Relics are nothing new to
religion, whose legitimacy used to be synonymous with being ancient, which is
one reason why the ancient Romans did not consider the nascent Jesus Movement
to be a religion. The cup that Jesus uses in the Last Supper in Gospels is
right up there with pieces of the wood cross of the Crucifixion as the most holy
of relics in Christianity. “In Europe alone, there are said to be around 200
cups, each thought to be the Holy Grail—the cup used by Jesus Christ at the
Last Supper.”[1]
They can’t all be THE cup, but I bet if you visited each place, the partisans
would insist that their cup is genuine. For example, the website of the
cathedral at Valencia, in eastern Spain, proclaims regarding the cup there, “Tradition
reveals that it is the same cup that the Lord used at the Last Supper for the
Institution of the Eucharist.”[2]
Never mind that medieval legend had it that Joseph of Arimathea had brought the
Holy Grail near Glastonbury Tor in southern England shortly after Jesus’ death.
That would be quite a distance to travel back them to deliver a cup. These two
cannot both be right, yet Christians have prayed in both places as if the cup in each place were genuine. That people have gotten carried away with the super relic through
history seems clear from “the fact that, over the centuries, legends have
arisen of ‘grails’ producing miracles.”[3]
That miracles have been said to arise from more than one of the cups ought to
be a red flag that something is amiss, for only one cup could possibly be
genuine and so miracles could not have come by means of proximity to the other
cups. I submit that basic category mistakes regarding genres of meaning (and
writing) are a big part of the problem as to why a presumed historical artifact
has given rise to puerile superstition in the name of religious truth.
One scholar of religious studies,
Joanne Pierce, is realistic in saying, “I honestly do not think that the actual
cup from the Last Supper still exists.”[4]
In fact, Pierce elaborates that because according to some Gospel accounts, the
room was already prepared before Jesus and his disciples arrived, the cup used
may not have even belonged to them. I submit that Pierce is conflating historical
accounts and faith narratives—two very different, albeit related—genres of
writing. That some of the Gospels have the room already prepared is
itself an indication that we should not assume that the room actually was
prepared beforehand.
Moreover, a faith narrative is
not written as a historical account; the concerns of the writers would have
been theological rather than to make empirical reports or accounts, especially
as the Gospels were written many decades after the Crucifixion. Is it really likely
that, for theological purposes, a detail such as how or whether the room
was prepared would have been preserved in notes or orally? Pierce gets around
this problem by stating that “the idea of the Holy Grail is more symbolic than
realistic—in her words, ‘a cultural reality rather than a religious reality.’”[5]
We are no longer concerned with the relationship of empirical history and faith
narrative; the idea of the cup is what matters, and that isn’t even
religious.
I think Pierce is wrong to jettison
the religious meaning of the cup, even as an idea, because of the salvific
significance at least in Roman Catholicism of the Eucharist in the gradual process
of sanctification. Given the theological doctrine of transubstantiation—the real
presence of Christ in bread and wine transformed into the body and blood of
Christ—in Catholicism, it is interesting that, “(f)or Pierce, a Catholic, the
idea of the Holy Grail is more symbolic than realistic.”[6]
Zwingli, the Swiss reformer for whom the Eucharist is only symbolic, would be
more likely than the Pope to agree.
Essentially, my argument is that faith
narratives are neither historical accounts nor just cultural ideas; rather, the
distinctive meaning in a faith narrative such as one of the Gospels is religious.
It is felt proximity to religious meaning that is important—not whether
a given cup was actually used by Jesus in a historical or empirical sense. To conflate
the religious and empirical is to engage in superstition, as evinced by the
attribution of miracles from Jesus’ historical use of a cup. Put another way,
the religious significance of the Last Supper, which is Jesus being
willing to follow his Father’s will in sacrificing his life for humanity, does
not come down to the trite contention of which cup Jesus actually used. “It was
just a cup,” Jesus might say; “You’re missing the point.” In other words, too
much attention to the means can obstruct the ends being served by the means.
Regarding the famous cup, the distinction between artifact and superstition can be transcended, perhaps even in a Hegelian sense of solving dialectics through human history, by focusing instead on distinctly religious meaning. In other words, perhaps superstition results from mistaking historical artifact for religious truth. This is not to say that the latter cannot come through history; only that if or when the transcendent does manifest on the surface of history, a faith narrative still cannot be taken for a historical account. To focus on the historical as if it were the point would be to miss the distinctly religious point, for the validity of religious meaning does not depend on the criteria of any other domain.
