22 The Church gives the Eucharist and the Eucharist gives the Church?

We come to the third and final of the difficult issues arising out our proposed presentation of the Christian basics.

Let us begin by recalling to mind an assumption I made throughout that presentation: that ritual produces and reproduces community, and that right ritual will produce right forms, and wrong ritual wrong forms.

Here to remind you are a couple excerpts from that presentation (which you will find in chapter 15):

By means of it (sacrifice), all the actions of our human lives can become a means of expressing a relationship to the divine. This gives our lives purpose; simultaneously it institutes bonds of communal living with those who share the same relationship to the same perceived source of existence. In a very real sense, sacrificial worship has always formed the basis, not only of individual fulfilment, but of community itself.

Christ offers his sacrifice on OUR behalf. And the implication of this ‘on our behalf’ is that he simultaneously offers US the possibility of participating in his perfect self-offering. By this, I mean nothing less than that he allows US to share in his sacrificial agency, so establishing, for the first time, the possibility of a universal human community – a community in his sacrificial offering.

Among theologians, the proposition that the Eucharist produces the Church is hardly unfamiliar.  Walker and Parry in their book Deep Church Rising cite the formulation of John Zizioulas: ‘the Church constitutes the Eucharist while being constituted by it’.(35) They helpfully enlarge on this as follows:

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)(35)

Needless to say, such theological statements would probably surprise many contemporary enquirers into the Christian faith, as well as of Protestant Evangelicals not used to according the Eucharist such importance. I can imagine their sceptical response: ‘Well how exactly does that work?’

I come now to the second half of our question – how the Eucharist encodes Christian values.  In response to this, the authors cited earlier, Walker and Parry, turn to the sociologist, Rodney Clapp.  The latter claims: ‘the Eucharist teaches and forms the church to sacrifice itself for the sake of the world. And in that sacrifice, of course, to gain its own life’. Our authors go on to conclude:

Holy Communion is ortho-praxia, right practice in terms of worship and formative for right practice in terms of Christian living.(p.164)

Few would disagree. It sounds like the kind of thing that ought to be true.  Still, there are some inclined to ask: How on earth does that work?

The authors on whom we have relied for answers to our earlier questions (Dix or Schmemann) have little to say to say on this.  And the reason is not far to seek.  Neither of our questions are, properly speaking, ‘theological’.  In broaching such issues we are leaving behind the areas of enquiry traditionally assigned to theology, and raising issues which pertain to the entire religious phenomenon – in particular, questions pertaining specifically to religious sociology. The proper theological response here is: Go and ask the sociologists – or, better still, the social anthropologists.

That is what I now propose to do.

Sacrifice and the reproduction of community

Let us restate, in more precise terms, the question we want to address.

We have already established that eucharistic sacrifice, like all sacrifice, involves giving back to the source of our existence out of the blessings we have received. Why does such symbolic giving back invariably result in the reproduction of a community? What is the mechanism by which it does so?

Given few theologians ask this question, it is hardly surprising we rarely find the question answered.  But it surprises me even more that, in the one serious instance known to me of the question being seriously addressed by a theologian, the answer we receive is, in my view, so very satisfactory – despite its early date. This single prescient individual was the Anglo-Catholic theologian, former bishop of Lincoln, FCN Hicks in his study The Fullness of Sacrifice (1930).

Hicks’ approach is, like our own, to distance himself initially from the Christian theological context of the Eucharist, and consider the matter in relation to religious sacrifice more generally.

The socially productive function of sacrifice (i.e. its production of community), Hicks argues, follows from its very essence.  That, he claims, consists in the giving and sharing of life.  For Hicks, life means more than ‘biological’ life, and the giving and sharing of life more than nutrition and sexual reproduction. The vulnerability of the new-born, he reminds us, requires the maintenance of those relational and social structures that enable nutrition and reproduction, and must therefore also involve the perpetuation of those structures down the generations. As Hicks puts it, ‘life’ is, of necessity, ‘life in society’. And by ‘society’, he means families as well as wider social groups.  It is the perpetuation of life so understood which he claims to be a function of sacrifice.  Life emanates ultimately from God; but sacrifice is an operation by which human communities come to participate actively in that divine gift through giving and sharing it.

(35) Citations from: Andrew Walker & Jonathan Parry, Deep Church Rising, SPCK (2014)

23 On the sacrificial sharing of life

There is a mental image that clearly underlies this conception of sacrifice.  That image, derives from an eminent nineteenth-century pre-cursor of social anthropology, Robertson-Smith.  It is the image of the ‘totemic feast’ – a feast at which a representative of the animal-type that is seen to embody the identity of the clan group (the ‘totemic’ animal), through being eaten, disseminates the clan spirit to the participants while at the same time giving meat to nourish them physically.

According to Robertson-Smith, the totemic animal is designated as a kinsman by being normally taboo to its clan. But on the occasion of a ritual feast the taboo is violated, and members of the clan kill and eat their totemic animal.  Thereby, they come to realize their bond both to their totemic deity and with other members of the tribe, through ingesting its flesh. For Hicks, at least, there is, between such ancient pagan ceremonies and the Christian Eucharist, no impassable distance.  After all, do we not all ‘share in the one body because we all share in the one bread’?

So much for the theory.

Unfortunately, the empirical evidence for Robertson-Smith’s ideas – the ethnographic evidence cited by The Religion of the Semites – hardly meets the standard of modern social anthropology.  That discipline has, since the twenties of the last century, developed its theories on the back of a laborious practice of participant observation, unknown in Robertson-Smith’s day. The basis of Hicks’ concept of sacrifice nowadays looks flimsy – to say the least.

Should we therefore discard Hicks’ intuitions as to the nature and function of sacrifice?

Not necessarily – and we will return to the review of their evidential basis in a moment.

First, we would do well to reflect on the intuitions themselves: above all, on what is – if we are honest – most surprising about them. This is surely the challenge to contemporary commonsense posed by Hick’s notion that the social bond is realized through an act of ritual sacrifice.  That chiefdoms and kingdoms might be constituted in this way, we can accept.  But the social bonds that Hicks has in mind include bonds of kinship, even those of the nuclear family group. For Hicks, as for Robertson-Smith, every social bond is created through social ritual.

There is, truth be told, something shocking about such a proposition, something that flies in the face of our common sense.  It overrides contemporary notions of an absolute separation between, on the one hand, genetic or biological relationships, and, on the other, relationships that we can remove ourselves from at will (such as those of religion or political grouping). As we say, ‘You can choose your friends, but not your family’. Hicks’ notion of sacrifice sits uncomfortably athwart this fundamental distinction.  It brings us back to a fundamental presupposition of our own culture: namely that the forging of a genuine kinship bond necessarily engages a natural (i.e. physiological) process, the modality of which is not subject to any human alteration – or not at least before the arrival of genetic engineering. God – or Nature – has ordained it involves the encounter of a sperm and an egg. Thus, there can be no doubt or confusion over the boundary between natural and cultural processes – between what is ultimately binding and what can be freely exited from.

Yet, ‘sacrificial societies’, according to Hicks, see the forging of kinship as potentially engaging a far wider range of modalities, none of which can claim to the extra-cultural exclusivity of genetics. Kinship may, for example, be viewed as something transmitted through a range of means (e.g. the sharing of blood, or food) that have none of once-and-for-all-ness of the fertilized egg, and sometimes require extended cultural activity down the generations. The kinship relations thereby created carry obligations and are certainly not ones that can be freely exited from. But the resulting kinship bond does not necessarily overlap with genetic relatedness.  Nor is it an either/or thing, but may be present to varying degrees. In short, Nature, on this understanding of sacrifice, may be sacrosanct; but it is also something that humans participate in reproducing through extended ritual processes that constitute the most significant element of we might consider their culture.

The relevance of all this, for our purposes, is that it introduces a perspective from which the kind of engendering (for want of a better word) that assures the reproduction of, say, Robertson Smith’s West Semitic clan might not necessarily be considered qualitatively distinct from the kind of engendering whereby the Church reproduces herself through the ritual nourishment of the Eucharist. We have, in both cases, social reproduction through ritual.

So, if we suppose Hicks to be correct regarding the centrality of religious ritual to the production of social relationships, we may be on the road to understanding the nature of relationship between eucharistic ritual and the reproduction of the Church.

The question remains whether Hicks’ counter-intuitive view of the role of sacrifice can be justified on the basis of an ethnography more up-to-date and less fanciful than Robertson Smith’s.

The evidence of social anthropology

I would argue that, to a remarkable extent, it can: furthermore, that Hicks’ understanding of the place of ritual in social reproduction can be shown to be remarkably prescient of developments in social anthropology since the 1960s.  Before then, many ethnographic studies had brought to light the parallelism between religious and social structures. But the dominant strand of that discipline had tended to regard the social structures of kinship as foundational, and the religious practices as following in the groove of those structures. All this was about 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. As a result, kinship identities came to be seen, not as a genealogical given, but as the product of an ongoing collective ritual ‘work’, sometimes extending over generations.

It is obviously impossible in a few words to give an adequate impression of the developments in social anthropology to which I refer. But a ground-breaking paper by Andrew Strathern gives us a snap-shot, as it were, of social anthropology at this decisive moment. The author takes stock of where anthropology had reached by the early 1970s, and sets out what he sees as the conclusions to be drawn from recent ethnography. Those conclusions, I would argue, have been corroborated, to a remarkable extent, by developments in social anthropology since that time.

Commenting on the way that kinship is not restricted to genealogical descent, he posits that clansmen ‘share substance in some way’: even that descent may often be more appropriately thought of in terms of shared substance (i.e. semen or blood) than of genealogical inheritance.’

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 ….(36)

Strathern proceeds to make extensive reference to a then recent ethnography of a New Guinea Highlands people called the Siane. Kinship here is essentially patrilineal (ethnographic present), and is associated by the Siane themselves with the possession of ‘paternal spirit’ (korova). However, 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 by Richard Salisbury 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’.

Strathern evidently cites this instance because, on the basis of his knowledge of the New Guinea Highlands, he regards it as representative of how the tribesmen themselves understand social identity, and he wants to bring contemporary theorizing about kinship by social anthropologists into line with the lived experience of these peoples. Having myself personally read some of the anthropological studies produced since this date I can attest that more recent studies in this domain have, if anything, further thrown the spotlight on the dependence of social structures of belonging on an ongoing process of collective ceremonial work to ensure their reproduction over the generations.

The rituals of which we are speaking do not, of course, much correspond to how Hicks, back in 1930, would have understood sacrifice. But that hardly matters. More important, I believe, is the way in which they demonstrate the central role of symbolic ritual in reproducing social structures.

From the perspective of the kind of symbolic engenderings of which we have just been speaking, we can better appreciate the social significance of what goes on at Mt Sinai when Moses is described by the Exodus narrative as ‘dashing’ the blood collected from the covenantal sacrifice upon the assembled people. The perspective of social anthropology broadly supports the interpretation of Hicks (and later, John Dunnill) that the blood of the covenant is a kinship substance whose ritual dissemination amongst the participants in the ceremonial institutes in them a covenantal community – indeed, it constitutes them as that community.(37) Yes, the process is symbolic. But in that respect it is, as we have just seen, no less an engendering than the process by which ‘blood’ comes to be shared through marriage. Either way, kinship is extended through symbolic means. It is because a covenantal identity is inaugurated at Mt Sinai that the people ‘beheld God, and ate and drank’.

Nor, from an anthropological perspective, is there any qualitative distinction between the manner of social engendering we see at Mt Sinai and the production of the ecclesial community through the ritual action initiated by Jesus at the Last Supper. Here, by a ritual process that seems to elide the two phases of the Mosaic covenantal sacrifice (first: sprinkling; second: drinking and beholding), the sacrificial blood of Christ becomes a shared ritual substance that renders God visible in the midst of a new sacrificial community. In all these cases – the tribe, the Jewish people and the Christian Church – it is a collective ritual action that engenders. And the recognition of this ritual production of kinship introduces a perspective from which the mode of reproduction of the tribe and that of the Christian Church do not stand on either side of an unbridgeable divide.

The truth is rather that the opposition of nature and culture is a fundamental presupposition our contemporary Western ideology of kinship.  To adopt a less ideologically motivated (i.e. properly anthropological) perspective is to be forced by the ethnographic evidence collected over many decades to recognize that nature and culture stand on a continuum of ritual symbolism that extends from largely genetically-linked groups at one end to groups in which the element of genetic inheritance is largely absent at the other. Correspondingly, there is, from this perspective, no absolute qualitative distinction between the social entities engendered through these symbolic operations. The West Semitic clan and the Christian covenantal community are, in equal measure, social entities reproduced through concerted socio-symbolic actions involving the use of blood.

From this perspective, the association of Eucharist and Church is something that no theologian – or anyone else – need scratch their heads over. And it is perspective that becomes available to us from the moment we allow the findings of social anthropology to introduce a little chink of doubt into what is an ideologically derived belief – namely the assumption of a dichotomy of nature and culture that relegates all non-biologically-derived cultural structures to the class of mere voluntary associations.

(36) 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

(37) An interesting parallel for the extension of kinship through blood sacrifice is given in Susanne Kuechler, Malanggan (2002)

24 The symbolic paradigm of ritual and its relation to everyday religious practice

We now move on from the question of how ritual sacrifice (e.g. the Eucharist) produces community (e.g. the Church) to the question of how this symbolic sacrifice relates to the kind of practice that the New Testament knows as agapeic love.  

Of course, if the Eucharist is entirely about an unrepeatable atoning transaction that benefits rather than actively involving us, there is no room for any such relation of symbolic ritual to everyday practice.  Our actions may be transformed as a result of Christ’s sacrifice, but not in a way that renders those actions ‘sacrificial’ in the same sense.  St Paul’s use of the term sacrifice in Romans 12.1 is therefore just a metaphor.

But we have already put the case against that understanding of the Eucharist. And it is not my intention to re-run that argument here.

Rather, in the following paragraphs I shall assume what I have already sought to demonstrate in previous chapters – namely, that there is a sense of sacrifice that can properly be applied to both Christ’s action and our own, and that the ritual action of Eucharist is the moment where our action and his are brought to engage with each other. We will, on that basis, now proceed to consider how that engagement works.  Once again, as in the case of the reproduction of community, I shall assume that the manner of this engagement reflects a function of religion itself – and religious sacrifice, more particularly – rather than anything specifically Christian.   To this end, I shall once again step back from Christian theology and attempt to adopt a broader anthropological perspective encompassing other confessional religions.  We will begin by establishing the common ground of how such symbolic ritual functions in relation to the rest of life, once again using Islam as our example.  Then we will go on to consider the distinctiveness of the Christian form of sacrifice as manifested both in symbolic ritual and everyday practice.

So, what is the nature of the engagement between ritual symbolism and everyday non-ritual action?

In what follows, our concern will chiefly be with what, in the last chapter, I defined as confessional religions. But in order to illustrate the nature of this engagement, I want to begin by taking us back to the case of the Merina ritual of the tsodrano as described earlier.

You will remember, this little rite hardly corresponds to what we would 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. We have an upward flow of resources in the shape of the coin; and the downward flow in the shape of blessing conferred.  Piety meets benevolence. 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 seems conveniently to encode 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, could find more substantive material embodiment.

Now the way in which such largely symbolic ritual encodes a pattern of relationships manifested elsewhere in more substantive giving can help us understand the function of symbolic ritual in contexts where that more substantive giving takes place outside the ritual sphere – i.e. in confessional religions.

We have already described the evolution of the latter – how, 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.(38)

Yet, as we saw, even in confessional religions not all kinds of symbolic ritual disappear. There often remain ritual practices that involve little conspicuous consumption (like the tsodrano) which ceremonially encode structures of socio-religious relationships that are materialized in substantive religious generosity outside the ceremonial sphere. There is an obvious logic to all this. With the new emphasis on intention (described in the previous section), religious agency becomes the responsibility of every individual, rich or poor alike. This effectively severs the link between ritual observance and the capacity to expend substantive wealth on the public behalf. Accordingly, we see a split between the ceremonial and the substantive aspect of sacrificial giving. Ritual without substantive giving encodes a paradigm in the ceremonial sphere, which then finds substantive expression in everyday, generous actions of a non-ceremonial kind. The result is that the spiritual value of the gift is no longer seen as proportionate to its size in absolute terms. The ‘widow’s mite’ principle now prevails.

We can see how this works in the case of Islam.

The fundamental paradigm of Muslim sacrifice we have already described. We find it encoded in the rituals of prayer or in the celebration of Eid sacrifice. Its features you remember were:  1. the offering of the whole self by each Muslim individual; 2. the exclusive direction of that offering to the one God – who, as the recipient of that offering, is sharply distinguished from any human being. If we broaden our focus from the individual to the collective, we might add to these features a third: 3. the elimination of all priestly mediation.

How does this paradigm find expression in substantive everyday actions outside the ceremonial sphere?

In a word, the answer is sadaka – a form of gift 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. The idea that such everyday actions are the practical outworking of what is manifested 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. ‘Our symbolic act finds practical expression in benevolence’, remarks one well-known Qur’anic commentator.(39) In other words, actions of sadaka are so because: 1. they involve the offering of something to God on the part of each individual; 2. that offering is addressed to the one God who, in his capacity of recipient is sharply marked off from any human being; 3. they require no priestly mediation.

How can such actions be addressed to God if He is not the material beneficiary?

The key word here is ‘intent’. Such 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 as an expression of the believer’s response to God.  To the extent that a return is sought, it is a spiritual reward in the Hereafter.  Needless to say, any hint of reciprocity between donor and human recipient of the gift would annul its status as sadaka.

The conditions for that status have been set out by Muslim jurists. In addition to the renunciation of any prospect of return other than a heavenly reward, they stipulate the irrevocability of the gift on the grounds that it has been given to God. The implications of this latter condition are very evident in the practice of the particular form of charitable giving constituted by the religious bequest or legacy (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 the institutional level, the consequence of this form of charitable giving – and this leads us to our third point – is the non-emergence in the Islamic world of anything resembling 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; but they do not endow an independent religious institution.(40) This, I would suggest, can be seen as a concrete institutional expression of the principled exclusion of all religious mediation.  It offers an interesting example of the power of ritual symbolism to give a distinctive shape to institutions through its shaping of everyday social behaviour.

(38) Marcel Mauss, The Gift [1950], Routledge Classics (2002), pp.22-23

(39) Sayyid Qutb, Tafsir Fi Zilalil Quran, S.22 (Al-Hajj) pp.103-4

(40) For some excellent accounts of pre-modern Islamic institutions and elites: Scholars, Saints and Sufis, ed. Nikki Keddie (1972)

25 The symbolic paradigm and everyday religious practice of Christianity, as contrasted with Islam

The case of Islam demonstrates the encoding of a distinctive paradigm of sacrifice in symbolic ritual, and the expression of that distinctive paradigm outside the ritual sphere in practices of substantive giving.  I believe this to be how the ‘engagement’ works between symbolic and everyday religious action – not only in Islam, but in other confessional religions such as Buddhism, Judaism, or indeed Christianity.   

What we now have to say of Christianity and its divergence from Islam, will corroborate what we have already claimed regarding the workings of the ritual process (i.e. the process whereby symbolic ritual engages practical religion) in confessional religions.  We will observe – in support of our explanation of the ritual process – how the everyday practices we observe in the two faiths differ in precisely the manner that their respective paradigms would have led us to expect

But it will also give us the opportunity to present the content of the Christian paradigm and the character of the everyday practice through which that paradigm is expressed – against the background of their Muslim equivalents. Where Christianity is concerned, the symbolic ritual in question is, of course, the Eucharist, and the everyday sacrificial practice is the kind of charitable action that the New Testament knows as agapeic love.  These we will now characterize in relation to the ritual and everyday Muslim practices of salat and sadaka, described in the previous chapter.

We will begin with the paradigm.

The Eucharist is, above all, not a sacrifice that each believer offers for themselves. Christianity does not believe that unmediated sacrifice on the part of human beings would be acceptable to the God of Holiness – let alone meritorious. The Eucharist is God’s sacrifice in Christ before it is ours. Indeed, our ‘sacrifice’ only becomes sacrifice at all through its participation in the one sacrifice that is Christ’s. 

Second, within the frame of an action which is wholly God’s in Christ, the parties to the sacrifice, divine and human, find themselves alternating in the roles of offerer and addressee/recipient.  Christ offers to his followers (‘this is my body’), so that they may in turn join their offering with his.  Christ’s followers offer to the Father, under the form of bread, only to become, at communion, the recipients of what is offered.  As a result of these ritual alternations, sacrificial agency – and, along with it, sacrificial status – are not so much asserted over another party as communicated to that party in such a manner as to allow them sacrificial agency themselves – and hence without the loss of status associated in other religions with being on the receiving end.  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. 

Third, the ecclesial community is not just a means to this sacrificial worship, or its outcome, but belongs to its very essence. For what each worshipper offers and receives – i.e. ‘the body of Christ’ – is also the addressee of their worship.  Moreover, that ‘body’ is a kind of corporate self insofar as it manifests the ‘body’ of which those offerers and receivers are the members: in giving and receiving it, they offer themselves up in order, as Augustine puts it, to ‘become what they are’. 

Now let us consider how these characteristics of the Christian paradigm show up in the form of agapeic generosity outside the ceremonial sphere.

Just as the symbolic act is perceived to be Christ’s, so, for Christians is the agapeic love.  This leads to a characteristic modesty when it comes to claiming charitable actions as one’s (human) own, a strong reaction against the idea of a ‘righteousness’ based on one’s own works, and a corresponding disinclination to think in terms of rewards – even heavenly ones.  For Christians, such works are indications of the Spirit of Christ working in them rather than being anything for which they are entitled to claim credit. 

The alternation in the roles of donor and recipient encoded in the symbolic rite leads to a revalorization of the role of addressee/recipient.  The latter comes to represent ‘Christ’ in relation to the donor, just as much as the donor represents ‘Christ’ to the recipient. This has important social implications for the status of the recipient of any form of generosity.  The elevation in the status of the recipient is a feature of the Christian gift (‘almsgiving’) often highlighted by ancient historians as strongly contrasted with the status implications for the recipient of Graeco-Roman beneficence (euergetism).(41)

Finally, the priority of community is reflected in the fact that the obligation to charitable action, and its scope, flow from the revolutionary institution of an ideal society ‘in Christ’ – i.e. ‘the body of Christ’ or Church. They are not universal, and they do not pre-exist the Church. They are the flow of blood that nourishes the members of that institution.  In this respect, the Church resembles archaic sacrificial institutions. However, it differs in respect to the fact that the direction of that blood flow is freed from considerations of traditional hierarchy in order to respond to those of relative material need within the body.

(41) For the comparison of Christian charity and pagan euergetism, see: Richard Finn, Almsgiving in the Later Roman Empire (2002)

26 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 talk. 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. Remember the grand vision which concluded the first section of this chapter, where 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.’***

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

(19) Sally Macfague, Metaphorical Theology (1982)

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

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

(25) Citations from here on are from: Alexander Schmemann,  For the Life of the World [1963] St Vladimir’s Seminary Press (second ed. 1973)