I believe Trent included something having to do with the mechanism, which is the part that the Orthodox didn’t embrace.
“I believe Trent included something having to do with the mechanism, which is the part that the Orthodox didn’t embrace.”
The Western Church, GL, has tended to define theological points more precisely and legalistically than the Eastern Church. The reasons for this are many and include a different mindset when it comes to theology, history and frankly the challenges faced in the West, like the Protestant Reformation, which the East has never had to face.
We in Orthodoxy are content to leave certain things a mystery. Indeed, we formally call the the sacraments “Mysteria”, the Mysteries, because we honestly don’t know how they work but we have faith, even “knowledge” of a spiritual sort, that they do.
In any event, you put it just right. We don’t reject the Trentian mechanics so much as we don’t embrace them.
We don't know the mechanism. The Eastern Church agrees that there is change in substance but that the mechanism remains a mystery. In other words, we agree with the meaning of the term transubstantiation but reject that it explains the mode by which the change is made.
In that regard, nothing has changed in either Catholic or Orthodox Church doctrine. Kolo correctly points to the fact that the Latin Church, faced with Protestant challenge, found it necessary to express the mystery in more legalistic and clearly defined terms in order not to confuse it with Lutheran "consubstantiation."
The Eastern Church to this day accepts, but not necessarily uses, the term metaousiois (change in substance, the equivalent of transubstantiation), because it expresses what the Church taught all along.