Anthropological symbol vs. metaphor
What, in the context of other religions, do we mean by the symbol? And how does it differ from the ‘just symbolic’ of contemporary Protestant and modernist discourse?
There are a couple of studies which I have found particularly insightful in addressing these questions.[ii] The first – Metaphorical Theology, by Sallie McFague – is, in some respects, representative of that important strand of theological literature which has attempted to understand anthropological symbolism, especially in the area of the atonement, as though it were metaphor. McFague’s metaphor is, in fact, a variety of ‘just symbolism’ – one that has, for reasons I shall shortly explain, acquired exceptional prestige within our own post-Christian culture. The ‘metaphorical theology’ of her title is a theology I happen to reject entirely – for reasons I give later on. But her views on metaphor interest me here because McFague, unlike so many theologians who share her desire to read symbol as metaphor, grasps the distance that separates metaphor from the anthropological symbol. She is consequently aware that understanding the one in terms of other is a work of cultural translation that cannot be expected to leave the sense of the original altogether intact. She nevertheless considers such translation indispensable in today’s world if the cause of religion is not to be lost. I entirely disagree. But, despite that, find her characterization of the distinction of religious symbol and metaphor very illuminating.
The second book – Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice by Catherine Bell – contains an enormously helpful synthesis of relatively recent discussions of the religious symbol in social anthropology and religious studies. To a remarkable degree, the broad consensus of views reflected in Bell’s account of the anthropological symbol closely supports McFague’s perception of the distinction between the anthropological symbolism and the ‘just symbolism’ of metaphor into which she proposes to translate it.
What appeals to McFague about the metaphorical variety of ‘just symbolism’ is a distinctive property it sometimes exhibits of bringing about the meaningful conjunction of seemingly unrelated things. Consider, for example, the metaphor in Shakespeare’s famous line from Macbeth: ‘Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave (stet) of care’. The distinctively metaphorical nature of the poet’s expression here resides in the fact that the referents of the terms ‘sleave’ and ‘care’, brought by Shakespeare into such felicitous union, are ontologically 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 that produces a temporary shock. Metaphors like this involve an equivocation – as McFague puts it, they ‘whisper that such and such a thing is and is not so.’(p.13) Of course, equivocation is not a feature of every metaphor. There are the conventional ‘dead’ metaphors that pepper our everyday discourse: e.g. ‘the leg of a table’, ‘the head of an organization’. The latter are univocal, not equivocal, metaphors, and they constitute the normal way to name the things to which they refer. McFague recognizes the existence of this work-a-day kind of metaphor; yet her analysis implies the primacy of the equivocal over the univocal where metaphor is concerned. It is the equivocal type which, in McFague’s perception, contains the soul of metaphor. We all of us demonstrate the same preference when we refer to univocal metaphor as ‘dead’ – as though expressions like ‘the leg of a table’ had started out as innovative juxtapositions and had somehow become jaded through overuse.
McFague’s celebration of metaphor differs from that of many theologians in being tempered by an awareness of the specificity of its cultural importance in modernity. It is here that her observations are particularly pertinent to our own concerns. In a passage towards the beginning of her study, where she is outlining the scope of her topic, she delimits the phenomenon of metaphor by contrasting it with another, distinct, type of signification which she terms the symbol. The metaphorical relation, she argues, is characterized by ‘creative tension’, the symbolic one by ‘ontological participation’. In the latter case, we are concerned with humanly meaningful relations that really exist between things, as opposed to relations that we imagine to exist between them. This is the type of signification I refer to in this piece as anthropological symbolism – and it will now be evident that it is quite unlike ‘just symbolism’. An example familiar to many English speakers would be Shakespeare’s conception of planetary influence. Shakespeare frequently characterizes his protagonists astrologically in terms of a balance of humours, or temperament, determined by the planetary conjunctions at their moment of birth. To us, Shakespeare’s language can sound poetic and metaphorical. Yet, for those who shared this worldview, the influence of planets on the human temperament was a real-life phenomenon deriving from the interconnectivity of things in the world. Which is why such ontological relations were the basis, not just for poetry, but for human interventions in the world – such as in medicine.
The possibility of ontological participation presupposes a world in which things ‘out there’ can inter-connect in humanly meaningful ways. Symbolism in this sense implies a particular worldview which is not, on the whole, that of modernity. McFague aptly describes these symbolic relations as ‘a silent ontological web which reverberates with similarity within dissimilarity out to its furthest reaches’.(p.6) The world of modernity, by contrast, is one in which this inter-connectivity is assumed not to exist, or rather, exists only to the extent that it is evacuated of any human significance. We are left with, on the one hand, things in themselves (as described by science), on the other, a type of significance imputed to those things by the imagination of a human subject. The world of the anthropological symbol has given way to a world of ‘just symbolism’.
The case of religious language
We have now defined the anthropological symbol. What are the reasons why we should treat expressions like ‘This is my body’ as cases of symbol (i.e. anthropological symbol) rather than ‘just symbolism’ (and potentially metaphor)?
Religious ritual has traditionally been the domain of social anthropology and comparative religion. It therefore makes sense to turn for an answer to scholarly work in these disciplines. How have anthropologists and academic specialists of religion spoken about the meanings of ritual?
We find a fairly conclusive response to this question in Catherine Bell’s book, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. One of her chapters addresses our question, and produces an answer based on a wide-ranging survey of the concepts and terminology scholars have employed in relation to the meaning of ritual. Overall, it will be no surprise to hear, it is the symbol, as understood by McFague (i.e. the anthropological symbol), that predominates in descriptions and analysis of ritual language by most scholars. There are even some who consciously avoid the terminology of metaphor in this context.
A well-known, and representative, example of the work to which Bell refers would be Victor Turner’s classic treatment of the ritual symbolism of colour in The Forest of Symbols.[iii] Turner’s discussion is based on his ethnography of a tribe on the boundary between NW Zambia and Angola called the Ndembu, and relates 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. We argued that symbolism can provide the basis for interventions in the world. In most rituals described by ethnographers, such 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.
The parallels between the nature and function of symbol analysed by anthropologists like Turner and the language of Christian ritual are so evident that it would seem perverse, in any analysis of the eucharistic symbol, to ignore the terminology, and the hermeneutic strategies, developed by these scholars in relation to the rituals of other religions. Let us, therefore, as the first step in our enquiry into the nature of eucharistic symbolism, consider the analysis of the symbolic relation developed 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. Though Bell’s terminology clearly reflects the cultural relativist bias of her discipline, the account she gives of the structure of the symbolic relation nevertheless offers an excellent point of departure for our enquiry.
According to Bell, the symbolic relation is circular in nature. Ritual actions, including verbal actions (e.g. ‘this is my body’), ‘project organizing schemeson ‘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’.
Let us try applying Bell’s model to 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. With the ‘reabsorption’ (or ‘naturalization’) of that ‘organizing scheme’ through the ‘homologizing’ of the two spheres of the offering of the bread at by the worshippers and the self-offering of Christ, the present eucharistic offering becomes the offering of Christ, and the bread that is offered becomes his body. There is no hint in this language of a ‘tensive opposition’ between signifier and signified such as we find with metaphor. The rite aims not – or at least not primarily – at a reconceptualization in the minds of the worshippers of what it means to make a sacrificial offering in view of the Christ’s offering of his own body. Rather it envisages a re-actualization of the sacrificial offering, seen both as Christ’s and the worshippers’ own, and the consequent transformation of the assembled worshippers into the body of Christ.
Two points stand out from this discussion of Bell’s model.
The first is the extent to which Bell’s understanding of the symbol, based on ethnographical analyses, corroborates McFague’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 of McFague’s 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 the meaning of rituals – such as that of the Eucharist – belongs in the category of anthropological symbol, not metaphor (or any other type of ‘just symbolism’). They enable us to appreciate why it has always been the terminology of symbol, not of metaphor, that has predominated in academic, but non-theological, studies of religious language. We can also better understand the very specific difficulties the anthropological symbol poses for our contemporary world, governed, as we have seen, by the very different philosophical presuppositions reflected in the ideationally dominant signification of metaphor.
The ‘reality’ of Christian symbolism
For all its usefulness as a point of departure, Bell’s understanding of symbol is not, at least in unmodified form, one that enables the Christian believer to grasp the notion of eucharistic participation – the ultimate goal of our investigation.
One reason for this has to do with the inevitable difference of outlook that distinguishes the anthropologist and the scholar of religion from the true believer (of any religion). Bell’s terminology of ‘projection’, ‘naturalization’ and of ‘organizing schemes’ inevitably conduces to the idea that what the religious believer sees cannot really be there. We should not perhaps go so far as to say that such scepticism regarding the reality of the believer’s experience is a logical consequence of her understanding of the symbol. After all, that understanding would not be inconsistent with the view that, among the many diverse schemes that humanity’s religions and cultures have ‘projected’ on the space-time environment, some might be truer to reality than others. Be that is it may, the terminology itself (‘schemes’; ‘projections’) has the effect of parenthesizing considerations of ultimate truth, and encourages us to place the diversity of these worldviews, at least for the purposes of scientific analysis, on an equal footing. My suspicion is that this tendency reflects, not a philosophical or religious prejudice, but rather a habit of thinking that spontaneously arises in comparatively-orientated disciplines like anthropology and religious studies, which are professionally committed to treating with equal seriousness all the worldviews (‘realities’) they encounter when studying the diversity of human cultures. This academic orientation inevitably encourages – even if it doesn’t logically impose – the perception that the ‘reality’ underlying our perceptions is a religiously and culturally neutral object beyond the bounds of the lived ‘realities’ of religion and culture – a ‘nature’ which confronts humans of all cultures prior to their socially and culturally orchestrated attempts to make sense of it. This, you will recall, is precisely the world presupposed by the modern cultural predominance of metaphor – the world we characterized earlier as one of ‘things in themselves’ deprived of all humanly significant interconnectedness.
Contrary to Bell, therefore, we will insist, as religious believers, that symbolism – at least in its Christian manifestation – does not operate on an exclusively cultural level. A proper Christian perspective presupposes a fundamental interconnectedness of things in the world that cannot be reduced to mere ‘projections’ of ‘schemes’. For Christian believers, those projected and reabsorbed projections are reality. That is to say: (1.) the ‘organizing schemes’ themselves are the truth of the world as Christians understand it, (2) the ‘projection’ of those ‘schemes’, the human discernment of that truth; (3) their ‘reabsorption’ or ‘naturalization’, the assimilation of that truth into the lived reality of our individual and collective lives.
To return once again to the case of the Eucharist, the redemptive self-offering of Christ in life and deathis, not just a ‘scheme’, but a truth which, enacted in worship and our everyday lives through ‘projection’ and ‘resorption’, makes sense of the human instinct, universal since Cain and Abel, to offer up ourselves to the source of our being (‘sacrifice’). The Eucharist therefore reflects an ontological interconnectedness between the action of Christ in his life and death and a universal human instinct to offer back to our source of being. The ontological ‘fit’ between the two (Christ-event and our universal human instinct) should not surprise us. After all, would we not expect that God would have so ordered His world in creation that it would be capable, when the time came, of reflecting his purpose of redemption? And would not the same God who was to offer Himself in the redemptive symbol of the Eucharist have so constituted our human nature that it would possess the instinct to offer such a sacrifice?
How Judaeo-Christian symbolism is different
To sum up where we have reached – the Eucharist is a symbol in the same sense that other religious symbols are symbols. This means there is, for the Christian, a real (‘ontological’) connection between a thing (or action) that symbolizes and a thing that is symbolized. What symbolizes here is Christ’s self-offering, as evoked in the eucharistic prayer. What is symbolized is the union of the Church with the source of its being. As always with anthropological symbolism, the one thing becomes the other. The self-offering of Jesus Christ in his life and death is brought into relation with the Church as it offers itself to its God in the form of bread and wine – not ‘just symbolically’ but ‘ontologically’.
The above paragraph sums things up very adequately, I think. However, to state things in concrete terms like this brings to light a serious difficulty. How can we claim that the symbolic relation of the sacrificial life and death of Jesus to the present ritual action performed by a group of Christian believers is ‘real’ (i.e. ontological) in the same way as – to use our earlier examples – the symbolic relation of the milk tree to the Ndembu matriline, or a particular configuration of the planets to the ‘temperament’ of the Shakespearian hero? Whereas, with Shakespearean astrology or the Ndembu cosmology, the symbol (i.e. the thing that symbolizes) is a kind of cosmic principle, in the case of the Eucharist, it involves an event (or events) situated at a discrete historical moment. Principles and ideas are not circumscribed in time, so it is not difficult to see how through ritual we can participate ontologically in them. It is much harder to see how ontological participation is possible in the case of a past historical event. This would involve ontological participation over time between things occurring at different historical moments.
Actually, we touch here on a respect in which Christian symbolism – or rather (as we shall see) Judaeo-Christian symbolism – differs markedly from the symbolism of other religions. The sacrifices of, say, the ancient Egyptians or the Hindu brahmins are typical of many religious rituals in referring, symbolically, to a cosmological moment of first origin. But this creation moment is by no means situated at a discrete moment in time. Indeed, in ancient Egypt, the daily ritual of sacrifice evokes (ethnographic present) the belief that the birth of each successive day (not to speak of each year) reproduces the moment of first origin, and marks the successful management, through sacrifice, of a precarious interval of crisis and challenge in which the powers of order and light are again pitched into a struggle against the gods of chaos and darkness.[iv] In other words, we find in these cultures an understanding of time which is not, like ours, a linear one of historical progress, but involves cycles (e.g. daily or yearly ones) that invariably take society back to a primordial first moment of inception and renewal. The Judaeo-Christian rituals may, in some sense, enact a moment of first origin (the exodus or the Christ-event) – but that moment is not ‘mythical’ and temporarily indeterminate, like the re-emergence of the Sun-god (Re) out or the watery darkness (Noun), or the rebirth of Horus dismembered by Seth; it is something that is believed to have occurred at a precise moment of historical time.
Hence, our problem. A ritual action can participate in a moment of mythical origin. It is not so obvious, how the celebrants of a Christian Eucharist can participate across time in a historical event known to have taken place c.33 AD.
We have not so far, in our discussion of the Eucharist, given much attention to the words which the eucharistic ritual itself employs to expound its own meaning and significance for the benefit of participants. I mean the eucharistic prayer, or anaphora, spoken by the minster over the elements of bread and wine at the consecration. But if we wish to grasp Christian ritual symbolism in its distinctiveness from the ritual symbolism of other faiths, there is no alternative but to go back to the words of the ritual itself. And, when we do so, we discover what appears to be explicit reference to this issue of participation over time.
In most forms of the eucharistic prayer, a repetition of the words in which Christ ‘instituted’ the Eucharist is succeeded by clauses of the prayer that formulate precisely the relation of Eucharist to Last Supper: ‘Our Lord did this’ …. ‘therefore, we are now doing this’. At this point, the ‘words of institution’ give way to the section of the prayer termed, for reasons shortly to be explained, the anamnesis or memorial. Given this explicit reference of the link over time between current ritual and Christ event, it is here that we would naturally expect to come upon the term symbol, or some equivalent – if indeed that were an appropriate description of the relation.
What we find instead is a variety of expressions – depending on the version of the prayer being used – all of which seek to render in English the sense of the Greek word anamnesis (from which you will remember this whole section of the prayer is named): notably, ‘memorial’, ‘remembrance’, ‘memory’. It is the word anamnesis itself that forms the hinge between the two sections – the words of institution and the anamnesis. Take, for example, this sections of the ancient anaphora of Hippolytus. The words ‘Do this (=poieite touto) for (=eis) the memorial (=ten anamnesin) of me (emou)’ are taken up and reapplied to the current ritual action in the word ‘remembering’ or ‘mindful of’ (memnemenoi): ‘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 one of commemoration appears to offer a very satisfactory clarification. We all know what is involved in commemorating something. We think of the gravestone that recalls the memory of the dear 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 the type of signification envisaged by Bell in her definition of symbolism. The relation of the memorial to what is commemorated, far from being one of ontological participation, is, if anything, the complete antithesis of it. We ‘commemorate’ what is absent from us; and the ‘memorial’ is an object or ceremony to which we are attached because it substitutes itself for the presence that we desire, not because it restores it. This relation displays, if anything, a closer kinship to the structure of metaphor than that of symbol, as a kind of signification only brought about through the intervention of the human imagination. In short, ‘just symbolism’.
This is highly problematic for the understanding of the eucharistic ritual we have been developing in this piece. If anamnesis means commemoration in the everyday sense of the word, then there can hardly be a properly symbolic relation between our Eucharist and the Christ-event, such that we could speak of the one as participating ontologically in the other. And if there is no ontological participation between Eucharist and Christ-event, then, the words ‘this is my body’, spoken by the priest, may be understood as ‘symbolic of’ the community of Christians and the self-offering of the Church, but the place of Christ himself in that self-offering remains unclear. We end up, I suspect, with something like Cranmer’s view of the Eucharist as ‘a sacrifice of thanks and praise’ which gratefully echoes the symbolic action of Christ, without participating in it.
On the other hand, if we try to envisage a kind of commemoration more like symbolism than metaphor, we face the challenge of imagining an ontological participation that stretches across time and somehow unites the moment of ritual symbolism with the historical moment of Christ’s own self-offering. It is already hard enough to conceive of things out there in the world as participating in each other; we struggle even more to comprehend an ontological participation of events separated by time. How can one moment participate in another?
Now, strangely, when we turn to the theologians on whom I rely for this piece, and the early Patristic authors on whom those theologians depend, we find, clearly articulated, an understanding of anamnesis that, far from conforming to the structure of commemoration as we understand it, does indeed differ from it in precisely the manner Bell & Mcfague’s definition of the symbol differs from that of metaphor – sometimes despite the fact that the signifying relation is now one that conjoins things separated by time as much as space. Gregory Dix, for example, refers by way of illustration to how the C3rd African theologian Tertullian, when speaking of the bread ‘whereby Christ makes His very Body to be present’, uses the word repraesentatio.(Dix, pp.255-6) The English equivalent of this Latin term (i.e. representation) denotes a substitutive and purely figural relationship whereby the one thing (bread) ‘stands for’ another (Christ’s Body). Quite evidently, however, this is far from the meaning of Tertullian’s Latin. Should we be in any doubt about that, Dix draws our attention to other occurrences of repraesentatio in this author where the word plainly alludes to a form of signification that is far from being simply figural. The noun repraesentatio is used, for example, to denote the ‘manifestation’ of God’s Kingdom for which we pray in the Lord’s Prayer. The third person verb repraesentat occurs in the context of the various theophanies of the Old Testament, such as the burning bush, to signify their ‘manifestation’ of their author (God); and the same word is employed, in the context of the Transfiguration narrative of the Gospels, in reference to the voice of God that ‘manifests’ the true nature of the Son. Dix concludes with an observation of the C19th theologian Adolf Harnack in regard 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.
Or, as McFague puts it, the relation of symbol to symbolized is ontological.
Nothing can remove the difficulty posed, in the case of the application of this language to the symbolism of the Eucharist, by the implication that a present ritual event can somehow participate in a past event. There does, however, exist a literary parallel for this ritual mode of relation. I mean typology – a specifically Christian form of relation, common in early literature, and, in some degree, still current in Christian thinking. We see this whenever events in the Old Testament are spoken of as ‘prefiguring’ the Christ-event, and the Christ-event as ‘fulfilling’ those events. As the literary scholar, Erich Auerbach has observed, typology is quite distinct from metaphor with which it is often confused.[v] To return to 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 on the objectively real term (i.e. ‘care’) in order to qualify it. In literary critical terminology, the former term is the vehicle, the latter the tenor, of the metaphor. An example of typology, on the other hand, would be the relation we see exemplified when the incident of the bronze serpent of Numbers 21 is said, by St Paul among others, to signify the redemption of the Cross. In the former case, the Israelites bring upon themselves a plague through their sin, and Moses raises up a bronze serpent on a pole, on which the plague-stricken Israelites are commanded to look for healing. According to St Paul, this incident prefigures the ‘lifting up’ of Jesus on the Cross, on whom believers are commanded to look for salvation. Correlatively, the lifting up of Jesus is said to fulfil what is prefigured by the bronze serpent. Typology is the technical term for this relation of prefiguration and fulfilment, whose two terms – the equivalent of the vehicle and tenor of the metaphor – are referred to as the type and the antitype. In the view of Auerbach, typology differs from metaphor in that there is, in the case of typology, no implication that one term of the relation is less objectively real than the other. The type, unlike the vehicle of metaphor, is no mere mental construct, and has no lesser degree of objective reality. Instead, we have two events, separated in time, one of which seems to participate, ontologically, in the other. On the basis of our characterization of the symbol, we might even be tempted to describe such typological relations as symbolic – though I do not wish to press the argument. Undeniably, however, the widespread emergence of typology in the Christian context suggests the openness of the Christian worldview to an understanding of time that allows for the ontological connectedness of privileged moments over time.
Jewish eschatological symbolism
Both eucharistic symbolism and typology, then, leave us puzzling over this bizarre idea. How, we are prompted to ask, is ontological participation over time even possible?
Our theological authors (Dix and Bouyer especially) have the answer. And it lies in the eschatological nature of Christian symbolism – or, rather, in a rather curious adaptation of eschatological symbolism that is unique to Christianity. Eschatology itself is not unique to Christianity, but embedded in Jewish thinking.
In what follows, we shall begin with the broader issue of eschatology as it figures in both faiths. We shall then focus in on the way eschatology develops in Christianity, and how this allows for the possibility of ontological participation over time. This way of proceeding is consistent with the approach adopted thus far – which has been as far as possible always to begin with the generic, and proceed to the specific in the light of the generic. It will allow us to illustrate eschatological symbolism through a ritual that in many respects parallels the Christian Eucharist and corroborates our analysis of it. But our Jewish example is not just a parallel; it is also the direct antecedent of the Eucharist, and comparing the two will enable us to show in very concrete terms the nature of the adaptation that Jewish eschatology undergoes when it becomes Christian.
We begin then with the eschatological worldview as we find it in both faiths.
As we have already pointed out, the latter differs significantly from the worldviews of most ancient cultures in respect to its understanding of time. Time in those other cultures is conceived of as cyclic. Remember the ancient Egyptian daily ritual described earlier, in which the action of sacrifice performed by Pharaoh or his priestly representatives, re-produces the cosmological origin event. By contrast, the Jews saw the world as originating in the purposes of a righteous God, and its history, guided by those purposes, as tending, in a manner still inscrutable to us, towards an ultimate end, when its meaning would at last be revealed. In other words, history is seen, in relation to this ultimate revelation (the ‘last day’ or eschaton) as having a direction, and may be considered in virtue of this relation as ‘linear’. The day of revelation does not render valueless the historical process that leads up to it. Rather, that day is described as completing the historical process, finally ‘gathering up’ the divine value which, for us, is still only ‘implicit’ and fragmentary’ in the events of this world as we experience them.
Dix explains the relation of the historical process to its the last day as resembling the relation of a mathematical calculation (say, 2+2) to its answer (4).(Dix, pp.257-9)
On the one hand, the last day or eschaton belongs to the historical process like the answer to the sum does to the calculation. The day of revelation makes no sense except in relation to historical process that brings its accomplishment. Indeed, it is the historical process itself of which that day brings ‘revelation’; it ‘reveals’ or ‘manifests’ something implicit in the historical process – rather as the answer to the sum tests and completes the calculation. On the other hand, the relation of the last day to the historical process is also a disjunctive one. As in the case of the sum, the day of revelation is also external to the historical process. Just as the answer to the sum is somehow separable from the calculation, and can be used as the basis of a new and different calculation, so the day of revelation exists outside and beyond the historical process (i.e. eternally).
So how is this eschatological worldview manifested in Jewish (and Christian) ritual symbolism?
The berakah ritual
The ritual I have in mind involves a series of customary blessings (berakoth) of considerable antiquity spoken at the Jewish family especially on holy days.[vi] 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 loving kindness 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.(Cited from Bouyer, p.84)
This formula is of particular significance since it was similarly added to the first of the prayers that concluded the synagogue service – the Abodah prayer (=’service’). The latter has generally been recognized to derive from the prayer recited in the temple of Jerusalem for the daily performance 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, you will notice, is the notion of ‘remembrance’ and ‘remembering’, for which the Hebrew term is zikkaron. Needless to say, this is the same concept that underlies 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 and eschatalogical understanding of commemoration outlined above. The background of this rite, and the reason for its necessity (in Jewish eyes), is the existence of an underlying eschatological belief in the working out through the historical process of the good purposes of a benevolent God – and in the central place of Israel in bringing this about – despite the apparent defeat and subjection of His chosen people to foreign rulers and their idolatrous gods. It is in this context that anamnesis assumes such importance. What is commemorated in this case are the great redemptive actions performed by God at the birth of the nation (mirabilia Dei). In response to their current tribulations God gives his people the rite as a sign (zikkaron). The latter is no mere subjective act of reminiscence; it is a divinely-ordained means by which they are commanded to recall both to themselves and their God the mirabilia Dei – as a sacred pledge of God’s faithfulness to His ultimate plan. The idea here is 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
There is a clear parallelism between this Jewish ritual and the Christian Eucharist. Indeed, it would be strange if there were not, given the probable origins of the Eucharist in the Jewish communal meal (whether or not that meal was also a Passover).
At issue in both Jewish and the Christian rituals is the action of commemoration through a divinely ordained sign (i.e. anamnesis/zikkaron). What is commemorated differs. For Jews, it is the redemption out of Egypt and their constitution as God’s people through the Covenant; for Christians, it is the passion and resurrection of Christ, which results in the reconstitution of God’s people through another covenant – in Christ’s blood. The actions constituting the sign itself also differ, though not so very much. In the one case, we have the blessing of bread at the beginning of the meal, and a whole sequence of blessing for the various kinds of food consumed, culminating in the blessing of a final cup; in the other, we have a blessing over bread and wine, largely disengaged from other elements of the meal. But in both cases the essential structure of eschatological symbolism is the identical. The wonders of God are evoked with a view to recalling to both covenantal parties – God and His people – an eschatological moment at which God’s plans for humanity are fulfilled in the redemption and restoration of his people. And in both cases, the covenantal people, in enacting the sign are themselves committed to the accomplishment of God’s purposes as a restored community.
But Christianity also represents a radically new departure within the world of Jewish eschatological symbolism. For, if both the symbolism of the Jewish communal meal and the symbolism of the Christian Eucharist are eschatological, they are eschatological in very different ways. To explain this divergence, we must 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 in a chronological sense is less clear. Dix argues convincingly, on the basis of certain Old Testament texts, that, even in the context of Judaism, it is not necessarily so.(Dix, p.261) Either way, the eschatological moment is the completion of history, and, as such, the point towards which history is moving – when the purposes of God, previously always at work, though in a manner often inscrutable to us, are finally revealed. As we have already argued, this moment is itself part of history in the sense of having no meaning except in relation to earlier moments; 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’. Now, for Jews, the eschatological moment, whether or not it coincides with the final moment of history, always lies, from the standpoint of the speaker, in the future. Christian eschatology, on the other hand, achieves the novel feat of moving the eschaton (at least in the sense ‘completion’) to the middle of history, and consequently lies, from the standpoint of the speaker, in the past. We are speaking, of course, of the moment of Christ’s resurrection and ascent into glory.(Dix, p.259) This marks the culmination of a sequence of events securely anchored in history – incarnation, life, passion – and in this sense, the eschatological moment is located within history. But it is also 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 as located partly within time 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 any but prophetic and figurative terms, the eschaton of the Christians is identified with the temporally 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 must relate ontologically to the other moments of history, as those other moments are ontologically related to the eschatological moment. In other words, we have the possibility of an ontological communication over time whereby moments participate ontologically in each other. 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, while temporarily located, also transcends history. In evidence of this Dix cites passages from the early eucharistic prayers, where the atonement and reconciliation achieved through Christ’s sacrifice ‘are predicated not of the passion as an event in the past but of the present offering of the eucharist’. This is not, of course, because the offering of the Eucharist sacrifice repeats Christ’s sacrifice; it is because each Eucharist is the anamnesis of the one sacrifice of Christ through ontological participation in it. In short, the one sacrifice that is Christ’s contains each moment of future eucharistic celebration, and thereby remains eternally available to us. 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.[vii]
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’ … (ibid., 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.(ibid., p.28)
[i] Weird examples of this kind of obfuscatory discourse are provided by E.L. Mascall, Corpus Christ, Longmans, 1953, pp.81-110
[ii] Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology, SCM, 1983; Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, Oxford University Press,1992
[iii] Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols, Cornell U.P., 1963
[iv] Franҁoise Dunand & Christiane Zivie-Coche, Gods and Men in Egypt, trans. David Lorton, Cornell U.P., 2004 [2002], pp.90-3; Marie-Ange Bonhēme & Annie Forgeau, Pharaon: Les Secrets du Pouvoir, Armand-Colin, 1988, pp.144-5
[v] Erich Auerbach, ‘Figura’ in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, Theory and History of Literature, vol.9, ed. Godzich and Schulte-Sasse, Manchester U.P., 1984 [1944], pp.11-76, p.53
[vi] My source for the Jewish blessing rituals is Louis Bouyer, Eucharist, University of Notre Dame Press, 1968, pp.78ff.
[vii] The following quotations are from Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973