Tag: Eucharist

Eucharist as the Nonviolent Reality of the Temple Rite: From Anthony Bartlett to Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Jesus’ recapitulation of the Temple is taken up in the Lord’s Supper, in which the Passover and the Day of Atonement are transformed in the meaning of the Eucharistic meal. The synoptics are in agreement in their presentation of this last meal as a celebration of the Passover Seder (Mark 14:12-16; Matt 26:17-19; Luke 22:7-13). The disciples ask Jesus specifically, “Where do You want us to prepare for You to eat the Passover?” (Matt 26:17). Whatever the various changes of meaning, changes in time, and specifics of the rite that are developed in Jesus version of the meal, it begins as a Passover meal. Jesus acts with a creative freedom in all of his activity and teaching surrounding Israel and the Temple, but the specific leverage and shift in meaning may be made most concretely obvious in his recapitulation of the Passover meal.

This helps explain John’s alternative account, in which the meal occurred before the Passover (John 19:14: Jesus’ trial and execution are on the day of preparation for the Passover). In the spirit of the liberty of Christ, John has Jesus dying while the Passover lambs are being sacrificed (after which is usually the Passover). Clearly theology and not chronology are the main point, and in each of the Gospels Jesus takes liberties which may make this meal something of a “quasi-Passover.”[1] Matthew is probably following Mark, but he also makes several modifications, adding that the “blood poured out for many” (Mk 14:24) is for “forgiveness of sins” (Matt 26:28). Both are echoing Isaiah 53:12, “he poured out his life unto death” setting the overall pericope in that of the suffering servant. The language of “poured out” is also an allusion to the sacrifices in the Temple (e.g., Lev 4:7, 18, 25, 30, 34)[2] but Matthew in linking the Passover meal specifically to the suffering servant and to the Temple cult, poses a different sort of forgiveness, which in the Temple rite is achieved through an atoning sacrifice.

The elements of the meal are made to bear a depth of meaning, fusing together both the Passover and the day of atonement, connecting both to the reality accomplished in Christ. The bread is part of the Passover meal, but is made representative of Jesus broken body (on the order of the servant of Isaiah), and the wine is representative of his poured out blood. Jesus commands them to drink the wine, now representative of the blood, but consumption of blood is prohibited in the Temple rite and in Judaism in general. The instruction is clear: “He gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink from it, all of you; for this is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins’” (Matt 26:27–28). There is no mistaking that the symbol of poured-out blood is to be drunk, a sacrilege for Jews. As Anthony Bartlett points out, “It was impossible that the blood be consumed, for the “life was in the blood” and the life belonged to God alone.”[3] Which may be part of the point; this is no longer a sacrifice, but it is the pouring out and sharing of the life of God.

Jesus is fusing the symbolism so as to make himself the center of what once was exclusive to Temple and Tabernacle. He is now the lamb sacrificed, and the disciples become the receptacles of his life, not simply life-blood spilled in death but taken up in new life. This is not a Jewish sacrifice, as in “the biblical tradition of sacrifice, it was imperative that the blood be separated from the body and spilt on the ground or at the altar” (Gen 9:4; Lev 17:10-14).[4] The Christians understand that there is a new meaning being worked out, which does not directly pertain to blood and sacrifice, as even in the early Christian community the Jerusalem Council would continue to forbid consumption of blood (Acts 15:29). “By telling his disciples to drink a symbol of his blood Jesus was transgressing the central vector of sacrifice as it had been formulated in Jewish practice, and He was going against formal sacrificial practice generally. Indeed, he was turning sacrifice into something other than sacrifice!”[5]

Combined with his action in the Temple, in which he halted the sacrifices, Jesus has permanently overturned the Temple tables, so as to set another table with a completely different meaning and economy. God had always sought mercy rather than sacrifice: “For I desire steadfast love (or mercy) and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings” (Ho 6:6). Jesus sees himself as accomplishing this reality: “But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matt 9:13). This is not an economy of sacrifice or exchange but the fulfillment of mercy and love.

Blood per se is not violent but contains life, so spilling blood means a violent loss of life. “The blood contained absolutely no violence – on the contrary, it contained non-violence, which is positive forgiveness, peace, love. Only in that way would it be possible to drink and not feel the temple universe crashing down on you in outrage.”[6] To drink this blood is to take up the life of the one giving it, enfleshing the body, not through a continued destruction but through a recapitulated sort of body. To drink the blood, in this meaning, is to recover it from being spilled, as it is taken back into life. Jesus in recapitulating the Temple and its meaning is focused on its sacrifices but he is removing the violence of sacrifice and replacing it with new life entailing the end of death (inclusive of violent sacrifice). “Thus, the ritual meaning of blood its elemental sign value – had been turned from the place where the violence of the group is poured away, removed as to become an inner agent that contains no violence and works proactively to transform into nonviolence and love. This is what it means to eat and drink the Eucharist. It is about as non-sacrificial as you can get.”[7]

The Temple recapitulated is clearly those who receive the life offered in Christ: “as living stones, being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (I Pet 2:5). The command to “do this in Remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19) contains the same point, of living out this reality. The focus in Old Testament rites is on God remembering his people, but here Jesus changes the subject; it is his disciples remembering or recapitulating him. Remembering, in Bartlett’s explanation, pertains not to God’s remembering but to the transformation of humankind: “He took God’s act of fidelity – the full story of the Messiah – and held it out in remembrance, not in some heavenly space, but on a human table at the center of human concerns.”[8] Attached to this remembrance is a new sort of imagination, divinely inspired, taking up the body and mind of Christ.

 Martin Luther recognizes it is not the elements which are transformed but the human imagination and heart, which certainly involves embodiment. But with the Counter-Reformation, it may no longer be a point of disagreement but of emphasis. In the description of American Catholic theologian William Cavanaugh, the body of Christ cannot be de-politicized, privatized or hidden (in the realm of the soul), but one must perform or do the Eucharist. The point is not simply a silent remembering, hearing, or attending, but a “literal re-membering of Christ’s body, a knitting together of the body of Christ by the participation of many in His sacrifice.”[9] An over-spiritualized emphasis may imagine the event in terms of an inward reception, rather than involving a holistic, embodied performance.

On the other hand, focus on the material elements alone may also miss this embodied holism. As G.W.F. Hegel describes, it was a degraded understanding surrounding the Eucharist that spurred the Reformation. “The Church whose office it is to save souls from perdition, makes this salvation itself a mere external appliance, and is now degraded so far as to perform this office in a merely external fashion.”[10] Hegel recounts the selling of indulgences so as to build St. Peter’s, and he describes Luther as turning away from the mere sensuous and external, to issues of the “Spirit and the Heart” or what he calls “Absolute Ideality.” “Luther’s simple doctrine is that the specific embodiment of Deity — infinite subjectivity, that is true spirituality, Christ — is in no way present and actual in an outward form, but as essentially spiritual is obtained only in being reconciled to God — in faith and spiritual enjoyment.”[11]

Focus is on the individual, who through faith and the Spirit, is filled with the “Divine Spirit” and not the external transformation of material elements. Ending external focus means “there is no longer a distinction between priests and laymen; we no longer find one class in possession of the substance of the Truth.”[12] The heart of every man can come into possession of the Truth, as an “absolute inwardness.” Hegel does not mean that this inwardness or “Subjectivity” is without its objective side, which is realized in an “actualized Christian Freedom.” “Time, since that epoch, has had no other work to do than the formal imbuing of the world with this principle, in bringing the Reconciliation implicit [in Christianity] into objective and explicit realization.”[13]

Faith and spirituality though, are not focused on a “sensuous object” serving as God, “nor even of something merely conceived, and which is not actual and present, but of a Reality that is not sensuous.”[14] There is the full presence of Christ, but as Hegel points out, this is not faith in a material object or even faith in historical events. “In fact it is not a belief in something that is absent, past and gone, but the subjective assurance of the Eternal, of Absolute Truth, the Truth of God.”[15] This is an achievement of the Holy Spirit, who alone brings about this Truth in the individual, constituting “his essential being.”[16]

For Hegel, this is true Catholicism, having taken away the focus on “externality.” But he is careful to point out that neither is this Calvinism, which reduces the Supper to a “mere commemoration, a mere reminiscence.” Luther’s view, according to Hegel, was that there is an “actual presence though only in faith and in Spirit. He maintained that the Spirit of Christ really fills the human heart — that Christ therefore is not to be regarded as merely a historical person, but that man sustains an immediate relation to him in Spirit.”[17] In Bartlett’s parallel description, “The anamnesis (remembrance) is then a work of semiosis,” that is, the mind and heart, in this mindful remembrance take on a depth of transformed meaning. It is “a day-by-day performance of divine meaning for the sake of human transformation.”[18] Bartlett, a former Catholic priest, sounds very much like Hegel’s Luther.

Jesus as Temple, in the Lord’s Supper, brings together the imagery of “death passing over” in multiple senses. No longer is there the necessity of violent sacrifice, whether that of religion or state, so as to avoid death. Death is no longer the impetus of control (over the Egyptians and humanity) and it is no longer the means of escape, as the Passover of Christ brings about a real deliverance from the clutches of death. The disciples find forgiveness, mercy, and love, through living out or being the body of Christ. This is the new non-ritualistic and non-sacrificial or “spiritual sacrifice” practiced in this new Temple of Living Stones (I Pet 2:5). As Bartlett sums it up, “At the end of the walk to Emmaus, and a dense catechesis showing the necessity of the Messiah’s suffering and non-retaliation, something happened; the living reality of this nonviolent Lord found its breakthrough point in the breaking of the bread (Luke 24:35).”[19] 

[1] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022) 168.

[2] Norman O. Francis, Jesus as the Fulfillment of the Temple and its Cult in the Gospel of Matthew (Edinburgh: Unpublished Doctor of Philosophy Thesis: The University of Edinburgh 2020) 229-230. There are discrepancies between when exactly the Festival of Unleavened Bread and Passover occurred, but the consensus is that by the first century the two festivals may have been fused.

[3] Bartlett, 171.

[4] Ibid, 170-171.

[5] Ibid, 171.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid, 172.

[9] William Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) 229.

[10] G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (Kitchener, Ontario: Batoche Books, 2001) 432.

[11] Ibid, 433.

[12] Ibid, 434-435.

[13] Ibid, 435.

[14] Ibid, 433.

[15] Ibid, 434.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Barlett, 173,

[19] Ibid.

William T. Cavanaugh: Recovering The Body of Christ from the Modern Nation State

Ivan Illich and William Cavanaugh both describe the development of the modern nation state as a displacement of the church by the state. Illich traces the first step in this transformation as occurring within the Catholic Church, as it transformed itself into “an independent, legally constituted, bureaucratically organized state exercising a dominion of an entirely new kind over the lives of the faithful.”[1] The institutionalization of Christian charity, fellowship, and love, had the effect of assigning a divine-like status to bureaucracy, church-law, priest and pope, such that the Christian suspension of the weight of the law becomes instead, a divinizing of the law, which through history is shifted to the powers of state.

Cavanaugh provides a case study of this development with the Church in Chile, where the responsibility and reality once assigned to the church become the domain of State in shaping peoples’ lives. The divisions between soul and body, State and society, politics and religion, effectively assigned predominance to the State. Inasmuch as the Eucharist joins Christians to the body of Christ shaping the life and mind of communicants, the State, through coercive measures such as torture, took over this Eucharistic power.

Cavanaugh shows “how torture works to discipline an entire society into an aggregate of fearful and mutually distrustful individuals” functioning as the State liturgy in Chile, in disciplining the population. [2]  “Torture is liturgy – or, perhaps better said, ‘anti-liturgy’ – because it involves bodies and bodily movements in an enacted drama which both makes real the power of the state and constitutes an act of worship of that mysterious power.”[3] Just as the body of Christ transforms human imagination, so too the state (in co-opting the church), can shape and discipline human imagination in a drama of its own making. Rather than divinization and salvation, the state both produces and controls the “enemy” through torture. The drama is a demonstration of the omnipotence of the state to discipline, control, and destroy the revolutionary, the subversive, or the “filth” that would oppose it.[4]

Torture atomizes the individual, destroying the connections of family, society, and church, producing the isolated individual with a singular focus (the pain of torture). In turn, the torturer functions on behalf of the state, sacrificing moral integrity in the service of the larger cause. “By focusing on their own pain and sacrifice, no matter how disproportionate to the pain of torture, torturers deny the reality of the other and confer reality on the concerns of the regime alone.”[5] The only reality that concerns torturers and their victims is that of the state, and in the process of torture this reality takes on flesh. While there is no concrete reality to the idea of state, the process of torture inscribes these ideas in the flesh. “With the demolition of the victim’s affective ties and loyalties, past and future, the purpose of torture is to destroy the person as a political actor, and to leave her isolated and compliant with the regime’s goals.”[6] In Cavanaugh’s telling, the Church in Chile is complicit in these goals, inasmuch as she relinquished the realm of the political and the body to the State.

Chile is simply a type however, of what has happened throughout the West with the rise of the modern state and what might be called modern religion, inclusive of nationalism and capitalism. He argues in Modern Theology and Political Theology, “the kinds of public devotion formerly associated with Christianity in the West never did go away, but largely migrated to a new realm defined by the nation state.”[7]  It is not that in the modern secular age we do without religion, rather the enchantments of religion have been invested in the nation state. The transcendent has been traded for an idolatrous immanence. As Eugene McCarraher in, The Enchantments of Mammon similarly describes (as in the subtitle of his work) “How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity.”[8] “Far from being an agent of ‘disenchantment,’ capitalism, I contend, has been a regime of enchantment, a repression, displacement, and renaming of our intrinsic and inveterate longing for divinity.”[9] McCarraher and Cavanaugh suggest that, rather than disenchantment, modernity is simply “misenchantment,” with state and capital becoming the immanent frame of worship. The state and its economy become the unifying center, with the accompanying demand that its citizens be willing to sacrifice their lives for the nation as they might have once sacrificed for Christ.

In Cavanaugh’s narration of how sacrifice for the nation displaced Christian sacrifice, the “revulsion to killing in the name of religion is used to legitimize the transfer of ultimate loyalty to the modern state.”[10] The so-called “Wars of Religion” of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe evoked the founding moment of modern liberalism by theorists such as John Rawls, Judith Shklar, and Jeffrey Stout. According to the liberal telling of the story,

liberalism … was born out of the cruelties of the religious civil wars, which forever rendered the claims of Christian charity a rebuke to all religious institutions and parties. If the faith was to survive at all, it would do so privately. The alternative then set, and still before us, is not one between classical virtue and liberal self-indulgence, but between cruel military and moral repression and violence, and a self-restraining tolerance that fences in the powerful to protect the freedom and safety of every citizen … [11]

In this telling, the modern state arose to keep peace among warring religious factions. The state must step in to mediate between competing religious beliefs, and the secularization of public discourse and the privatization of religion were necessary to keep religionists from slaughtering one another.

Cavanaugh maintains this telling of the story is backwards: “The ‘Wars of Religion’ were not the events which necessitated the birth of the modern State; they were in fact themselves the birth pangs of the State. These wars were not simply a matter of conflict between ‘Protestantism” and “Catholicism,’ but were fought largely for the aggrandizement of the emerging State over the decaying remnants of the medieval ecclesial order.”[12] Cavanaugh argues that “Wars of Religion” is an anachronistic misreading, as “religion” as it will come to be known – an apolitical and private sphere, and State as the proper realm of the political (and with it the embodied and public) did not exist apart from the creation of these categories through justification provided by the Wars of Religion. “The creation of religion was necessitated by the new State’s need to secure absolute sovereignty over its subjects.”[13] Gaining this sovereign control explains why the religious wars pitted co-religionists against one another (sometimes Catholics versus Catholics or Protestants versus Protestants), as it was not religion but state power that was being contested, and religion was simply a justifying backdrop in this effort.

As religion was privatized and separated from the political, the State shifted from reference to the condition of the ruler or condition of the realm (in the medieval period) to an abstract and independent political entity: “a form of public power separate from both ruler and the ruled, and constituting the supreme political authority within a certain defined territory.”[14] The result of the conflicts was an inversion of the previous ecclesial dominance over civil authorities, with the modern State dictating to the Church.

Martin Luther, Henry VIII, and Philip II, backed and insured this new arrangement. According to Luther, every Christian is subject to two kingdoms, the spiritual and the temporal. “Coercive power is ordained by God but is given only to the secular powers in order that civil peace be maintained among sinners. Since coercive power is defined as secular, the Church is left with a purely suasive authority, that of preaching the Word of God.”[15] Luther assigned coercive power (the power of the sword) to the state (picturing the state as the peacemaker), attempting to disinvest the Church from such powers. In so doing , he left no clear jurisdiction to the Church. As he writes To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation: “I say therefore that since the temporal power is ordained of God to punish the wicked and protect the good, it should be left free to perform its office in the whole body of Christendom without restriction and without respect to persons, whether it affects pope, bishops, priests, monks, nuns or anyone else.”[16]

This sensibility among both Protestants and Catholics, explains not only the case of Pinochet in Chile, but the general relegating of the religious to the private and non-political. “Because the Christian is saved by faith alone, the Church will in time become, strictly speaking, unnecessary for salvation, taking on the status of a congreganofidelium, a collection of the faithful for the purpose of nourishing the faith. What is left to the Church is increasingly the purely interior government of the souls of its members; their bodies are handed over to the secular authorities.”[17] Cavanaugh goes to great lengths in showing the Wars of Religion were actually the wars of this emerging State dominance. “The new State required unchallenged authority within its borders, and so the domestication of the Church. Church leaders became acolytes of the State as the religion of the State replaced that of the Church, or more accurately, the very concept of religion as separable from the Church was invented.”[18]

This aggravated form of Constantinianism goes beyond the early Roman Church, in that the State as guarantor of freedom and peace with final authority over the body, becomes an end in itself. Freedom in Christ and that freedom and safety secured by the State are fused, and the State is the ultimate public good, while religion is relegated to soulish goods. “Wars are now fought on behalf of this particular way of life by the State, for the defense or expansion of its borders, its economic or political interests.”[19] In the words of Immanuel Kant, thus the State can “maintain itself perpetually.”[20] For Kant, the peace and stability provided by the State is integral to his theory of right, and it would be as wrong to attempt to overthrow the State as it would be to overthrow reason.[21] So the Church in Chile serves as a type of the Church in general, in imagining it could liberate itself from political alignments with the State, it became one of many privatized groups, subject to State domination and torture.[22]

Cavanaugh’s more positive conclusion is that part of the Church in Chile gradually found a way to escape the confinement to the private and the “soul” put upon it by the State, and it was able to “body forth the life of Christ” in resistance to the liturgies of State. He describes a small segment of the Church “performing the body of Christ” as it began to reconceive itself and its relation to the State, especially in conjunction with being the body of Christ in an imagination shaped by the Eucharist.[23] “If torture is the imagination of the state, the Eucharist is the imagination of the church.”[24] It is the means of resisting the state and being conformed to Christ so as to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice” (Rom. 12:1-2). The body of Christ cannot be de-politicized, privatized or hidden (in the realm of the soul), but one must perform or do the Eucharist. The point is not simply a silent remembering, hearing, or attending, but to “Do this in remembrance of me” (Lk. 22:19) is a “literal re-membering of Christ’s body, a knitting together of the body of Christ by the participation of many in His sacrifice.”[25] “The word anamnesis had the effect not so much of a memorial, as one would say kind words about the dead, but rather of a performance.”[26] The church resists state oppression by being the body of Christ and resisting the isolating, fragmenting, discipline imposed by the state.

 In the words of Justin Martyr, the Eucharist is not a common bread or drink, but just as the Word becomes incarnate so Christians are to incarnate Christ. The “food over which thanks has been given by the prayer of his word, and which nourishes our flesh and blood by assimilation, is both the flesh and blood of the incarnate Jesus.”[27] Those who participate in communion without love, with no thought for the widow and orphan, according to Ignatius, “will not admit that the Eucharist is the self-same body of our Saviour Jesus Christ which suffered for our sins, and which the Father in His goodness afterwards raised up again.”[28] Ignatius is reflecting on Matthew 25:35-36, “For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.” Christians are to body forth and live out His life. Those who assimilate and discern the body of Christ partake of His suffering with the weak. As Augustine reports, he heard a voice say, “I am the food of the fully grown; grow and you will feed on me. And you will not change me into you like the food your flesh eats, but you will be changed into me.”[29] By the power of His life, and the power of His body (tortured and killed and raised), His followers have a body which the powers of state, the principalities and powers, the powers of death, cannot erase or disappear.

(Register now for the course Colossians and Christology which will run from June 3rd to July 29th https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1] Though Illich wrote extensively, the ideas expressed here come toward the end of his life and were only captured in an interview recorded by David Cayley, and presented as a series of podcasts https://www.davidcayley.com/podcasts/category/Ivan+Illich, for which Cayley has provided transcripts https://www.davidcayley.com/transcripts. Paul Kennedy moderates the overall podcast, with David Cayley, commenting in both the direct conversation and explanatory asides. 

[2] William Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) 15.

[3] Torture, 30.

[4] Torture, 31.

[5] Torture, 36.

[6] Torture, 38.

[7] William T. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011) 1.

[8] Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity. (Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition).

[9] McCarraher, 4.

[10] William T. Cavanaugh, “A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State,” (Modem Theology 11:4 October 1995 ISSN 0266-7177) 397.

[11] Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, Mass Harvard University Press, 1984), ρ 5. Cited in Cavanaugh, Wars of Religion, 397.

[12] Wars of Religion, 398.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1978), vol II, ρ 353. Cited in Wars of Religion, 398.

[15] Wars of Religion, 399.

[16] Martin Luther, “To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation,” trans Charles M Jacobs in Three Treatises (Philadelphia Fortress Press, 1966), ρ 15. Cited in Wars of Religion, 399.

[17] Wars of Religion, 399.

[18] Wars of Religion, 408.

[19] Wars of Religion, 409.

[20] Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 136 [326]. Cited in Wars of Religion, 409.

[21] Ralph Walker notes that Kant “clearly regards the stability of the state as an end which the Theory of Right requires us to pursue (though he does not put this in so many words, so that the contradiction with his other remarks about ends does not become obvious)” Ralph C. S. Walker, Kant (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 161. Wars of Religion, 409.

[22] Torture, 202.

[23] Torture, 253.

[24] Torture, 229.

[25] Torture, 229.

[26] Torture, 230.

[27] Justin Martyr, First Apology, 66, in The Eucharist, Message of the Fathers of the Church, no. 7, ed. Daniel J. Sheerin (Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazier, 1986) 34. Cited in Torture, 231.

[28] Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Smyrnaeans 6-7, Early Christian Writings, trans. Maxwell Staniforth (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 121. Cited in Torture, 231.

[29] St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 124 [VII. X (16)]. Cited in Torture, 232.

Joy

In Scripture the path to joy is to be found in and through the presence of God (Psalms 16:11, Isaiah 61:10, Psalm 9:2), through being present with/to others (Romans 15:32, Romans 12:15) and this joy is integral to salvation (1 Peter 1:8-9). Joy is linked to ecstasy (Acts 15:32), or going outside of the self, which accords with being present with and loving others. There is a mutual indwelling, a giving, a going outside of the self, which is definitive of love, joy, and peace. The reason the presence of God is linked with joy is that God is, by definition, continually pouring himself out in Kenotic self-giving love (Philippians 2:7). As Dionysius describes, “He who is the cause of all, in His beautiful and benevolent longing (eros) for all, is carried outside Himself in His providential wills for all creatures through the superabundance of His loving goodness, being, as it were, beguiled by goodness, love, and intense longing.”[1] God is by definition, ek-static, or always going outside of himself (in the self-giving of the Father, through the Son by the Spirit). Though some may think of God as above all and removed from all, He comes to all in Christ. This ecstatic power of love is inseparable from who He is. God is defined as love (I Jn. 4:7), and this intense love is a longing for the beloved, and thus we are drawn to Him as His great love attracts us to Him. As David describes, “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God” (Ps. 42:1). We were made for God and for love, and this love is as necessary to our spiritual well-being as water is to our bodies. God moves us as he moves toward us, or as Maximus puts it, “He thirsts to be thirsted for, and longs intensely to be longed for, and loves to be loved.”[2] As John says, He ignites in humanity a desire for Him: He “will draw all men unto Me” (Jn. 12:32).

But there is a reciprocity in this drawing, in that those drawn to and by the love of the cross, must take up their crosses and follow Christ (Matt. 16:24-26). There is a giving and receiving, in which the receiving calls for a giving, and this reciprocal identity (in and through the other) nurtures an outward bound, and continually expanding love. Just as Christ is consubstantial with the Father and Spirit, we are conjoined in a body whose identity is ever-enlarging. Just as we are drawn into the love of God, so too others are drawn into the love we carry (John 13:35). As we open our life to the life of others, we expose the lie of self-contained self-sufficiency (the world’s definition of happiness). Whether we know it or not, everyone seeks mutuality, reciprocity, the sustenance of life with the other.[3] True eros or desire recognizes the infinite opening of love, true desire, true love. As Rowan Williams states it, “this means that finite being tends towards being spoken, being apprehended, represented, regenerated in human response and engagement.”[4]  We are made for communion and interpersonal love, which means that like God, we are to be continually moving out of ourselves, beyond our person, beyond our nature. In the explanation of Maximus, “man is not his person, nor his nature, nor even a sort of an addition of them, but his wholeness. . . (is) something beyond them, and around them, giving them coherence, but itself not bound with them.”[5] To be fully human (like Christ) is to be in continual synthesis, moving toward the other, toward mutual indwelling, toward participation.

The Bible gives us a variety of metaphors or pictures of this synthesis. Baptism is to be joined to Christ in his death and resurrection (Romans 6:3-4); communion is a partaking of Christ (Mark 14:22–24); the Holy Spirit is for indwelling (I Corinthians 3:16); to be joined to Christ (as pictured by Paul) is on the order of being joined in marriage (Eph. 5:31-32). Christ as Logos is God’s way to ecstatically offer himself. He offers himself in the incarnation as Logos (Jn. 1:1) but this Word is interwoven in Creation: “All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being” (John 1:3). The Logos, the person, “upholds all things by his powerful Word” (Heb. 1:3); “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). He is the ordering person or arche behind all things. He is the world’s reason, at multiple levels, to be experienced intellectually, erotically, or emotionally. He is for apprehending, speaking, and consumption.

As I have written previously (here), Michael Polanyi, a scientist and philosopher, describes the research scientist as being drawn in by the world, in a kind of longing for satisfaction, in which a presence in the world seems to look back at the scientist looking into the world. “Potential discovery may be thought to attract the mind which will reveal it inflaming the scientist with creative desire and imparting to him a foreknowledge of itself; guiding him from clue to clue and from surmise to surmise.”[6] Nature, in Polanyi’s description calls out to be realized. “In this light it may appear perhaps more appropriate to regard discovery in natural sciences as guided not so much by the potentiality of a scientific proposition as by an aspect of nature seeking realization in our minds.”[7] There is a presence, a deep joy, a profound satisfaction, in discovery, understanding, and meaning, all of which can be attributed to synthesis with the Logos, which is all-inclusive.

As Paul says, there is “the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth” (Eph. 1:10). There is only one person, one energy, one principle operating in and through all things. God interpenetrates the universe and he also interpenetrates persons, and the realization of this synthesis is holistic – knowing God, knowing others, knowing the world. Caught up in this exchange, we lose our enclosed egos and are made alive in Christ: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me” (Gal. 2:20). I or ego is crucified, opening the self to life in Christ (inter-Trinitarian love), and escaping the bonds of self-enclosure.

If participation in God is joy, then non-participation is hell. Hell seems to be a world of our making, inspired by the devil (Matt. 25:41) as the one who would be God, envies God, who refuses to participate in God, and who declares that freedom is self exploration.[8] The danger is in being seduced by something less than the divine, perhaps our own image, our own ego, and instead of being drawn to life, love and ecstasy, we are drawn into a suffocating finitude. In our sin, we would obtain being, obtain life, obtain self. In Christ’s warning in each of the Gospels, those who would save themselves lose themselves (e.g., Matt. 16:25). The rivalries, the imitated desire, the jealousy, the earthly, all describe a failure to escape the self. Paul describes this stifling world as compulsive, neurotic, law bound, Godless, spiritless, and ultimately as the body of death (Rom. 7:24). This self-enclosed ego is split between the law of the mind and the law of the body, and no Other appears on the horizon for this sick soul (of Romans 7). The lost treasure of self requires a constant turn inward. All one can do is enjoy their symptom, and compulsively repeat, in the deadly drive toward possessing the self. Instead of ecstasis, there is stasis in the refusal to enter into dialogue with God, the world, and nature. Here there is no history, no movement, no growth, no reciprocity, no meaning, and certainly no joy.

This dark picture (summed up in Romans 7), stands in contrast to the joy of chapter 8. This joy, which resonates throughout the chapter, is built upon being joined to the love of God in Christ (8:38-39). In Paul’s description, nothing can separate us from the love of God. Throughout, he is describing a metamorphosis as we are “set free” (v. 1), through mind transformation (v. 7) and through the gift of the Spirit (v. 9) “made alive” (vv. 10-11) and adopted as God’s children and enabled to call God Abba (vv. 15-16) as we are transformed into the image of the Son (v. 29) through love. Being joined to God, participating in the body of Christ, finding love, means transformation through this inter-hypostatic, synergistic, reciprocal, joyfulness.[9]   

[1] On the Divine Names, IV.13, PG 3: 712AB. Cited in Nicholas Loudovikos, “Analogical Ecstasis: Maximus the Confessor, Plotinus, Heidegger and Lacan” (https://www.academia.edu/20373350/_Analogical_Ecstasis_Maximus_the_Confessor_Plotinus_Heidegger_and_Lacan), 1-2.

[2] Ambigua, PG 91: 1206C. Cited in Loudovikos, 2.

[3] See Rowan Williams, “Nature, Passion and Desire, Maximus’s Ontology of Excess”  In Studia Patristica, LXVIII, 267-272.

[4] Ibid, 271.

[5] In the summation of Nicholas Loudovikos, “Possession or Wholeness? St. Maximus the Confessor and John Zizioulas on Person, Nature, and Will” in Participatio: The Journal of the T. F. Torrance Theological Fellowship (https://tftorrance.org/journal/v4/participatio-2013-v4-14-Loudovikos-258-286.pdf) 285.

[6] Michael Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, (London: Oxford University Press) 19.

[7] Ibid, 21.

[8] Nicholas Loudovikos, “Ecstatic or reciprocal Meaningfulness?: Orthodox Eschatology between Theology, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis” (www.academia.edu) 6.

[9] Ibid, 11.

Eucharist as The Counter to Thanksgiving

The seemingly benign aspect of Thanksgiving, a eucharistic like thanksgiving meal incorporating all the elements of American religion, functions as something just short of myth. The meal celebrates the great good will of Pilgrims embracing God’s good earth and her native people sharing together in the plenteous bounty of an emerging millennial kingdom. Here, at its beginning is the Eden of the American experience in which nature meets grace. Of course, it wasn’t until around the time of the American Revolution that the name “Pilgrims” came to be associated with the settlers, at which time they became symbolic of the American faith. (The name itself a false description implying mere pilgrims on a religious pilgrimage across a new holy land.) Myth conjoined with national identity may appear benign only from the perspective of belief. The blood and soil of Germany or the folk myths of Japan function in a role of invented tradition which demonstrate the dark side of the founding myths of the nation-state.

 The Meiji Restoration, in Japan, puts on full display the necessity of having something to restore as the unifying element which would form the core doctrine of the modern ideology. The Kojiki, with its depiction of the emperor descended from the Sun Goddess, served as the myth to give divine dignity to the newly emerging Japanese identity. The emperor restored to centrality is putting God “back” in the center of a socio-political system which must posit the reified element from which it emerges. Though there cannot be said to be a “Japanese” identity until it is forged in the modern period, for the identity to function it must have eternal roots in the mythical past. The tradition does not predate the modern practices but the legacy is a necessity to obtain a unified ideology and population. The Emperor was not only the center of a new identity but would be the means of mobilizing the population in a religious world war. Japanese, German, and American identity are built upon imagined communities, the stories of which are contested, quite literally, on the world stage. The modern needs the imagined myth from which to forge the common culture, but by definition the shared values of the nation (constituting a religious-like identity) cannot tolerate counter-myth.

In the description of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, what Germany lacked at the end of World War I was an enduring subject or identity, and the Nazi notion of an Aryan race filled in this mythical role. Nazism as Alfred Rosenberg says, is a resuscitation or restoration of Odin (Odin is the God of wisdom, poetry, death, divination and magic). Odin is dead but as essence of the German soul Odin is resuscitated in National Socialism. The height of German thought “restored” by Nazism forges an identity from out of a mythic Aryanism, setting up the ideology of restoration and return.

The deadly aspect of the myth is that pure humanity is gained in differentiation and contrast with its polluted present identity. Just as the Japanese is precisely not Christian, the German Aryan is precisely not Jewish. In Hitler’s description, the Jew is not simply a bad race, a defective type: he is the antitype, the bastard par excellence as he has no culture of his own.  He is man in the abstract, as opposed to the man of singular, concrete identity forged from the blood and soil of Germany. The race linked to blood is repeated endlessly by Hitler. Blood is nature, it is natural selection; the material sign of a “will of nature” (Mein Kampf, pp. 390, 581), which is the will to difference, to distinction, to individuation.

Both the Aryan and Japanese myth focus on the Sun, the gestalt for distinction and sight serving as the backdrop for all forms of differentiation. Roman Emperor worship likewise was connected to Sun worship (the Unconquerable Sun, Sol Invictus, later identified with the Emperor). The Jews invoke the Roman Emperor at the trial of Jesus (“We have no King but Caesar”), and as they are swept up into cultic state identity they sacrifice the Jewish Messiah. The will to power, the power of distinction and difference represented in the mythological Sun gods, is the original National identity. The Aryans, the Japanese, the Americans, the Jews, give rise to cultures which bear, in Hitler’s words, “the inner features of their character” (MK, p. 400).  The delineation of this character is etched in the blood, the Other must die that the Volk, the nation, would be formed.

The colonists were not innocent refugees, mere pilgrims, as by 1620 hundreds of Native people had already been to England and back, mostly as captives.  This unimproved – formless people (Hitler’s depiction of the Jews often echoes in descriptions of the Natives) were “wild,” mere roving heathens, and the land they occupied open for the taking. The Separatists and Puritans constituting the “Pilgrims” were, from the beginning, intending to take the land away from its Native inhabitants and establish a new “Holy Kingdom.” In a Thanksgiving sermon delivered at Plymouth in 1623, Cotton Mather praised God for the smallpox epidemic that wiped out the majority of the Wampanoag people who had been their fellow diners at Thanksgiving. This blood for which Mather gives thanks is “chiefly young men and children, the very seeds of increase, thus clearing the forests to make way for better growth.”  The sacrifice of the Wampanoag is the divine opening of the new kingdom.

Sorting out myth and truth surrounding Thanksgiving may be aided in pitting the Eucharistic thanksgiving meal against American Thanksgiving. Both are meals expressing thanks for the abundance of the earth in providing food. The use of bread and wine as signs of gratitude, employed by Jesus, are first seen when the priest Melchizedek offered bread and wine to thank God the creator for the fruits of the earth (Gen. 14:18-20). In both meals, thanks is offered in the midst of an impending death. The Words of Institution of the Lord’s Supper are: “He took the bread, and giving thanks, broke it,” and, “He took the cup, and once more giving thanks, he gave it to his disciples” (see Lk 22:19, 17 and 1 Cor 11:24). The impending death is not hidden or mythologized by the meal but accentuated. Jesus alludes to his death and to the traitor in their midst. There is an inherently demythologizing element in the discussion of betrayal, death, sacrificial servitude, and the reversal of nation building in the Lord’s Supper.

Included in American Thanksgiving are all the elements of myth (in a Girardian sense) covering over the genocidal inclinations, the unfolding betrayal, the sacralizing of those betrayed, all of this already present in the hearts of the “Pilgrims.” (Even the beloved corn of the sacred tradition was stolen from the natives, along with many “pretty” items taken from Wampanoag graves.) The American myth hides the death dealing intentions of the “Pilgrims.” Christ exposes the death dealing nature of these “inner features” (Hitler’s depiction) and this is the original Gospel message: “Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36). The true thanksgiving exposes the murderous complicity in the invented myth underlying nation building.

The great irony of the American Myth is that it defangs Eucharist and Church by enfolding it into the founding of America. On the Manataka American Indian Council website it notes the mythic element to each part of the Thanksgiving story, ending by noting the possibility that the myth about the “Pilgrims” landing on a “Rock” (they did not land at Plymouth Rock) originated as a reference to the New Testament in which Jesus says to Peter, “And I say also unto thee, Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church and the Gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.” (Matthew 16:18) The appeal to these scriptures gives credence to the sanctity of colonization and the divine destiny of the dominant culture.

At a minimum the myth surrounding Thanksgiving should not be accepted as benign storytelling, as from such myths religious identities are forged.