I was reading an article today, "The Chaldean Oracles," by John F. Finamore and Sarah Iles Johnston, in The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity, and I came across a bit that I found of interest:
Marius Victorinus, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Synesius of Cyrene all talk about the "symbola," a technical term of Platonic theurgy. The Pseudo-Dionysius specifically uses the term in reference to the Eucharist, and the article seems to imply, though it does not explicitly say, that the other two were speaking in the same context.
The symbola, in Platonic theurgy, was a material element which had a natural kinship to a given deity who was to be summoned. So, suppose that Hecate has a natural kinship to gold: you get some gold, make a statue, consecrate the statue, and perform the theurgic rite...this actually calls down Hecate into the statue.
To my mind, if (relatively) early Christian writers (St. Augustine too, perhaps?) spoke in terms of the Eucharist as a symbola, this is a decisive argument in favor of transubstantiation.
Here we have a piece of bread and a cup of wine, symbola, material tokens which have some special relationship to the God who is to be invoked (after all, "He took bread...He took wine" at the Last Supper). The priest consecrates them and speaks the words that Jesus did: he performs the rite ordained by the Lord Himself.
And now bread and wine are no longer present: Jesus Himself, the Incarnate God, is present in the hands of the priest.
Marius Victorinus, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Synesius of Cyrene all talk about the "symbola," a technical term of Platonic theurgy. The Pseudo-Dionysius specifically uses the term in reference to the Eucharist, and the article seems to imply, though it does not explicitly say, that the other two were speaking in the same context.
The symbola, in Platonic theurgy, was a material element which had a natural kinship to a given deity who was to be summoned. So, suppose that Hecate has a natural kinship to gold: you get some gold, make a statue, consecrate the statue, and perform the theurgic rite...this actually calls down Hecate into the statue.
To my mind, if (relatively) early Christian writers (St. Augustine too, perhaps?) spoke in terms of the Eucharist as a symbola, this is a decisive argument in favor of transubstantiation.
Here we have a piece of bread and a cup of wine, symbola, material tokens which have some special relationship to the God who is to be invoked (after all, "He took bread...He took wine" at the Last Supper). The priest consecrates them and speaks the words that Jesus did: he performs the rite ordained by the Lord Himself.
And now bread and wine are no longer present: Jesus Himself, the Incarnate God, is present in the hands of the priest.