divine Righteousness for the sin of Adam (and our sins) by doing what Adam failed to do and thus countering his sin and fall, taking upon the condition of fallen man and healing him, etc..

But St. Thomas continues in III 48, 2: "But by suffering out of love and obedience, Christ gave more to God than was required to compensate for the offense of the whole human race."

The language still remains that of measuring or "accounting, as given in the language of the third objection, "Further, atonement implies equality with the trespass, since it is an act of justice," which Aquinas does not deny in his response.

Similarly, forcing an interpretation of justice as Divine Righteousness (in its wholly holy sense) could be done for ST III 46, 1 ad 3 but it would notbe a good fit :

That man should be delivered by Christ's Passion was in keeping with both His mercy and His justice. With His justice, because by His Passion Christ made satisfaction for the sin of the human race; and so man was set free by Christ's justice: and with His mercy, for since man of himself could not satisfy for the sin of all human nature, as was said above (Question 1, Article 2), God gave him His Son to satisfy for him, according to Romans 3:24-25: "Being justified freely by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God hath proposed to be a propitiation, through faith in His blood." And this came of more copious mercy than if He had forgiven sins without satisfaction. Hence it is said (Ephesians 2:4): "God, who is rich in mercy, for His exceeding charity wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together in Christ."

The article from the new Catholic Encyclopedia may be an attempt at a corrective to "A rigorously juridical concept of satisfaction [that] can suggest an exchange governed by commutative justice. Excessive humanization of the Creator-creature relationship can effect the theological discussion of whether or not Christ's payment of satisfaction in mankind's name was in the strictest sense a work of justice."

It goes a way to try to return to Christus Victor theories of atonement and return to a fuller sense of Divine Righteosness, but it also takes steps back as soon as it advances. For example:

The Prophets and the Psalmist appeal to the justice of god when yearning for deliverance. Goodness, mercy, fidelity, constancy—all these are aspects of the Biblical notion of God's justice. When Saint Thomas speaks of "the severity of God" that was "unwilling to forgive sin without punishment," he rightly couples this immediately with "His goodness" in giving mankind one who could adequately satisfy in behalf of all those who deserved punishment (Summa theologiae 3a, 47.3 ad 1).

[Hampered by too much attachment to Aquinas.]

And: "The word propitiation reminds one that Christ's suffering and death were an expiation for an offense or an appeasement of an offended God."

And yet what follows does not support this as the explanation of propitiation, but rather propitiation as understood in Christus Victor theories : "Though God's loving justice was not punishing His innocent Son, He did so plan the redemptive Passion as to enable Jesus to express His filial love through experiences that came to mankind historically as punishments for sin, namely, suffering and death "

(FB)

What is Righteousness?

Post by Orthodox Christian Network.