Elsewhere in this series of posts, I have defined sacrifice as expenditure on the sources of our identity. Look back at the examples of sacrifice I have offered in the earlier posts, and you will see that we seem to have been speaking of ritual as much as – if not more than -expenditure. Admittedly, ritual often involves substantive expenditure of a certain kind (in the case of the tabernacle cult, for example). But there are other cases we have discussed where this is not obviously the case – or where the expenditure in question seems merely token (as in the case of our own celebration of the Eucharist). This raises the question of the role of ritual in relation to sacrifice; why sacrificial expenditures (outside the modern world at least) should so often take a ritual form, and why, in certain cases, ritual action would even seem to take the place of substantive expenditure.
Our account of the sacrifice of the Old Testament (see ‘4.Good and bad sacrifice’) may offer a clue to the answer. We spoke there of how the ritual symbolism ordained by God Himself allowed the substitution of one thing for another, and how this permitted, in Abraham’s case, an act of devotion that would otherwise not have been possible for a human agent. But this is a theological explanation. And our guiding principle through this series of posts has been always to assume – save evidence to the contrary – that what we observe in Christianity (sacrifice, mediation, etc.) is a specific instance of something more universal. I now propose to extend the same approach to the exploration of ritual and its relation to sacrifice. Here, as elsewhere, my aim will be to capture the Christian form of the thing (here the role of ritual) by characterizing it against the background of its forms in other (non-Christian) religions).
Where ritual is concerned, this task promises to be more straightforward than with symbolism or mediation (see 7.1 and 7.2). There is nothing particularly mysterious or controversial about either of the propositions we will be defending in this chapter: namely that (1) the eucharistic ritual is crucially involved in reproducing the Church, and that (2) it shapes Christian sacrificial practice. Take, for example, the statements of Walker & Parry in a book (Deep Church Rising) authored collaboratively by an Orthodox and an Evangelical believer, and apparently based on a series of workshops aiming to achieve broad consensus across all wings of the church.[i] First, on the role of ritual:
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)
Second, on the relationship of ritual to sacrificial practice:
Holy Communion is ortho-praxia, right practice in terms of worship and formative for right practice in terms of Christian living. (p.164)
These statements seem quite unequivocal. They would, for all that, baffle many of those who share a pew with me on Sundays – not to mention non-believers interested in the Christian faith. Moreover, it is one thing to state that something is the case; quite another to explain how and why. Sceptics might reasonably demand to know whether such assertions have any theological (or other) basis.
Our earlier chapters may open the way to a partial answer. We have consistently claimed that that religion and sacrifice are about our expenditures (of material assets, effort, or time) on the sources of identity rather than some aspect of our inner existence. If you accept that argument, there will be less to surprise you in the idea that a ritual deemed to be ‘sacrificial’ (i.e. the Eucharist) should have a role in the production of religious community. That said, the notion of ritual introduces an additional element whose specific contribution to sacrificial practice remains as yet unexamined either in the case of the Eucharist or in sacrifice more generally. What is it about a ritual specifically that would make it essential to the practice of the type of sacrificial expenditure that binds us to the source of our Christian identity? Why would our participation in such a ritual shape our sacrificial practice in a way that, say, exposure to Christian teaching, or personal devotion, would not?
These are good questions. Sadly, the sceptical will have to search far and wide for answers. The authors on whom we depend in earlier chapters have surprisingly little to say on such matters. This is hardly surprising. The how and why of religious ritual is not, properly speaking, a ‘theological’ concern. “Ask a social anthropologist, or a sociologist of religion!” our theologians might reasonably respond.
Only, I suspect, few theologians would respond in this way – and especially not the ones motivated by an interest in spreading the Gospel. For it is widely suspected in theological circles that anthropologists, sociologists and other such secular academics are in hock to methodologically dubious ideological positions opposed to theology in their very essence. And not without reason. Comparative approaches to religion, as we have seen, bracket out the ultimate truth claims dear to theologians in order to give equally sympathetic attention to all the various religious ‘realities’ that constitute their object of study. Theologians could reasonably object that that this ideational neutrality precludes even the possibility of any one of these ‘realities’ being more ‘real’ than the others.
Needless to say, the resulting failure of dialogue between theology and comparatively-orientated disciplines has contributed to ensuring that the questions articulated above have remained largely unaddressed – at least, by anyone sympathetic to Christianity.
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 sacrifice produces community. I am speaking of The Fullness of Sacrifice (1930) by the Anglo-Catholic theologian, former bishop of Lincoln, F.C.N. Hicks.[ii]
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.
Yet, there are good reasons why, despite its early date, Hicks’ work merits our attention. For a start, Hicks has had few, if any, successors – such is the gulf between theology and anthropology already alluded to. Still more importantly, however, 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. Though Hicks himself does not use the term, the underlying concept (which I shall define below, but whose general meaning will emerge from my exposition of Hicks’ ideas) is absolutely formative for Hicks’ understanding of sacrifice. Moreover, his application of it to the Eucharist blazes a trail (still sadly neglected) 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 explain sacrifice?
Certainly, as expenditure. But, further than that, as a rather specific form of expenditure: the giving, in the case of God – and, in our case, the giving back and sharing – of the gift of life. It is in respect to this narrower specification of sacrificial expenditure that the socio-symbolism of ritual enters the picture. Sacrifice, on Hicks’ narrower definition, is expenditure that binds us, not just to any old source of identity (e.g. an internet fandom, or a football club), but to (a) god(s) who is/are perceived by a community as their source of life. This giving and sharing of life – at least where humans are concerned – involves more than the provision of its physical necessities (e.g. nutrition). Above all, it requires the maintenance and transmission of relational and social structures, without which human survival would be impossible. ‘Life’, as Hicks puts it, always means ‘life in society’. And, it is the maintenance and transmission of these necessary structures that Hicks attributes to ritual sacrifice.
By comparison, then, with ‘sacrifice’ in the modern free-floating sense of expenditure on whatever gives our individual lives existential meaning (e.g. well-being culture or New Age spirituality) [iii], Hicks’ understanding of sacrifice roots the human need for purpose and belonging in less individualistic and more physically embodied structures of identity such as those of family, tribe or nation – in short, the kind of identities we earlier identified with other (non-modern) forms of religion.
A more concrete idea of what Hicks has in mind emerges – both as regards these social structures, and the kind of sacrificial expenditure that sustains them – in what he has to say about a practice he and Robertson-Smith refer to as the ‘totemic feast’. As regards the institution itself, the evidence on which our authors rely for their description may not meet the standards of modern social anthropology. Yet, Robertson-Smith’s account of it allows Hicks and his contemporaries, in the absence of better ethnographic evidence, to conceptualize sacrificial ritual in a non-theological way that, in many respects, anticipates the theories of that discipline. In essence, it makes possible the conception of sacrificial ritual as a collective action through which a community acts purposefully to reproduce its corporate identity – a type of sacrificial expenditure, that is, which takes a specifically ritual form.
According to ideas of ‘totemic religion’ prevalent in the C19th, ‘primitive’ societies are composed of a number of clans each of which defines its identity through association with a creature these scholars refer to as a ‘totem’. The latter is considered by members of the clan to be a kinsman through descent from a common mythical ancestor. The totem embodies the spirit of the clan, and is never eaten by members of the clan in normal circumstances. However, the clan’s collective existence depends upon a ritual – the totemic feast – where its members violate this taboo by killing and eating their totem. Through the collective ingestion of this forbidden flesh, clan members 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 Hicks’ development of a ‘social’ understanding of the Eucharist is evident. After all, Christian communicants, too, are marked out from the world, and united with each other, through an action that might seem to resemble – and, in former eras was actually mistaken for – ritual cannibalism. In either case – totemic feast and Eucharist – the food consumed, being the substance of the god, offers the ongoing means of participation in the god’s spiritual being. This ritual eating is not just the figurative expression of a spiritual and physical reality that is already a ‘given’ of the believer’s existence – but the ongoing means of producing and reproducing that reality. Just as believers have to eat ‘physically’ in order to sustain their physical existence, so they must eat ‘spiritually’ – i.e. of the flesh of their deity – in order to sustain their socio-religious identity.
Sacrificial ritual as social reproduction
This, as we shall see in a moment, is the kind of collective action to which anthropology attaches the term social (re-)production.
From a modern Western standpoint, there is something utterly counter-intuitive about it, both as it is deployed here by Hicks and, as we shall see, by social anthropology. The idea that kinship bonds – including, crucially, those of family and lineage – could be constituted through the socio-symbolic action of ritual rather than through a once-and-for-all encounter of sperm and egg strikes modern people as a breach of basic commonsense. For us, relationships constituted biogenetically stand apart from all other types in that they comprise a domain of relationships whose basis appears to lie outside any purposive activity on our own part. Kinship is consequently seen as something rooted in accomplished biogenetic fact, and its influence limited to those individual physical and mental propensities transmitted through our genes. By contrast, any inter-generational transmission of collective values through up-bringing or education we would tend to see as qualitatively distinct from – and superimposed upon – this biogenetic substrate. For us, cultural transmission is, by definition, opposed to the transmission assured through kinship. From the modern perspective, then, there can be no doubt, when it comes to religion and the kind of sacrificial ritual Hicks associates with social reproduction: because these are activities requiring purposeful engagement, the relationships they engender are not those of kinship.
So how to respond to Hicks’ claim that kinship is produced – and reproduced – through the purposive activity of ritual? View one is that Hicks is wrong, that the modern biogenetic understanding of kinship is the correct one, and that whatever solidarity arises from the practice of socio-reproductive ritual isn’t ‘real’ kinship. View two, more open-minded, is that Hicks may be right in respect to certain (non-modern) forms of kinship. That latter view requires us to make a distinction between two senses of ‘kinship’: i.e. ‘family identity’, and ‘biogenetic interconnectedness’. The phenomenon of ‘family identity’ is of course indispensable to any human culture; biogenetic interconnectedness may not universally have the importance it appears to have in modern society, where it becomes the primary idiom in which family identity is expressed. On the first view, it is the fact of biogenetic connectedness that produces kinship. On the second, kinship is a cultural construct, with biogenetic connectedness being just the way kinship happens to be constructed by modern culture. Of course, biogenetic connectedness is also scientific fact. However, just because the fact of biogenetic connectedness is universal doesn’t mean, its ideational use as the determinant of family identity has to be universal as well.
The first of these two views is that of contemporary commonsense; the second the view of Hicks, for whom commonsense is culturally relative, and social reproduction through ritual, as he believes, a known ethnographic fact. If, on the first view, kinship is a ‘natural’ (i.e. biological and physiological) phenomenon, on the second, it is an ideational belief that attaches to the natural phenomenon. That is to say, biogenetics constitutes, not the ‘nature’ in which kinship is grounded, but the ideational belief through which kinship is ‘naturalized’. In this respect, the modern ideation of biogenetics is no different from the kind of ideation produced through socially reproductive ritual. Cast your mind back to our early chapter on symbolism, and you will recall that naturalization was the term we used, following Catherine Bell, to describe the manner in which the social symbolism of ritual operates in order to invest the world with humanly significant meaning. Kinship is central to such cultural constructions. It is no surprise, therefore, to find kinship grounded in nature in all societies – modern and non-modern. This does not necessarily mean kinship is a natural phenomenon (view one). It could also mean (view two) that the claim to be grounded in nature is everywhere a feature of ideational belief, serving to establish an institution as socially binding for those engaged in its reproduction.
The relevance of this for our purposes? Well – the only way Hicks’ view of kinship (view two) can be sustained is on the assumption there are two alternative forms of kinship ideation, with the naturalization of the one entailing the de-naturalization of the other – on the assumption, that is, that the kinship engendered by social reproduction (as Hicks understands it) has been supplanted by modern biogenetically-based ideation. This would explain the modern incomprehension of the socially reproductive function of ritual. We carry on asserting that the Eucharist ‘produces the Church’, but without understanding.[iv] In practice, I suspect, the notion of eucharistic ritual as ‘metaphorical’ expression of the strength of the relationships we have in Christ comes to replace the notion of the Eucharist as genuinely socially reproductive. As a result, the Church comes to resemble a mere association of believing individuals.
However, the direction of the naturalization and denaturalization could just as easily be reversed. Allow Hicks’ ‘anthropological’ perspective to unsettle our modern preconceptions, and there is no good non-ideational reason why the modern biogenetic ideation of kinship should trump our allegiance to a kinship ideation engendered through Christian ritual (supposing the Eucharist to be a socio-reproductive ritual in the way that Hicks imagines). Why interpret the Christian language of kinship as a metaphor dependent on the reality of biogenetics? We can, instead, take that language literarily, as signifying an ultimate (Christian) reality of kinship, on which modern biogenetic ideation must itself draw for its understanding of family identity. Just as the modern faith in biogenetics denaturalizes Christian ritually reproduced kinship, so the latter will denaturalize the modern ideation of biogenetics. For Hicks, it is the notion of a kinship of faith uniting all Christ’s younger brothers and sisters around the communion table that constitutes the fundamental reality upon which all ideations of kinship depend – including the modern belief in biogenetics.
Sadly, Hicks’ perspective has been unavailable to theology.
Much of the blame for this lies with another adaptor of Robertson-Smith’s ideas, far more influential on the future course of the social sciences than Hicks: the sociologist, Emile Durkheim. Like Hicks, Durkheim understands religion to be ‘an eminently social thing’. But, in construing this ‘social thing’ in narrowly materialist terms, he diverges from Hicks, and diverts Robertson-Smith’s legacy, and, with it, the whole future of social anthropology, along paths that no theologian would approve. An understanding of religion that is ‘scientific’ (in Durkheim’s sense) is intended to replace the understanding of the believer, since the latter is implied to be, if not altogether illusory (since the social object is real), then scientifically inadequate.
Durkheim’s approach is ultimately reductive. It is also no longer much favoured by social anthropologists who are trained to give due weight to indigenous explanations (though its intuition of the ‘social’ function of religion has foundational importance for the establishment of the discipline). Thankfully, the work of Hicks is there to remind us that the adoption of a social perspective on religion need not involve reductivism. While in agreement with Durkheim on the social nature of religion, Hicks also insists, in marked contra-distinction to Durkheim, on the religious nature of the social. In Hicks’ view, the network of our social relationships (‘society’) extends far beyond those entertained between living humans to encompass those that link living humans with their forbears and gods.
Christians have no need to fear a social perspective, therefore. Far from posing a threat to Christianity Hicks’ anthropological understanding of ritual as socio-symbolic unsettles enculturated notions of modernity in a manner entirely conducive to a more even-handed assessment of the relative merits of Christianity. Furthermore – and more importantly for the purposes of understanding Christian sacrifice – Hicks’ anthropological understanding of non-modern sacrifice opens our eyes to the socio-reproductive function of sacrifice where it takes a ritual form (as in Christianity).
This all assumes, of course, that Hicks’ counter-intuitive understanding of the socially reproductive function of sacrifice can be justified on the basis of an ethnography more up-to-date than Robertson -Smith’s …..
It is to this crucial 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 fundamental, 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):[v]
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 ….
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.
Let us finally turn to the case of ritual that chiefly concerns us here: that of the Bible.
The recognition of the role of ritual action in creating kinship allows us to grasp the significance of that absolutely crucial moment in the Old Testament account, when Moses ratifies the covenant on Mt Sinai, and Israel officially enters upon its existence. The Exodus narrative, you will remember, describes how Moses ‘dashes’ the blood collected from the covenantal sacrifice upon the assembled multitude, who are thereby constituted as the people of God. Comparison with ethnographic material such as that 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. If the cases mentioned above represent incorporation as an extended process, there are also instances in the ethnographic record of the use of sacrifice as a single, once-and-for-all action whereby the group extends kinship to previously unrelated individuals.[vi]
The covenantal sacrifice at Sinai prefigures, in turn, the socio-symbolic action of Jesus at the Last Supper. The second covenant is, like the first, sealed by sacrificial blood that is subsequently disseminated amongst those who are to be members of God’s people. In this case, it is drunk from a cup, rather than sprinkled, as in Exodus. Yet it performs a similar role of inaugurating a covenant and incorporating a covenantal people. Like their OT predecessors, the participants ‘drink and see God’. The eucharistic ritual seems, if anything, closer to our other examples of sacrifice in that the ritual is not a once-and-for all rite of incorporation, like the covenantal sacrifice on Sinai (or the Christian rite of baptism), but constantly repeated one. Like the participants of the totemic feast, the Church ‘feeds’ on the Christ, and is thereby spiritually ‘nourished’. The Church that sustains itself in this way is a ‘social body’ – and the notion of ‘social reproduction’ therefore seems a perfectly apt description of this process. But we understand ‘social’ here in Hicks’ – not Durkheim’s – sense: that is, as referring to a sphere of relationships that extends beyond those involving living humans, and includes God, as well as humans who have died, or are yet to be. ‘Society’, understood in this way, is not a reductive concept.
So much, then, for how the Eucharist ‘produces’ and ‘reproduces’ the Church.;
Ritual and non-ritual sacrifice
We move on now to the second half of our question. Why and how is sacrificial ritual, as Walker & Parry put it, ‘formative of’’ right religious practice?
By ‘right practice’ our authors are evidently referring to sacrificial expenditure (of money, time or effort) outside the ritual 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’s use of the term sacrifice here is evidently not just secondary and metaphorical. What does this ‘living 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 to say, with practical actions (i.e. sacrificial expenditure), demonstrating Christ’s love to those around us – especially within the community of faith.
By ‘formative of’’ Walker & Parry indicate that the symbolic action of the Eucharist has an influence of a specific 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, we are assuming that such an influence exists – an influence, that is to say, which is specific to ritual action. If the Eucharist is simply a commemoration of an unrepeatable atoning transaction that benefits, rather than actively involving, us, there is little room for such a thing. Our action may indeed be transformed by Christ’s sacrifice, but not in a way that renders it sacrificial in a more than 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 – and it is not my intention to re-run that argument here. Rather, in the remainder of this chapter, 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 – I ask what it is specifically about ritual action that would make it the means by which such ‘formative’ influence (i.e. ‘orthopraxia’) is achieved. What is so special about ritual?
To put things in this way is once again 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 socio-symbolic ritual in Christianity might operate in much the same way as socio-symbolic ritual in other religions.
At a theoretical level, the issue has been extensively discussed by social anthropologists (e.g. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice).[vii] But rather than reproduce their abstract – and often rather abstruse – arguments, I propose to give concrete examples which will serve to convey a general idea of how socio-symbolic ritual works.
How socio-symbolic ritual works in confessional religions
In the interests of developing a model, I shall return, briefly, to the case of a ritual practised in Madagascar, which I described in the previous chapter. It happens to illustrate particularly well the kind of socio-symbolic effect we see deployed on a grander scale in confessional religions
This little rite – the tsodrano – hardly amounts to what we normally think of as sacrifice at all. 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. There is an upward flow of resources in the shape of the coin, and a downward flow in the shape of blessing conferred. But 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 attached. Indeed, Maurice Bloch, our ethnographer, introduces the tsodrano rite because of its helpful analogy to those grander rituals, and as a means to explain their meaning. In the eyes of the anthropologist, the small everyday practice appears to encode the socio-religious structures he sees expressed in other rituals. The material wealth may be just a coin, but the hierarchical relationships expressed in its use are ones that, in other, more ceremonial contexts, find more substantive material expression.
Now this encoding of a relational structure manifested more substantively elsewhere is what we find in the socio-symbolic ritual of religions where, unlike with the Merina, substantive giving mostly takes place altogether outside the ritual sphere.
Our previous piece spoke of a transformation of religious practice accompanying the rise of confessional religions. This consisted in the displacement of substantive expenditures from the ritual and ceremonial to the everyday realm. In the words of the 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.[viii]
This change arose, you will remember, out of: first, a new insistence on the intent of the religious gift (as opposed to its size or conformity to ritual protocol) and its potential as a means of spiritual progress for the giver; second, an extension of the obligation and privilege of religious giving from an elite authorized to act on behalf of everyone else to each and every individual regardless of their wealth. We said nothing, however, about the consequences of this transformation for ritual practice. And it is to this issue that we will now turn.
Ritual practice does not disappear with the arrival of confessional religions, even if it ceases to resemble the kind of ritual for which Mauss reserves the term sacrifice. What replaces it are practices that, in certain respects, might remind us of the tsodrano – practices which ceremonially encode relational structures without involving significant material expenditure. Only, with the definitive separation of ritual practices and substantive giving, there is forced on our attention the specific role of ritual practice in communicating relational structures.
We can see how this works in practice in the case of Islam.
Here the socio-religious paradigm is encoded in the rituals we described in the last chapter: namely, prayer and in the celebration of Eid sacrifice. Its principal features 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 this 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 takes place outside the ritual sphere, 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.[ix] Such actions are sadaka to the extent they involve the expression of the paradigm encoded in the rituals we have just alluded to – prayer and Eid sacrifice. 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 every human being. 3. They require no priestly mediation. The idea that sadaka constitutes the practical outworking of a paradigm encoded symbolically in ceremonial action is fundamental to the Muslim faith. Popular etymology associates sadaka with the sincerity (sidk) of the almsgiver’s religious belief. As one eminent Qur’anic commentator remarks: ‘Our symbolic act finds practical expression in benevolence’.[x]
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. That 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).[xi] 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.[xii]
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 socio-symbolism works in Christianity
The foregoing case of Islam demonstrates what it means for purely ritual action to be ‘formative of’ 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 the sacrifice of God Himself in the person of 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 people (‘this is my body’), so that they may in turn join Christ in offering themselves back to the Father. (The recipients – Christ’s people – thus become offerers.) Then, in a second moment of the same sacrifice, the people, 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. There is a notable disinclination amongst Christian believers to think of personal righteousness as something for which they might 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.[xiii]
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 non-confessional 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. As a result, 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 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.’ (p.247)
[i] Andrew Walker & Jonathan Parry, Deep Church Rising, SPCK, 2014
[ii] Frederick Cyril Nugent Hicks, The Fullness of Sacrifice, SPCK, 1953 [1930]
[v] This and following citation are from: Andrew Strathern, ‘Kinship, Descent and Locality’, in The Character of Kinship, ed. Jack Goody, Cambridge U.P., 1973, pp.21-23
[viii] Marcel Mauss, The Gift, trans. W.D. Halls, Routledge, 1990 [1922]
[ix] See the entry ‘sadaka’ in H.A.R. Gibb et al., The Encylopedia of Islam, 12 vols., Brill, 1960, vol.8, pp.708-715
[x] Sayyid Qutb, Tafsir Fi Zilalil Quran, S22 (Al Hajj), pp.103-4
[xi] See entry ‘waqf’ in H.A.R. Gibb et al., op.cit..
[xii] Excellent accounts of pre-modern Islamic institution and elites in ed. Nikki Keddie, Scholars, Saints and Sufis, University of California Press, 1972
[xiii] A comparison of Christian charity with pagan forms of sacrificial giving to be found in Richard Finn, Almsgiving in the Later Roman Empire, Oxford University Press, 2002