One of the more curious criticisms sometimes leveled against Catholicism by Eastern Orthodox Christians concerns Eucharistic adoration. Catholics reserve the Blessed Sacrament in the tabernacle. They pray before it. They expose the consecrated Host in a monstrance. They keep hours of adoration before Christ. They carry the Eucharist solemnly in procession. They incense it, kneel before it, sing hymns before it, and receive Benediction with it.

To many Orthodox Christians this is a distinctly Latin development, and therefore foreign to the Byzantine tradition.

That much is indisputable.

But some Orthodox critics go considerably further. Eucharistic adoration is presented not merely as something the East did not develop, but as a theological distortion of the Eucharist itself. The Eucharist, we are told, was instituted to be eaten. Christ said: “Take, eat; this is my body.” He did not say, as the polemical formulation goes, “Take and look.”

At first hearing the objection may sound powerful. Upon examination it creates serious problems for Orthodox Christianity itself.

For the Orthodox believe, no less than Catholics, that the consecrated Eucharist truly is the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. They believe the Eucharistic presence continues after the Divine Liturgy. They reserve the consecrated Gifts outside the Liturgy, for Communion of the sick and dying, and for the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts in Lent.

And therein lies the problem.

If the Eucharist really is Jesus Christ, and if it remains Jesus Christ after the Liturgy, what exactly could be wrong with adoring Jesus Christ who is present there?

That question deserves an answer.

THE ARGUMENT IN ITS SIMPLEST FORM

Consider four propositions.

One. Jesus Christ is God and therefore must be adored. Two. The consecrated Eucharist truly is the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. Three. Christ remains truly present in the Eucharist after the Divine Liturgy. Four. Therefore Christ present in the reserved Eucharist is worthy of adoration.

Which proposition can an Orthodox Christian deny?

Certainly not the first. Certainly not the second. And not the third, since Orthodoxy itself reserves the consecrated Gifts.

The conclusion follows with remarkable simplicity.

If it is Christ, He is adorable.

The Catholic who kneels before the tabernacle is not worshipping bread. He is not worshipping a sacramental function. He is not inventing a new object of Christian worship.

He is worshipping Jesus Christ.

And the Orthodox Christian believes that the same Jesus Christ is objectively present there.

Saying that “the Eucharist was instituted to be eaten” therefore does not establish that adoration is illegitimate. Catholics agree that Christ instituted the Eucharist to be received. But a thing can possess a primary purpose without every legitimate consequence of its existence being exhausted by that purpose.

WHAT THE FATHERS ACTUALLY SAID

There is a difficulty for the objection that arrives long before the Latin Middle Ages.

Around the year 415, St. Augustine preached on Psalm 99, and specifically on the verse “worship his footstool.” He reasons that the footstool of God is the earth, that the flesh Christ took is of the earth, and that in the Eucharist we receive that flesh. Then he draws the conclusion.

Whatever one concludes about monstrances, this much is difficult to escape: the notion that adoring the Eucharistic Christ is a Latin novelty foreign to the ancient Church does not survive contact with the fourth and fifth centuries.

“TAKE AND EAT” DOES NOT MEAN “DO NOTHING ELSE”

The popular objection sometimes takes this form: Christ commanded us to eat the Eucharist, not to gaze upon it.

But if this is intended as a general theological principle, that Christian devotional practice must be restricted to the immediate action explicitly commanded by Christ, it does considerable damage to Orthodoxy itself.

Christ never commanded: “Paint icons of me.” He never said: “Kiss those icons.” He never commanded Christians to carry icons in procession, illuminate lamps before them, incense them, bow before them, or construct great iconostases covered with them.

Yet Orthodoxy does all of these things. And Orthodoxy has a theological explanation for doing so.

The Incarnation has consequences. Because the invisible God truly became visible in Jesus Christ, the human face of Christ may be depicted. Because the image refers to its prototype, honor shown to the image passes to the one depicted.

That reasoning is not a repetition of an explicit command of Jesus. It is theological development from a revealed reality.

And Orthodoxy is right to reason that way.

Catholic Eucharistic devotion operates according to precisely the same kind of reasoning.

THE ICON TEST

Perhaps the clearest way of seeing the parallel is to set the two arguments side by side.

If such reasoning is legitimate for the Incarnation and icons, a principled explanation is needed for why it becomes illegitimate for the Eucharist.

DEVELOPMENT CANNOT BE A ONE-WAY STREET

Christianity is not governed by the principle that if Jesus did not explicitly command a particular devotional expression, Christians may not do it. Orthodoxy knows this, and its own life demonstrates it repeatedly.

Christ left no instruction to paint icons of departed Christians, place them throughout the churches, kiss them, burn incense before them, carry their images in procession, and repeatedly ask them to intercede. Orthodoxy rightly rejects the Protestant objection that these practices are therefore illegitimate.

Christ taught renunciation, celibacy and ascetic discipleship. But the institution of Orthodox monasticism (tonsure, the schemas, monasteries, abbots, rules, habits, developed ascetical systems) was not delivered fully formed to the Apostles. It developed.

The Jesus Prayer and hesychasm possess profound biblical and patristic foundations. But the developed tradition surrounding repetitive prayer, stillness, breathing, posture and the theology of the uncreated light cannot be read verbatim from a command of Christ. It developed.

Christ did not pronounce the word homoousios. The Church employed non-biblical terminology to articulate faithfully the implications of revelation. Again: development.

None of this embarrasses Orthodoxy. Nor should it.

Which is why identifying something as a “later Western development” answers only the historical question, when and where did this arise? It does not answer the theological one: is this development true, legitimate, and compatible with the apostolic faith? The Byzantine Rite of the first millennium did not fall from heaven in its present form either. Orthodox liturgy, iconography, monasticism, hymnography and theological vocabulary all developed.

“Rome developed it” is an observation, not an argument.

THE STRONGEST ORTHODOX OBJECTION

Fairness requires confronting the serious version of the argument, which is not “Jesus said eat, not look.” The serious version comes from one of the finest Orthodox theologians of the last century, and it is a claim about what the Eucharist is.

On this view the Eucharist is not a static object which acquires a permanent property and may then be handled devotionally at leisure. It is an event: the Spirit gathering the Church into the Kingdom, the assembly offering and receiving. Latin exposition, the argument runs, detached the sacrament from that action and turned it into something to be looked at. The complaint is therefore not that Christ is unworthy of worship. It is that Western devotion altered the sacrament’s proper end and context.

This deserves considerably more respect than the popular objection, and it should be answered rather than brushed aside.

There is a further difficulty with the historical half of the claim, and it comes from the East.

THE PRESANCTIFIED ANSWER

Fr. Schmemann wrote that the Gifts “never became in the Orthodox East an object of special reverence, contemplation, and adoration.”

Consider first where the Orthodox keep the reserved Gifts.

Not in a side chapel, and not in a cupboard. The artophorion stands on the holy table itself, the altar, the most honoured surface in the church, and it stands there permanently. It is not emptied at the end of Lent. Each year on Holy Thursday the priest consumes what remains and replenishes it from that day’s Liturgy, so that Christ is never absent from the altar of an Orthodox church.

A tradition that regarded the reserved Gifts as mere provisions for the sick would not house them in its holiest place, in perpetuity, and renew them annually with ceremony.

Then consider the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts.

On the weekdays of Great Lent the Byzantine Church does not celebrate the full Eucharistic Liturgy. Instead the Gifts consecrated at a previous Sunday Liturgy are brought out and distributed. There is no anaphora. Nothing is consecrated. The Gifts have been reserved, kept, outside the Eucharistic action, from a former day.

And they are treated differently from the bread and wine of an ordinary Liturgy. They are carried in at the Great Entrance in silence, and the faithful go down before them. Not because a consecration is about to occur; none will. The reason is the only one available: unlike the gifts carried at the Great Entrance of an ordinary Liturgy, these are already the Body and Blood of Christ.

That the difference turns on precisely this point is not our inference. It is a question the Byzantine tradition argued over internally. St. Nicholas Cabasilas urged caution about venerating the Gifts at the ordinary Great Entrance precisely because they are not yet consecrated. St. Symeon of Thessalonica took the other side, holding that they might be venerated even then, as images of the Body and Blood.

Read that dispute carefully. Both men take for granted what the objection denies: that veneration is owed to the Gifts once Christ is present in them. What they disagree about is whether anything may be offered before that point. Neither entertains the thought that the consecrated Gifts, reserved and carried outside the Liturgy that consecrated them, might be improper objects of reverence.

So the principle at issue is not foreign to Byzantium at all. It is presupposed by both sides of an argument the East conducted with itself.

What remains between East and West, then, is not the principle but its extension, how long, how often, with what furniture. That is a real conversation. It is a much smaller one than the polemic supposes.

“A MEDICINE FOR A WESTERN DISEASE”

A more historically minded critic may put it differently.

Latin Eucharistic devotion, he observes, took its developed form in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: the elevation of the Host, the feast of Corpus Christi in 1264, exposition and Benediction thereafter. And it did so in the wake of the Berengarian controversy, when the Real Presence had been publicly doubted in the West. Adoration, on this reading, is medicine for a Western disease of Eucharistic doubt, a disease the East never caught, and whose cure it therefore does not need.

There is real history in that. But the inference does not hold, and Orthodoxy is the tradition least able to make it.

Doctrine and devotion very often take developed form under the pressure of controversy. The Church did not define homoousios in a vacuum; she defined it because Arius denied it. The theology of the icon was not elaborated in tranquillity; it was hammered out against iconoclasm. In both cases a crisis occasioned the articulation, and in neither case does the East regard the result as a merely local remedy that may be discarded once the crisis passes.

A development prompted by controversy is still a development from the deposit. What must be shown is that it contradicts the deposit — not merely that we can name the century in which it became explicit.

RESERVATION CREATES A PARTICULAR DIFFICULTY

Suppose the objection were that the Eucharist exists exclusively within the liturgical action and ceases to signify when that action ends.

Orthodoxy cannot say this. It reserves the Gifts. And it reserves them because they remain the Body and Blood of Christ. The Orthodox priest who approaches the reserved Gifts tomorrow does not believe he approaches ordinary bread which will somehow become Christ again when carried to a sick man.

Christ remains present.

Now imagine two Christians standing before those reserved Gifts. Both believe that Jesus Christ is there sacramentally.

One says: because Jesus Christ is here, I will adore Him.

The other says: you must not, because He instituted this sacrament to be eaten.

But the first has not denied that the Eucharist is to be eaten. He has simply drawn a further conclusion from the second man’s own premise: the One whom I am commanded to worship is really present before me.

What principle forbids him to worship?

That is precisely what must be demonstrated. Repeating the purpose of Communion does not do it.

THE MONSTRANCE QUESTION

The criticism can be narrowed further, and at its narrowest it is a genuine question about devotional development rather than about whether Christ may be adored. Grant that private prayer before the reserved Eucharist is unobjectionable. Why deliberately expose the Host in a monstrance?

The Catholic answer is straightforward.

The monstrance does not change the Eucharist. It changes its visibility.

The Christ inside the monstrance is the same Christ who was inside the tabernacle moments earlier. If worshipping Him while the tabernacle door is closed is legitimate, opening the door does not make worship illegitimate. If exposing Him behind glass makes the practice wrong, one must say what theological change has occurred.

None has. Christ remains Christ. Exposition simply assists the Church in contemplating a presence she already believes to be there.

One may prefer another devotional tradition. One may argue that exposition is unnecessary. One may hold that Byzantine spirituality does not require it. But “we did not develop this” and “this is theologically erroneous” are radically different propositions. The first may be historically indisputable. The second requires proof.

WHAT ISRAEL WOULD HAVE RECOGNISED

There is a further consideration, and it runs deeper than polemics.

Ancient Israel did not believe that God’s special presence could be reduced to the utilitarian function of sacred objects. God was omnipresent, yet He chose to manifest His presence uniquely among His people. The Tabernacle was holy. The Holy of Holies was holy. The Ark was treated with extraordinary reverence. Incense surrounded the sanctuary. Israelites prostrated themselves before the manifested glory. The Temple became the geographical centre toward which Israel turned in prayer.

The biblical instinct is unmistakable: where God manifests His presence, His people respond with worship.

That instinct does not disappear in Christianity. It reaches an astonishing fulfilment.

The Catholic does not claim merely that God’s glory rests above the Eucharist as the shekinah rested above the Ark. He claims something greater: that Jesus Christ Himself is substantially present. The Eucharist is not a reminder of someone absent. It is Emmanuel, God with us, under sacramental signs.

If Israel could orient her worship toward God’s presence in the sanctuary, it is difficult to see why worshipping the incarnate Son substantially present in the Eucharist should represent an alien religious instinct.

WHAT ORTHODOXY CAN COHERENTLY SAY

There is a perfectly coherent Orthodox position available.

“Eucharistic exposition, Benediction, Forty Hours and similar devotions did not develop within Byzantine spirituality. We possess our own inherited way of expressing Eucharistic faith, and we see no reason to adopt Latin devotional forms.”

There is nothing inconsistent in that, and Catholics should respect it. Eastern Christians need not become Latins. Uniformity is not catholicity.

Something very different is being claimed, however, when one says that Catholic Eucharistic adoration is a corruption because Christ commanded the Eucharist to be eaten rather than adored.

That argument does not survive examination.

For the Eucharist is not an it. It is He.

The Catholic is not taking an object intended for eating and inventing another use for it. He believes he is standing before Jesus Christ. And so, crucially, does the Orthodox Christian.

Trent is worth reading precisely here. The charge it anathematizes is not “you have a different devotional custom.” It is the charge that those who adore Christ in the Eucharist are idolaters. That is the accusation actually at issue, and it is the one the Church has formally refused.

A QUESTION OF CHARITY

There is also a pastoral dimension to this controversy that should not be overlooked.

Consider what the Catholic believes he is doing. He believes that Jesus Christ is before him. He loves Him. So he kneels. He remains with Him. He speaks to Him. He sits silently before Him. He thanks Him. He asks forgiveness. He gazes upon Him. Sometimes he says nothing at all.

What precisely is objectionable about this?

The Orthodox Christian may prefer to express Eucharistic devotion differently. That is entirely legitimate. But preference is not prohibition.

There is an analogy in human love. Imagine one husband expressing genuine affection toward his wife, and another saying: “That is not how I express affection toward mine.” Fair enough. But it would be extraordinary for him to conclude: “Therefore you are wrong to love your wife that way.”

And the analogy understates the Catholic claim, for the Catholic does not believe merely that the Eucharist reminds him of the Beloved. He believes the Beloved is there.

So he stays.

There is something deeply human in this. When someone we love is present, we desire to remain with him. Presence itself is a reason. We do not require that every moment of it accomplish some additional purpose. A husband does not ask what function is being served by sitting quietly beside his wife; the relationship supplies the answer. Likewise the Catholic before the Blessed Sacrament need not justify each minute by appeal to the Eucharist’s purpose as food.

He is with Christ. That is enough.

The best description of it comes not from a theologian but from a peasant of Ars, who spent long hours before the tabernacle. Asked by his curé what he was doing there, he is said to have answered:

THE STRANGE ASYMMETRY

The situation becomes more striking when set alongside Orthodox devotional life.

Orthodox Christians kiss icons of Christ. They bow before them, illuminate lamps before them, incense them, carry them in procession, and spend long periods in prayer before them.

Catholics do not respond: “Christ gave us the Incarnation for salvation, not so that you could stand looking at His icon.”

Catholics recognise what the Orthodox Christian is doing. He loves Christ. The icon assists him in directing that love toward Christ. And Catholics can appreciate the devotion even where its particular expression developed differently in East and West.

How strange, then, to extend less generosity toward a Catholic kneeling before what Orthodoxy itself confesses to be not an image of Christ, but the actual Body of Christ.

A Catholic can watch an Orthodox Christian kiss an icon of Jesus and say: he loves Our Lord. An Orthodox Christian ought at least to be capable of watching a Catholic kneel before the Eucharistic Christ and saying the same.

THE QUESTION THAT REMAINS

This leaves the critic with a simple question.

Is Jesus Christ truly present in the reserved Eucharist, or not?

If the answer is no, then Catholic adoration is indeed idolatry. But Orthodoxy emphatically rejects that answer.

If the answer is yes, then Christ is there. And if Christ is there, He is God. And if He is God, He is worthy of adoration.

One may dispute whether a monstrance is necessary. One may prefer the tabernacle. One may reject Benediction as foreign to one’s ritual patrimony. One may prefer Byzantine Eucharistic spirituality to Latin. Those are legitimate discussions.

None of them establishes that worshipping Christ in the Eucharist is wrong.

The burden rests upon the critic who wishes to move from “we never developed this devotion” to “Catholics ought not practise it.” The first is an observation about history. The second is a theological condemnation. And it cannot be established by saying “Take and eat”, not when Augustine says no one eats worthily who has not first adored, and not when the East itself prostrates before the presanctified Gifts every Lent.