The Eucharist Makes The World Real
Communion works to bring the whole of creation into Christ. The world is transfigured, the world participates in the eucharistic transformation, with the eucharist itself being a participation of the eschatological feast where Christ will be all in all. By partaking of the eucharist, we find ourselves drawn into Christ; we are made one with him. By being made food, Christ has found a way to join himself with us, to have us take him in and transform us from the inside out. We become united with Christ, for we become what we eat. “Now when the body of Christ is eaten, not what is eaten but he who eats is incorporated with Him whom he eats. On this account Christ wished to be eaten by us, that He might incorporate us with Him.”[1]
The world itself found Christ’s body and blood, his living tissue, within itself and so was also taken in by it; it too, can be and is transformed from the inside out. Christ’s body was like every other human body; he would have had sweat dripping from his brow, he would have had hair and skin being discarded into the earth, giving himself to the world and letting it thrive. The eco-system of the world shows that we are food to each other, we give life to each other, in many ways; what dies becomes food for something else. Christ has become food for all, each in their own unique way, so that all can thrive and be transformed with him, to move from the fallen, imperfect world where the negation of being, sin, tries to destroy creation, to that which is real and true, that which is eternal, as it is incorporated in Christ. “God’s power descends into the world and transforms it at definite moments and points, filling it with another life.”[2]
The mystery of the eucharist show that matter itself is affected, that it has had an internal transformation:
Sacrament transubstantiates the cosmic and makes it transcendent in relation to the world, in relation to itself; the nature of the cosmic becomes an incarnate antinomy, because, on the one hand, it’s ‘matter’ is necessarily cosmic, belongs to this world (otherwise the sacrament would not be accomplished, for it must have an object, is accomplished in the world and above the world), and, on the other hand, it makes the matter transcendent in relation to itself.[3]
When one thinks about Gnosticism and its denial of the reality of the world, one would then find it unlikely that any Gnostic would have a eucharistic view of the incarnation. The two seem to go against one another. If one believes the world is illusory, the incarnation seems to be about the presence of the transcendent in the world to break open the world and to lead us out of its grip. However, Philip K. Dick, who saw himself as a Gnostic, who truly held many Gnostic views, nonetheless also held a very eucharistic view of the incarnation. Christ, for him, was really incorporating the world in himself. By that process, what is illusory and fake could become real. This is an interesting take for a Gnostic, and one in which the Gnostic predisposition against the world can be found, however, it is also something which can almost be said to be based upon an orthodox understanding of the world. The world is, in a way, illusory; the world does not meet its essence, and is less than itself; sin negates being, it destroys it from the inside, so that all one has is a shell of being, a shell which points to what it should be but is not. And in this way, Christ’s incorporation of himself into the world so that the world can be incorporated in him is thus the restoration of being to the world, of making the world real and alive, filled with the radiance of O WN. Thus, PKD, though coming to the incarnation with Gnostic overtones in his thought, nonetheless is capable of appreciating the way the incarnation transubstantiates the world, makes it real, and indeed, how God uses the ways of the world itself for its own benefit.
Zebra counterfeits the counterfeit – which fits the Gnostic idea of the bumbling demiurge being helped out, out of mercy, by the true God. This helping out, not just of humans but of the whole fallen (fucked up, not really real) cosmos is the transubstantiation of objects and processes on an invisible ontological level which I saw the growing Corpus Christi achieving. A fake fake = something real. The demiurge unsuccessfully counterfeited the pleroma, and now God/the Savior is mimicking this counterfeit cosmos with a stealthily growing real one. What this all adds up to is that God, through the cosmic Christ, is assimilating our cosmos to himself.[4]
While we must be careful, and not believe the world was given its origin, its foundation, by some secondary force outside of the vision of God. God created the world out of nothing. However, there is a kind of demiurge in creation. The world itself was given its own ability to define itself, to have a form of self-making, and within creation, there are many who are given roles as subcreators. The bumbling demiurge can be seen as all those who live and thrive in creation, who have been given a role as co-creators with God but who failed to follow God and instead looked in on themselves and turned themselves into their own gods. Even then, in their idolatry, their role has not been denied, and so their God-given power to influence the development of the world and all that is within it becomes negative as their sin takes root in the world itself. The world is a world of fakes because the co-creator has turned away from the real, first in themselves, and then in the world at large. The real is touched, the real is drawn into their sub-creation, but sin deconstructs what is taken into the world and makes it less than it should be; what is good and true becomes cut up from within, and only the semblance of the good and true remain. Adam the first human was to be a mediator, to help elevate the world with his own theosis; but in his sin, the world fell with him, turning away from the eternal truth in God. Jesus Christ, God the Son, the Logos, took on the nature and way of humanity – even mortality – so that he can be a part of the world, to take the world from within, from within its imperfect, fallen mode of being, and bring it with him to the eschaton. “Thus then of His own will He bore mortality, that He might taste death and thus put mortality aside.”[5]
Philip K Dick, in his way, saw the work of the Logos transforming the world from within. We are like Pinocchio – we have been given life, but will we fully become transformed into real humans or remain trapped in a wooden imitation of humanity? The Logos, who is the second Adam, is also the true Adam, the one who allows us to become all that we are meant to be, and in him, we are then to be united in God. Communion, the eucharist, is the means of such transformation. In death, Christ was able to do more than give us himself as food – though it is through death, food is made; it is in death, Christ was able to give us the food which, when incorporated in us, is able to transform us so that he can take our place, he can take the pain and suffering of sin, the full karmic assault for our actions, replacing himself with us from within so that from without we can be saved:
This is the heart of the Christian mystery – and the heart of the issue, ‘where is our God (dues asbconditus)? where can he be found?’
Again: it is at the moment when the ultimate blow (of pain, murderous injury, humiliation and death) is struck, it is Christ who is there, replacing the victim and taking the blow himself. This is what happened to me in 3-74.[6]
Christ in the eucharist transforms us, “replaces us” from within; the wood becomes flesh, the flesh is alive, and we become who we really are because of our unity in Christ. PKD really caught on to what is so central to the Christian mystery, even if his Gnostic inclinations made him second-guess the full implications of what he had seen and experienced. The transformation is real, the world itself is to be made full, as we all become incorporated in and united with Christ. The world is not to be denied, but lifted up, to be transformed as the eucharistic elements are transformed — the physical appearance, the physical properties remain the same, appear to “mimic” the world, even as what they bring is something above and beyond the world and capable of making it what it is truly meant to be in Christ, who is to be all in all.
[1] Hugh of St. Victor, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith. Trans. Roy J. Deferrari (Cambridge: The Medieval Academy of America, 1951), 307.
[2] Sergius Bulgakov, “On Holy Relics” in Relics and Miracles. Trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 2011), 10.
[3] Ibid., 10.
[4] Philip K. Dick, Exegesis. ed. Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2011), 277.
[5] Hugh of St. Victor, On the Sacraments, 305.
[6] Philip K. Dick, Exegesis, 294.
Comments are closed.
Henry,
I love the Hugh St. Victor quote. But please note that it represents a pre-transubstantiation view. It gives a very elegant sense of how the matter was understood at an elite theological level, before it was reified– if you will excuse a rather harsh word– into transubstantiation.
“When the Eucharist is carried in procession, the body of Christ does not move.”
Peter
Well, it depends upon what one means — there is nonetheless a transformation involved, and one which also includes the self. Remember, I am Byzantine Catholic — I will use transubstantiation (and I did here, in part, because PKD himself uses the word quite a bit!) — but I also know that it is not the end all of discussion/explanations and there are problems with it (as Bulgakov explores in his writings on communion). It must not be understood as physical, for sure.
Yes, and just because the popular understanding of transubstantiation is reified, does not mean Thomas’ was. In fact, with transubstantiation, Thomas was fighting a popular reification that was taking place in response to Berengar. I think Thomas would have really liked Henry’s piece!
And Henry, a little addendum,
I certainly honor your deep religious intuitions in writing as you have here. But I want to raise an almost methodological matter. The modern Catholic Church makes clear that in principle it stands for religious liberty and right of conscience. It seems that in writing that the whole cosmos is transformed by the ritual effectuation of your religious belief (I am anatomizing dryly here for a reason) that such naturally and without consent involves others inexorably in such an intuition. In other words, if all matter is transformed by the Catholic Eucharist, then that means the matter of a whole lot of non-Catholics is being transformed as well. In a technical sense there would seem to be a violation. As often in life, the pragmatic fix is the best. Catholics could avoid this problem by just inserting regularly the following phrase: “, for us Catholic believers, ” This phrase set off by commas both conveys respect for non-believers, and allows the specialized religious prose to continue untrammeled. For me, though I am not a believer, I am always going to have a cultural identification. In fact, I actually had a real tabernacle in my bedroom as a high school kid, which a nun was a relative had acquired from a Catholic Church that got torn down, and someone landed at my family’s house.
Peter
I am going at this Sophiological/cosmological, follow Bulgakov, who does see the whole world is brought together in and through the eucharist — though it is tied to what I also discussed here, the body of Christ, the blood of Christ, also went into the earth – thus bringing grace to the earth and through the earth, to the whole of creation. The interdependent nature of the cosmos connects us in many ways — and I would also say that it is in such interdependence there is also grace being spread. So what is the violation if one believes that Christ’s grace is transforming the cosmos? Religious liberty is about the personal choices one makes, and the freedom to believe or not believe, to take of the mysteries or not; however, what underlies those choices is the stage we are set upon, and if one believes Christ is working on the whole of creation, that doesn’t remove their religious liberty (are they feeling forced to something?). It’s not a religious liberty issue any more than Brahmins in their rituals believe they are preserving creation another day!
Henry,
Let me be technical again, and I do so because we have had some nice interactions and I trust that you won’t take offense. Because I think you have a profound view on these things. But in fact Catholicism is one of the few world religions that takes such a stance. The Jewish community could not be more distinct in this way. Its understandings are for their faith-community primarily. And Protestantism does it differently by having a continuum between predestination and ideas of election. In this way Catholicism’s view is more inclusive, and that is a good thing. But the downside is that it makes it hard for Catholics to see that it can easily be taken as a violation. What you are saying, again technically and yet ontologically, is that Grace is going to transform you and all creation. whether you like it or not. And further, that for those who know nothing about it, or more likely care nothing about it, that it will happen by a form of stealth, as it were. I know how funny this sounds to a Catholic. But that is only because the ideals of religious liberty are quite recent in human affairs, and the social consequences of it are scarcely understood even by religionists who adopt it explicitly. Essentially it seems to be handled by a compromise. To wit, one assents to the social need to confer the right of a religious choice on other; yet, in private one concludes that one’s own personal understanding will existentially trump that of others’ personal choice and will affect them down to their very being-in-the-cosmos by virtue of one’s personal religious fiat.
Some sort of religious amplitude needs to be gained by which the cosmos is seen as amenable to diverse ultimates. That this still seems an intrinsic impossiblity for believers who feel their point of view is the ultimate, is culturally speaking no more insuperable than the view that there must be one religion in the state or “land” which was held for most of human history, if not always practiced. In a way, we can see part of today’s extremes as partly the result of there being no way to acceptably prescribe these beliefs for society. So now they are proscribed for the “universe” or “cosmos” . It sounds more mystical, and therefore somehow more liberal, but human history shows that is a slippery slope.
Peter,
Again, it is like complaining the laws of physics remove free will. It is not an issue of religious liberty; if it is true, then it is true, if it is not, then my belief of it is not forcing others to act in any way. It is religious liberty to allow people to believe in universal aspects of their faith applying to others as long as that belief doesn’t force them to convert or something. Would you, for example, say it is a denial of religious liberty if I prayed for someone, whether or not they wanted me to do so? It would be a violation of my liberty to say I couldn’t pray. I myself have no problems with Muslims having a universal vision, nor with Hindus having it. Again, will you say — for the sake of religious liberty – Brahmins must stop their Vedic rituals because they believe these rituals have universal effects on the whole of creation? That is an odd form of religious liberty.
If we explored Buddhism, they too, believe something universal about the world — those who take a bodhisattva vow are vowing to help everyone; but even those who do not follow the bodhisattva route, there is the belief that many people are just ignorant and believe in things as silly as a rabbit with horns. They believe in a reality underneath the convention which is all inclusive. Are they to deny this now?
I follow Panikkar here, who points out, if we start denying our own beliefs because of how others believe differently, we loose our faith and no longer represent any.
Henry,
Thanks for a very thoughtful reply. But distinguo: They are not all the same as you aver. First, from my sort of vantage point generally considered, there is no desire at all to prescribe or proscribe any view, except one that would directly lead to violence. So we are first not talking about liberty per se on this end, because even a more primitive view than yours would not meet the requirements of something objectionable. Now your view is the opposite. you are wishing a good thing on a vast cosmic scale. I recognize that. But in fact this is a very Catholic thing. Thus, the second point is that Buddhists see sunyata not as a field in which things become other than they are. They are what they are, with their own ultimates, and all that as it is is sunyata. Hinduism has a more round-about view, but similar. Some sort of Divine mind is informing things, but they are what they are. Still. Catholicism is different in this way. This is why it has the most rigorously and elaborately developed theology of any faith tradition in the world. It has a strong view of things being transformed by its own understanding. Not as they are. But who they will be “in Christ”. Now again, I am not trying to proscribe this or even suggesting it. Just pointing out that in fact this is what is going on in the religious system and this is why it is different. More reactionary Catholic types than the denizens of this blog handle this whole matter lately by taking a sort of Finnis-type Natural Law and and suggesting that such could somehow underlie all of society because it somehow describes the cosmos everyone is living in.
There is one other faith tradition that seems to take a similar cosmic view for everyone whether they like it or not. It is found in the Middle East and has mostly handled this impulse in a way vastly less elegantly than the Catholic Church by a long shot. Oblique is good sometimes.
Lastly, apropos Pannikar, he showed a great sort of impulse for Catholicism. But it should be seen for what it was — “just a start” in the tradition. It is a great tragedy that so much has reversed that trend in the Roman Church. Out of fashion, to put it mildly. Here’s hoping your type, Henry, will have their day again.
Peter,
Actually, in Hinduism — and not just with the Vedic Brahmins, there are indeed great theological developments which go along and follow the route I go, from a Hindu perspective. It’s not just bhakti in general, but if you explore some of the various traditions (Vishnu/Shiva) and their supporters, you will find their theological discussions go into similar thought as with what you see here — and, if you join the Gita with it, you really get a sense of incarnational universalism. I find good in all three major versions of Vedanta (though I think the kind associated with Ramanuja is closest to me, since I am panentheisti, but I find much in Advaita and Dvaita both).
With Buddhism, you will find the whole foundation of the path being connected to “giving” actually develops interdependent connections and explains why a Buddha is said to give in an omnipotent/omniscience way ( and develops even further when we look into the Trikaya theories). There really is a sense that a Buddha is doing something which affects the whole of creation, and, rooted as it is in compassionate giving.
Of course there are, to be sure, differences in faiths — but to ignore that other faiths have their own ideas which they are trying to spread and use to influence the world does none of them justice.
I certainly agree that one must always go with faith in a moral way which does not violate others; but the thing is, any belief, even in something like evolution, can in theory be turned into a thing for violence. It’s not the beliefs, it is something else combined with them which we must be concerned about.
Yes, Panikkar is a great example — I don’t always agree with his conclusions, but I really loved his methodology. I taught it to students who found it was good for all kinds of dialogue not just religious.
Henry,
What an odd position to be in for me. I am needing argue how more developed Catholicism is, even though I don’t like it all that much. You are dissembling a bit on Buddhism and Hinduism. There is simply nothing in either tradition which matches the level of intricate development one sees in the Catholic Church. The closest is maybe Nagarjuna. The intricate development of the Western Catholic Church happened for a cultural reason. They were defending a tradition that battled with a more highly evolved social world than had existed before. Doesn’t make it good, or noble, but for complexity Europe in the Renaissance trumps a lot of other instantiations. That is precisely how the Catholic Church’s “counter-Reformation” is contextually explicable.
I sense that your view is deeply connected to your Eastern Christian viewpoint. As part of my work I edited a book which will be published soon which touched on many aspects of eastern orthodox religiosity. It was an eye-opener for me. But it is clear that it is quite different from much of what obtained in the West. Your “uniate” status should not obscure those factts in my humble opinion.
Peter
There is every bit the intricate development in Buddhist and Hindu traditions. Both Buddhists and Hindus also went into defense mode — against each other in India – which also brought quite a bit of development. Asanga, Dharmakirti, Tsong-Khapa — they provide rather sophisticated thoughts for the Buddhist tradition. Abdhidharma makes the schoolmen look rather simplistic. In the Hindu tradition, Nyaya is a good start for study.. but really, with Hinduism, you will find major developments and sophistication coming from its debates with Buddhism and in the development of the bhakti movements.
I’m with Henry on this, and feel that he has an almost excellent understanding of Hinduism, as I know it. However, I think that Ramakrishna and his movement are as “universalist” as anything in the West.
As for this,
Some sort of religious amplitude needs to be gained by which the cosmos is seen as amenable to diverse ultimates. That this still seems an intrinsic impossiblity for believers who feel their point of view is the ultimate, is culturally speaking no more insuperable than the view that there must be one religion in the state or “land” which was held for most of human history, if not always practiced. In a way, we can see part of today’s extremes as partly the result of there being no way to acceptably prescribe these beliefs for society. So now they are proscribed for the “universe” or “cosmos” . It sounds more mystical, and therefore somehow more liberal, but human history shows that is a slippery slope…
isn’t it possible to believe, as Mother Teresa apparently did, that Christ works with the very great deal that is good within ALL the “higher” religious traditions, and sanctifies them all? How is that to denigrate any of them, if we also assume–as I feel we should–that they help to clarify our understanding of both the deity and the spiritual evolution of the individual?
I have to admit, I’ve not read as much into modern Hindu thinkers as classical ones, though I know general aspects of them and their thought and you are right about Ramakrishna being universalist (at least, as far as I know of it). But the classical tradition is quite sophisticated and universalist – the whole notion of caste in its proper (and best) application represents this. I think the moderns are like me from a Hindu perspective, so it makes sense they would be a Hindu variation of what I am engage in theologically (or, it probably is better to say, I am doing a variation, since the modern greats precede me).
Henry and digby,
I love this discussion! And I love this blog truly for discussions just like this. There is a great edge here which blogs like Patheos lack in all their self-censored tidiness. Patheos is so genteel. Like boring man, as we said in highschool.
Look I have been hearing assertions like the ones you are making for a long time. I’m going to argue a bit more for my point, but first a meta-argument if you will indulge. As I can limn the ever-evolving field of comparative religious studies, there is a surface level and a deeper intent. The surface level is of course to offer some relative weight to each tradition in light of their their documents. This surface level runs into a huge methodological problem as I see it. Namely that it spurns questions of quality of intellectual development by dint of the nature of the comparison itself. The assumption is that all manifestations are, for sake of the analysis at least, considered to be on some similar plateau. Therefore all judgments are similarly related to a preceding sort of soft ideology, that of equality.
I will come back to this point, but first let jump to the deeper intent. Namely that for many in the Christian tradition there is tandem need to at once assert that Christianity is no different and maybe no worse than any other tradition. But related to this is the almost unspoken need to find a conceptual aperture for something special therein. Thus, Christianity participates in the maelstrom of religious development, and yet, ta-da, it is still special.
What this approach has also is a deep need to act as if that which makes Christianity special is something that is human (involved in the maelstrom) and yet of course not (a special revelation).
I suggest a much more forthright way to go about all this is with an approach by which we can actually make some judgments based on evidence. Namely an analysis by cultural manifestations, of which we often have evidence not only in documents but in related phenomena, art, government, etc.
By this simple standard, I think your assertions about Hinduism and Buddhism make little sense. I think no one here is going to mistake me for an apologist for the Catholic Church at this point. But what is clear is that when we take cultural manifestations as direct evidence, the actual religious prose of those cultures appears in a more realistic light. I have had a considerable interest in Buddhism in my life. Less so for Hinduism. But even with that it is crystal clear that the intellectual tradition of the West, and yes, often contained in Catholic church documents is of quite a different order. Please note, I make this analysis not by way of the (pardon me guys) cryptic need to find the pot of gold at the end of the analytic rainbow in which Christianity is special in some way. I don’t think so. I make the judgment based on strict analyses of culture. Christianity in the West produced phenomena that existed no where else, and needs to be read in that manner. That changes the whole field of comparison in my book.
This is such a serious matter that I would like to end on a light comic note. One of the most surreal moments of my life was during a period where I briefly wrote music criticism for the Washington Times. I later wrote for the Washington Post. But my short stint writing blurbs for the Times happened because the former Music critic of the Miami News who I knew had gotten hired by the Moonies to be their first chief music critic. Long story short, I got invited to a party where a lot of the writers in the art section of the Times were in attendance. And they had so much money at their inception that there were a lot of people there. I got into a discussion with some woman who was also an arts writer about how Persian music was just as developed as Beethoven or Mozart, an even more so according to her. She went ballistic on me for sticking to my guns that Beethoven was greater than some unknown composer she was profering for comparison. I found out later she was one of the actual Moonies who worked there. I took it as an indication that in the great need to defend her own deep uncompromising religious belief was in tandem related to a strategic need to not make obvious cultural comparisons, Don’t get mad, I am not comparing you guys to Moonies. But I think there is a sort of basic underlying strategem at work which needs to be more critically esamined.
Peter
I think we are sometimes are discussing different points. If you are discussing a missionary standpoint, things differ, to be sure. Hinduism, though there has been a recent mission movement, really is inclusive mostly of India. That we can agree with. However, they still have a view of the world which extends beyond it, which is universal, which historically has seen what is outside of the Hindu caste system as something quite “beneath” them. Certainly things changed in more recent centuries for obvious reasons, but Gandhi himself shows us that it was not entirely out of the Hindu context.
Buddhism has been more mission-centered, but again, it’s view is such a long view, that it sees mission as helping people to follow the good dharmic values first – one can later become a Buddhist monk. But there is still a tier in their ideas, and this has led to some negative consequences in world history as well (icchantikas being allowed to be killed!).
So if you are talking about missions — that is different from universal world views, to be sure; both Hindus and Buddhists have them (Buddhists moreso), but you are right in saying there is more incentive in the Christian and Muslim traditions.
Henry,
Let me try to wrap up this complicated matter, by using something you just mentioned. (Which btw I wanted to bring into the discussion, but was wary of doing). Whatever one may think of various aspects of Hindu culture, that it produced the Caste system at all is a grave indictment. This is why harmless hucksters like Deepak Chopra are always so rigidly abstract and la-la in their Hindu derived language. The actual cultural manifestations of the religious tendencies has a very chequered past, and even present. Let me add I still practice yoga every day, and without it I would be a big frozen ball of flesh. So some things from the culture are great!
The caste system itself is interesting; I would say its origin was more benign than people realize, but then it became solidified, literalized, causing problems. It took the Buddha to provide a significant challenge to it — and afterward, though Hinduism would return to it (thanks, in part, to Muslim help), there was always the monastic out — and Shankara helped make this possible, too.
Excellent piece Henry! I will reread this before I write my dissertation’s concluding chapter. You’re in my Zotero!
Brett,
I thought you would like it. Going through PKD’s Exegesis (slowly) is providing me a lot of quick things to write up for VN. Some I know will be more popular than others, and I do see them as a “series” even if I write them to be read individually. When PKD engages transubstantiation — as he does quite a bit — he goes into it and comes out with all kinds of interesting reflections — even more interesting, of course, is PKD was a Protestant…
Transubstantiation is incredibly rich once one gets it. It says (or at least implies) a lot about ecclesiology, creation, eschatology, soteriology, even pneumatology. It is, as PPF notes, all too often reified into alchemy.
I have a chapter (the concluding one, actually) in a manuscript under construction called “Transubstantiation: How the Eucharist Changes Everything” that comes to similar conclusions to yours here, though with very different sources (Teilhard, Martelet, Ratzinger).
Teilhard is a major source for PKD.
Gerard Manley Hopkins loved transubstantiation because he felt that was a NECESSITY for him and other men like him to have a physical, as well as spiritual relationship with Christ.
I am not kidding; read Julia F. Saville’s masterly work on Hopkins, called A Queer Chivalry; the Homoerotic Ascetism of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: University Press of Virginia, 2000).
This is beautiful and well-thought. I have to quibble with the language of “co-creatorship” and would say instead that the problem (or the “bumbling demiurge” to use PKD’s language) comes when human creatures who have been given a role as co-operators, instead of receiving that responsibility humbly, have the audacity to establish themselves as creators alongside or even above the one true creator. But that’s a minor quibble and it sounds as though we may be saying the same thing anyway.
The bigger and more important point is that the Eucharist is such an infinitely expanding universe that we can never run out of ways to talk about it. And I love this way, with so much meaning packed into it: “the incarnation transubstantiates the world.”
I will admit, co-creation can confuse people, and often I use the term (following Tolkien) of “sub-creator.” The point of the term/use is that God has given us the chance to help participate in the process of creation — our lives are helping the continuation and evolution of creation. It is not to be seen as the same level as God (far from it), though I understand why many would find it troublesome if they think of it along those lines. God allows us to have a creative interaction with the world, and to influence it — which is why our sin is disastrous and allows for things like climate change to happen as a result. But as demiurges, the idea is we are not the creator of the world-system, but people molding it, working it to create an end product.
Now, I will agree, given that role, we are to do so in a way where we keep united with God and grace — to interact with it, and if we did, would have only been a positive effect. But since we did not cooperate with God as you put it, our creation ends up destructive.
As for the eucharist — yes, that is a wonderful vision of what is going on. Transubstantiation makes more sense when we see the whole world in connection to it. I think that so much has been said ignoring this has led to the sacramental problems we see in history.
Henry,
“The caste system itself is interesting; I would say its origin was more benign than people realize.”
Yikes, and double yikes.
Don’t mean to be rude, but was the origin of the Inquisition in Bonaventure’s notion of will or Love or something.
All history involves some judgment, otherwise it could never tell us anything worth knowing.
Augustine, persecute them with love — from his writings against the donatists…
You have a cool sense of humor, at least I hope that’s what it is. More like:
“A loaf of bread, the Walrus said, is what we chiefly need. Pepper and vinegar besides are very good indeed.”
Peter Paul, I recommend that you read Alain Danielou on the caste system. And also I recommend that you consider that “things happened” to practicioners of Asian religions that did not happen to Europeans. Those “things” (like colonialism, like addiction to opium, like slavery) complicated the development of higher cultural manifestations of the religion. Also, I think you should remember the judgment of Walter Benjamin, that all of the great cultural and artistic triumphs of the West are ALSO manifestations of barbarism, e.g. you don’t get St. Peter’s Basilica or the Sistine Chapel without the plundering by deceitful indulgence peddlars of German peasants, and you don’t get the great religious art of Spain without the slaves of the silver mines of Potosi. You don’t get several of Mozart’s operas without the castrati.
digby,
Again, what a funny position to be in here. I am certainly not hanging around here to be a defender of the Catholic faith, but its critical interlocutor. One can always read more; and it is always good thing. But I have read both authors considerably and am hardly convinced of the points you make. I won’t take second place to anyone here for being able to add up details of Catholics and others’ corruption. But that is not really the point. It is what it all produced as a cumulative matter. You seem to start with some rather sanguine view of human nature, and when it is contradicted you consider it a failure. History is nothing but contradiction for such a view. By such standard it is always a failure. Of course Western culture is filled with barbarism. But it has produced heights that other cultures have not. Those heights should allow us to be humble and yet acute in our critiques of the same traditions which allowed the whole thing in the first place. Specifically in reference to the Catholic Church what it boils down to is this. It is a faith that inspired lots of good and bad. In terms of that eflforescence it is probably unique in world affairs. But that is both a lauding and damning assessment. It makes it present disengagement from real historical accountability truly a sort of human crime, and maybe a cosmic one.
Well, I was trying to explain where the love turns into inquisition, and I believe it is from Augustine — On the Correction of the Donatists — where we find this coming out. And he does say in it, persecute them with love. “If, therefore, we wish either to declare or to recognize the truth, there is a persecution of unrighteousness, which the impious inflict upon the Church of Christ; and there is a righteous persecution, which the Church of Christ inflicts upon the impious. She therefore is blessed in suffering persecution for righteousness’ sake; but they are miserable, suffering persecution for unrighteousness. Moreover, she persecutes in the spirit of love, they in the spirit of wrath; she that she may correct, they that they may overthrow: she that she may recall from error, they that they may drive headlong into error.”
Henry,
In re Augustine and “love”, I wanted to bring up the notion that the Bishop from Hippo was a sort of cause for the Reformation. And I found a good summary by googling which makes the point neatly. I only add the gloss that predestination hardly seems to indicate a great love for human beings:
“theophiliacs
amiable. anglican. awesome.
Augustine, Luther, And The Development Of Predestinarianism In Reformation Thought: Part I
August 29, 2009
I felt like I would try to tackle the “free will vs. predestination” debate from a different angle. I am pretty sure that I have settled the argument here (bring on the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes – read sarcasm, if you’re not sure). Consequently, I’m off to solve world hunger and the problem of evil after I have a midnight snack.
Introduction
As Augustine’s predestinarianism was developed by Luther and assimilated into Reformation thought, an inexorably flawed theological system based on double predestination quickly emerged. Prior to Luther’s utilization, prominent figures in church history left Augustine’s doctrine relatively intact. As early as the Synod of Orange in 529 and notably in the Belgic Confession of Faith in 1561, church leaders rejected the assertions of double predestination.[1] Gottschalk hazarded an attempt at interpreting Augustine in a theory of double predestination in the ninth century, but was condemned of heresy because of it in Maiz. Anselm of Canterbury promoted the Augustinian position in the eleventh century. Thomas Aquinas elaborated the Augustinian position by differentiating between God’s general will and his special will in the soteriological realm in the thirteenth century. If any real deviation from Augustine’s predestinarianism took place, it was in the Catholic Church’s general trend toward Pelagianism.[2]
For eleven centuries, then, endeavors to deviate from the Augustinian position on predestination were generally met with condemnation by the church. Though Luther played a seminal role in the Protestant church’s schism with Catholic thought, he too maintained an Augustinian predestinarianism. Scholars cannot agree concerning a cause for the longevity of Augustine’s postulation. However, history makes clear the fact that attempts to create a system of thought centered on his postulation would not be tolerated. The Reformation, though, provided grounds to contradict the wishes of the Catholic Church. This provided opportunity for the Reformation’s thinkers to speculate the value of theological system based on Augustine’s philosophy and theology independent of church councils.
Unfortunately, only one of those thinkers really understood Augustine’s agenda and, perhaps, the doctrinal consequences of basing a theological system on it. The correlations between Augustine and Luther reveal that their theologies sought to accomplish a different goal than those found in the reformed tradition that emerged from Calvin’s influence on the Reformation. The predestinarianism of Augustine and Luther was born out of a personal struggle with sin and served as the means to a soteriological end, not as the framework for a theological system.”
Peter Paul, I THINK I know what you mean by this:
It makes it present disengagement from real historical accountability truly a sort of human crime, and maybe a cosmic one.
However, I should like you to spell it out further for me and for others. I think it may be an important insight of yours. Could you please do that?
digby,
Thank you for asking for my elaboration. The background story for this is that the Catholic Church actually has a pretty good history (say in the last 150 years) of having its very own historians be pretty honest about the past. Part of this may have been that they felt so secure that they did not have to dissemble or even just make things up, because they felt the Catholic Church’s societal position was very solid in many ways. Many books of Catholic history with imprimatur and nihil obstat are quite striking for their forthrightness and candid nature, especially in side comments, which significantly were not seen as damaging their overall objective — to give an account of the past that put their own religious experience in an understandable context. This jibes with my sense of all history that it is interpretation on a profound level. The question is: what kind of interpretation. To be coherent it must deal in facts that can be sourced and recognized by any party. It still remains interpretation; but since it is constructed of building blocks of facts it can cohere. What is going on in the Catholic Church nowadays is a tragedy. Many Catholic historians seem to feel that a de facto “mandatum” – interpretation must underlie even their analysis of the verifiable past, and thus they are just making things up. The technique seems to involve something I have also discussed here: the notion that “they don’t understand us.” In other words, they seem now to be positing some interpretative realm by which even history can be made not to cohere with well -established facts. It is sad that the Jesuit O’Malley’s book on the Council of Trent seems to have headed in this faulty direction. When it reaches the level of scholars like that, you know there is real trouble. His contentions seem to flout established cultural understandings of the era, which I do not believe are in dispute seriously, anywhere. they have “circled the wagons.”. Worst of all they seem to flout the rock-solid history of Trent by Jedin which is a gold-standard, and not just for Catholics.
This whole issue is not unrelated to the paranoid comments of Archbishop Burke that Kelly has highlighted. If I may give a quirky final comment: I actually suggest listening to Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen, which he wrote at the end of his life. It ends with a quotation from the funeral march of the Eroica symphony. It is in that wise that I would like m comments to be understood, for beginnings and endings. There is always hope.