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" No one ever achieved theosis/mystical union via a horizontal communion with their fellow man."

I did not get the impression that the Cardinal was saying that one did. Looking at his comments from an Orthodox point of view, he seems quite Orthodox here. We believe that our theosis is quite individual, but that for the overwhelming majority of us, we work out that theosis within a Eucharistic Community of fellow believers. For great spiritual athletes, this may not hold true. St. Mary of Egypt, whose memory and example we celebrate today is an example of such a person as are the many anchoite Desert Fathers, but for most of us, the community is necessary. Our participation on the "right praise", the "Orthodoxia" of the Divine Liturgy is an example of this since there we join with our brothers and sisters and the angels and the communion of saints to sing the praises and give thanksgiving to our Triune God. From the earliest days of the Church, we have defined ourselves as a bishop surrounded by his priests and people in the Divine Liturgy because there Christ is. By being members of the Church and partaking of His Body and Blood, we become part of His Mystical Body together and are thus connected to each other in a way which extends beyond simple human relationships. The Cardinal speaks of a social dimension to all of this and that certainly has been our experience. Our social "circle" is made up almost entirely of the people we go to Liturgy with or others in an extended Orthodox Christian family, even people I have met here on FR. We pray together, party together, share each others joys and sorrows together, even bear each others burdens. My wife and I have friends who are not Orthodox and yet who socialize with us and others of our Orthodox friends. On a number of occasions these people have remarked how close we are to each other and how lucky we are to have each other. I've told them that what they are seeing is a hallmark, at least, of Orthodoxy here in America and that they can have that too. Some have responded to that, most haven't but they continue to marvel at it. None of this though, Deborah, means we worship ourselves or each other, but it is a "horizontal" manifestation of the "vertical" Orthodoxia we offer to our God. In a sense I think this is revolutionary and it is certainly communal which is why I am wont to say that for us in the West, Orthodoxy is counter cultural. This Eucharistic Communalism does not lead, however, to innovation in the Faith, to such statements as we see from the heresiarchs of some in both the Roman Church and the Anglican Communion that the Holy Spirit is "doing a new thing", that what was revealed as sinful to our fathers and mothers in the Faith is no longer sinful or that the purpose of the Faith is to allow us to fulfill some personal goals of complete "personhood". Our only fulfillment, our only goal, is theosis, to become like God as individuals and for most of us, we work on that within the community.

Comments?

K, I agree with everything you wrote. I also have to admit that I found nothing in Ratzinger that I really disagreed with.

But there is soemthing about the tone and emphasis of his essay that makes me very uncomfortable, but that I couldn't articulate well -- that's why I haven't posted anything on this thread, yet.

At the heart of my discomfort is exactly what C of D points out -- the heavy emphasis on the horizontal aspect of communion.

K, you are right that for us Orthodox, this horizontal aspect is part and parcel of what communion is. As our priest said a week or two ago, sin creates isolation, alienation, and lonliness. Put differently, he said "everyone goes to hell alone, but we all go to heaven together." When we were having a time of troubles in our parish, and a split was looking inevitable, one of the things that we agreed on was that this would hurt our path to salvation. We need each other, and in a sense "it takes all kinds" -- we gain something from communion with everyone else in the parish, something we wouldn't gain without them.

I think, though, that *in the context of Vatican II* the way that Ratzinger talks makes me squirm a bit.

The Orthodox approach to communion never loses the vertical aspect. The performance of proskomede by the priest alone in preparation for the Liturgy is intensely vertical, although the horizontal aspect is there, and in a bigger way than Ratzinger even discusses, since the communion of the living with the departed and all the saints is enacted there. During the Liturgy itself, the priest still faces east when at the altar -- symbolically facing God along with the people. The reverence shown to the Gifts is deep. The sacrificial aspect is clear.

For the Orthodox, it seems that the vertical aspect of the Eucharist creates the horizontal in a natural and organic way, whereas the post Vat II Catholic church seems to attempt to directly jump to the horizontal and social aspects of communion, bypassing the vertical aspect. This is most strikingly created symbolically by the fact that the priest faces the people.

I know that I'm rambling, but I'm attempting to put my finger on what it is that makes me uncomfortable with the Cardinal's writing. It just seems a bit mushy. It technically is nothing I can disagree with, and seems to correct many of the previous Roman overemphases on the vertical (typified by the fact that Roman priests can say mass and receive "communion" all by themselves -- there is no imagery of communion with one's fellow Christians in a mass that is said with no-one else present).