We come to the third of the difficult issues arising from the account of the Christian faith offered by our earlier post.
There we claimed that sacrifice – in this case, eucharistic sacrifice – ‘institutes bonds of communal living’. In the words of the Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas, the Church ‘is constituted by’ the Eucharist. Enlarging on this, Walker & Parry (Deep Church Rising) helpfully explain (1):
Theologically speaking, without the body of Christ (which is both the body of the individual man, Jesus, and the community that exists in him) the Eucharist is nothing – no church, no Eucharist. But by the same token the Eucharist is the sacramental means by which the Spirit enables us all to participate in an ongoing way in the one body of Christ (1 Cor 10:17) – no Eucharist, no church. (p.161)
We also claimed that, on both a collective and individual level, the Eucharist moulds everyday Christian practice. As the sociologist, Rodney Clapp, puts it: ‘The Eucharist teaches and forms the church to sacrifice itself for the sake of the world.’ Once again, Walker & Parry (from whom I cite) helpfully enlarge:
Holy Communion is ortho-praxia, right practice in terms of worship and formative for right practice in terms of Christian living. (p.164)
For a wide range of theologians, neither claim is controversial, I suspect. But these theological propositions would baffle many everyday enquirers into the Christian faith. They might also come as a surprise to my fellow Protestant Evangelical believers, who, on the whole, see ‘the Lord’s Supper’ as having an importance that is entirely personal and devotional rather than social or institutional. Moreover, there remain the questions of why and how. That is, assuming such claims to be true, why and how they are true: why and how the Eucharist produces or ‘constitutes’ the Church, and why and how our participation in an act of worship should impact our everyday actions in a way that exposure to Christian teaching would not. Indeed, why is an act of ritual necessary at all, and what does it contribute above and beyond the practice of personal devotion?
Here, the authors on whom we relied for answers to our previous questions (Dix or Schmemann) have little to say. This is hardly surprising. The why and how of symbolic action is not, properly speaking, a theological concern; these are questions for religious sociology, or of anthropology. ‘Ask an anthropologist’, we can imagine the theologians might respond … Or would, at least, if they didn’t believe anthropologists to be in hock to a methodologically dubious ideological position opposed in its very essence to theology.
And not without reason. Comparative approaches, by definition, bracket out the ultimate truth claims of the theologians in order to give equally sympathetic attention to all the various religious ‘realities’ that constitute their object of study. Theologians could claim, no doubt legitimately, that such ideational neutrality precludes even the possibility of any one of these ‘realities’ being more ‘real’ than the others.
Needless to say, such failure of dialogue between theology and the comparatively-orientated disciplines has had its part in ensuring that our questions have largely remained unaddressed – at least, by anyone sympathetic to the goals of Christian theology.
The unusual case of F.C.N. Hicks
All this explains the exceptional interest, from the perspective of this piece, of the one theological study known to me that ventures beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries in order to engage with anthropology (in an admittedly early form) on the question of how of symbolic action produces community. I am speaking of The Fullness of Sacrifice (1930) by the Anglo-Catholic theologian, former bishop of Lincoln, F.C.N. Hicks.
Given its early date, it is no surprise that the theory of sacrifice on which Hicks’ study draws (that of William Robertson-Smith) has long been superseded. Social anthropology would hardly recognize itself in the latter’s great work, The Religion of the Semites. Why concern ourselves with studies dating from the nineteenth, and turn-of-the-twentieth, centuries?
There are, in fact, some very good reasons. For a start, Hicks has had few, if any, successors – such is the gulf between theology and anthropology already alluded to. But, perhaps more importantly, we see in the impact of Robertson-Smith’s work on Hicks (and, prior to Hicks, on the sociologist Emile Durkheim), if not quite the emergence of social anthropology itself, then at least the dawning of an intuition that was to lie at the core of the future discipline. This was the idea of religion as a ‘social’ phenomenon, and the means of what anthropologists have since learnt to call social reproduction. The latter concept – which I shall define below, but whose general meaning will become plain from my exposition of Hicks’ ideas – is absolutely formative of Hicks’ understanding of sacrifice (though he doesn’t himself use the term). Moreover, its application to the Eucharist blazes a trail (though a sadly neglected one) for a potential theological engagement with the approach to religion still embodied in the discipline of social anthropology.
In the absence of any more recent theological forays into this domain, we shall therefore adopt Hick’s study as our point of departure.
Hicks’ theology of sacrifice
How then does Hicks define sacrifice?
As the giving and sharing of life. The concept of life as Hicks defines it includes ‘biological’ life. So, giving and sharing life involves nutrition and sexual reproduction. But, for humans at least, the meaning of life is not containable within a physical or material understanding of the concept. One has only, Hicks reminds us, to consider the vulnerability of our young, their inability to survive without the maintenance of those relational and social structures that effectively enable their nutrition and reproduction, and without the perpetuation of these structures down the generations. Life is, therefore, of necessity, ‘life in society’. And its giving and sharing requires action that isn’t limited to biological sustenance, but also involves the reproduction of social identity. The actions that accomplish the latter are what Hicks calls sacrifice. The Eucharist is the form that such action takes in Christianity.
To give you a more concrete idea of what Hicks means by ‘the giving and sharing of life’, I shall have to say something of a practice to which Robertson-Smith and Durkheim refer as the ‘totemic feast’. Evidence for reality of the practice hardly meets the standards of contemporary anthropology. Yet Robertson-Smith’s account of it concerns us here because of its influence on Hicks’ understanding of sacrifice.
According to notions of ‘totemic religion’ widespread in Robertson-Smith’s day, we find archaic societies characterized by the existence of clans which define their identity through association with an animal/creature referred to as the ‘totem’. The latter is considered by members of the clan to be a kinsman through descent from a common mythical ancestor. It embodies the spirit of the clan, and is never eaten by members of the clan in normal circumstances. The totemic feast, however, is a ritual event at which the clan violate this taboo by killing and eating their totem. Through the collective ingestion of this forbidden flesh, members of the clan actualize, physically and ritually, the bond they have, both with the totemic creature and with each other as fellow clansmen sharing the same totem.
The potential relevance of this practice for the development of a ‘social’ understanding of the Eucharist, like that of Hicks, is evident. After all, Christian communicants, too, are marked out from the world, and united with each other, through an action that, in other circumstances might seem to resemble cannibalism – namely, the ingestion of their human deity. In either case, the food consumed offers both physical sustenance and (since what is consumed is the god) an active participation in the god’s spiritual reality. The participation is active in both cases because the ritual eating is not just an acknowledgement of an accomplished fact – a figurative expression of a spiritual and physical reality that is a ‘given’ of the believer’s existence – but a process which, through their ritual action, the worshippers contribute to maintaining. Just as believers have to eat ‘physically’ what the gods provide in order to sustain their physical existence, so they must eat ‘spiritually’ – i.e. in due consciousness of the nature and origin of the food, and of their relation to its provider – in order to sustain their spiritual being. Theologically speaking, this understanding of sacrifice recalls of the account of the Eucharist we find in the Orthodox theologian, Alexander Schmemann in passages such as the following:
Man is a hungry being … To be sure, man is not the only hungry being. All that exists lives by ‘eating’. The whole creation depends on food. But the unique position of man in the universe is that he alone is to bless God for the food and the life he receives from Him …. ‘Homo sapiens’, ‘homo faber’ … yes, but, first of all ‘homo adorans’. The world was created as the ‘matter’, the material of one all-embracing eucharist, and man was created as the priest of this cosmic sacrament.
To eat spiritually, on Schmemann’s understanding, is to consume what God provides in full consciousness of whence that food comes, and, hence, of the relationship of dependence that this implies. For humanity prior to the fall, life itself was, no doubt, a spontaneous act of worship in this sense – as it was presumably for Christ in his earthly ministry. Now, following the fall, such unmediated spiritual life is no longer available to us, and it is ‘in Christ’ that we eat ‘spiritually’ – as we do through consuming the bread and wine which, through its communication of his life, becomes our spiritual sustenance.
Sacrifice as social reproduction
On all this, Hicks would be in entire agreement with Schmemann. But there is an additional dimension of Hicks’ account of sacrifice not to be found either in Schmemann or most other theological studies of sacrifice.
For Hicks, the ‘homo adorans’ of Schmemann’s ‘cosmic sacrament’ acts in a corporate capacity as the bearer of a collective identity – whether of Church, or of totemic clan. Spiritual sustenance, on this understanding, becomes a collective action through which a corporate body (Church or clan) is sustained. And it is primarily the corporate body which draws sustenance from that action – and the corporate body to which that action properly belongs.
And it is in reference to this collective operation that anthropology would employ the term social (re-)production. Though the word does not appear in Hicks, the idea is clearly present, being at the heart of that intuition that he has taken over from Robertson-Smith. Essentially, it denotes the process whereby social bonds – not just political and ‘religious’ ones, but the bonds that unite clans and families – are constituted, not through genetics, but through sacrificial (i.e. socio-symbolic and ritual) actions like Robertson-Smith’s totemic feast or Hicks’ Eucharist. Hicks himself extends his application of the concept to all types of human relationships, not even drawing the line at those of the nuclear family.
What is challenging about this idea, from a modern Western perspective, is that it refuses a unique status to the human relationships we are accustomed to see as genetic or biological ones – relationships we assign to a special class on the grounds that unlike all other relationships (such as political or religious ones) they lie outside the sphere of our active control, as a kind of fait accompli into which we are born. In contradistinction to all other relationships, deemed in some degree elective, these relationships of ‘blood’ are seen as rooted in a natural (i.e. biological) fact which precedes our very existence, over which we have no influence. As we like to say: ‘You choose your friends, but not your family’
By contrast, Hicks’ understanding of kinship sees all social bonds – even the closest – as ultimately produced and reproduced through ongoing cultural activity. The evocation of Robertson-Smith’s totemic feast in support of this idea leads Hicks to more generalized, and I suspect, conjectural, claims as to the role of sharing food or blood as means of creating relatedness that have none of the once-and-for-all-ness of the fertilized egg, and often require extended cultural activity down the generations. What is more, the kinship so produced is not always an all-or-nothing thing, but can be present in varying degrees. It is tempting for us to assume that the obligations thereby created would be less binding, more comparable to those we classify voluntary or elective. But this is not at all the implication of Hicks’ argument. Rather, he sees these relationships (like those reproduced through the totemic feast) as equally constitutive of group identity, and as establishing what the community perceives as a natural order – no less definitive than the natural order we see as constituted uniquely through sexual intercourse, though differing from the latter in respect to its need for ongoing cultural maintenance.
The absence, for Hicks, of any essential qualitative distinction of biological and ritual relatedness such as would relegate the latter to the status of being ‘merely symbolic’, i.e. non-literal, effectively allows the Eucharist to be categorized with archaic rituals such as the totemic feast, and the community it reproduces (i.e. the Church) with the tribes, clans and families reproduced by archaic ritual. Both operations – that of the Eucharist and the totemic feast – constitute, from Hicks’ perspective, forms of (for want of a better word) ‘engendering’ brought about through sacrifice (i.e. socio-symbolic action).
An implication of this (though not one particularly brought to our attention by Hicks’ text) is that the distinction thus overridden by archaic societies – that between biological and cultural relatedness – does not, as we might suppose, constitute a universal of the human condition, but belongs to an understanding of kinship specific to Western modernity. Here, the role of ritual symbolism in establishing relatedness seems to decline with the growing naturalization of the biological understanding of kinship. Needless to say, our privileging of certain relationships as ‘biological’, hence ‘natural’ – however ‘scientifically’ justified as a reflection of objective realities ascertainable through genetics) – conceals the operation, at least where kinship is concerned, of what is also an ideational principle – no less in our own case than in archaic societies. Kinship being a cultural construct, the claim of certain relationships to be ‘natural’ reflects not ‘nature itself’ but the ‘naturalization’ of something that is ultimately ideational.(2)
Sadly, this naturalization of the biological – and the corresponding de-naturalization of the socio symbolic – tends to empty sacrificial ritual – including the Eucharist – of its social reproductive meaning. We reduce the Eucharist to something individual and devotional; or else, if we hang on to the theological belief that it has an institutional importance (e.g. that ‘the Eucharist gives the Church’), we do so without understanding. However, to the extent that we can allow Hicks’ and Robertson-Smith’s ethnography to relativize the preconceptions of our own secular modernity and open our minds to a world that does not naturalize the biological, a veil is lifted on the socio-reproductive dimension of eucharistic sacrifice. We can begin to grasp the possibility of understanding nature as something which humanity, through sacrifice, actively engages in sustaining rather than as something extrinsic to human culture. This is a perspective from which it makes sense to compare the Eucharist and the totemic feast as two instances of the reproduction of social institutions through socio-symbolic actions involving the consumption of flesh and blood.
It is nevertheless a perspective that has largely been unavailable to theology. Why? Because the idea of sacrifice as social reproduction implicit in Robertson-Smith has had a more culturally salient and theologically problematic legacy in the work of the sociologist, Emile Durkheim and his disciples. Like Hicks, the sociologist understands religion to be ‘an eminently social thing’. Yet, he sees this ‘social thing’ as capable of analysis in an objectively scientific as well as a religious terms. By implication, Durkheim’s own ‘scientific’ perception of the religious phenomenon is thereby opposed to the perception of the believer in a manner that appears to reduce the latter – if not to an illusion (since the social object is real) – then to a scientifically inadequate perception of that social object.
Needless to say, this is a reductive understanding of religion, and, as such, objectionable to theologians. It is also, I suspect, not a view much favoured by contemporary social anthropologists – though this is not to deny the foundational importance of Durkheim’s – or Robertson-Smith’s – perception of the ‘social’ function of religion in the establishment of the discipline.
Yet, the adoption of a social perspective on religion does not necessitate a reductive approach such as Durkheim’s. And the alternative offered by Hicks serves to remind us of the fact. While the latter entirely shares with Durkheim the fundamental intuition that ‘religion is an eminently social thing’, he also holds, very much in contra-distinction to Durkheim, that the opposite is equally the case: namely, that society is an eminently religious thing. In his view, the network of our social relationships (‘society’) extends beyond those entertained between living humans to include also relationships that link living humans with their forbears and gods.
Christians have, therefore, no reason to be shy of a social perspective. Indeed, they have every reason to promote it since, on closer analysis, it turns out to be no more undermining of the traditional Christian notions than of contemporary secular ones. Far from posing a threat to Christian belief, the anthropological understanding of ritual as socio-symbolic serves to unsettle enculturated secular notions in a manner entirely conducive to a more even-handed appreciation of their relative merits. And, the socio-reproduction function of the Eucharist – i.e. its role in constituting the Church – becomes nothing that a theologian, or anyone else, for that matter, need scratch their heads over.
But, in making this claim, we are assuming that Hicks’ counter-intuitive views of socially reproductive sacrifice can be justified on the basis of an ethnography more up-to-date than Robertson Smith’s. It is to this issue that we will now turn.
The evidence of social anthropology
I would argue that Hicks’ views are by no means out of line with conclusions some anthropologists have reached on the basis of more substantial evidence. They even turn out to be remarkably prescient of the developments in the anthropological field since the 1960s. Prior to that date, ethnographic studies had brought to light the parallelism between religious and social structures. But a dominant – and more ‘Durkheimian’ – strand of that discipline (‘corporate lineage theory’) had tended to regard the social structures of kinship as essential, and the religious practices as following in their groove. Around the 1960s, this began to change. Partly, because of the encounter of anthropologists with apparently more fluid and less hierarchized social structures in Melanesia which did not appear to fit the established pattern. Partly, because of new developments in anthropological theory which questioned the ‘essentialization’ of kinship. These began to represent kinship, not so much as a genealogical given but as the product of an ongoing collective ritual ‘work’, sometimes extending over generations.
It is obviously impossible to give an adequate impression of these developments in a few words. But an illuminating paper by Andrew Strathern gives us, as it were, a snap-shot of social anthropology at this moment of transition. The author takes stock of where anthropological theorizing had reached and sets out what he sees as the conclusions to be drawn from recent ethnography – conclusions which, I would argue, have been amply confirmed by work in the discipline since that time. He comments on the way that kinship is not restricted to genealogical descent, arguing that kinship would be more appropriately thought of in terms of shared substance (i.e. semen or blood):
Another way in which they (the tribal peoples of Melanesia) share substance is through consumption of food grown on clan land. Food builds their bodies and gives them substance just as their father’s semen and mother’s blood and milk give them substance in the womb and as small children. Hence it is through food that the identification of the sons of immigrants with their host group is strengthened. Food creates substance, just as procreation does ….(3)
In support of this, he goes on to make extensive reference to a then recent ethnography by Richard Salisbury of a New Guinea Highlands people called the Siane. For this group, kinship is patrilineal (ethnographic present), and associated with the possession of ‘paternal spirit’ (korova). However, group membership is open to sons of sisters of the clan, and also other men, whether kinsmen or not, who have been brought up in the clan village. The following passage from the study describes the multiple ways in which this is achieved.
A child at conception is composed of paternal spirit (semen) and maternal spirit (blood). Ritual is performed to remove maternal spirit and infuse paternal spirit. Techniques of doing so are to play flutes before young male novices – the flutes represent the ancestors – and to give them flying-fox meat to eat (i.e. they eat creatures which also represent ancestors), and to expel maternal spirit in the form of blood through their noses … Paternal spirit may be introduced into a person in many ways. It may come from ‘the father’s semen, food eaten during childhood which contains spirit from the land on which it is grown, from pork, from a name, or from proximity to objects such as sacred flutes which symbolize korova … The individual has a direct relationship to the original clan ancestors, sharing their material essence … most of which is acquired through ceremonial or growth’.
For Strathern, this understanding of kinship as the outcome of a ‘sharing of substance’ is characteristic of local understandings in the New Guinea Highlands. But he evidently also sees it as significant for our understanding of kinship more generally. This is an area where particular indigenous behaviours and beliefs seem to demand a revision in the conceptual frameworks we have brought to their understanding – in this case, that of kinship. Strathern’s theory that a notion of kinship as ‘shared substance’ would prove more generalizable to the variety of existing human cultures is evidently one that invites future demonstration.
From my own inevitably limited reading of subsequent ethnographic studies, I can attest that there is no lack of such evidence. Kinship has indeed come to be seen as dependent on shared substance, hence of an ongoing collective ceremonial work over the generations. The socio-symbolic activity they describe bears little resemblance to how Hicks, back in 1930, would have understood sacrifice. But they nevertheless demonstrate the central role of symbolic ritual in reproducing social structures.
This recognition of the role of ritual action in kinship allows a fuller appreciation of the importance of sacrificial blood at the decisive moment of the OT narrative, when Moses ratifies the covenant on Mt Sinai. The Exodus narrative informs us, it will be remembered, that Moses ‘dashes’ the blood collected from the covenantal sacrifice upon the assembled multitude, who are thereby constituted as the people of God. Comparison with the ethnographic material we have cited supports the interpretation of Hicks (and later, John Dunnill) that the blood of the covenant is here functioning as a kinship substance whose ritual dissemination amongst the multitude incorporates them within a covenantal community. (4) The covenantal sacrifice at Sinai prefigures, in turn, the socio-symbolic action of Jesus at the Last Supper. Here, too, the blood consumed by Jesus’ followers under the ‘species’ of the wine is functioning as a kinship substance. It is drunk from a cup, rather than sprinkled, as in Exodus; but, in similar way, it inaugurates a covenant and incorporates a covenantal people. of God; like their OT predecessors, they ‘drink and see God’. The second covenant is also sealed by sacrificial blood that is ritually disseminated amongst those who are to be members of God’s people, though in this case, not through sprinkling but through consumption of the blood. This notion of a socio-reproductive ritual ‘function’ is by no means reductive, even though it establishes a human institution (‘the Church’). This is because the social bond created by the ritual is one with God, even before is one with fellow disciples. As Hicks makes clear, ‘society’ is not limited to its human members.
The symbolic paradigm of ritual and its relation to everyday religious practice
Let us now move on to the second half of our question. Why and how is symbolic practice, as Walker & Parry put it, ‘formative of right practice in terms of Christian living’?
By ‘right practice’ our authors are evidently referring to action outside the ritual and symbolic sphere – the kind of action to which St Paul alludes in Romans 12.1 when he urges his Christian brothers and sisters to ‘present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.’ Paul actually uses the term sacrifice here in what appears to be more than an entirely secondary and metaphorical sense. What does this ‘right practice of Christian living’ – this non-ritual sacrifice – consist in?
It would seem uncontentious, on the basis of a reading of the New Testament, to equate it with agapeic love (agape): that is say, with practical actions motivated by our understanding of God’s love for us in Christ, and demonstrating that love to those around us – especially in the community of faith.
By ‘formative of’’ Walker & Parry seem to imply that the symbolic action of the Eucharist has an influence of a special kind over our individual and collective practice. Through the Eucharist, it is implied, our everyday practice comes to participate in the sacrifice of Christ, to the extent of itself becoming ‘sacrifice’ in a more than figurative and metaphorical sense. The aim of the rest of our piece will be to specify the nature of this influence.
Of course, this presupposes that there is such an influence – an influence, that is to say, which is specific to the symbolic action itself. If the Eucharist is simply a commemoration of an unrepeatable atoning transaction that benefits, rather than actively involving, us, there is no room for such an influence. Our actions may indeed be transformed by Christ’s sacrifice, but not in a way that renders them sacrificial themselves in more than a figurative sense. St Paul’s application of sacrifice to our everyday lives in Romans 12.1 is in that case pure metaphor.
But I have already put the case against the non-participative understanding of the Eucharist. It is not my intention to re-run that argument here.
Rather, in the following paragraphs, I shall treat our earlier conclusions as a point of departure – our conclusions, that is, that there is a sense of sacrifice that can properly be applied to both Christ’s action and our own, and that the Eucharist is the moment where his action engages with ours in such a way that the former could be said to be ‘formative’ of the latter. Granted this – and here we come to our chief concern in the rest of this piece – what is it specifically about symbolic action that would make it the means by which this ‘formative’ influence (i.e. ‘orthopraxia’) is achieved? Why the symbolic action of the Eucharist – what does its ‘formative’ power consist in?
To put things in this way is once again – as with our previous investigation of sacrificial reproduction – to distance the perspective of theology, as commonly understood, and to encroach on the domain of the anthropology of religion. It is to embrace the idea that the manner in which the symbolic action of Christianity operates may not be specific to Christianity. Accordingly, I shall proceed here, as in my previous piece, by establishing the common ground of how symbolic ritual operates more widely (chiefly using the example of Islam), before going on to consider what renders Christianity distinctive.
Our question, then: how does symbolic action relate to everyday non-symbolic action?
Developing a model
For reasons that will shortly become apparent, I shall largely be concerned here with the symbolic action of what, in my last piece, I termed confessional religions. But I shall begin by returning to the case of the Merina ritual of the tsodrano described in my previous piece.
This little rite, as you will remember, hardly amounts to what we normally think of as sacrifice. There is no slaughter of domestic beasts – just a coin offered up to a senior, who confers blessing on his juniors by sprinkling them with water that he blows across its surface, before pocketing the coin – an upward flow of resources in the shape of the coin; and the downward flow in the shape of blessing conferred. However, it is significant for the purposes of our argument here that the Merina do, in fact, also perform the grander kind of rituals to which the term sacrifice is more normally applied. Indeed, Maurice Bloch, our ethnographer here, introduces the tsodrano rite for its helpful analogy to those grander rituals, and as a means to explicating their meaning. In the eyes of the anthropologist, the small everyday practice conveniently encodes the socio-religious meaning he sees deployed on a larger scale elsewhere. The material wealth in this case may be just a coin, but the relationship signified by its upward movement, is one which, in other, more ceremonial contexts, finds more substantive material embodiment.
Now the way in which such largely symbolic ritual encodes a pattern of relationships we find manifested elsewhere in more substantive giving helps us understand the function of symbolic ritual in contexts where that more substantive giving occurs predominantly outside the ritual sphere – i.e. in confessional religions.
Our previous piece spoke of the transformation of religious practice occasioned by the emergence of Islam and Buddhism, where an insistence on the intention of the religious giver – as opposed to the size of the gift or its conformity to ritual protocol – brought about a new focus on the value of the gift as a means of spiritual progress for the giver. And we saw how this was associated with a displacement of substantive giving from the ritual and ceremonial to the everyday realm, whereby, in the words of the sociologist, Marcel Mauss:
the gods and the spirits accept that the share of wealth and happiness that has been offered to them and had been hitherto destroyed in useless sacrifices should serve the poor and children.(5)
But we have said nothing as yet about the fate of symbolic practices in these religions. This is where our attention will now turn.
Such practices do not disappear in confessional religions, even if they cease to resemble the kind of rites for which Mauss seems to reserve the term sacrifice. However, the role of symbolic action changes – and in a manner that the foregoing case of the Merina practice of the tsodrano can help us to understand. The kind of symbolic action we continue to see are practices which, like the tsodrano, ceremonially encode structures of socio-religious relationship but without significant material expense. Those structures are then materialized in substantive religious generosity outside the ceremonial sphere. In what follows, we will refer to the structures themselves as a paradigm. The paradigm is encoded in symbolic action, and expressed in everyday (i.e. non-symbolic) religious practice.
In confessional religions such symbolic actions are at the heart of the religion. There is an obvious logic to this. With the new emphasis on intention (described in my earlier piece), religious agency is devolved to the individual, rich or poor, rather than being the obligation and the privilege of an elite who act on everyone’s behalf. With the severance of former association of religious observance and the capacity to expend substantive wealth, we see a split between a ceremonial (but non-substantive) and a substantive (but non-ceremonial) expression of sacrificial giving. And with the disappearance of the kind of ritual ceremonial requiring the conspicuous consumption of wealth, the role of articulating the fundamental socio-religious structures devolves to ritual practices of a less ostentatious kind.
The case of Islam.offers a good illustration of how this works in practice.
There the socio-religious paradigm is the one encoded in the rituals described in my previous piece – namely, prayer and in the celebration of Eid sacrifice. As you will recall, the principal features of that paradigm are: 1. the offering of the whole self by each Muslim individual; 2. the exclusive destination of that offering to the one God – who, as recipient, stands absolutely apart from every human being; 3. the elimination of all priestly mediation.
How does the paradigm find expression in substantive everyday actions outside the ceremonial sphere? The answer, in a word, is sadaka – a form of gift practice regarded by Muslims as having a religious intent. This giving is not itself ceremonial, and includes an enormously diverse range of generous practices. One dictionary of Islam mentions: giving assistance with the loading of a beast; every step taken towards prayer; lawful intercourse with one’s wife; greeting with a smile – in fact, just about any conceivable act of kindness, not excluding, of course, generosity involving substantive expenditure. Such actions are sadaka to the extent they involve the expression of the paradigm encoded in the rituals discussed in my previous piece. 1. They involve the offering up of the worshipper’s self. 2. They are addressed to the one God alone, who, as recipient, stands apart from everyone human being. 3. They require no priestly mediation. The idea that these everyday actions are the practical outworking of a paradigm encoded symbolically in ceremonial action is fundamental to the Muslim faith. Popular etymology associates sadaka with the idea of the sincerity (sidk) of the almsgiver’s religious belief. Or as one well-known Qur’anic commentator remarks: ‘Our symbolic act finds practical expression in benevolence’, (6)
How can such actions be addressed to God if He is not the material beneficiary?
The key word here is intent. Such charitable actions evidently require human addressees, and will generally end up meeting the material or spiritual need of some human recipient. But their primary intent is the expression of the believer’s offering of self to God. This is why any pursuit of a return for one’s gift (other than in the Hereafter), or any hint of reciprocity with the human recipient, would annul the status of the gift as sadaka.
The conditions for that status have been set out by Muslim jurists. These stipulate another condition which is additional, though related to, those already mentioned: the irrevocability of the gift on the grounds that what is God’s cannot be taken back. The implications of this latter condition are very evident in the practice of the particular form of charitable giving constituted by religious bequests or legacies (waqf). These post-mortem donations, prior to modernity, were the chief means of supporting the institutions dominated by the Islamic social elites (ulema). But they were not made directly to other people, and do not presuppose an institutional addressee (e.g. ‘church’). They were tied up under legal provisions (i.e. waqf) that had to reflect the requirements of sadaka, and were controlled by trustees bound by the conditions of the original donor.
On an institutional level, the consequence of this form of charitable giving has been the non-emergence in the Islamic world of anything resembling a priesthood or church. The givers of sadaka support an apparatus of mosques, madrasas, courts and markets, broadly comparable throughout the pre-industrial Islamic world, staffed largely by ulema supported on this basis. However, they do not endow an independent religious institution.(7).
Here, I suggest, is a concrete institutional expression of the principled exclusion of all religious mediation – an interesting case of the power of ritual symbolism to give a distinctive shape to institutions through the shaping of everyday social behaviour.
How this works in Christianity
The foregoing case of Islam demonstrates what it means for symbolic action to be ‘formative of’ our everyday behaviour. This, I would argue, is how symbolic action functions in all confessional religions – not only in Islam. What we now have to say of Christianity will corroborate this model; but will also allow us to describe the socio-religious paradigm encoded by the Eucharist and expressed in the practice of agapeic love – in the way that we have done for Islam.
On first view, the Christian paradigm would seem to resemble the Muslim one, at least in respect to the first two features: the Eucharist, like Muslim symbolic action, involves an offering of the self by the believer (1) and that offering is addressed to the one God (2). But, on the issue of priestly mediation, the two faiths are clearly opposed. Priestly mediation is at the heart of Christianity – most importantly, the mediation of Christ.
On closer analysis, we find considerable differences even in respect to the first two of these features.
The Eucharist is indeed, for Christians, an offering of the self to God. But it differs from the ritual of Islam in that it is absolutely not an offering that the worshippers make for themselves. This relates to the issue of mediation. The Christian sacrifice is God’s in Christ before it becomes our own. Indeed, our eucharistic sacrifice is properly only sacrifice at all to the extent that it participates in the sacrifice of Christ.
As for the addressee of the eucharistic sacrifice, He is indeed the one God. But, in Christianity, the one God cannot be a God who stands apart from human beings as sole recipient – or not, if, as we have claimed, the eucharistic sacrifice is God’s in Christ before it is ours. It follows, as a consequence of God’s sharing of His sacrificial agency that the parties to the sacrifice, divine and human, will alternate in the roles of offerer and recipient. In Christ, God offers Himself to his followers (‘this is my body’), so that they may in turn join Him in offering themselves to the Father. (The recipients – Christ’s followers – thus become offerers.) Then these followers, who join Christ in offering themselves under the form of the bread, become, at communion, the recipients of what is offered. (The offerers thus become recipients). As a result of these alternations of ritual role, sacrificial agency – and, along with it, sacrificial status – are not asserted by one party over the other; they are communicated by one party to the other in a manner that allows the one who was initially recipient to become an offerer in turn. The process is reminiscent of a dance in which someone who has occupied a certain role in relation to one partner comes to occupy the complementary role with someone else. In fact, dance (perichoresis) is a term sometimes applied to the give and take of relations between the persons in the Trinity – a dance in which, as we have said, the Eucharist allows us to join.
A further, though related, feature of the Christian eucharistic paradigm that sharply distinguishes Christianity from other confessional religions is its prioritization of the collective over the individual. Ultimately, this follows from that fact that Christian sacrifice begins in the trinitarian God Himself and precedes any offering on the part of individuals. It isn’t a universal religious obligation imposed by God on individuals that results (as it were, incidentally) in the constitution of the religious community; it is the existence of a community, rooted in the relationships of the Trinity that results in the religious obligation for those who have become its members.
So much then for the paradigm encoded in the eucharistic ritual. Let us now see how these features are expressed in the practice of agapeic love outside the ritual sphere.
Just as the eucharistic offering is perceived to be Christ’s before it is ours, in the same way Christians see the love they are enjoined to show to their fellow believers as something inspired in them by the Holy Spirit, rather than good works for which they could claim credit. is the practice of agapeic love. There is a notable disinclination amongst Christian believers to think in terms of personal righteousness as something for which they might personally be rewarded – either in this life or the Hereafter.
The alternation in the roles of donor and recipient encoded in the symbolic rite leads to a revalorization of the role of the (human) recipient – including the recipient of substantive giving on the part of fellow-believers. This is an aspect of Christian everyday practice that has been widely remarked upon by historians, both ancient and modern, as strongly differentiating the ideal of social relations prevailing in Christian societies from what we find elsewhere. The recipients or potential recipients of generosity assume the role of Christ in relation to givers, according the latter an occasion to witness their own faith. They are consequently in no way demeaned by this role. This has important social implications for the status of the recipient in Christian communities. (8)
Finally, the prioritization of collective over the individual is reflected in the fact that the obligation to agapeic practice arises in relation to the ideal community that is the body of Christ. It is not an obligation that should be seen as existing independently of that community in Christ – in the way that, for example, the religious obligations of the Muslim reflect the demands God makes of each individual human. From a Christian perspective, the latter view would amount to the restitution of ‘the law’ with its commandments; whereas the prioritization of collective demands that the way of law gives place to that of ‘grace’.
Here Christianity is closer to archaic religions than to those confessional religions which in other respects seem its spiritual cousins. In archaic religions, the flow of giving arises in relation to a social order that sanctions the flow of wealth by which its structures are upheld. Similarly, in Christianity, the generosity associated with agapeic practice arises in relation to body of Christ and its manifestation in the world. In neither Christianity nor archaic religions does substantive giving arise out of some universal ethical demand on each and every human individual independently of, and prior to, engagement in the religious community. Where Christianity differs from archaic practices, however, is in the disengagement of such religious giving from the constraints of hierarchy, so that the flow of wealth can respond to material need, rather than serving the needs of social reproduction.
Code and expression
I have spoken of Christian values in terms of a ‘paradigm’ that is ‘encoded’ in ceremonial and ‘expressed’ in substantive giving outside the ritual sphere. This is a sociological or anthropological language. It seems to identify the ultimate goal of religion with observable social behaviours and structures, and to place ritual in a secondary relationship to those behaviours and structures as a kind of blueprint finding its actualization in real-life. Such a perspective has some value, I believe, if we want to demonstrate what a religious ritual like the Eucharist might have to do with the reproduction of individual and collective practices such as those of Christian charity.
Yet, there is also a sense in which it falsifies the true relationship between ritual and practice, as perceived by believers – at least in Christianity. Actually, that relationship is not so much that of a blueprint to its realization – rather the contrary. You will remember how, earlier, we claimed that, in the Eucharist, believers quite literarily ascend into the heavenly tabernacle in order to return into the world transformed. From this perspective (the perspective of Christian belief), it is the Eucharist itself that already constitutes the consummate realization of a sacrifice of which our everyday practices offer only a faded approximation. Hence, what we have termed the paradigm is actually the full reality – not the other way round. As for its relationship to the future realization of the Kingdom at the eschaton, even that is not properly one of a ‘shadow’, but of a genuine foretaste – a full manifestation in other words, albeit in the limited mode in which that reality can yet be fully manifested.
The time, of course, is yet to come when it might be said of the Church in its entirety that it is the Kingdom of God on earth. It is not just that our individual and collective service falls short; the city of God will only fully become the city of God when it achieves that universality that is God’s ultimate intention for it. Until that time, the world is fragmented, and that state of fragmentation itself impacts on our individual and collective capacity to realize our worship as service and to transform our city into His Kingdom. Needless to say, no theoretical limit is set on such a transformation, nor on the sanctification of our individual and collective lives. Meantime our eucharistic worship remains, not just a sign of the Kingdom still to come but its full reality, as we are able already to experience it in the present age.
How strange, then, that it has been sacrificial status of the Eucharist itself that has, historically, been a point of contention amongst Christians. One could imagine some reasonable grounds for refusing the term sacrifice to the non-ceremonial offering that Christians make of the everyday lives, the ‘spiritual sacrifice’ of Paul’s Letter to the Romans – given that it always falls short. But the form of the Eucharist is not something sullied by such human imperfection; it is entirely of God, as was the blueprint of the temple cult given to Moses. Here, if anywhere, our human hearts are refashioned after the divine model, our values transformed, so that we convey something of that light into the everyday realities of our lives in the world.
I can find no better way to conclude this chapter than by re-stating the words of Dix, citing Augustine, on the way the eucharistic sacrifice functions to enable this crucial ‘refashioning’:
In the Eucharistic bread and wine (‘work of human hands’) we offer ourselves – our livelihoods, our projects, all that we are. But we offer them not individually, but collectively as the Church. And we offer them in order that we ourselves (as symbolized by our gifts laid on the altar) may become, in actuality and at this moment within time, what notionally we already are before God: the body of Christ. In this way, the actuality of our individual and collective lives, now no longer held back in rebellious independence from God, but offered up in unity with the sacrifice of Jesus, is transformed into the living body of ascended and glorified Christ. When we then receive this living body back from the altar, and we take it into our physical bodies, we become what we truly are. ‘If you have received well,’ says Augustine, ‘you are that which you have received’. ‘Your mystery is laid on the table of the Lord, your mystery you receive. To that which you are you answer “Amen”, and in answering you assent. For you hear the words “the Body of Christ” and you answer “Amen”. Be a member of the Body of Christ that the Amen may be true.’
(1) Citations from: Andrew Walker & Jonathan Parry, Deep Church Rising, SPCK (2014)
(2) See David Schneider, American Kinship (1968), p.23: ‘In American cultural conception, kinship is defined as biogenetic’. In other words, the ‘biogenetic’ definition of kinship is a ‘cultural conception’, and, as such, one of many possible definitions.
(3) This and the following citation are from: Andrew Strathern, ‘Kinship, Descent and Locality’, in The Character of Kinship, ed. Jack Goody (1973), pp.21-31
(4) An interesting parallel for the extension of kinship through blood sacrifice is given in Susanne Kuechler, Malanggan (2002)
(5) Marcel Mauss, The Gift [1950], Routledge Classics (2002), pp.22-23
(6) Sayyid Qutb, Tafsir Fi Zilalil Quran, S.22 (Al-Hajj) pp.103-4
(7) For some excellent accounts of pre-modern Islamic institutions and elites: Scholars, Saints and Sufis, ed. Nikki Keddie (1972)
(8) For the comparison of Christian charity and pagan euergetism, see: Richard Finn, Almsgiving in the Later Roman Empire (2002)