Eucharist – Forging Ploughshares

Anthony Bartlett’s Love’s Entanglement: God as Nonviolent Relation and How That Brings the World to Peace

We need Anthony Bartlett’s delineation between the clear, apocalyptic, anti-sacrificial, early Girard, and the compromised, muddled, and somewhat defeated later Girard, now more than ever.[1] Tony gently calls us to return to the true vision of Girard, in the midst of this cultural and political moment in which flaky Girardians, such as Peter Thiel and JD Vance rule. It is nearly impossible to initially distinguish between two groups: those Girardians who, like Thiel, would “turn to a new kind of Constantinian order where Christianity accepts the expedient role of force” and those who like the Girard of Things Hidden, who writes, “(The) sacrificial concept of divinity must ‘die’ and with it the whole apparatus of historical Christianity, for the Gospels to be able to rise again in our midst, not looking like a corpse that we have exhumed, but revealed as the newest, finest, liveliest and truest thing that we have set our eyes on.”[2] Girard initially saw no possibility of accommodating his theory to the institutional Church or the “apparatus of historical Christianity,” but then he compromised. Bartlett compares him to Galileo, making his initial discovery, and then under pressure from the Church, or friends such as Raymund Schwager, he backs down. Maybe the earth and its history of violence are true center (he seems to be saying in Battling to the End). Maybe his discovery in the Bible and Christ of a primary “transcendental relation of nonviolence” is inadequate in the face of “reality.”

Girard backs down in his opposition to the term “sacrifice” in conjunction with the death of Jesus. Schwager referred to Jesus’s death as “scapegoat” and “sacrifice” which had aroused his “unease” but he decides Schwager must be right, and he wants to be accepted by the Church.[3] He had wanted to “draw a definitive line between the death of Jesus and the deaths of the gods, since the former was viewed by ethnologists and cultural commentators as the ‘same-old’ mythical story.”[4] Schwager convinced him to drop his opposition to the language of sacrifice, and with this he compromised his original notion of a “symbolically manifest difference, something as visible and tangible as possible.”[5] Bartlett explains that accompanying this shift then was a compromise to what was key in his theory: “This is important as it seems to manifest the intention in Girard of expressing a critical semiotic shift from sacralized Christianity to the new meaning of the Gospels: he talks of a symbolically manifest difference.”[6] His theory had focused on the manifest difference of revelation breaking into human violence in Jesus Christ and making a clear distinction between a violent God and a nonviolent God. There was an absolute and apocalyptic difference, and no notion of some neutral ground with an admixture of violence and nonviolence. “Surely the deep tilt of Girard’s argument was a revelation coming from outside of humanity, and this does have a manifest difference for which it is correct to seek a proper symbolic or semiotic status. Girard’s instincts were by no means wrong.”[7]

“The gospel has its authentic character as a message, an angelion, which stands urgently for itself with its own highly distinctive semiotic status. Early Christianity expressed this dramatic difference by calling the crucified-and-risen Jesus ‘Lord and God.’”[8] Bartlett dubs this unique relation to God revealed in Christ “the transcendental relation of nonviolence.” This is the absolutely unique transformation, which cannot be laid out on some sort of historical or philosophical continuum. Bartlett recognizes that theology has continually compromised philosophically and historically, by imagining the divine revelation on a continuum with natural revelation, but this is always a compromise with violence. The semiotic shift of Christ is a different order of meaning. It “should be announced as an absolute difference reconstituting human meaning. Anything less is to forfeit the remarkable evangelical breakthrough Girard has himself brought about.”[9]

Girard abandons his clear understanding of Christianity’s uniqueness; there is “archaic sacrifice and Christian sacrifice. However it is all sacrifice.”[10] Mimetic desire and rivalry, he concludes are the case for all humans and there is no escape. “I repeat, absolute knowledge is not possible. We are forced to remain at the heart of history and to act at the heart of violence because we are always gaining a better understanding of its mechanisms. Will we be able to elude them? I doubt it.”[11] He had once understood “it is Christ who finalizes . . . the definitive revelation of a nonviolent god.”[12] Yet, in conversation Bartlett asked Girard if God is nonviolent, he answered, “I don’t know.” In his early work Girard sets forth the priority of Christ over subsequent violence. “’Christ was the last messenger who came first.’ “It is a remarkable announcement of his full biblical thesis, presented with unquenchable brio and clarity, with the theme of revelation running like white-hot lava through its lines.”[13] By the writing of Battling to the End, however,Girard abandoned his belief in the priority of the nonviolence of Christ. “There Jesus is a last figure at the very end of history whose first meaning has been swallowed up in mimesis and violence.”[14] Girard begins to darkly presume apocalypse means a violent end to all things, and no longer refers to Christ’s apocalyptic breaking into history.

Girard once held that the biblical critique of violence was the basis for a sociological understanding, which arose from a place that was unassailable. He saw the gospel text as working unlike any other as it “breaks away from the rules of ordinary textuality.” As Bartlett notes, “These rules are obviously rooted in the relationality of generative violence.”[15] It is only in Christ, and reading in light of the gospel of Christ, that the violence of ordinary textuality is undone. Girard adds, “If this is the action of the text, the claims of Christianity to make Christ the universal revealer are much more well founded than its defenders themselves imagine, by which I mean those who always blend elements of ordinary sacralization into Christian apologetics. As a result they invariably regress to protocols of ordinary textuality . . .”[16] Bartlett adds, “Christ is the ‘universal revealer’ not ‘the universal scapegoat’ and it is this function that both breaks with past hermeneutics and appears weak before them if new relationality is not fully thematized.”[17]

Bartlett’s goal in the book is to demonstrate the necessity of thematizing, centering on, making primal, the role of relationship. He sees this as the original failure of Girard, and why his thinking was vulnerable to subsequent failures and shifts. Certainly, it is correct to desire “symbolically manifest difference,” as “it speaks to the sense of the new generative object-sign for human meaning.”[18] But if this new meaning is not grounded in relationship rather than abstraction it will collapse. Thus, Bartlett sees his work as providing a bulwark against this collapse, and he seeks to preserve the stark realization of early Girard, against his own collapse. “He held onto his manifest difference as long as he could, but in the end he let go of it, for lack of feedback and the intellectual shift of categories that would fully vindicate him. His thought was brought back within ‘ordinary sacralization’ because it had not found or expressed its crucial semiotic and relational framing.”[19]

Bartlett has extended and applied René Girard’s theory philosophically and theologically, providing a fresh reading of Scripture, founded, not on ontology or metaphysics but in relationship. Love as nonviolent relation, as in the subtitle of his book, is simultaneously an explanation of reality, and salvation as being brought into that reality. Undergirding Girardian theory is a linguistic and anthropological understanding, exposing relationship as primary. Bartlett does not repeat the Girardian picture of the initial scapegoating entry into language, but he provides Kierkegaard’s definition of self as “a relation that relates itself to itself . . . the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself.”[20] This is not a relation to language, but it is a possibility within the self, posed by language. “God sets humanity in motion as relation, which then opts for all the wrong solutions within its synthesis until it comes to relation with God.”[21] Bartlett then turns to Martin Heidegger, (who plays the role of summing up the Western philosophical tradition and who fails in his attempt to escape metaphysics), Charles Peirce, Jacque Derrida, the Greek philosophical tradition, along with Girard and Scripture, and picks up where Girard left off. As he describes in the Introduction of his book, “This is a book about René Girard wrapped in a book about relation.”[22] Kierkegaard sets the tone of the book, in seeking to get to the bottom of relationship.

In particular he has in mind the relationship of love. “Once the gospel antithesis to violence is established then a project of semiotics rather than metaphysics becomes unavoidable.”[23] In Girard’s theory of hominization, humans enter into language over the cadaver of the scapegoat, which provides the focus so as to give birth to the sign. Difference, life and death, signaled by the cadaver of the scapegoat, acts as the primary focal point that transforms terrifying, chaotic violence into unified attention. The cadaver is the first sign because it is the first thing humans looked at collectively in peace, transforming a physical remainder of violence into the foundation of meaning, language, and the sacred. The manner in which we are all grounded in violence is the beginning point: “A theory of language that clearly recognizes violent origins is then able to open up, simultaneously and necessarily, to a radically alternative language, a message, a gospel, that overthrows those origins in explicit nonviolence.”[24] Part of the saving work of the gospel must be the exposure and overthrow of this inherent violence. To begin in metaphysics or philosophy or in some “natural understanding” involves a continuation in this violent inheritance, opposed to the gospel. In Kierkegaardian terms, this is to continue in the “sickness unto death,” which recognizes in the diagnosis of the disease the primacy of relation (ultimately resolved in Christ).

Of course, this insight is not lacking in Girard; the Logos of the Prologue to John, and the whole Bible must be re-read “in a genuinely Christological light, we must recognize the Word of truth to be the true knowledge of the victim, continually eluded and rejected by mankind.”[25] Genesis portrays God expelling the first couple from his presence, and then Cain slays Abel and establishes the first city, while “in the Prologue to John it is mankind who expels God.” The God who inflicts violence is replaced with “the God that only suffers violence, the Logos that is expelled.”[26] This Logos that has been cast out by his own and by the world, is the rejected truth (with the rejection signaling the nature of this truth). “Pascal writes somewhere that it is permissible to correct the Bible, but only in invoking the Bible’s help. That is exactly what we are doing when we re-read Genesis and the whole of the Old Testament, and the whole of culture, in the light of these few lines from the Prologue.”[27] The truth of the Bible is summed up in the new beginning proclaimed by John, in which all truth and meaning is “ready and waiting.” Bartlett observes, “with Girard there is a relation to a revelatory ‘other’ (God) hand-in-hand with the human other, but the dynamic is always disclosure. There is something coming from below, as it were, claiming the attention of human history.”[28]

Bartlett is building on his two previous books, Theology Beyond Metaphysics: Transformative Semiotics of René Girard and Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence. In the former is Bartlett’s depiction of Girard’s theory of mimetic rivalry and the discovery of the scapegoating mechanism, as a necessary step in evolutionary development of language. The sign that arises around the scapegoat initiates entry into language, constituting an originary violence in the human condition. In both Love’s Entanglement and Theology Beyond Metaphysics, Bartlett assigns great weight to Martin Heidegger’s turn from traditional metaphysics to the “firsthand experience of ‘being.’” He explains, that “Heidegger’s intervention is a serious relativizing of core concepts of metaphysics, demonstrating – from the alternative perspective of being – that they are not eternally ‘given’ apart from a history of their conceptual production.”[29] Heidegger undermined the presumed “foundation” of metaphysics, and Derrida would continue in his “deconstruction,” and Girard builds on both. The twentieth century shook the foundations of Western thought and civilization (with two world wars). As Bartlett puts it, “What greater proof could you have of original violence than Hiroshima and Nagasaki? In which case it is even more pressing to discover a source of life ‘in the ruins,’ rather than imagine some kind of return to pre-modern metaphysical order that smiled complacently as all this grew to monstrous term.”[30]

Heidegger is a symbol of the Twentieth Century shift, upon which Girard builds. He served to prepare the ground for Girard’s work, but it was Heidegger’s purposeful failure to distinguish the Greek logos from the Johannine Logos, and in conjunction with this a second failure, to recognize that relation precedes being. “You cannot have ‘being’ without difference – the relation – which provides the opening or realization of being.”[31] Heidegger assigns a singular, Heraclitean meaning to logos, presuming the Christian Logos is more of the same, but a degraded form of the Greek logos. It is not a matter of violence versus nonviolence but a subordinating of Christian thought to Greek thought, with Christianity playing a subservient role to the Greek logos. What is to be noted in Heidegger, is that Greek “Logos brings together entities that are opposites, and it does not do so without violence.”[32] In Heidegger, there is no difference between the Johannine and the Heraclitean tradition (the original development of the Greek logos).

The Christian understanding is relegated to a continuation of Greek thought. Girard considers the contrast between the Greek and Christian Logos as definitive. Christ “interrupts” the Greek logos, it interrupts the grounding in mythology (the scapegoated and deified victim), and it displaces the grounding in violence, but for this very reason the Logos of Christ is cast out of human culture and religion: “The Johannine Logos is foreign to any kind of violence; it is therefore forever expelled, an absent Logos that never has had any direct, determining influence over human cultures.”[33] The incapacity to discern and apply the peace of Christ, as shown in Heidegger and the Western tradition, is pervasive.

To not recognize the violent foundations of language and the possibility of an alternative, or the difference between a Greek and Christian starting point, is to presume an originary violence, and to the degree that theology has girded itself with a Greek philosophical understanding it has a necessary violence at its origins, a charge Bartlett levels at the Thomistic understanding of God (along with Anselm or any theology which would employ Greek philosophical thought). It is a failure to recognize the change in the role of signs, or the profound basis for a new meaning introduced by Christ. It is not simply that Christ gives new meaning, on the basis of the sign system of language in which in semiotics, it is recognized that meaning arises through differences (differences in terms, such as “black and white,” or differences in sounds, or the living and dead body, etc.). The role of difference, of the cadaver, becomes fully accessible in the body of Christ, a living sign exposing the role of the deadly letter written on the grave. The cadaver played the role of a false or mythological “transcendental signified” and the living transcendental signified expose this lie. Christ demythologizes the sign, emptying the grave of its grounding significance. Mythology is a homage to the victim, but in the same sense language, as a repeatable sign system, arises through the clash of difference and the arising of a third element (the reification of death). Christ’s entry into sign making starts with the recognition that death is the ordering principle of a universe of opposed pairs. “It is a matter of turning around with the universe itself and facing the terrible violence of our origins . . . to relate again as if for the first time to the victims at its core. We are called to relate in nonviolence and forgiveness where before we related in blame and murder – because it is in this way that root relationship is both acknowledged and made good.”[34] Ultimate meaning is not grounded in the dead victim but the living Christ who has emptied the grave of its deceptive meaning.

Much of Bartlett’s work is given over to demonstrating Christ’s change of the meaning of signs, or more accurately Jesus bringing about a foundational shift as to how signs are constituted. The sign of Jonah (the scapegoat thrown overboard), taken up by Jesus, undoes signs built upon sacrifice and death, as there “is a deliberate manipulation of familiar biblical DNA to produce a remarkably new mutation.”[35] The sailors, more than Jonah, are sensitive to spilling innocent blood, and rather than the usual release from guilt with the death of the sacrifice (Jonah tossed overboard) their fear is not assuaged: “Then the men feared the LORD greatly, and they offered a sacrifice to the LORD and made vows (Jonah 1:16) like true Israelites (Ex 14:31). The sailors and all of Nineveh are more quickly changed than Jonah, who shows no sign of repentance. Rather than satisfy the Pharisaical demand for a sign, he indicates the only sign he would give is the sign of Jonah, who was thrown into the abyss and was then delivered (which is what they will do to Jesus). The sea is representative of the abyss, the chaos, that the scapegoat was meant to tame. Jesus confronts and overcomes the abyss in his death and resurrection, defeating the very impetus behind scapegoating religion.

Though John does not mention the sign of Jonah, he closely echoes the story (in 6:16-21), the explanation of which closes Bartlett’s book. The sea, often equated with chaos (and as in Daniel, the gods of violence and chaos), is where Jesus reveals his divinity, tying the ἐγώ εἰμι to his power over nature in calming the storm and walking on the water (as if we now see YHWH trampling down the waves (Job 9:8 and Ps 89:10) and offering the comfort of his presence in the storm (Gen 26:24; 46:3; Jer 1:8; 1:17; 26:28). “So, it is the same battle, against the violence of the deep, gained victoriously by the peace-bringing word and presence of Jesus.”[36] In the portrayal of the synoptics, the disciples panic in the storm while Jesus sleeps, and they double down on their rowing before waking Jesus, to save them from “perishing.” Much like Jonah is vomited by the great fish, Jesus and the disciples arrive suddenly at the distant shore of the Gadarenes where he encounters a horde of demons and sends them (back?) into the sea (Mark 5:1–20) and the demoniac becomes an evangelist to the Decapolis. Jesus defies the expectations of the Jews and even his disciples by saving the wrong people, like Jonah.

Connected to the walking on the water is the feeding of the five thousand, a proleptic Eucharistic event: “The dramatic entirety of the scene has to be taken into account: the journey accompanying Jesus to ‘a deserted place,’ the weariness and hunger, the complete bafflement of the disciples, and, of course, the mirror hints of the Roman military legion. This is a scene of a new creation, where a new humanity is separated out from generative violence, and it is the significance itself of the whole complex that carries the scene.”[37] The echoes of the escape from Egypt, the Passover, the miraculous manna, the crossing the Red Sea, and the deliverance from slavery. “The bread is the meaning of a new human way of life, one to be consumed for its own sake once its revolutionary semiotics is grasped”[38] which is made explicit in the Passover meal celebrated by Jesus and the disciples.

Theology and not chronology are the main point. In each of the Gospels Jesus takes liberties which may make this meal something of a “quasi-Passover.”[39] The time may be incorrect or inconsistent between the Gospels, but more importantly the meaning is shifted. The point is no longer warding off death through the firstborn. Death is no longer the fulcrum, sacrifice is no longer the mechanism, but the defeat of both in a higher meaning (of relationship). 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 (a shared body, a shared life). 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. “It was impossible that the blood be consumed, for the ‘life was in the blood’ and the life belonged to God alone.”[40] Which is the point; this is no longer a sacrifice. It is the pouring out and sharing of the life of God, not on the basis of death, but in its defeat in history. As Bartlett explains in the case of Mark, “The point for Mark surely is to not narrate a separate ‘spiritual’ body for Jesus on the other side of human life, but to place his triumph right in the middle of human reality and experience. This now is the ‘Kingdom of God come with power’ (9:1)!”[41]

Jesus is fusing the symbolism so as to make himself the center of what once was exclusive to Temple and Tabernacle (life will replace sacrifice and death). He is now the lamb sacrificed by our murder, 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).[42] The Christians understand that there is a new meaning being worked out, which does not directly pertain to blood and sacrifice; 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!”[43] There is an “eruption of a completely new meaning in life, signified by the miraculous bread,” as the disciple is enabled by his Lord to also give his life, and not strike out in retaliation. The disciples were each to enter the jaws of death enabled by the body of Christ. “We know from Christian history that many individuals have done this, finding an abyss of strength within themselves to enter the jaws of violence without retaliation, and leaving behind an indelible witness in the same path and truth as Jesus himself.”[44]

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. Though only a minority of Christians may follow Jesus into a martyr’s death the meaning is there for the majority; “the meaning by which they shape their lives continues to eat away at the violent structures of actual historical humanity.”[45]

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.”[46] 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 focused on sacrifice, 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.”[47] Though the Constantinian Church might return the meaning of the Eucharist to a sacrifice administered under its power and control, Bartlett ends his book with an appeal in regard to the meals significance: “the Eucharist will become not a badge and communication of official standing, but what it was always meant to be: an ongoing divine mimicry (imitation of signs) available to all human beings. What the Eucharist intends is to teach humans via a set of signs to be as totally nonviolent as God is.”[48]

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.”[49] Attached to this remembrance is a new sort of imagination, divinely inspired, taking up the body and mind of Christ. This double movement or “double revelation” simultaneously exposes the human violence (e.g., the shedding of blood, sacrifice) and from out of this exposure their erupts a new meaning in Christ (the giving of life in place of the taking of life).

For Bartlett, this is the Girardian synthesis, which Bartlett credits Benoît Chantre with helping to draw: “Chantre sums it up as Girard’s ‘fascinating and complex central thesis . . . it is the disruption of ancient mechanisms for containing violence, in their essential exhaustion, that the true face of man and the true face of God conjointly appear.”[50] The primacy of relation, coming face to face, is key. “The Girardian understanding can tell us that relation throughout the human cosmos is ultimately and thoroughly messianic.”[51] Human history is the story of a delivery, from out of violence and rivalry, into the realization of the fulness of relationship. “Relation is the hidden truth of existence that is more critical to existence than existential moods of anxiety, dread, or even the inevitability of death.”[52] The collapse of the sacred, a sacred constructed out of violence, reveals the individual and the possibility of relation, brought to its fulness in Christ. Sacrifice has lost its power and “it is Christ who finalizes that loss with the definitive revelation of a nonviolent god. . . . The gods of violence are demonetized by the announcement of a god of love; the machine has broken down, the expulsion no longer works.”[53] This is the power of the gospel as Girard originally recognized it and upon which Bartlett is building. God is the nonviolent relation that brings the world to peace.

[1] Anthony Bartlett, Love’s Entanglement: God as Nonviolent Relation and How That Brings the World to Peace (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2026).

[2] René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans., Stephen Bann & Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 236. Cited in Love’s Entanglement, 151.

[3] Love’s Entanglement, 151.

[4] Love’s Entanglement, 151.

[5] Girard, One by Whom Scandal Comes, 43. Cited in Love’s Entanglement, 151-152.

[6] Love’s Entanglement, 152.

[7] Love’s Entanglement, 152.

[8] Love’s Entanglement, 152.

[9] Love’s Entanglement, 152.

[10] Love’s Entanglement, 153.

[11] Girard, Battling to the End, 47, 119, cited in Love’s Entanglement, 153.

[12] Things Hidden, 56. Cited in Love’s Entanglement, 154.

[13] Love’s Entanglement, 154.

[14] Love’s Entanglement, 154.

[15] Love’s Entanglement, 155.

[16] Things Hidden, 66, cited in Love’s Entanglement, 155.

[17] Love’s Entanglement, 155.

[18] Love’s Entanglement, 155.

[19] Love’s Entanglement, 156

[20] Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 13, cited in Love’s Entanglement, 21.

[21] Love’s Entanglement, 21.

[22] Love’s Entanglement, xxiii.

[23] Love’s Entanglement, xvii.

[24] Love’s Entanglement, xvii

[25] Things Hidden, 275.

[26] Things Hidden, 275.

[27] Things Hidden, 276.

[28] Love’s Entanglement, xxiv-xxv.

[29] Love’s Entanglement, 67.

[30] Love’s Entanglement, 67,

[31] Love’s Entanglement, xxiv.

[32]Things Hidden, 265.

[33] Things Hidden, 271.

[34] Love’s Entanglement, 135.

[35] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022) 126.

[36] Love’s Entanglement, 170.

[37] Love’s Entanglement, 170.

[38] Love’s Entanglement, 170..

[39] Signs of Change, 168.

[40] Signs of Change, 171.

[41] Love’s Entanglement, 176.

[42] Signs of Change, 170-171.

[43] Signs of Change, 171.

[44] Love’s Entanglement, 177.

[45] Love’s Entanglement. 177.

[46] Signs of Change, 171.

[47] Signs of Change, 171.

[48] Love’s Entanglement, 203.

[49] Signs of Change, 172.

[50] Benoît Chantre, The Time Has Grown Short: René Girard, or the Last Law, Tran. By Trevor Cribben Merrill, (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2022), xi. Cited in Bartlett, Love’s Entanglement, xxvi.

[51] Love’s Entanglement, xxvii.

[52] Love’s Entanglement, xxvii.

[53] Things Hidden, 55-56, cited in Love’s Entanglement, 154.

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]

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.