Taking a swipe at a core tenet of Catholicism, Bill
Keller of the New York Times writes, “Every faith has its baggage, and
every faith holds beliefs that will seem bizarre to outsiders. I grew up
believing that a priest could turn a bread wafer into the actual flesh of
Christ.” I contend that the editor’s characterization of consecration
represents a misunderstanding of the Eucharist. Such misunderstandings have
been worse; in the early years of the Church, some pagans were under the
impression that the Christians were meeting on Sundays to eat babies. Indeed,
phrases such as “eat my body” may in fact be inherently prone to being
misunderstood.
Generally speaking, religion may have a tendency to flirt
with the literal, or empirical, even at the expense of that which is distinctly
religious in nature. Hence Keller’s point that every institutional religion has
baggage may be correct even if his interpretation of the Eucharist is
erroneous. It should be of no surprise that religion is hardly immune to the
vaunted pretentions of the human mind even to that which is beyond the limits
of its cognition and perception. Under the circumstances, we would be
well-advised to be relatively circumspect in how firmly we impose our religious
beliefs as if they were established knowledge.
Regarding the Eucharist, Keller’s use of “actual flesh”
is misleading, for both actual and flesh point to an empirical
basis or connotation. When we moderns typically say actual, we mean that
something actually exists, which is to say that it is the case
empirically in the world in which we live (i.e., based in the human domain).
Keller’s use of flesh confirms his usage of actual, for flesh is
indeed found descriptively in the world, as in, The wolf ate the lamb’s
flesh. In German, the word for meat is Fleisch. To be blunt, a
priest does not turn a wafer into meat. I’m not sure whether changing something
from one food group to another would constitute a miracle anyway. This allusion
to food groups is apt, for my approach stresses the utility of delimiting
categories. I assume that the various realms, such empirical, metaphysical, and
theological, are qualitatively different and distinct.
I contend that the Eucharist involves the application of
a theological concept through social contract as pertaining to an empirical
object. This is not to say that the empirical realm is that of theology.
Van Rad makes this point in his text, History of Israel. A faith
narrative, such as the covenantal relationship between Jehovah and the Hebrews
is not comprised of bare historical facts, even if Biblical allusions to
history are used for theological purposes and given a theological
meaning. The meaning gleaned
from the faith narrative does not establish or confirm historical facts. Nor are theological meanings
scientific concepts; the two domains are distinct, and thus have their own respective
criteria. Whereas history and science are confined within the empirical domain,
which is in principle within the limits of human cognition and perception,
theological meaning is transcendent in nature, meaning that our ideas and
sensual impressions fail inherently to go the distance with respect to
religion.
Neither is theology essentially metaphysics, for otherwise,
religion would be none other than philosophy. Put another way, meaning is not reality itself. People
who characterize the Trinity as real are making a metaphysical rather than a
religious claim. The latter has to do with the unfathomable mystery behind the
notion of a triune god, rather than any metaphysical claim that the three
persons exist in reality itself. Put another way, if God is the condition or
source of existence, then God cannot be existence itself—much less some
empirical object existing. Neither does God as
conceived theologically reduce to Kant’s “things in themselves.” God is not “the
Real.” Yet neither is the transcendent limited to Kant’s phenomenal realm of
appearances. Religious meaning is of its own, distinct, realm—yet how elusive it
must truly be, for all the rush to cover it over with leaves from other fields.
If I am indeed on to something here, we would hardly recognize the distinctly
religious terrain for all we have interlarded on top of it. Put another way, our theological gardens tend to
end up looking a lot like ourselves.
In terms of the Eucharist, Catholics maintain that the
body and blood of Christ are really present theologically under the empirical
“species” of bread and wine. In Catholicism, the real presence is a theological
concept called transubstantiation. That it is applied to empirical
objects—bread and wine—does not mean that the religious meaning is empirical in
nature. The religious term refers to another theological concept—that
of resurrected body—rather than to the empirical concept of “actual
flesh.”
In a nutshell, Bill Keller has Jesus’ earthly body rather
than his resurrected body in mind. To think of a resurrected body on the basis
of a physical body is to reduce theology to physiology or biology. The
resurrected Jesus walking through a door and asking for something to eat
anticipates the tendency to liken what we don’t understand to things that are familiar.
Theological meaning is distinct, rather than reducing to any of the empirical
sciences, yet for centuries Christians insisted on being buried so their
physical bones would be available to be resurrected.
Augustine writes that the relation between the Father and
the Son should not be thought of in terms of the relationship between dads and
sons. By implication, the Son as a theological concept is qualitatively
different—meaning not just in degree—from what we know of what it means to be a
son from our observations of sons in our midst. Christians forget Jesus’s
reminder, “no one knows the Son except the Father” (Mt 11:27). It is all too
natural to reduce begotten to made by clothing the transcendent in familiar clothes.
Resurrected body does not apply empirically;
rather, it is a theological meaning that
is situated in a faith narrative rather
than a historical account. This is the point that Keller so vitally misses in
his essay. The real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is not actual flesh.
Nor is the real presence metaphysical in nature. The empirical species of
bread and wine as like posts around which the Catholic believer can swing
around, as it were, in the transition from the empirical realm of the everyday
to a distinctly transcendental experience that transcends even the posts
themselves. A major pitfall to watch out for is slighting the experience in
favor of holding onto the posts. There is even a risk that some of the
unsatisfied religious meaning gets transferred onto the empirical signs
themselves, thus making them into idols without realizing it. The mistaken
assumption is then that a sustained, intense focus on the empirical objects enhances rather than takes away from religious
experience. In actuality, the religious domain, which is inherently
transcendental, has been confiscated with more familiar experience within the
limits of human cognition and perception. All the while, the Kingdom of God is within,
as though smiling at these artificial edifices we create to edify and bemuse
ourselves.
I contend that the bottom line on the real presence is
the theologically-felt experience of transformation or sanctification
that can be induced by applying the theological concept to the bread and
wine via ritual. The religious experience is not exhausted by the symbols on
the surface; religionists merely use them, and the associated ritual, as prep. Crassly
put, they put people in the mood. Sustained, concentrated transcending as an
experience that is really present (though not reality!) does not just happen
after a person steps into a church from a busy day, hence the rites and posts
to follow along the way. The point is the experience, felt as really present
(and thus eternal rather than of time and space)—the artifices along the way
are just so, rather than religious objects to be held as though they were ends
in themselves, which is to say, idols.
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