Do the sins and inaction of Pope Leo X by necessity diminish the reality of his office and teaching authority? Not at all; it is a principle, recall, that "act necessitates potency, but potency does not necessitate act (within a subject)".
If you get the time and inclination, I'd like you to elaborate a bit more on this connection you're establishing between the pope as office and these metaphysical principles. Honestly, the more reading that I'm doing on the subject of the New Testament gospels the more I am realizing that a historicist interpretation applied to them must fail miserably. But following on this realization comes confusion, because whereas some of the crucial 'events' of the gospels are not to be taken historically, we are to apply their symbols as a hermeneutic for interpreting the papacy (for example, the Last Supper or the Keys).
I see parallels here which exist between the Eucharist and the pope, for this reason, but whereas the Eucharist is merely liturgical and ritualistic, the high office of pontiff is consequential in a way beyond the spiritual. Where the Eucharist is something like a correspondence in sympathy to something taking place at a spiritual level (in Heaven), the papal office can influence the very 'magisterium' which was thought to have entered the physical world but originated in Heaven. I'm not sure I am making this clear, but imagine that you say, "The pope cannot alter the core of the magisterium." There appears to be a bit of convenient back-and-forth here, i.e. between the less substantive position of a viceregency alone and the literal Vicar of Christ on earth.
Where it suits, one can point to the pope's lack of authority, but at the same time it removes the 'teeth' from the arguments that support his position on theological grounds. So what happens is a kind of wavering between a power-level which would honor the theological justification, and the more mundane human side of things. If the man can say things which even bridge the unholy, then where are the distinctions drawn? Is it merely in what he chooses to label a given utterance or piece of writing? If it is called X it is binding, but if it occurs as a Y, then it is just a man talking. When and where do these powers 'kick in', at will? It's hard to conceive of a Vicar of Christ on earth which can be such a thing and exist in such a way that at one moment, he is speaking blasphemy, and in another he is speaking with Christlike authority.
When it comes to the Pope, when do these correspondences between earth-Heaven (as in what is bound here is bound there, and what is loosed here is loosed there) cease and then resume again?
In fact, extending this Eucharist example, one could say that it is not contained in Scripture with the same degree of explicitness or lack of ambiguity as the Ten Commandments, but nonetheless it is affirmed by both East and West, and it is contained I would say clearly in Scripture, but not undeniably in Scripture - just like the primacy of Peter.
It is interesting that you bring up the Eucharist, again because most of the evidence shows that the concepts contained in this particular ritual preceded Christ, and certainly preceded the gospels. Take the Didache from the 1st century:
Concerning the eucharist, give thanks thus:
First, concerning the cup: We give thanks to you, our Father, for the holy vine of David your servant, which you have revealed to us through Jesus your servant. To you be glory forever.
And concerning the broken bread: We give thanks to you, our Father, for the life and knowledge which you have revealed to us through Jesus your servant. To you be glory forever.
As this broken bread was scattered upon the hills and has been gathered to become one, so gather your church from the ends of the earth into your kingdom.
The Didache predates the gospels, and we see a quite different focus of the eucharistic rite here, with no mention of the blood or body of Christ, but of the wine as symbol for the Vine (or branch cf. Jeremiah XXIII 5) of David's House and the bread as a reunification of its crumbs in one body of followers. As I think about this ritual, it is so obviously a mixture of Greek and Hebraic components. The bread and wine are a perennial component of rites of theophagy, going back to the most ancient proto-Greeks (contemporary with the Hebrews of Deuteronomy) who consumed them to worship Bacchus. The signature Hebraic component of this early Eucharist evidenced in the Didache is precisely that it does not celebrate either the death or resurrection of Christ, but instead worships the lineage of David through Christ as a revealed holy 'branch'. They praise this branch, or vine, symbolically via the fruits of the vine - as Christ is The Fruit of the Davidic branch, King of kings.
So what are we to think of the Eucharist as supposedly issuing from the Last Supper of the gospels? It's really impossible to think of this in historical terms. For one, Christ was a Jew and the ethnoreligion of His apostles was deeply Jewish. It is unthinkable they would have espoused the consumption of blood or of the body.
No, the far likelier origin of the Eucharist is not from Christ himself or from the gospels. Instead, the gospels adapted an existing and widely respected ritual into the gospels, including the highly non-Jewish (I really can't stress enough how much Jews themselves would have anathematized theophagy, especially involving blood consumption symbolism) aspect of theophagy, at once uniting the narrative of the Jewish messiah together with a would-be priestly liturgical rite. (I don't rule out the possibility that Christ himself could have known of the Greek tradition though and possibly introduced it to the apostles in a Judaized manner).
The point is that what we find in the Catholic Church as Eucharist today is not strictly scriptural, but no doubt relies on certain commentaries and oral traditions arising throughout and after the time of Christ. You have said as much about the papacy itself, and I am inclined to agree that although the papal office is not laid out concretely by scripture, it is a Christian tradition which is not unique to Christians, but is something featuring an admixture of Jewish and Roman influence.
I don't think these facts diminish much in the case of the Eucharist. In fact, I'm not at all convinced that it does. If as Plato told us (after many others had) in philosophical terms that what happens on earth corresponds with what happens in Heaven, and Christ conferred by way of knowledge to His apostles the first powers to govern how that transmission from earth-to-Heaven would go, it almost seems as if Christ might have been conferring some power to decide what way is best to facilitate the binding of people to the earthly church so as to bind them to the Kingdom of Heaven (in the spirit). Therefore, would we not expect some of these extra-scriptural rituals - many of which had already been proven, despite their roles in pagan traditions - to be claimed and modified for the Christian Church?
I truly believe my difficulty is coming from the way I interpret both Jesus Christ and the pope. If I take a historical view of the Christ (but not merely a historical version of him), it's hard to see how Christ did not establish an eternal kingship in the Spirit, and abolish any and all need for priestly offices. At the same time, there are the practical and earthly matters that attend what PS has called the temporal church. If Christ gave the crucial news to the apostles and expected from them to 'fan out' this good news, then something of an institution is implied (even if not laid out explicitly). The latitude given to these men in terms of their ability to best build on earth that which would bind in Heaven, may leave room for considerations in praxis that Christ did not simply hand them.
So there is one aspect in which we could choose to view the Catholic system as a 'paganized Christianity', and another where we could choose to view the Catholic system as 'Christianity that took for itself the useful, but errant (in object) rituals of the pagans and adapted them to direct their power to binding in Heaven by the authority of Christ.'
It's interesting because to view things the former way is almost to give more power to paganism, i.e. if paganism 'paganized' Christianity, we see it as an interloper on Christianity that was able to alter Christ's church. But if we view things from the latter perspective, why wouldn't Christianity have the power to say, 'Yeah, that ritual you have there? Christ is the one way, the one truth, the one life. That ritual literally belongs to us now.'
Just want to mention that the bread-and-wine of the Eucharist hearken back to Melchizedek, in Genesis. St. Paul talks about Melchizedek in the Epistle to the Hebrews, wherein he explains that Christ is a priest-king, like Melchizedek.
That is interesting. I was not aware of that - the OT is my biggest weak spot. If it is the true source of the signs for the bread and wine, that would make it the earliest reference for a eucharistic rite that I am aware of. I want to say that Genesis is supposed to date from around 1500-1300 B.C.
One thing I am wary of - just taking the scripture on its own - is that to bring out bread and wine to celebrate Abram doesn't appear to be a eucharistic rite, but rather something merely celebratory. As far as I know of sources for eucharistic material in the Palestinian/Hellenistic world, the Didache and Paul's letters were the earliest, along with the gospels. I brought up the Didache in the prior comment because it appears to contain evidence for very early Jewish-Christian observance of the shared-table literal rite of a eucharist, but not truly, for the reasons I gave before.
I suppose it could be possible that if Christ had introduced the concept to the apostles at Passover, that he might have been drawing on Melchizedek instead of a Hellenized version of Jewish table tradition. It's the drinking it and treating it as blood that form the strongest case against a pure Jewish or Christic origin. That consumption of a savior-God's body and blood appears very tethered to the mysteries of the Greeks.
But, who the hell knows. When it comes to the Bible, where there is a question, there is a controversy.
For my part, I think Paul is (if not wholly, then close to it) responsible for the gospel-form of the Eucharist. Paul had a Hellenistic background, and he was primarily preaching to the Gentiles, so the transition from what we see in the Didache to what we get with Paul's description makes sense if he was doing what I think he was. Of course, we know that Paul says he is bringing to the Corinthians what he received from God, but either way, even if we take it as having divine origin, the change over to the traditional sacrament that we know today is something I'd place with Paul.
I'm highly doubtful that Christ Himself ordered this as a sacrament to the apostles at the Last Supper. It's certainly possible that Christ would have, in teaching at the Passover table, made a reference to the Passover lamb and to the blood that they were to mutually spill as sacrifices. That just makes sense. But it doesn't make sense that Christ would have told the apostles to drink His blood and eat His body, that is, unless Christ himself (in the decades of his early life the Bible omits) was exposed to the same Hellenism that Paul had been.
EDIT: Just for clarity, what I'm trying to do here is establish a way to see the development of early Tradition from within the logical framework that Peace has given us as it regards popery, the idea being that what Christ empowered through the apostles was a means of founding the Church by means of binding and loosing people by temporal forms, assuring the apostles that what they did to this end would be binding in Heaven also. Viewed this way, this bestowal is the prescription to build the Church according to ways which Christ may not have directly prescribed, but which we think are inspired by the Spirit. Hence, my belief that Paul had a heavy hand in the early tradition of the developing Eucharistic sacrament, which the writers of the gospels would have taken up in his wake (and they did).
On the one hand, if we appeal to the advent of popery on the very grounds that Peace has, then what I am saying about the Eucharist can't be rejected on the grounds of the argument where you say: "Well, that's wrong because it's not contained in scripture! It's wrong to appeal outside of scripture for the source of the Eucharist when it says so right in the gospels!", while at the same time not relying solely on scripture for the case for the pope. I'm trying to resolve what I see as the source of wrong impressions about early tradition. The result must be the very same source of authority that was first granted to the apostles to bind and loose. If Christ didn't lay out the way to build the Church up temporally, then it makes sense that the earliest fathers had the latitude and inspiration to know how best to do it. In the case of the Eucharist, I think Paul, and later the gospel writers, were exercising that exact authority.
In the case of the Last Supper anyway, I’m certain the earliest Church regarded Christ’s utterances, (“take, eat, this is My body ... drink of this all of you, this is My blood”) as entirely historical, and no serious scholarship even questioned that until at least, say, sixteen hundred years later. As far as the Orthodox are concerned, Christ’s words here are all the proof needed that the Eucharist is literally His Body and Blood. God says so, it is thus.
I think there’s probably plenty of leeway on the historicity of other topics, but the Eucharist is one of the least debated, right up there with the Crucifixion. I think I see where you’re going with it, though ...
Clearly, there’s difference of opinion on the type of bread. One of my favorite names for Latin Christians is azymites. I need to start using it more often.
The Greek word for “bread” used in the Gospels is artos, which means “ordinary bread*, most often leavened, though not absolutely necessarily. The Greeks have always interpreted this as evidence that the Last Supper was a Communion Meal they had together while preparing the Passover Lamb - that is, Christ Himself. Because everybody knows they’re supposed to have azymes at the Passover - not artos. And it was at this meal that Christ (re)instituted the Melchizedek Priesthood.
The Orthodox have always used leavened bread for Holy Communion, because that’s what it says, and it’s what they’ve always done. But it’s easy enough to argue the other direction - that is, that it’s a Passover Meal, and therefore artos _must_ be meant as unleavened bread. Which is what the Latins use.
Which one is right? Personally, I go Orthodox on this one. My Church uses leavened bread, deliberately and decidedly. We think it’s the stronger case. But at some point, someone in the Latin Communion had authority to decide it’s supposed to be azymes.
The fact of the Eucharist is beyond debate. But the type of bread is indeed a perennial debate. Somehow, someone in either Communion had the authority to decide one way and somebody in the other, the other way.
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