James Alison Theology

Eucharist, Sacrifice and Meaning

Some Girardian considerations for the Christianity of the future

Thank you very much indeed for inviting me to share in this gathering to discuss the meaning of the Eucharist[1], taking into consideration both the thought of Pierre Gardeil, whose book[2] and whose family bring us together, and that of René Girard, with whom M. Gardeil had such a fruitful relationship. That relationship and that book are even more notable as having developed at a time when there was little uptake of Girard’s thought among specifically Catholic thinkers in France. I rejoice with you in seeking to contribute to something that will rectify the silence that traditionally surrounds the “propheta in patria sua”, a silence our friend Benoît Chantre, in his wonderful biography of René[3], has done so much both to illustrate and to puncture.

Before moving into my main exposition today, I would like to recognise that concerning the central point of dispute, about the appropriateness, or otherwise, of using the word “sacrifice” to describe Jesus’ death, and therefore of it also being used to apply to the liturgical celebration of the same, I am in agreement with M. Gardeil’s views in “La Cène et la Croix”. There he explains, in a way that is thoroughly informed by the exegesis of the immediate post-Vatican II era, the link between the meal and the Cross. Fortunately, we also have René’s famously unique “retractatio” in De la Violence à la Divinité[4]. It dealt with just this point, so I have no wish to go back over the same arguments[5]. My concern is to take the discussion forward in a way which will help make the Eucharist more prayable, liveable and preachable, especially in our societies where attendance at Mass has plummeted, and where despair at lack of meaning has led it to be used in ways that encourage cheaper, and more immediate, violent and ideological forms of meaning than Jesus’ death in fact offers us.

1. Deep background

Any discussion of the Eucharist is inseparable from the overall “heavenly vision” of what Jesus was doing in our midst and why. For the obvious reason that the Eucharist, alongside Baptism, is one of the principal signs of active power by which we are inducted into our own signed participation in the Kingdom of Heaven coming among us. In other words, the whole nexus mysteriorum of our Faith is most completely manifest in this, the most obviously dynamic and frequently repeated of the signs by whose help the Spirit gives us Life.

So, let me set the stage with a quick description of the process by which the Church came to have a “heavenly vision”, one which always requires a split narrative. This is because it was first a lived and disputed process of events leading to a happening which was barely understood by its witnesses. And even then, only within more or less familiar parameters. It was a long slow journey, or journeys, between Galilee, Samaria and Jerusalem over a three-year period. However, the end of the process, the death of its particular protagonist, very quickly turned out to be the arrival of something entirely new which not only opened up the future for its witnesses, but radically recast their shared past, and the nature of those witnesses’ understanding of everything that had happened in the deeper past. A new beginning, in the midst of time, invited them into participating in a very rich, ancient and loving project that could scarcely[6] have been imagined prior to the “happening”.

Every one of the Gospels, each in its own way, shares this sense of a split narrative: they set forth human interactions in a rough chronological sense corresponding to Jesus’ ministry and Passion. However, they simultaneously bring into evidence an understanding of what these interactions were about that the apostolic witnesses themselves had barely understood at the time. Nevertheless, after what they found themselves made witnesses to through the Resurrection, the Ascension and the Gift of the Holy Spirit, they began to understand all that had gone before as fulfilments of ancient promises. But more than that: as an entirely new and fresh perception of the relationship between God and everything that is, going back to “before” Creation. A relationship into which they found themselves inducted as into something that is not only real now, but had always been real, and which has been struggling to get through to us for millennia. It is this level of understanding that the apostolic group brought to their “putting into words” the events they witnessed earlier, with a much more limited grasp of what was going on. In this way they share the perception that had broken through, with all its consequences for their lives, enabling us in turn to be stretched into becoming active participants in what the project of Creation has always been about.

So now it makes sense for us to tell a story about the magnitude of God’s love for us: that God, creating us, likes us enough to think that it is an unparalleled adventure to invite us to share God’s life. Even though we have an extraordinary history of becoming more dangerous to our own species than any other comparable animal. For unlike other animals we can not only kill, but murder; not only speak, but lie; not only are we capable of wonder at what we find around us, but we are also capable of locking ourselves into an inability to see what is before us. Indeed, our rivalry fixates our attention enviously on each other in ways much more powerful than those by which our desire for collaboration allows our attention to rest disinterestedly on what is real.

This is a story therefore, which is always going to re-imagine our beginnings as at least partially false, such that in the middle of history we reached a point where an astonishing act of communication could light up the reality of what we really always have been all along. This is an act of communication that is able to offer us the equivalent of a retrofit, a realignment with what we always were, such that we can recognise the vanity and futility into which we had trapped ourselves as we leave that short-cut behind and come to discover what this much-loved adventure of being human is really all about.

It is from within this framework that we may dare to stand back from the order of experience, the order of our learning such things, and instead attempt to narrate something from the order of logic, from outside our experience. That story sounds like this: The Creator God’s act of communication came into the world slowly, first through historical gestures and prophetic utterances to begin to show who God really was, and how related God is to the goodness, reliability and intelligibility of Creation. This slow act of communication, often misunderstood, rejected and twisted by us, was not extrinsic to God, but always shared God’s heart, who God really is. Eventually the time came when that same act of communication, that sharing who God really is and how God relates to created reality, came among us as a human. This means that the very fulness of God’s sharing who God is, and how God is towards us and towards the whole of created reality is made wholly available in the human life of Jesus, coming among us at a horizontal level, as a human sibling, not as something from “above”.

So, we begin to understand the life and ministry of Jesus as the culmination of this entirely human act of communication. As such it operates by signs and words which do two things simultaneously. First, it prepares people for the complete re-symbolisation of human life which would occur when Jesus finally died, living into his death in such a way that he is not run by it. It is this assumption by him of death that detoxifies it, showing how it can be an entirely human generous gift, a sign of love to others, not a source of fear, curse and loss, making cowards of us all.  It takes death out of being the more or less well-hidden capstone of human meaning which it had been since the pre-human crisis which led our species to be formed by symbolicity[7]. And which has led to us living in a permanent crisis of meaning since then. Jesus’ signs and teaching up until his death were to enable those who began to understand him beforehand to get a hint of the sibling relocation of God, away from any form of idolatrous paternity. As well as a sense that, despite all apparent human programming making us susceptible to the contrary, there is no vengeance in God. And secondly, the same narration of signs and teaching after the deathlessness of God had been revealed in the Resurrection (thus unveiling and bringing to an end the futile mendacity of all human narratives based round death) work to enable us to get hints of the shape and structure of the flexible and creative imitation of Jesus’ life into which we can now begin to live.

2. A deliberate invention

If I have taken my time to get here, it is because I wanted to bring out something which ought to be obvious, but is often understated, which is that the Eucharist is a complex mixture of sign and language which Jesus deliberately invented as a way of enabling us to learn our way into living what his death was about. A mime he created, something imitable, in such a way that after it, when the Spirit was given, we would be able to find our way into keeping alive the link between the teaching and the death as we learn to make sense of it for ourselves in following him. I stress this inventive, creative, dynamic and epistemic, or intellectually creative, nature of what Jesus was doing since far too often, we drown the Eucharist in mute solemnity.

It is not only the case that Jesus invented something. It is also the case that the apostolic witnesses themselves point towards different senses of what he invented. The words we receive are subtly different and point knowingly to different elements of what Jesus was doing, in their different versions in Mark, Matthew, Luke and Paul. We will look at some of those different elements in a moment. But first I wanted to bring out that this is not an accident. It is rather a challenge, an ongoing challenge, to our obedience. Since Jesus’ instructions before his death, the Church has constantly been reinventing our way back into making sense of that obedience.

So the Eucharist is, of course something that has been received and re-invented by the Church, and is constantly being received and re-discovered by the Church as, over the centuries, we realise more and more of what it’s about. Our current Eucharistic prayers are rather obviously not a simple repetition of any of the phrases in the apostolic witness, but a highly judicious and creative collage of different phrasings and translations. To give a simple example: in our Western Church the template for the words of consecration is in Latin, and for the cup these are: “qui pro vobis et pro multis effundetur”. In English the official translation currently in force is “poured out for you and for many”, which is an exact translation of the Latin, but a slight betrayal of the original meaning of the phrase in Aramaic. Your French translation is somewhat better “pour vous et pour la multitude”. But this is neither an exact translation of the Latin, nor of the Greek word πολλωνbehind the Latin. And behind all these there is an Aramaism in which there are two ways of saying “many”, of which one is universalizing – many tending to all, and one is restrictive – many as opposed to all. And it is the universalizing “many” that is behind the Greek, as none other than Pope Benedict recognized without embarrassment. The Vatican’s late distinguished Latinist, Reggie Foster OCD, told a friend of mine that the original Aramaic was probably an ejaculatory, so should be translated something like “for you and for oh, how many!” in order to achieve in our languages the universalizing sense of the ancient phrase.  Even within the lifetimes of many of us, these words have been changed and will surely be changed again. And with them, the sense we give to what we are doing. In matters to do with God, if obedience is not creative, it is not obedient.

3. Finding sense

So what, creatively, can we recover in terms of sense from the evidence we have? The first thing is to point out in that in all four Gospels the meal is precarious. It takes place amidst announced hostility. A betrayal is announced either before the meal or in its middle, or at its end. This is so that we should not lose sight of the different sorts of “handing over” that are going on[8]. Jesus is handing himself over, and Judas is handing him over, which will lead to a concatenation of handings-over which culminate in the Romans crucifying him.

Then, in some of the accounts, Jesus himself deliberately does not drink the cup, but announces he will not drink wine again until he does so in his kingdom. Again this is fulfilled ironically by the bitter wine (vinegar) he is offered on the Cross. But it is a sign that he himself was understood to have linked for his disciples everything between the meal and the Cross as a single interpretative act that he would be sharing with us going forward. It is these things, held together, that will structure the presence he shares with us thereafter.

So we can say that the (post-Pentecost) apostolic witnesses clearly understood that amidst a group of friends, something happy, a shared meal, was also a place of betrayal, leading to a certain sort of sacrifice – the one so elegantly described by Caiaphas at John 11:50[9]. And that in the midst of this there was a self-handing over which was enacted first in the giving of the portions to all those present, and which culminated in the Cross – which was how John corrected Caiaphas’ understanding in the very next verse[10]. In other words, this was one single deliberate act in the mind of the inventor of the mime. One which we always repeat in reverse, and from the reverse side, since we are giving thanks for the death which enables us to feast from, and to become, the body.

Then there are the different elements of the mime which the apostolic witnesses have put together, and which give us some sense of the parameters which Jesus used to sign what he was doing. Here I am following John’s Gospel, and the indications which Margaret Barker has made available to show that Jesus’ third Passover in John was the one in which the dates from the pre-exilic Calendar for the celebration of the feast of the Atonement, and the Second Temple calendar for the feast of Passover coincided – which they did in 30 A.D.[11] In other words, Jesus was deliberately inserting himself into a human sacrificial process that brought together two ancient and different sacrifices into a single act of meaning. One of these (Atonement) was understood to be simultaneously for the remission of sins and for the renewal of creation, hence the words about the cup. And the other, (Passover) was not to do with the remission of sin. It was understood to be a supper in memory of God having allowed sheep to be sacrificed instead of the firstborn: to redeem the firstborn of Israel, while killing the firstborn of Egypt. This sacrificial structure having been foreseen by Abraham when he told Isaac “God will provide for sacrifice”.

It is for this reason that Jesus is referred to as “my beloved son” (since the LXX translates “yechid” “only” as “agapetos”, “beloved” in Genesis 22:2) because it is understood that he is the beloved son whom God has provided for sacrifice so that it is no longer necessary to redeem the first born, for the real first born has redeemed everyone. Jesus says as much in John’s Gospel when he says: “Abraham saw my day, and he rejoiced”.

The atonement sacrifice, dating back to the first temple, and of which we have the later remains in Leviticus, presumed that the Great High Priest became interpenetrated by YHWH, (as it were, became “sacramentally” YHWH for a day). This was so as to enact liturgically the God/King/Priest sacrificing himself ritually for God’s people, and no doubt went back to something much nastier in an ancient Hittite or Ugaritic world. But it had become, thanks to the Hebrews, a way to sign God’s generosity. In the Atonement sacrifice one sheep (or goat) stood in for the priest, who stood in for YHWH, and one stood in for the demon Azazel who was to be driven “out of the camp”.

References to the Atonement are present throughout the Gospel accounts of the Supper, from the moment when Jesus tells the disciples to follow the man with a pitcher of water to prepare the upper room. For on the eve of the feast of the Atonement, the High Priest, preceded by an aquifer, went to an upper room where he would “trouble his soul” for the people, before participating in the joyful feast of the next day. The reference to blood “poured out” is atonement, not Passover, language.  

Notoriously in John’s Gospel it is Jesus who stands in for both priest and lambs (or goats) simultaneously. Just before crucifixion he is stripped of his tunic, woven in a single piece from top to bottom. This was the tunic that was put on the high priest when he come out of the Holy Place and into the Temple Court so that YHWH would become temporarily visible. Here Jesus’ naked flesh on the Cross is finally revealed as the true visibility of God in his simultaneous expulsion (by humans) and glory (in his self-giving to us). In case this were not obvious, the Romans then cast lots for the cloak thus ironically reenacting the casting of lots as to which sheep or goat would stand in for the Lord, and thus be sacrificed, and which would be the scapegoat, the goat that would stand in for Azazel, and be driven outside the camp. Which is to say that Jesus was fulfilling both at the same time. In this he enacted that the Lord and the Scapegoat are the same, thus bringing to an end the world in which such sacrifices are necessary, or imaginable as something “good”.

Finally, in what was not the Passover meal, but a Passover preparation meal (the night before the Passover meal, since the latter could only take place after the lambs had been slaughtered), Jesus offered his disciples bread and wine (notunleavened bread, αζυμος, but αρτος – a loaf) Jesus was pre-enacting the mysterious Priest /King Melchizedek whom we glimpse in Genesis 14 as offering Abraham bread and wine. We now know from the Dead Sea scrolls that Melchizedek was a far more important figure close to the time of Jesus than had been imagined given the simple reference to him in the Epistle to the Hebrews. Specifically he was important as part of the promise of the fulfilment of the tenth jubilee: that within it the great sacrifice would be completed and the Temple come to an end. The dates of the beginning and end of the tenth jubilee correspond closely with those of Christ’s ministry and death, on the one hand, and the Roman destruction of the temple in 70 A.D. on the other.

It seems therefore that Jesus created and pre-enacted a mime exemplifying what he was doing that could not have been understood in all its richness at the time. It was one which ran backwards in time from the Passover to the Atonement, to Abraham and to Melchizedek, and then to Abel. Each one of these is not simply a matter of “erudition” but involves us being sucked into a sense-giving narrative by which Jesus is making himself the living dynamic interpretative key. That this goes back to “the blood of Abel” and to the lamb sacrificed “before the foundation of the world” and therefore to something that is proper to all humanity, and not simply to an ethnic liturgical group, should be evident. It is the mime by which the road from the symbolism flowing from violent foundational human sacrifice is recast and becomes a form of being together offered by the cast-out-one in which we nourish each other among friends relaxing in God.

4. Instructions 

And it is within this world of meaning, I take it, that we are given two explicit instructions to structure what we are doing, and one implicit one. The first explicit instruction is “take” (repeated) and the second is “do this in memory of me”. The “take” means that we are all, always, in the position of people learning to receive something that is offered to us, learning to work out what it is that we are receiving, and how to discern what it is that the One who gives means when he says: “this is my body, this is my blood”. Hence the appropriateness of our reenactment of the mime being called “Eucharist” for we are participating by thanksgiving in what Jesus was and is doing, what he was and is giving to us and how he is using this to nourish our bodies and minds with what it is to be his body now. 

For me at least part of the sense of the word “take” is the perception of being entrusted by someone who has no good reason to trust me. When I do “take” him, he will become what I make of him, which is by no means guaranteed to be something he would have imagined. In other words, he is entrusting himself to be both betrayed and handed over in my exceedingly fallible and often shameful attempt to become his body. This presupposes an extraordinarily brave and adventurous spirit on his part – his faith, an extraordinary belief in me which is to drive and to characterize my lifelong failure to have much to show for it. This sense of the adventurousness of the host who hands himself over, and the boldness of his imagination for us are absolutely linked.

The second explicit instruction is “do this in memory of me”, which I understand, from what I have learned concerning both Greek and Jewish understandings of “anamnesis”, means rather more than “please repeat these gestures”. It means something much more like “invoke my presence in a constant re-working of your memory of what I am doing so that its meaning, and thus my presence, is constantly fresh to you”. And this is why, I hope, my previous trip through the sacrificial narratives which Jesus suggested by his acts and words was not a display of erudition, but, indeed, an exercise in memory. Our memories are formed by narratives, and narratives are formed by analogies: things which are like things, but also subtly unlike them. Jesus is using narratives of sacrifice to offer us something which is a living analogical fulfilment of those narratives. By which I mean, using them to say something so much richer and stronger than any sacrificial language could indicate that it is really beyond our imagination. And we only have any access at all to that through the subversion from within of our symbolic universe in which sacrifice, which gyrates round death, has such a constant, but an invisible and disguised presence.

Then, linked to this, there is the implicit instruction, which I consider essential to the sort of “mime” Our Lord asked us to perform. We are asked to remember the whole ghastly route by which cultures rife with human sacrifice, covering up what we do and congratulating ourselves on our fake goodness, was gradually uncovered by becoming visible in the Hebrew experience, and then finally fully revealed in what is at the root of all culture – participating actively or by proxy in lynch-killing. So that at the end of that process we see Jesus who has deliberately occupied that space for us all as “the man”, Adam, “Ecce Homo” the Α and Ω, the one who has given himself into that place for us. 

But that is not all. We are then asked to learn to reinscribe our stories within his. In other words we do not only remember what he did and is doing, as we might remember something outside ourselves in the past. We allow the stories we tell about ourselves, our cultures, our memories, to be illuminated, critiqued, de-railed, re-imagined, by the signs and words which he performed and led up to his inaugurating this mime. And here again, I’d like to stress something that is unfortunately made frequently invisible owing to the solemnity, clericalism and massive attendance at our Eucharists. The liturgy of the Word preceding the handing over of the Body is as essential a part of the real presence as the consecration of hosts and cup.

For the spoken word of the texts of the readings are invitations to us to find ourselves on the inside of Jesus’ story. We are not becoming his dumb, mute, body, but a speaking and interpreting body as we react to his words. We can easily miss this if we react merely silently to his words after the clerical presider has given a little monologue in which, often enough, a seriously moralistic and anachronistic account of the Gospel is delivered.  As if Jesus were a legislator rather than a speaker of words, puzzles and enigmas in our midst which he empowers to do work in us, so that they suddenly take us to another place, rework our memories, shift our perspectives on what we’ve done to others, and they to us. Furthermore this process of chewing on the word is made much more effective when it is a joint chewing of the word: when others tell how bits of that word impacted them, so giving us insights into ways of hearing and perceiving that are not our own but open us out into hearing and receiving much more.

In my own years of priesthood so far, the Masses I remember most fondly as with the strongest sense of the real presence of Jesus were those held in my flat in São Paulo for a number of years. Around 25 LGBT people would come, we would follow the ordinary missal, the reading for the Sunday in an ordinary room with no special seating. After the Gospel, I would attempt very briefly to crack open the text, and then those present would react to what they had heard from the Gospel, from me and then from each other as the sense of being spoken to by someone who loved them grew. And because those present were generally relaxed about being sinners, and unashamed to share, there was little need for fake goodness and a strong awareness of being given a new story. By the time we came to communion, Real Presence was palpable.

So, I take it that “do this in memory of me” means “allow yourselves to be taken into my living narrative by which your memory, the faculty that holds who you are, will gradually, but really, be altered from within as the set of relationships within which you dwell change around you and so change you.” It is an invitation to be re-membered, to be “pruned by the word which I have spoken to you” (John 15:3).

5. Meaning

Given Jesus’ creative imagination in inventing this mime; given that it has its aim to afford humans a way of living bodily into the new meaning which comes pulsating alive once death begins to be re-signified (the tedium of our addiction to the meanings by which death has formed us laid bare); and given that obedience must be creative; how then do we begin to imagine doing what Jesus told us to do in circumstances where our institutional officials (one of whom I am) seem to have little sense of how far away we are from living from the meaning that is made available through our own central sign. 

Which is not an accusation of hypocrisy, I think. It is merely a sign that repeating gestures that lead to sacrificial meaning, creating belonging by contrast with “others”, and policing “in” and “out” in reaction to current social, political, and cultural headwinds, is much easier than undoing that world from within. What is relatively new is that so many people have had to learn to navigate the currents surrounding so much of their own and their families’ lives, concerning what it is to be a woman, reproduction, sexual orientation, gender identity, and economic turbulence, without any real help from Church authority, that the world where meaning is forged is now lost to those who themselves act as signs, but protect ourselves from undergoing these routes of change, of loss, and of growth. 

We (clergy) are no longer signs of some transcendental meaning, but of a stubborn refusal to dare to become meaningful, holding instead to reactive accounts of meaning as if from God, and losing our flock accordingly. The ongoing ecclesiastical crisis of discernment concerning vocations has left authority stuck with an institutional rule book locked into what is increasingly obviously fake meaning concerning maleness, concerning heterosexuality, and concerning singleness of life, unable to work out why they are getting so few vocations and why the flock has walked away. Few people have a genuine vocation to repetitive meaninglessness. Vocations to becoming hardline defenders of reactive culture war positions are exceedingly fragile in their rigidity and constantly threaten to be undermined over time by the presence of Grace.

In other words, it is just much easier to try to repristinate the sacrificial signs than it is to encourage and accompany the living through the undoing from within of the sacrificial world which is their only point. For I take it that meaning is discovered in those who are chewed over by the grinding down of the old sacrificial world run by death, and who yet find themselves taken to a place where they can begin to bear witness to what it is like to recognise, and then refuse, its meanings, to discover what Jesus made available in going to his death, and has been making available ever since through the Holy Spirit: the Creator sharing with us the making new of all things through our own invited participation into being signs of new life.

So I think that, for a bit at least, we will have to learn how to pray eucharistically. Which means creating small groups who are brave enough to share the readings, share the homily, and so share how they are being taken out of one world into another in such a way that they build each other up. They can then share in the words of consecration, and share the Body and Blood, regardless of whether there is an “ordained” person present. And experience for themselves how the source of all meaning gives Himself to them as Real Presence. For those alarmed: none of this is in rivalry with official Mass, or to be done in rivalry with the clergy. Indeed it should be wonderfully educative and edifying for when people can actually find and share in the Mass as duly appointed by the local Bishop, which, with ever fewer priests, will become more difficult to find except as massive and impersonal occasions.

Notoriously, not a few communities of nuns, accustomed to flaky treatment by ecclesiastical males, have been doing such things for years. Likewise Sisters celebrating the Eucharist for communities of lay people that are far off the beaten track (for instance in South America) has been a well-known half-secret for too long to pretend otherwise. Jesus obviously wants to get through to us to give us his Presence, his Meaning and make us into his Body. So surely, we shouldn’t be too scrupulous in how we relate to an institutional leadership that is much better at withholding authority than at making it available by sharing it. It is the avoidance of “rival altars”, of rivalry with Church authority, that is essential[12].

In any case, the bringing together of meaning-making and rite seems to me to be essential to the path of evangelisation going forward, since it is the path by which we are inducted into the Presence, and so find ourselves being transformed into witnesses of a power that is not of this world, with whom joy and the path towards truthfulness of life come together.

6. Presence

I take it for granted that as we engage in creative obedience to Jesus’ words, we should expect moments, however they may surprise us, when Meaning and Presence come together, and when we perceive the Body. I suspect that many Catholics, more or less quietly, have had such experiences, and I only wish that more were in a position to bear witness to them. It seems to me that one of the things that is key to this is when the celebration is genuinely being carried out in hope.  Hope is the virtue by which the coming upon us of the Kingdom, already present among us in sign, empowers our memories, and thus the reality of the past which has structured us, to be re-structured, thus making us dwellers in a new and vibrant present. In other words, Hope stretches us into being present to the Presence.

And that is the purpose of the organized form of worship called “The Eucharist”: to enable us to come together in an ordered way into The Presence so that we see by sign the Kingdom that is coming upon us and are empowered to multiply it. The Presence is that of “The Lamb standing as one slain” surrounded by myriad people of every nation, tongue, people and tribe. It is always “just there”. Always longing to spill down into our midst so as to bring us into itself.

Traditionally, the focus of the change undergone during Mass has been on the Eucharistic Elements, the bread and the wine, and how they really become the body and the blood of the crucified and risen Lord. The fact of the change was, and is, not in question: the “how” is. Historically the issue was always about being faithful to Jesus’ truthfulness when he said “This is my body” and “this is my blood”, linking those phrases with his very clear indication from his discourse about the Bread from Heaven: “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you…for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.[13]”

The notion of “transubstantiation” was, at the period of Aquinas’ recovery of Aristotelian thought, a fitting way of describing how the real substance of something – what it really is – might change into something entirely different, while yet its every outward appearance remained exactly the same. Thus what appeared to be, and was, a piece of bread, ceases, after the words of consecration, to be a piece of bread, even though conserving every physical and chemical “outward appearance” (or “accident” in Aristotelian terms) of “breadliness”. Those “accidents” have now lent themselves to something entirely different: the physical self-giving of himself to us in human bodily form of the “lamb standing as one slain”. Since that is something far too dynamic to be seen by us, it makes itself visible through the humble accidents of the bread. These latter become signs which show off, reveal, what they really are.

Personally, I have no problem with the fittingness of transubstantiation as a hard-won description of something real. However, I think we ought to be able to find ways of giving an account of “what happens” that doesn’t depend on a particular ancient philosophical school, and which doesn’t confine the notion of Real Presence simply to the consecrated elements, though they are surely constitutive of it. For what it’s worth (and it may be too infantile for proper consideration), I use a different set of images to encourage people to find themselves in the Real Presence (and the Real Presence among and in them).

Pictures referred to as “Magic Eye Images” became popular in the 1990’s. The technical term for one is an “autostereogram”. A picture is put before you which, when you first look at it, is a combination of dots, lines and colours. The pictures tend to look like nothing more than pieces of richly coloured wallpaper. While there is no obvious “object” in it, the picture is pleasing enough in itself. If you didn’t know that it was a “Magic Eye” image, you might take a quick look and think “that’s quite nice, in an abstract sort of way, though I’m not sure what it’s about”, and leave it at that.

However, if you have been inducted into “what it’s about” you will have been encouraged to let your eyes linger on the surface of the picture, allowing them to relax, maybe gently moving the picture closer and further from your head. As you do so, there will emerge, as if by magic, a three-dimensional object which seems to float freely just above a two-dimensional background. It may be a shark, or some dolphins, or whatever. It will have exactly the same colour as was always visible in the “wallpaper” picture, but those colours now “give away” as it were, what they were really doing all along. Which is making a 3-D shark visible to you[14].

 So, an object which seemed to be an object (X -Wallpaper) became to us an object (Y- Shark) which is quite different than anything that could be imagined from object X. Once you see object Y you realize that object X has ceased to be object X and become what it was always meant to be: merely the contours necessary to make possible your capturing something which can’t easily be captured. It isn’t that it is both a nice-enough 2D picture and a 3D image. Once the 3D image is seen, you realise that the 2D picture isn’t really a picture, merely the contours necessary to enable you to see the 3D shark, which was what it was about all along.

This all works, of course, because a skilled artist has set in place quite specific groupings of dots, lines and waves, each one of which is quite visible in itself: there’s nothing actually “hidden” under anything else. The artist knows that your eyes, if allowed to relax on the image, will do something called “vergence accommodation[15]”. They will seek to rest on a three-dimensional object present if one can be found. So find it they will, and then they will rest on it, as on something quite stable, knowing that they have found the real thing. There is nothing magic about it at all. Merely cleverly deployed use of art to bring out something which our eyes want to do anyhow.

Now what I would like to suggest is that this, by distant analogy, is how Jesus makes himself present to us in the Eucharist. The only thing I will say that might cause some surprise is that it is not only the bread and wine which turn out to be the contours of the “self-giving-to-us Lamb standing as one slain” – though they are. But that rather in this particular exercise, every part of the Eucharistic liturgy – something we do – turns out to be a contour of the real thing, including each one of us, as well obviously as the presiding presbyter, the deacon, the words we hear, the way we respond to those words, and how we are learning to desire together through the stories and prayers.

The original artist set it up as a mime with instructions which, if followed through by us with a certain relaxed intentionality, allowing our memories to be reworked by hope as we allow him to inscribe our stories into his own, will take us all to a space when we are aware of his Presence, in us, among us, through us, and between us as what is real, where meaning and person become one, the Body perceived. The mime allows us to be made present to The Presence.

None of this is to say that Jesus isn’t always really present in a duly appointed Mass, however sinful the priest and however distracted or sluggish the faithful. Of course he is. The true basis of “Ex opere operato” is not some special power of the priest, but the (properly Catholic) assurance that Jesus really, really wants to get through to us, and will take advantage of even the most minimal act of obedience on our part to get through to us just as far as we will let him.

However, it is to say that there are richer and poorer ways of being present to the Presence, and that these are objective, and not magic. For instance, if shown a Magic Eye Image, we might say “Oh yes, I know what that is, I know there is a shark in there somewhere, but I can’t be bothered to allow my optic nerve to be drawn into the hassle of adjusting my vision so that I can see it. So, I believe that it is there, and will just carry on with my life, assured by faith that what seems to all intents and purposes to be a 2D piece of wallpaper is in fact a 3D image of something which will remain invisible to me”. Such a person might even describe the 3D image as being “hidden” by the 2D image (or Jesus as being “hidden” by the apparent “breaditude” of his body). Which is exactly the wrong way round of course – neither the 2D image nor the bread are hiding anything at all: they exist entirely to “give away” to “manifest”, to make available, perception of something much greater than themselves.

I’d like to suggest that there are ways of allowing ourselves to be made more richly present to the Presence than this. Remember that the artist behind the Magic Eye Image was aware of something objective about us, the functioning of our optic nerves, which he was using to get through to us. So, I would like to say, the inventor of the mime that is the Eucharist was aware that there are quite objective elements in our so called “subjectivity”, ones obviously vastly more complex than those of our optic nerves. These concern desire, memory, words, stories and interpretations, togetherness and belonging, and they can be called into a certain ordered-ness by obedience to the set of instructions which I attempted to describe above: the inventor of the mime was not primarily inviting us to “know” something against the evidence but to perceive the Body and taste something of eternal life.

Thank you very much for trusting me to be suggestive among you. I hope that these observations may contribute to our bringing together Eucharistic Presence, our presence at the Eucharist, the reception and recovery of meaning through our faith in Jesus, and new possibilities of Evangelisation.

James Alison
Madrid-Toulouse-Bogotá-Madrid, September-December 2024

  1. « La Cène et la Croix : L’eucharistie vue par les philosophes René Girard et Pierre Gardeil » Toulouse, 12.x.2024. ↩︎
  2. Pierre Gardeil : Quinze regards sur le corps livré   Geneva : Ad Solem 1997. ↩︎
  3. Benoît Chantre : René Girard Biographie  Paris : Grasset 2023. ↩︎
  4. René Girard : De la Violence a la Divinité  Paris : Grasset 2007 p1001. ↩︎
  5. For anyone unfamiliar with the long-running discussion about whether, and how, the Mass is a sacrifice, and how Girard’s thought enables a quite particular approach to this question, I explain that approach in an article in Concilium 2013/4: “We didn’t invent sacrifice, sacrifice invented us: unpacking Girard’s insight”. ↩︎
  6. For Paul, the prophets were clearly on the inside of the same vision – cf Romans 3:21. ↩︎
  7. Cf René Girard Evolution and Conversion ch3 “The symbolic species” for Girard’s discussion of the different takes on symbolicity and hominization of a series of major 19th and 20th Century figures. ↩︎
  8. Including, obviously and potentially, our own share in the “traditio” – both the handing over and the betrayal. ↩︎
  9. “You know nothing at all! You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.” ↩︎
  10. “He did not say this on his own, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus was about to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but to gather into one the dispersed children of God.” ↩︎
  11. See Barker. M: King of the Jews: Temple Theology in John’s Gospel (London: SPCK 2014) Particularly in Chapter 2 and in her commentary on John 12 (hard copy page numbers unavailable to me, since consulted in e-book form). ↩︎
  12. My own rule of thumb, as a Catholic Priest, when travelling, teaching, and celebrating with the most diverse mix of peoples of different religious belongings and none, is (a) never to refuse people communion – as the Holy Father has repeatedly insisted; (b) respectfully to decline to receive communion when participating with a formal group identified by their historic setting up of a rival altar over against the Catholic Church (Anglicans and Lutherans for instance) receiving a blessing instead and leaving questions of shared communion to our respective leaderships’ formal discussions; and (c) happily to receive communion when the group, of whatever denomination, is informal, or one whose foundation included no historic rivalry with the Catholic Church, sure that Jesus wants to give himself to us as best we allow him to. ↩︎
  13. Jn 6:53-55. ↩︎
  14. I had the privilege of having had Herbert McCabe OP as both novice master and teacher. If I understand anything in this field, it is due to him. He used to make a similar point to the one I attempt here, using what appears to be a “poem in archaic French” (Un petit d’un petit s’étonne aux Halles), to bring out a poem in good English (Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall). In this example it turns out that the “poem in archaic French” isn’t a French poem at all. When you understand the English poem that is “trying to get through”, you understand that the French words and accents were merely there as “accidents” allowing a different “substance” to emerge. ↩︎
  15. How the eyes engage in a slight conflict of convergence and divergence in order to settle on a 3-dimensional object. ↩︎