How can participation in a two-thousand-year-old event be real?

There have broadly been two approaches taken to answering this question.

The eucharistic symbol as traditionally understood

The first is that of the majority of theologians both Protestant and Catholic. They tell us that, when understood in a theological sense, the term symbol does not mean what we think it means.  In the case of the Eucharist, we have to do with a sacramental symbol – something apparently so mysterious as to elude the human intellectual grasp. The sacramental symbol has no positive attribute, it would appear – other than a mysterious property, occasionally alluded to, of ‘bringing about what it signifies’. Theological definitions seem designed to convey an impression of Christian exceptionality devoid of meaningful content. Yet, lest we be tempted by a comparative religious approach to the phenomenon in question, we should be warned that the sacramental symbol is unique to Christianity. Indeed, it is unique, full-stop.

The sacramental world is a new world created by God, entirely different from the world of nature and even from the world of spirits … Sacraments are a new creation with entirely new laws. …. To speak of this sacramental presence is to say something entirely distinctive, something entirely other than any general spatial presence: Christ’s presence here is unique; he is present here in a manner in which he is present nowhere else; he is present ‘sacramentally’(1)

I would suggest that, if this is the best theology can do, we should just forget about the whole idea of eucharistic participation in the Christ event, and content ourselves with a non-sacrificial theology on the lines of N.T. Wright such as I have set out elsewhere.

Thankfully, however, there IS an alternative ….

A better understanding

You will find it in well-known studies of which the most influential for me have been: Gregory Dix (The Shape of the Liturgy, 1945); F.C.N. Hicks (The Fulness of Sacrifice, 1930); Alexander Schmemann (For the Life of the World, 1963; Eucharist, 1987); Edward Kilmartin (History of the Eucharist in the Latin West, 1998); Louis Bouyer (Eucharist, 1968); Henri de Lubac (Corpus Mysticum, 2006).  This alternative to the standard position claims to go back to an earlier, pre-Reformation, understanding of the eucharistic symbol. It has been arrived at independently by progressively-orientated theologians from across the denominational spectrum (Anglican, Roman Catholic, Orthodox).

This piece will make out a case for an understanding of symbol which is essentially the one we find in these authors. But, rather than just re-stating their conclusions, I want to offer further evidence of their validity by demonstrating the consistency of their views with understandings of religious symbolism developed by non-theological disciplines in relation to the study of other religions. Ultimately, as we shall see, the type of religious symbolism to be found in Christianity is indeed distinctive in certain respects – but by no means in all.

I foresee major benefits from the multi-disciplinary proposed. For a start, explanations of the nature and function of religious symbol in other religions lend weighty non-theological support to the explanations of our theologians. But Christian apologetic has also much to gain from the more open approach recommended here. There is a real danger, given the obscurity of religious ritual to the contemporary mind, that purely theological explanations, where they refer uniquely to the Christian case, will be dismissed as self-serving ‘mumbo-jumbo’. At best, they inevitably sound arcane. So by enlarging the focus of our enquiry to include religious symbolism throughout human culture as studied by anthropology and the human sciences we draw attention to a near-universal human phenomenon that is harder to dismiss out of hand. We also issue an implicit challenge to the hegemonism of that weirdly non-symbolic world which we know as secular modernity.

Religious symbol vs. metaphor

So, what, in the context of religion, do we mean by symbol?

This question forces us to confront a problem not widely recognized either by theologians or by the general public.  I mean the dominance in our modern Western culture of an alternative means of attributing meaning to the world – a competing mode of signification. Modernity has recently seen the progressive upstaging of the symbol by metaphor, with the latter now coming to frame our conceptualization of what it means to ‘signify’. The point has been reached where even language more correctly characterized as symbolic finds itself re-classified as metaphorical. This involves more than just the obsolescence of symbolic thinking and practice; it is a matter of the metaphor acquiring cultural prestige. Metaphor is now ‘cool’ – and a source of temptation hard for the theologians to resist.

This development has not escaped the attention of scholars of religious language (even theological ones), a few of whom combine an appreciation of the contemporary salience and prestige of metaphor with an awareness that this dominance of metaphor has not been a feature of every time and place, and may impede our interpretation of figurative language – or even our comprehension of worldviews – in non-contemporary, and non-Western, contexts.

A good case is the study of the role of metaphor in religious language by the feminist theologian, Sally Macfague.(2) Like many advocates of metaphor, she locates its distinctiveness in the way it brings into relation terms – or rather, referents of terms (i.e. the realities to which those terms refer) – that are seemingly unrelated.  Let us take, for example, the metaphor contained in Shakespeare’s famous line from Macbeth: ‘Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave (stet) of care’. The distinctively metaphorical nature of the expression resides in the fact that the referents of the terms ‘sleave’ and ‘care’, brought by Shakespeare into such felicitous union, are ontologically so distinct. On the one hand, we have a piece of material; on the other, a mental state. Their fusion by Shakespeare into a single image is a subversive act of the human imagination which produces a temporary shock. Such metaphorical statements involve an equivocation – or as Macfague puts it – they ‘whisper’ that such a thing both is and is not so.

We should note, however, that it is the distinctiveness of metaphor that Macfague defines in this way, and not metaphor itself.  Macfague knows, of course, that, in everyday language, the term metaphor can refer to figurative language that doesn’t involve equivocation. Consider, for example, the case of the conventionalized ‘dead’ metaphors that pepper our everyday discourse: e.g. ‘the leg of a table’, ‘the head of an organization’, ‘the heart of a problem’, etc.. Everyday speech would be impossible without the faculty exemplified by these expressions to stretch literal language to cover a range of objects and situations. Yet, they are, for all intents and purposes, uni-vocal, not equi-vocal, since they constitute the only way to name the things to which they refer.  What Macfague is actually doing, therefore, through her own use of the term metaphor is to privilege equivocal over univocal metaphor.  As, indeed, we all do when we refer to properly univocal metaphorical language as ‘dead’ – as if such expressions were once innovative juxtapositions, and had since become jaded.  Actually, there is nothing self-evident about this priority attributed to equivocal over univocal. It goes along with the prestige of metaphor in our culture, and points to an underlying cultural bias (actually quite specific to the contemporary West) that places a high value in certain contexts on the mode of semiotic relationship manifested in equivocal, or live, metaphor.

So far, so uncontroversial.

Less familiar, and more interesting, is a passage towards the beginning of Macfague’s study where, in outlining the scope of the phenomenon she wants to analyse (i.e. metaphor), she makes a sharp distinction between the ‘creative tension’ of the metaphorical relation, and the symbolic relation, characterized as one of ‘ontological participation’. In other words, with symbol, we have to do, not so much with of a thing being like another as about a thing, in some degree, actually being another.

What is this alternative mode of semiotic relation?

Essentially, semiotic relations of ontological participation are relationships inherent in things themselves, not relationships merely attributed to things by the human imagination. In other words, with ontological participation, we are speaking of an inter-connectivity between things that is humanly significant. An example of this familiar to many English speakers, is the analogy of humours and planetary influence so prevalent in the poetry of William Shakespeare. Poetically speaking, this language can function like metaphor. Yet, for those who shared Shakespeare’s worldview, the influence of planets on the human temperament constituted a natural phenomenon deriving from the interconnectivity of things in the world. Such relations can be the basis for human intervention in the world – for healing people, for example – not just for poetry.

At stake, then, with the possibility of symbolic, as opposed to metaphorical, relations is an entire worldview. With the former, we have a world where things outside us, like humours and planetary influences, can relate to each other in ways that implicate us. This Macfague describes, rather beautifully, as ‘a silent ontological web which reverberates with similarity within dissimilarity out to its furthest reaches’.  With the latter, the worldview presupposed by the contemporary dominance of metaphorical relations is one in which the interconnectivity between things is evacuated of all human significance, leaving, on the one hand, just things in themselves, on the other, the possibility of a kind of human significance imputed to those things by the imagination of a human subject.

The case of religious language

So much then for Macfague’s distinction of metaphor and the symbol. We now need to establish on which side of the dividing line to place eucharistic language such as: ‘This is my body’.

Our interest, here, is with the nature of the language of ritual. This is a central concern for social anthropology and comparative religion – so it is to overviews of scholarly work in these domains that I propose to turn for an answer to our question. How have anthropologists and academic specialists of religion characterized the language of ritual?

A fairly conclusive response can be found in Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice.(4) A chapter of this book addresses our very question, and bases its answer on a fairly wide-ranging survey of the concepts and terminology scholars have employed in relation to the language of ritual. Broadly speaking, it is the symbol, in much the sense attributed to it by MacFague, that predominates in descriptions and analysis of ritual language by most scholars. There are even some who explicity eschew the term metaphor as inappropriate to the uses of language constituting their object of study.

A well-known, and characteristic, example of this kind of analysis would be Victor Turner’s classic treatment of the ritual symbolism of colour in The Forest of Symbols.(3) It is based on the author’s ethnography of a tribe on the boundary between NW Zambia and Angola called the Ndembu and relates specifically to the initiation of girls into the role of adult members of the clan. The role of colour in these rituals exemplifies the practical applications of symbolism to which we alluded earlier in relation to Shakespeare’s worldview. Such symbolism, we said, provides the basis for interventions in the world. In most rituals described by ethnographers these interventions involve transformation of human social and political realities. The example discussed by Turner revolves around a change in the social status of the initiates – a process that engages not just the girls at its heart, but the whole community to which they belong.

As regards the nature and function of religious language, the parallels here with Christian ritual symbolism are so evident, that to treat the Christian eucharistic language as a case apart, and ignore the hermeneutical approaches to ritual language developed by social anthropologists would seem perverse. So I propose, as the first step in our enquiry into the nature of eucharistic symbolism, to consider the analysis of the symbolic relation developed by by Bell on the basis of her review of the anthropological literature. We can do this, I believe, without prejudice to a theological commitment to the truth of the Christian revelation. There is no doubt as to the secular orientation of Bell’s project, which comes out unmistakeably in the terminology she adopts to describe the symbolic relation. Yet, however theologically unacceptable the terminology, the structure of the symbolic relation which emerges from her description offers an excellent point of departure for our enquiry.

According to Bell, the symbolic relation – in contradistinction to the metaphorical one – is circular in nature.  Ritual actions, including verbal actions (e.g. ‘this is my body’), ‘project organizing schemes‘ on ‘the space-time environment’, then ‘re-absorb’ those schemes as the nature of reality itself.  Symbol and symbolized – the meaning-giving action and that aspect of the exterior world to which it refers – become ‘homologized spheres’, ‘orchestrated’ (or else ‘confused’ or ‘collapsed’) so as to produce ‘an experience of their basic identity or coherence’. 

Thus, in the case of the Eucharist, the ‘verbal action’ of offering and consecrating the bread projects onto the ‘space-time environment’ of the assembly of a representative group of believers the ‘organizing scheme’ of Christ’s offering up of his own life to the Father.  The ‘reabsorption’ (or ‘naturalization’) of that ‘organizing scheme’ comes about with the ‘homologizing’ of the two spheres: i.e. the offering of the bread at the Eucharist becomes the self-offering of Christ.  That we really have ‘homologizing’ here, rather than the ‘tension in union’ characteristic of metaphor, is reflected in the conviction of the participants that the body of Christ is ‘really present’ in the bread, and thus capable of being shared among the communicants.  Crucially, there is no sense here of the tensive opposition of metaphor – such as would make us re-conceptualize the one thing (bread) in terms of the other (body of Christ). Indeed, the focus is precisely not on the properties of the referents of the words bread and body of Christ, but on the transformation through those things of the assembled worshippers.

Two points stand out in relation to our discussion. 

The first is the extent to which Bell’s understanding of the symbol, based on ethnographical analyses, corroborates Macfague’s definition of it as a relation of ontological participation.  For both authors, symbolism is about one thing being or becoming another, not about the two things resembling each other. 

The second point is the way in which the structure of the symbolic relation described by Bell inverts the relational structure that Macfague attributes to metaphor.  With metaphor, we have a ‘tensive’ relationship which maintains the distinction of the two terms of the relationship, accompanying the assertion that something ‘is’ with the whisper that it ‘is not’; with symbol, we have ‘collapse’, ‘confusion’ or ‘homologizing’ of the poles with a view to producing an experience of ‘basic identity’ or ‘coherence’.

These considerations clinch our general argument that specifically religious language – such as that of the Eucharist – belongs in the category of symbol, not metaphor.  The concept of symbol pre-dominates in discussions of religious language by social anthropologists.  Bell mentions some who explicitly eschew the term metaphor, on the grounds that it is inappropriate to the uses of language that constitute the object of their study.  Her analysis of the phenomenon enables us to see why.

They also cast a helpful light on the phenomenon that confronts us in the Christian sacrament, allowing us to appreciate the very particular difficulties it poses for a contemporary world, governed, as we have argued, by the very different philosophical presuppositions involved in the culturally dominant concept and practice of metaphor.

The ‘reality’ of Christian symbolism

We stated earlier that, for all its usefulness, Bell’s understanding of symbol is not one a Christian can accept as it stands. 

It has two short-comings

The first of these relates to the inevitable inadequacy of sociological or anthropological explanations of religions from the perspective of the religious believer.  The second is specific to the particular kind of symbolism that we find in Christianity.  Reflection on the latter, will lead us to consider a certain aspect of certain Christian – and, as we shall see, Jewish – symbolism that distinguishes it from religious symbolism as it exists in other faiths.  We will move at this point from the treatment of Christian symbolism as a case of religious symbolism in general to a focus on what distinguishes Christianity from other religions. 

First, however, a word on the former – more general – issue pertaining to the sociological analysis of religion.

Bell’s terminology of ‘projection’ and ‘naturalization’ and of ‘organizing schemes’ is likely to be unacceptable to the believer because it appears to conduce to the idea that what the religious believer sees cannot really be there.  Whether that is being strictly fair to Bell is hard to say.  One might ask, for example, whether her model is necessarily inconsistent with the idea that a shared experiential reality, common in some degree to all cultures, might reveal different aspects of itself to human perspectives that were diversely culturally attuned – rather as the same universe appears differently according to the different wavelengths across which it is observed. In which case, the mere diversity of Bell’s ‘organizing schemes’ would not preclude the possibility of their demonstrating a greater or lesser measure of attunement to experiential reality. 

That said, the language of ‘projection’ and ‘naturalization’ suggests a more polarized concept of the human relation to the world, according to which questions of ‘nature’ are simply bracketed out of the equation. Rather than arising from a philosophical position, I suspect, this is here, as elsewhere, the effect of a habit of thinking common to practitioners of comparatively-orientated disciplines, professionally committed to treating with equal seriousness all the ‘realities’ they encounter when studying the diversity of human cultures.  The practice of such disciplines inevitably encourages – even if it doesn’t logically impose – the perception of nature as a religiously and culturally ‘neutral’ object of experience beyond the lived ‘realities’ of religion and culture – a nature that confronts humans of any culture prior to their socially and culturally orchestrated attempts to make sense of it.  This is, you will recall, precisely the worldview of metaphor which we described earlier as antithetical to the ontological participation of religion – namely, a world of ‘things in themselves’ deprived of all humanly significant interconnectivity. 

Contrary to Bell, therefore, we need, as Christians, to insist that symbolism – at least in its Christian manifestation – does not operate on an exclusively cultural level.  From a Christian perspective, we are speaking of a fundamental real-life interconnectedness of things which is genuinely ‘in nature’.  So no question (at least, for Christian believers) of ‘organizing schemes’ in our collective imaginations ‘projected’ onto an exteriority of some ill-defined kind, then ‘re-absorbed’ as though they were reality.  For Christians, those projected and reabsorbed projections are reality.  That is to say: (1.) the ‘organizing schemes’ are nothing less than natural principles already active prior to our recognition of them; (2) ‘projection’ is nothing less thanthe human discernment of these principles; (3) ‘reabsorption’ or ‘naturalization’ nothing less than the appropriation of the principles in practice as the reality of our individual and collective lives. 

So – if we take the case of the Eucharist – there is something about the action of symbolism of offering the bread and wine that transcends cultural particularity.  The offering up of the ‘work of human hands’ reflects a religious instinct common to humanity at large; but, for Christians, it anticipates the redemptive self-offering of Christ; likewise, the food and drink offered is a representative example of the means of human sustenance, but nevertheless anticipates the body and blood of Christ.  For the one God so ordered His world in creation that it should be capable, when the time came, of reflecting his purpose of redemption. After all, the same God who was to offer Himself in the redemptive offering of Christ gave his creatures the religious instinct to offer the work of their hands as the means by which His own redemptive action might be symbolized; and the same God who gave Himself in Christ also gave the food and drink by which the body and blood of Christ would one day be represented.  So it is that the redemptive action of Christ in the Eucharist relates to the universal experience of humankind not as a metaphor but as a properly religious symbol – that is to say, in a manner that implies a real-world ontological connectedness of symbolizer and symbolized. 

Other religions would no doubt claim as much for their own symbolism, of course. But that does not disqualify the claims of Christianity.  Nor does it oblige Christians to limit their claims, as Christians, to what comparative anthropologists would feel able to assert in their capacity of comparative anthropologists.

How Judaeo-Christian symbolism is different

But there is another reason why Christian theologians would, I suspect, be very wary of the account of Eucharistic symbolism given above.  Like other rituals, the Eucharist involves words, as well as actions, and these offer their own account, for the benefit of participants, of the significance of what is being undertaken.  We are speaking of the so-called eucharistic prayer, or anaphora, spoken by the priest/minister over the elements of bread and wine in order to consecrate them.  For all the regional variations, the forms of this prayer used by the different churches (with the notable exception of some Protestant denominations) display a considerable degree of uniformity in structure and content.  Here, in the prayer, the eucharist ritual would seem to offer its own account of its meaning and significance.  Yet, the only element of the prayer to figure in our discussion hitherto has been the so-called ‘words of institution’ – i.e. the repetition within the prayer of the words pronounced by Jesus himself at the Last Supper: ‘This is my body’; ‘this is my blood’.

Earlier, we interpreted these words as an instance of the symbolic use of language characteristic of religion where humanly meaningful connectedness is attributed to things in world rather than being assumed to have been imputed by the human imagination.  The bread and the wine are properly symbolic, we claimed, because they really are Christ’s body and blood, not merely a metaphorical figure of them; and, accordingly, Christ’s offering up of the bread and wine really is his offering up of his own life. 

But while this may offer us sufficient grounds for considering Jesus’ actions and words at the Last Supper properly symbolic, the case is more complex where those words are repeated by the priest/minister presiding over the Eucharist as part of the eucharistic prayer. Here the question of the symbolic nature of what is going on arises not only in regard to the relationship of the elements of bread and wine to ‘the body of Christ’, but also in regard to the relationship between the eucharistic re-enactment of Christ’s words and actions (as described in the words of institution) and their original performance.  We have argued that, in both contexts (our Eucharist and the Last Supper), what is done with the bread and wine is properly symbolic of the offering of the self (the collective self of the Church in the former case, as the self of Christ in the latter).  There remains the question of how the Eucharist (which is the offering of self by the Church), relates to the Last Supper/Passion (which is the offering of self by Christ himself). Is the relationship of Eucharist and Last Supper/Passion itself a properly symbolic one, or is it not?  The case is complicated here, I suspect, by the involvement of a temporal aspect.  Unlike the relationship of the elements to ‘the body of Christ’, that of the eucharist ritual to the words and actions of the Last Supper and Passion spans time as well as space.

The eucharistic prayer itself acknowledges this complexity. In most of forms of the anaphora, the words of institution are followed by a formulation of the relationship between the eucharistic action now being undertaken by Christ’s disciples to the actions and words of Christ at the moment of institution.   ‘He did this’ …. ‘Therefore, we are now doing this’.  It is at this point of the liturgy – termed, for reasons we shall shortly explain, the anamnesis (memorial) – that we would be expecting the term symbol, or some equivalent, to crop up – were it, indeed, an appropriate description of the relationship of the eucharistic ritual to the words and actions of Christ himself.

In place of symbol, we consistently find something else: namely, a range of expressions seeking to render in English the sense of the Greek word anamnesis (from which you will remember this whole section of the prayer is named).  These include ‘memorial’, ‘remembrance’, ‘memory’.  The term anamnesis (or its equivalents) constitutes, in most versions of the prayer, the hinge between the ‘words of institution’ and the section named after this term, ‘the anamnesis’.  The words of Christ, as repeated in the prayer, conclude: ‘Do this (=poieite touto) for (=eis) the memorial (=ten anamnesin) of me (emen)’.  The prayer continues: ‘Wherefore we, mindful (memnemenoi – cognate with anamnesis) of his death and resurrection, offer you this bread and this cup, giving thanks to you that you deemed us worthy to stand before you and to serve you as priests.’

At first sight, this self-definition of the eucharistic rite as an act of commemoration seems reassuring.  We all know what is involved in commemorating something.  We think of the gravestone that recalls the memory of the departed, or the local war memorial with its associated armistice day solemnities commemorating the victims of the world wars.

Unfortunately, however, if this is what we mean by commemoration, it is not at all a form of relationship that fits the mould of symbolism as defined by Bell’s model.  True, everyday English usage does not forbid the use of the term symbol in relation to the war-memorial.  But a moment’s thought will suffice to recognize that the relationship implied by the act of commemoration, is far from being consistent with the ontological participation involved in symbolism; if anything, it is the antithesis of it.  Terms like ‘commemoration’ or ‘memorial’ imply the absence from the signifier of the signified.  The only kind of continuing presence that can be attributed to things commemorated or memorialized (in the modern sense), is a subjective presence – that is, a presence that is purely mental.  In other words, the relationship of commemoration is more closely akin to the structure of metaphor as we have defined it, given that it suggests meanings that can be only maintained through the intervention of the human imagination. 

This is highly problematic for the kind of understanding of the eucharistic ritual we have attempted to develop in this piece. If anamnesis meant commemoration in this sense and implied the absence of the signified from the signifier, then the eucharistic action conducted by the Church would not have a properly symbolic relationship to the Last Supper/Passion such as would imply ontological connectedness between the two.  This, in turn, would mean that, even if the expression ‘the body of Christ’ as applied to the bread may have had a symbolic meaning on the lips of Christ himself in reference to his physical body – it can hardly have a properly symbolic meaning on the lips of the priest/minister presiding over the Eucharist in reference to his ‘mystical’ body of the Church.  This would suggest an absence from the central Christian ritual of the kind of social symbolism which – if the ethnographers and social anthropologists are to be believed – characterises the symbolic ritual practices of other faiths.

The only alternative to this rather unsatisfying conclusion is an attempt to envisage the possibility of a kind of ‘commemoration’ that embodied, not the absence, but the ongoing presence of the signified – i.e. the thing commemorated – in the signifying thing/action.   Such an idea represents a considerable imaginative challenge since it suggests the possibility of a form of ontological participation spanning time as well as space.  Were it actually the case, for example, that Christ’s action at the Last Supper/Passion somehow remained ontologically present in our eucharistic ‘commemoration’ of it, then this would seem to involve the ontological participation, not just of one thing in another, but of one moment in another.  It is hard to imagine what, in practical terms, the ontological connectedness of moments over time could mean – though there does appear to exist a kind of literary parallel for this in the case of typology – a form of semiological relationship frequently to be found in early Christian texts, and, in some degree, still current in Christian thinking.  Even nowdays, it is not uncommon to read biblical commentaries that speak of events in the Old Testament ‘prefiguring’ Christ and the Christian salvation event, and correlatively of the latter ‘fulfilling’ the former.  Such thinking was widely prevalent both in antiquity and the mediaeval times as a means of scriptural exegesis.  As the literary scholar, Erich Auerbach as pointed out, the typological relationship is quite distinct from the metaphorical one with which it is often confused.  In our earlier example of metaphor, Shakespeare’s ‘tangled sleave of care’, only one of the terms, i.e. ‘care’, is objectively real; the other, i.e. ‘tangled sleave’ is a mental construct, brought to bear in order to qualify the objective term, i.e. ‘care’.  In literary critical terminology, the former term is the tenor, the latter the vehicle, of the metaphor.  Where, on the other hand, the bronze serpent raised up by Moses in the desert, on which the plague-stricken Israelites are commanded to look for healing, is described as prefiguring the ‘lifting up’ of Jesus on the Cross, there is no implication that the former is not objectively real, whatever value it may have in qualifying the similarly objective reality of the Cross.  Thus, unlike the vehicle of a metaphor, the first termof the typological relation (the type) has no lesser degree of objective reality than the second (the antitype).  The exact relation between typology and eucharistic symbolism is something I feel unsure about.  However, the existence of the possibility of the former in the Christian worldview of our Christian predecessors is at least suggestive of the openness of that worldview to an understanding of time that might allow an ontological connectedness of privileged moments over time.

Hopefully, this may render marginally less alien to us the firm conviction of the eucharistic theologians on whom I am relying for this piece that the anamnesis of the Eucharist is a ‘commemoration’ not in the first, reassuringly familiar sense, but in the second, admittedly bizarre, sense for which the existence in the Christian worldview of typological relationships may serve as a partial warrant.  Dix refers by way of illustration to the manner in which the C3rd African theologian Tertullian, when speaking of the bread ‘whereby Christ makes His very Body to be present’, uses the word repraesentatio.  The latter term might seem to suggest to us a substitutive and purely figural relationship in which the one thing (bread) stood for the other (Christ’s Body).  Yet, when he look at other occurrences of repraesentatio in this author, we discover term used for: 1. the ‘coming’ of God’s Kingdom for which we pray in the Lord’s Prayer; 2. the theophanies and manifestations of God in the Old Testament, as in the burning bush; the ‘declaration’/’manifestation’ of the true nature of the Son by the voice of God at the Transfiguration (God repraesentat him).  Dix concludes by citing the C19th theologian Adolf Harnack who observes, in relation to anamnesis/commemoration:

What we nowadays understand by “symbol” is a thing which is not that which it represents; at that time “symbol” denoted a thing which in some kind of way really is what it signifies’. The ‘symbol’ manifests the secret reality.

Eschatological symbolism

This leaves us trying to get our heads around what, either in the case of eucharistic action or typology, it might mean for one moment of time (i.e. an event at one moment) to ‘participate ontologically’ in another (i.e. an event at another moment).  How would this even be possible?

Our theological authors (Dix and Bouyer especially) have an answer to this question.  It lies in the eschatological nature of Christian (and Jewish) symbolism.  To understand this notion, we need to zoom out from our immediate focus on the Christian Eucharist to broader considerations regarding Judaeo-Christian worldview – and more particularly its view of time and history.  The latter differs interestingly from the views of most ancient cultures where religious symbolism has a non-eschatological character.   

To summarize very briefly what it would require a whole chapter to explain at all adequately – the understanding of time in those other cultures is not, like ours, a linear one of historical progress, but involves cycles that invariably take society back to a primordial first moment of inception and renewal.  A good example would be the way ancient Egyptian culture saw the ritually maintained procession of each day, and each year, as a constant renewal of a primordial struggle of light over darkness reflected in the origin myth of the triumph of Osiris and Horus over the powers of chaos.(6) 

By contrast, the Jews saw the world as originating by the will of a righteous God, and its history as guided by a divine purpose – however inscrutable to human minds – and moving towards some ultimate end, when its meaning would at last become manifest.  This ultimate end was the eschaton (or ‘Day of the Lord’) to which the term eschatology refers.  This ‘last day’ does not annul what precedes it, but brings it fulfilment, in the sense of ‘gathering up’ the divine values which, for us, are still only ‘implicit’ and ‘fragmentary’ in events as we experience them.  Dix gives the illustration of a mathematical equation.  The manifestation of divine purpose at the eschaton is like the ‘answer’ to a calculation.   

The answer is part of the calculation; it cannot be arrived at without the calculation; but without it the calculation is meaningless.  When it is reached the answer ‘manifests’ something implicit throughout the whole process; the answer ‘tests’ the working and completes it; but it is also something which is separable from the process, which can be used as the basis of a new and different calculation.  It is something ‘beyond’ the process, even though it is the result of it.

This eschatological understanding of history was Jewish long before it became Christian.  Yet, in the specific case of Christianity, it can help us make sense of the idea, implicit in the eucharistic symbolism and typology, of an ontological connectedness between one moment in time with another.  

Just how I propose to demonstrate shortly.  First, however, I want to say a few words about a particular manifestation of the Jewish view of time in the Jewish meal ritual.  It will serve to corroborate what Dix is arguing in the above passages at a more concrete level, and offer some independent ethnographic support for it.  It will also help us understand the rather specific adaptation of this way of thinking that occurs in the case of the Christian messianic eschatology underlying the development of the eucharistic ritual.

The berakah ritual

The ritual in question involves a series of customary blessings (berakoth) of considerable antiquity spoken at the Jewish family especially on holy days.  Most important of these were the blessings spoken over the final cup of wine.  Appended to the third and final prayer on festive occasions were formulas that are of particular interest:

Our God, and the God of our fathers, may the remembrance of ourselves and of our fathers and the remembrance of Jerusalem, thy city, and the remembrance of the Messiah, the son of David, thy servant, and the remembrance of thy people, the whole house of Israel, arise and come, come to pass, be seen and accepted and heard, be remembered and be mentioned before thee for deliverance, for good, for grace, for lovingkindness and for mercy on this such and such a day. Remember us, JHWH, our God, on it for good and visit us on it for blessing and save us on it unto life by a word of salvation and mercy, and spare, favour and show us mercy, for thou art a gracious and merciful God and King.

This formula was similarly added to the first of the prayers that concluded the synagogue service – the Abodah prayer (=’service’) which has generally been recognized to derive from the prayer recited in the temple of Jerusalem for the daily offering of the burnt offering. Its repetition at the meal blessings has been recognized as demonstrating the sacrificial status of the communal meal and the growing perception of its equivalence to animal sacrifice in the temple.

At the heart of this all-important prayer is the notion of ‘remembrance’ and ‘remembering’, for which the Hebrew term is zikkaron.  Needless to say, this is the concept underlying the Greek word anamnesis in the eucharistic prayer, and in Jesus’ words: ‘Do this in remembrance of me’.

Corroborated by studies of the Jewish and biblical background to the emergence of the Christian Eucharist, is the properly symbolic understanding of ‘commemoration’ outlined above.(5) Commemoration in this Jewish context (as zikkaron) means the commemoration of the great redemptive actions of God in Israel’s past (mirabilia Dei).  But it involves not just a subjective act of remembrance on the part of God’s people (such as we might perform at a war memorial), but the repeated enactment of a ‘sacred sign’ given them by God Himself (like Passover and the sacrificial cult of tabernacle and temple) as a pledge of His covenant faithfulness both to them and Himself.  The sign itself embodies for both parties to the Covenant – people and God – the ‘mysterious permanence’ of the mirabilia Dei thereby commemorated.  It constitutes a foundation for the belief that the God, who had sealed His covenant promise to make Israel a people for His own possession by the opening of the Red Sea, could on the basis of such miraculous interventions, be trustingly supplicated to accomplish that promise in full, and ultimately (at the eschaton) make Israel everything He had intended her to be.  By enacting this sign, the prayers of the suppliant Israel are aligned with the promises of her God; in other words, the people are themselves consecrated to the accomplishment of the divine plan.

Christian symbolism and eschatology

The parallelism between this Jewish ritual and the Christian Eucharist is immediately apparent.  But given the probable origins of the Eucharist in the Jewish communal meal (whether or not that meal was also a Passover), it would be strange if the Eucharist were not characterized by a symbolism of the same kind.

At issue in both Jewish and the Christian rituals are the mirabilia Dei and their ‘commemoration’ (i.e. anamnesis/zikkaron) through a ‘sacred sign’.  For Jews, the mirabilia focus on the redemption out of Egypt, for Christians, on the passion and resurrection of Christ himself.  As for the sacred sign, this involves in both cases the ritual blessing of the cup, and of bread (as well as, in the Jewish case, other food), but, for Christians, the wine and bread which are blessed become Christ’s body and blood.  As for the workings of the symbolic relationship, this is evidently similar in the two contexts.  The performance of a ‘sacred sign’ embodies the ‘mysterious permanence’ over time of the mirabilia Dei , and, through its performance, makes them present on an ongoing basis.  Also comparable is the way in which the people of the New Covenant, by enacting the sign, are themselves consecrated to accomplishment of God’s purposes, thus re-echoing the Jewish hope of a restored community.  In short, we have in Christianity, as in Judaism, a commemoration that is symbolic in the proper sense, and involves ontological connectedness.

But in explaining how the eucharistic ritual is also (as Dix claims) eschatological, we come to an aspect of Christianity that marks it as a radically new development within the world of Jewish ritual symbolism. For, if both the symbolism of the Jewish communal meal and the symbolism of the Christian Eucharist are eschatological, they are eschatological in rather different ways.

To explain this divergence between the two faiths, we need first to return to the issue of eschatology which we broached earlier. 

The eschaton, or ‘Day of the Lord’, is the ‘end’ of time and history in the sense of being its completion or consummation.  Whether it is also the final moment of time and history is less clear.  Dix makes a good argument, on the basis of certain Old Testament texts, for its not necessarily being so.

In any case, as the ‘completion of history’, the eschatological moment is the point towards which history is moving – the moment at which the purposes of God, previously always at work, though in a manner often inscrutable to us, are finally manifested.  This moment is itself part of history in the sense that it has no meaning except in relation to earlier moments; it is, after all, the purposes of God in time and history that it reveals, not His purposes outside time and history. In this sense, the eschatological moment belongs to history. (Think of Dix’s illustration of the mathematical equation, whose answer is ‘a part of the calculation’).  At the same time, it is also the moment at which the world as we experience it sequentially in history and time at last comes to coincide with the world as it exists eternally ‘in the mind of God’.  To the extent that it is the ‘completion’ and ‘consummation’ of what went before, it is implied that the eschatological moment is indeed separable from the historical process by which it was arrived at.  It is therefore also beyond time.  (As in the case of Dix’s mathematical equation, ‘the answer is separable from the process’, and ‘can be used as the basis of a new and different calculation.  It is something “beyond” the process, even though it is the result of it’).

What we have said thus far of the eschatological understanding of time and history (i.e. the idea of history and time and moving towards an eschatological moment) is as true of Christianity as it was – and had previously been – of Judaism.  In what respect to they differ?  For Jews, the eschatological moment, whether or not it was seen as coinciding with the final moment of history, always lay, from the standpoint of the person referring to it, in the future.  Christian eschatology, on the other hand, achieves the novel feat of moving the eschaton (at least in the sense of eschaton as ‘completion’) to the middle of history – a moment, which, to the extent that it is perceived as being within history, has always, for Christians, been located, from the standpoint of anyone referring to it, in the past.  That eschatological moment, which sits both within, and yet beyond, historical time – is the moment of Christ’s resurrection and ascent into glory.  It marks the culmination of a sequence of events securely anchored in history – incarnation, life, passion – but itself transcends the frame of historical time.  It is within history, in the sense that Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension were witnessed by human beings (the Apostles) who could presumably have reported the day and the hour of their occurrence.  Beyond history, in the sense that the sacrifice in the heavenly tabernacle inaugurated by Christ’s ascent into glory (an event one might identify with his death, resurrection or ascension) is eternal, and, as such, beyond our time and space. 

So, there is an important contrast to be drawn with Judaism here.  For Jews, the eschaton may be historical, but in the somewhat putative sense of an event that is yet to happen – and is destined, while history lasts, always to remain so. For Christians, the eschaton is an event that, for all its transcendent and eternal dimension, has already fully happened, and was witnessed to have happened on a given day of human history. Of course, this, in turn, forces, in the case of Christianity, a separation (which may or may not have sometimes been present in Judaism) between the eschaton as completion of history and the eschaton as history’s final moment.

It is this new concept of the eschatological moment in Christianity that explains the strange phenomenon of an ontological connectedness of moments and events over time.  Whereas the Jewish eschaton is, by definition, not a thing any human has experienced or could describe in in any but prophetic and figurative terms, the eschaton of the Christians is located in time, identified with the temporarily located events we find described in the New Testament. It is therefore as capable of description as any human event.  If, however, as we argued earlier, this eschatological moment, located as it is, gathers up and consummates the whole of time and history, then that moment contains the other moments of history, as those other moments are contained in the eschatological moment.  In other words, we have the possibility of ontologically connected moments, and of the participation of one moment (that of ‘type’ or Eucharist, for example) in the reality of another (notably, the eschatological moment).  This is precisely what occurs with typology where the reality of an earlier moment (e.g. the raising of the bronze serpent on Moses staff) is said to prefigure an aspect of the eschatological moment (Jesus being ‘raised up’ on the Cross), or the reality of eschatological moment is said to fulfil (in the sense of assigning its meaning to) some earlier moment.  

But it is also what happens when the Eucharist participates in the eschatological reality of Christ’s sacrifice.  When, as Christ’s followers, we take our part in that ritual, we are brought into contact with an event (i.e. Christ’s sacrifice) whose occurrence is not limited in time to any historical moment.  In evidence of this Dix cites passages from the early eucharistic prayers, where the atonement and reconciliation achieved through that sacrifice ‘are predicated not of the passion as an event in the past but of the present offering of the eucharist’.(7) This is not, of course, because that sacrifice is repeated at each Eucharist; it is because each Eucharist is the anamnesis of the one sacrifice whose reality it maintains eternally present.

The implications of this are mind blowing.  As Dix comments: 

The eucharist is the contact of time with the eternal fact of the Kingdom of God through Jesus.  In it the church within time continually, as it were, enters into its own eternal being in that Kingdom, ‘in Him’, as Body of Christ (p.265)

A similar understanding propels the Orthodox theologian, Alexander Schmemann to speak of this eucharistic contact of the earthly and heavenly in the same spatial terms applied the Christ’s own entry into glory – as an ascension.

The early Christians realized that in order to become the temple of the Holy Spirit they must ascend to heaven where Christ has ascended… (For the Life of the World, p.28)

It is not ‘grace’ that comes down; it is the Church that enters into ‘grace,’ and grace means the new being, the Kingdom, the world to come.  And as the celebrant approaches the altar, the Church intones the hymn which the angels eternally sing at the throne of God – ‘Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal’ … (p.31)

They (the early Christians) realized also that this ascension was the very condition of their mission in the world, of their ministry to the world.  For there – in heaven – they were immersed in the new life of the Kingdom; and when, after this ‘liturgy of ascension’, they returned into the world, their faces reflected the light, the ‘joy and peace’ of that Kingdom and they were truly its witnesses.(p.28)

(1) Citations from various liturgiological studies given by E.L.Mascall, Corpus Christi (1953), pp.81-110

(2) Sally Macfague, Metaphorical Theology (1982)

(3) Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols (1970)

(4) Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (1992)

(5) My discussion of zikkaron here is indebted to: Louis Bouyer, Eucharist (1966)

(6) For an excellent account of the cyclic view of time in Pharaonic Egypt, see: Francoise Dunand & Christiane Zivie-Coche, Gods and Men in Egypt (2004), pp.66ff

(7) Citations from Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy [1945], Dacre Press, Westminster, (second ed. 1945)