What is the role of the Holy Spirit in the Eucharist? Examining the RC position through Lawrence Feingold, The Eucharist (2)

However, there is one important issue where I am tempted – perhaps mistakenly – not to follow Feingold & Ratzinger.

I cannot understand why more is not made in mainstream Catholic theologians I have read of the Eucharistic role of the Holy Spirit.  Ratzinger gives his account of the workings of the Eucharist without mentioning the Holy Spirit once.  As Feingold understands that role, it consists in the descending ‘on the bread and wine to make them His Body and Blood’ … ‘on the faithful so that they can offer themselves to the Father with the Son and in His likeness’.  I strongly feel there is more to be said. 

Related, I rather suspect, to this underplaying (as I see it) of the role of the Holy Spirit, is, as I shall show, the rather curious insistence on viewing the Lord’s Supper as the first Eucharist – in strong contradiction to the views of some theologians and bible scholars (e.g. Dix or Raymund Schwager).

My own reasoning, for what it is worth, is as follows.  I will be greatly indebted to any reader of this blogpost who will take the trouble to show me where I am wrong!

If Pentecost marks the birth of the Church, surely it must also constitute the terminus post quem for the celebration of the first Eucharist.  As John Zizioulas remarks: ‘the Church constitutes the Eucharist while being constituted by it.  Church and Eucharist are inter-dependent’. Ergo, prior to Pentecost there can have been no Eucharist. 

A moment of reflection will suffice to comprehend why this would be.  When Christ spoke the words of institution at the Last Supper, his disciples cannot – and, from the biblical record, patently did not – understand what he was saying and doing.  Of course, the time came, when, what Christ had done for them at the Last Supper, they were able to do actively for themselves in union with Him.  But for that moment to come, something else had to happen.  The words of Christ (John 16) make abundantly clear what that thing was (the descent of the Spirit), and the nature of the difference it would make (revelation of the truth about Jesus).  This was surely the moment of transition from the age of the Son’s earthly ministry to the age of the Spirit, beautifully prefigured in Luke’s story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, where revelation of who their fellow-traveller was coincides with his disappearance from their sight. Had Jesus not said: ‘if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you’?   

In view of this it seems to me to make little sense to speak of a Eucharist before that moment of transition had come – given that moment was also the moment of revelation.  Does Eucharist – like the Church that springs from it – not require the possibility of the disciples actively sharing Christ’s sacrificial agency, and making his sacrifice their own?  If Feingold and Ratzinger are correct in their understanding of the Eucharistic sacrifice (as expounded in the citations above), then that possibility is part of what it is for the Eucharist to be Eucharist (and the Church to be Church).  So, what sense does it make to speak of the Eucharist as pre-existing the moment when the Spirit’s descent made that revelation a possibility?  It is surely not irrelevant to my case that, in the story of the road to Emmaus, the revelation of who Jesus was (anticipating, no doubt, the revelation of Pentecost) comes through the breaking of bread.  The text implies, if it does not altogether make explicit, the fact, that the discernment of Christ in the breaking of the bread marks the dawning of the age of the Spirit – when ‘the true worshippers of the Father will worship Him in spirit and in truth’.

Why then does Feingold (p.336) (like Ratzinger) seem to want to elide this transition (thus suppressing the revelatory role of the Holy Spirit) by insisting, following the Council of Trent that: the disciples ‘were then established (at the Last Supper) as priests of the New Covenant’.  Yes, indirectly, I suppose, they were so instituted, since those present at the Last Supper were the Apostles whom Jesus had previously elected.  But the idea that the Last Supper itself directly instituted a priesthood (a notion I first encountered in the Rosary) strikes me as having – to say the least – little Biblical or historical grounding.  But, these questions aside, my real problem with this opinion is that it presupposes in the disciples a capacity for understanding which, in reality, it required the ascent of Jesus to his Father, and the descent of the Spirit, for them to achieve!  If – as ‘instituted priests’ – they already had that capacity (and surely they could hardly otherwise be so described), why does Jesus refer to the necessity of his departure, so that the Advocate would come?  What would there be left for the Spirit to do?  And what did Pentecost contribute to the great sacrifice that was not already achieved?

Also at issue here seems to be the Trinitarian understanding of the Gospel-event conceived of as cosmic sacrifice.  If the role of the Father is that of the ultimate giver (through Creation and Redemption) of all we have, and that of the Son is in making a worthy reciprocal return on our behalf, then surely that of the Holy Spirit will be one of enabling humanity’s participation in that sacrificial return to the Father through the constitution of the Church.  So why would the Eucharist not be the specific work of the Holy Spirit, bringing about, in us, the realization of that sacrificial return of mankind to the Father initiated by the Son, and the completion of the whole perichoretic cycle of gift and return initiated by the Father?  Surely, what is most required for the third and final stage of this cycle is the revelation to human hearts of the sacrifice of the Son.  And isn’t that precisely what is attributed by John’s Gospel to the role of the Advocate who will ‘teach’, ‘declare’, and ‘testify’ to us on the Son’s behalf?  So why is God’s work in the Eucharist not conceived of primarily in terms of the agency of the Spirit, acting through the people, in response to, as well as in union with, the Son?

Feingold on symbolic participation

I am now finished with the issues that principally concern me – the ones in pursuit of which I chose to read the book in the first place.  I could just close here.  But, having got this far, I feel I might as well say a few words about the rest. 

The book begins with an exemplary outline of the development of the Eucharist and its precursors, as represented in the OT, NT, and patristic literature.  There follow three long sections devoted to real presence, sacrifice, and communion.  Most of the discussion hitherto relates to matters treated in the sections on sacrifice and communion.  The issues treated in the first concern the nature of Eucharistic symbolism, which is understood in terms of the three-fold meaning of the symbol as ‘sacramentum’, ‘sacramentum et res’, ‘res’ and the mediaeval doctrine of transubstantiation.  As an elucidation of statements in Catholic authors (e.g. Ratzinger) that have frequently puzzled me, I found all this very helpful.  The manner of exposition is very clear (as befits a textbook), and the content well organized.  However, as an explanation of Eucharistic symbolism it struck me as pretty useless.  The theology developed in this section offers a mediaeval response to a series of essentially mediaeval theological concerns.  Various theologians in the wake of Henri de Lubac have argued that those very concerns attest the loss of that properly symbolic mode of apprehending the world that was characteristic of the original Christian Eucharist, and consequently represent an attempt to explain philosophically what had already become obscure and embarrassingly in need of intellectual buttressing.  These are radical arguments; the kind of epistemic shift they presuppose is certainly not of the kind that can be absorbed into the traditional incrementalist understanding of the development of Eucharistic theology propounded by this book. 

But where I found Feingold’s section on real presence particularly helpful was in clarifying what I had previously found obscure in Ratzinger’s presentation of Biblical teleology as fulfilled in the three stages of ‘shadow, image, and reality’.  This was the issue discussed at some length in my previous blog.  Having read Feingold pp. 348-351, I can now see where Ratzinger is coming from!  (This is exactly the kind of thing I’d hoped for from a Catholic textbook on Eucharist). Now I understand, I don’t feel the issues involved to be of any great moment.  But readers of my blog who want further elucidation could do no better than to read these pages of Feingold’s book.  Ultimately, however, the question of the nature of the Eucharistic symbol, and its implications for our Eucharistic participation – which is what really matters – depends on how we understand ‘image’ (Greek: eikon).  Unfortunately, this is where the epistemic shift comes in.  No amount of pondering of St Thomas’ use of terms such as ‘sacramental representation’ or ‘sacramental image’ will get us anywhere.  What we need is to understand the epistemic shift that separates the early Christian understanding of the ritual symbol from Aquinas and the modern world.  Here Dix and Schmemann (as well as de Lubac) have much more illuminating things to say.  We need to try and understand the symbolic world view, as represented by the early Church and by religious cultures today – and that means challenging and relativizing the non-symbolic world view that was beginning to emerge with the Berengar and Aquinas, and remains ours today.  Feingold would be more illuminating, I would venture to say, if he had approached the whole issue via modern social anthropology rather than scholastic philosophy.