How Eucharist relates to Christ-event.

I will be addressing three issues relating to the meaning of the Eucharist. There will be no surprise which issues. They are the obvious ones – the issues which inevitably get asked by any contemporary Christian with an interest in the Eucharist. They are also issues that have been repeatedly addressed by those theologians who see the Eucharist as fundamental to the faith. In this present post:

-What is the nature of the ‘symbolism’ by which our Eucharist relates to the Christ-event.

In subsequent posts:

-Is the Eucharist a ‘sacrifice’, and what does it mean to say so.

-How does the Eucharist produce the Church.

The background to these pieces is an attempt to offer an intellectually cogent account of the Christian faith for the benefit of non-believers. The account itself has been published on my website. Indispensable to it has been an understanding of the Eucharist which I have discovered in studies by experts on the liturgy. I have built on the findings of these studies, but I have so far made little attempt to demonstrate their validity. This I now propose to do. The task will require us to go more deeply into the arguments of these studies than we have hitherto.

These three pieces, therefore, have a place in my presentation of the Christian faith. But they also stand on their own as self-contained treatments of issues which are of general concern to all Christians, but have been little discussed – still less understood – by non-specialists.

We begin then with the first of our issues.

-What is the nature of the ‘symbolic’ relation of our Eucharist to the Christ-event.

The eucharistic symbol as traditionally understood

What does it mean to say that the Eucharist is a symbol? In other words, what is the relation between the ritual action performed by the church and the Christ-event itself – the relation designated in a Christian theological context as symbolic?

In my experience, Christians likely to be discussing the nature of eucharistic symbolism are in most cases, Catholic. And the responses they give fall, by and large, into two overall categories. The first is what I propose to term the standard Catholic theological position. On this view, symbol, at least in a Christian theological sense, does not mean what it means elsewhere; we are dealing in this case with the sacramental symbol. And the sacramental symbol is an absolutely exceptional kind of symbol. Exceptional, first in the sense of being so removed from the rest of our mundane experience, that very little can be said of it in positive terms; exceptional also in the sense of being unique to Christianity.

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)

Frankly, if this is the best theology can do, I would suggest we forget about the whole idea of a ‘eucharistic’ understanding of our relation to 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. However, rather than simply re-stating their conclusions, I shall offer further evidence of the validity of this position by demonstrating its consistency with understandings of religious symbolism developed by non-theological disciplines in their study of other faith traditions. Contrary to the claims of the standard Catholic position, the religious symbolism of Christianity is exceptional in some respects, but by no means in all.

I foresee major benefits from a multi-disciplinary approach incorporating the findings of non-theological, but theologically adjacent, disciplines. On this issue, and those treated by my subsequent pieces, the conceptual frameworks and terminology developed by social anthropologists and religious studies specialists in relation to other religions can prove relevant and helpful when it comes to Christianity. Their findings also offer independent support for our position on the Eucharist.

Moreover, where the issue of symbolism is concerned, a characterization of Christian faith through a comparative treatment of its rituals and practices sits well with the apologetic goals of my overall project. Frankly, the whole matter of religious ritual is opaque to the contemporary mind. Hence, purely theological explanations of symbolism, which refer uniquely to the Christian case, risk being dismissed by our interlocutors as self-serving ‘mumbo-jumbo’. At best, they seem arcane. By enlarging the focus of our enquiry to include religious symbolism across cultures we draw attention to a near-universal human phenomenon that is harder to dismiss out of hand. We also challenge the hegemonism of that weirdly non-symbolic world that is secular modernity.

Religious symbol vs. metaphor

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

We cannot begin to address this question properly, without confronting a problem not widely recognized either by theologians or by the general reader.  I mean the dominance in our modern Western culture of a means of attributing meaning to the world – a mode of signification – that is not the symbolism that we find in Christianity (or other religions). Secular modernity has seen in the rise of metaphor the emergence of its own distinctive mode of signification, and its gradual displacement of symbol as the preferred mode. Metaphor has come to frame our conceptualization of what it means to ‘signify’. The point has been reached where even language of former times, more correctly characterized as symbolic (such as that of the Eucharist), finds itself re-classified and re-interpreted as metaphorical. There is more at issue here than the obsolescence of symbolic thinking and practice; metaphor has acquired cultural prestige. It has become ‘cool’ – and, as such, a source of temptation hard for the theologians to resist.

In the modern context, we cannot properly explain the symbol without explaining its relationship to the metaphor with which it is often confused. The task requires a theologian to be both appreciative of the contemporary salience and prestige of metaphor, and, at the same time, aware of the potential danger this poses for our understanding of forms of language characteristic of non-contemporary, and non-Western, contexts. These qualifications are both met by the analysis offered by Sally Macfague in her book Metaphorical Theology.(2)

Like other theological advocates for metaphor, Macfague locates the distinctiveness of metaphor in its power to bring about the meaningful conjunction of seemingly unrelated things. 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 poet’s 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 – as Macfague puts it, they ‘whisper that such and such a thing is and is not so.’ Of course, while being a distinctive property of metaphor, 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 heart of a problem’. These are uni-vocal, not equi-vocal, because they constitute the only way to name the things to which they refer – indeed, everyday speech would be impossible without them. Macfague is aware of this. But her treatment of metaphor attributes a primacy to the equivocal over the univocal type of metaphor. We all of us exhibit 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 since become jaded through overuse. This is hardly a plausible theory of linguistic development. In reality, as we shall see, the primacy we ascribe to equivocal metaphor reflects the ideational role it has for the contemporary secular worldview.

For all her celebration of metaphor, Macfague’s treatment of the topic differs from that of many theologians in being balanced by an awareness of its cultural specificity. 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 the kind of non-metaphorical use of figurative language that she terms symbol. Whereas the metaphorical relation analysed by her book is characterized by ‘creative tension’, the symbolic relation is instead one of ‘ontological participation’. In other words, with symbolism, we are speaking, not of things being like one another, but of things actually being one another. Relations of ontological participation, she says, are relations that really exist between things, not relations that we imagine to exist. They presuppose the possibility of a humanly significant inter-connectivity out there in the world. An example familiar to many English speakers would be Shakespeare’s language of planetary influence. Shakespeare’s protagonists are often characterized, according to the physiological theories of the time, as having a ‘temperament’ influenced through the preponderance of one or other of the four humours by a particular astrological conjunction. The language Shakespeare uses can sound poetic and metaphorical to us. Yet, for those who shared this worldview, the influence of planets on the human temperament constituted a natural phenomenon deriving from the interconnectivity of things in the world. Such relations were therefore the basis, not just for poetry, but for human interventions in the world – such as in medicine.

When we have to do with symbolism, then, questions of signification inevitably give way to broader issues of worldview. Macfague speaks of symbolic relations in a world like Shakespeare’s as ‘a silent ontological web which reverberates with similarity within dissimilarity out to its furthest reaches’. By contrast, we could characterize secular modernity as a world in which this interconnectivity does not exist, or rather, exists only to the extent that it is evacuated of all human significance. We are left with, on the one hand, just things in themselves as described by science, on the other, a kind of human significance imputed to those things by the imagination of a human subject. The world of symbol has given way to a world of metaphor.

The case of religious language

We have defined symbol and metaphor. Are there reasons why we should assign expressions like ‘This is my body’ to the category of symbolic rather than metaphorical language?

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 characterized the language of ritual?

We find a fairly conclusive response in a book by the religious studies scholar, Catherine Bell, in her book, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice.(4) One of her chapters addresses our very question, and bases its answer on a 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 the sense attributed to it by MacFague, that predominates in descriptions and analysis of ritual language by most scholars. There are even some scholars she mentions who have eschewed the terminology of metaphor as inappropriate to religious language.

A well-known, and representative, example of this work would be Victor Turner’s classic treatment of the ritual symbolism of colour in The Forest of Symbols.(3) 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. 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.

The parallels between the nature and function of language analysed by anthropologists like Turner and the language of Christian ritual are so evident that it would seem perverse, in any analysis of eucharistic language, to ignore the terminology, and the hermeneutic strategies, developed by these scholars in relation to religious language. 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 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 secular 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 – 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’.

So, if we apply 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; but at the reactualization of that sacrificial offering which is both Christ’s and the worshippers’ own, along with 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 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 of Macfague’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 specifically religious language – such as that of the Eucharist – belongs in the category of symbol, not metaphor.  We can appreciate in the light of them why it has always been the terminology of symbol, not of metaphor, that have predominated in academic, but non-theological, studies of religious language. We can also better understand very specific difficulties the understanding of symbolism poses for our contemporary world, governed, as we have seen, by the very different philosophical presuppositions reflected in the ideationally dominant concept 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 religious believer to give an adequate account of their faith.

There are two reasons – and the first of these would apply to the religious believer of any faith. It reflects the inevitable difference of outlook that distinguishes the anthropologist and the scholar of religion from the true believer. 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 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 more true 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 position, but rather a habit of thinking that spontaneously arises in comparatively-orientated disciplines like anthropology and religious studies, which are professionally commited 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 secular dominance 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 offering of Christ is, 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 the work of our hands (‘sacrifice’). And the manifestation of Christ’s body and blood as consumed in bread and wine conveys a truth that gives spiritual meaning to those daily physical acts of eating and drinking by which our human lives have always been sustained. The Eucharist therefore reflects an ontological interconnectedness between the symbolic actions of Christ and those universal human behaviours (i.e. work and nourishment) that are most essential to our individual and collective life. This ontological ‘fit’ between the ritual enactment of the Christ-event and our universal human experience is hardly surprising. Would we not have expected our God to have so ordered his world in creation that it would be capable, when the time came, of reflecting his purpose of redemption? So it is that 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 a means by which His own redemptive action might be one day be symbolized; and the same God who gave Himself in Christ also gave us eating and drinking, as a symbolic vehicle through which that divine self-offering might one day be manifested.  

How Judaeo-Christian symbolism is different

Yet there are other reasons why Christian theologians, in particular, would, I suspect, not respond positively to the account of eucharistic symbolism I have just given. For a start, we have attempted to generalize across religions and cultures, when, as we shall see, Christian religious symbolism differs in crucial respects from the religious symbolism of other faiths. Then there is the absence from our account, thus far, of any detailed examination of the liturgy of Eucharist. More specifically, we have failed to attend to the words which the eucharistic ritual itself employs to expound its own meaning and significance for the benefit of participants: the eucharistic prayer, that is, or anaphora, spoken by the priest/minister over the elements of bread and wine at the consecration. If we wish to grasp Christian ritual symbolism in its distinctiveness from the ritual symbolism of other faiths, this liturgical evidence is the obvious first place to go.

We have, on the basis of an understanding of symbolism we find in Macfague and Bell, interpreted the words ‘This is my body’ as symbolic. We have done so in respect to the relation they imply between an action outwardly typical of the kind of rituals communities have always performed in offering themselves up to their gods and the specific redemptive action of Christ in offering up his life. As Bell would say, the ‘scheme’ of Christ’s self-offering is ‘projected onto’ the socio-religious action of offering ourselves up through sacrifice to the source of our being.

But, of course, in the case of the eucharistic prayer, those words (the so-called ‘words of institution’) occur not on the lips of the historical Jesus at the Last Supper, but as repeated in the eucharistic prayer pronounced by the priest on behalf of the ecclesial community. When it comes to symbolism, this presents us with a more complex situation than, say, the Ndembu ceremonies in which the principle of matriligny is evoked through the role of the ‘milk-tree’ and its distinctive whiteness. With the Eucharist, the possibility for symbolism doesn’t just arise in respect to the relation between a ritual action of offering bread and wine and the redemptive self-offering of Christ. It also arises in respect to the relation between whatever it is the ecclesial community claims to be doing in the Eucharist and the symbolic action of Jesus at the Last Supper. We have argued that the former relation – that of the offering of bread and wine to the redemptive action of Christ – is genuinely symbolic. But what of the latter – the relation of our eucharistic offering to Jesus’ action in the Upper Room? Can it be said that the action of the Church in celebrating its Eucharists is properly ‘symbolic of’ (in the sense of ontologically participating in) the action of Jesus? The claim to symbolism in the latter case seems considerably more extravagant than in the former, as it implies an ontological participation spanning time as well as space.

Interestingly, the eucharistic prayer itself appears to acknowledge this additional complexity. In most of forms of the anaphora, the repetition of the words by which Christ ‘instituted’ the Eucharist is succeeded by clauses of the prayer that formulate precisely the relation of Eucharist to Supper:  ‘Our Lord did this’ …. ‘therefore, we are now doing this’.  This is where the ‘words of institution’ give way to the section of the anaphora termed, for reasons shortly to be explained, the anamnesis or memorial. And it is here that we would naturally expect the term symbol, or some equivalent, to crop up – if indeed that were an appropriate description of the relation.

Instead, we find a range of expressions 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.  For example, in the ancient anaphora of Hippolytus, the words of Christ: ‘Do this (=poieite touto) for (=eis) the memorial (=ten anamnesin) of me (emen)’, 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 make everything clear.  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 the form of significative relation 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.

This is highly problematic for the understanding of the eucharistic ritual we have been developping 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 Cranmner’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 & Macfague’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 rather than 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. Of course, 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).  But, evidently, that is far from Tertullian’s meaning here. 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 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 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.

One is reminded here of the Greek word for presence – parousia – which, prior to its Christian use of ‘the second coming’, denoted more generally the ceremonial arrival of the emperor or potentate at a subject town or colony. The outward show makes ritually present the secret reality of supreme power.

None of this, of course, removes 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 pointed out, typology is quite distinct from metaphor with which it is often confused.  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 exemplied when the incident of the ‘bronze serpent’ of Numbers 21 is said, by St Paul among others, to signify the 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 on the pole. 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 named 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 that would no doubt be courting controversy. 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, hoewver, 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 only 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.

The latter differs significantly from the worldviews of most ancient cultures in respect to its understanding of time. 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 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 is described 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).

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.  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.

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.(5) 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 fulfiled 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. Either way, the eschatalogical 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.  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 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’.(7) 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.

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)(8)

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)

(8) Citations from Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World, St Vladimirs Press (1973)