Beyond the Body

An Antitheology of the Eucharist

Heaney

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781630874971
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The Eucharist has become the central act of Christian life and worship. Unresolved disagreements about it, however, remain as obstacles to religious unity, and to developing a eucharistic spirituality adapted to the unpredictable standards of a deconstructed, critically driven, postmodern age. Beginning with a reassessment of medieval "realist" doctrines of the Eucharist, Beyond the Body argues that the real meaning of the Words of Institution is their use in fulfilling the Last Supper command of Jesus to be remembered. Where traditional doctrines of the Eucharist and their corresponding forms of piety dead-end in intellectual conundrum or disembodied symbolism, that command evokes a world of transformative events with the historical Jesus of the Last Supper as real and constant partner. As an "antitheology" the task of this book is to sketch the intellectual footprint of a nonmetaphysical eucharistic faith. Setting aside traditional approaches, however, will have been worth it only if this enables a eucharistic belief that meets the needs of and is fruitful for religious life in general. Its ultimate goal is to refocus eucharistic piety on the liturgical act itself as a transformative event united in time with the person of Jesus in both remembrance and thanksgiving.

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Introduction

Faith and Understanding

A century before the intellectual upheavals that would culminate in the “scholastic” theology and philosophy of the great medieval universities, Anselm, later to become archbishop of Canterbury, set out to determine what certainty might attach to our most elemental notions of God.1 He did this from the standpoint of one doubting not God but the sufficiency of human understanding for describing God, either as such or as the object of human religious feelings, attitudes, and expectations. Although the motive for Anselm’s quest has been widely construed as a need for assurance that God does in fact exist and has on this reading sponsored an enormous literature of both agreement and disagreement, more yet remains to be said regarding the shape of this program as he characterized it: fides quaerens intellectum, “faith seeking understanding.”2

The seeming simplicity of this triad of terms easily tempts the reader, whether casual or professional, to assume their meanings to be readily available either in the text of Anselm’s work, in its religious and cultural contexts, or, more ambitiously perhaps, in those forms or instances of thinking within in it that typify human reason. And the breadth and depth of scholarship on Anselm bear ample witness to the wealth of possibilities for interpretation these offer. But although Anselm influenced a few in his time whom we might think of as followers, no “Anselmian” school would develop as there would be schools of Thomists, Scotists, Calvinists, Kantians, Heideggerians, or even Lonerganians in later centuries. In part this is owing to Anselm’s predilection for writing directly about the matters in hand without any seeming need to prove his consistency with the written tradition. In the letter to his former teacher Lanfranc introducing his first great effort, the Monologion, he attributes this directness to his own lack of education.3 But the absence of ostentatious erudition throughout his works fails to hide that it is not the words but the thoughts and convictions of his predecessors that he has so completely taken to heart and understood that he prefers to express them as he sees them rather than citing them supportively in proof texts. Debts to predecessors he certainly has, the greatest of these to Augustine, like whom he employs whatever genre or style suits the purpose in hand, whether monolog, dialog, letter, prayer, or topically focused treatise. And further like Augustine, it is his style that carries the discussion forward, in a carefully orchestrated flow of words that conjointly express the sought-for understanding, words that find their meaning within that flow rather than in external definition.

That Anselm left no school behind, no metaphysical system that could be adapted to explore further areas of the theological landscape, is hardly a fault, considering the extent of his effect on later Western religious thought. His description of Christ’s redemptive action as substitutionary atonement in Why God Became Man remains central to the theology and religious life of Reformed Christianity in the Calvinist tradition. His eloquence on the sinless purity of Mary in the conception of Jesus and the unique role this defines for her as intermediary between God and humanity has similarly shaped centuries of Roman Catholic devotion and theological thought alike. His “ontological” argument for the existence of God, perhaps more an accidental than an intended outcome of his efforts, seems never to fall from favor as an object of contentious philosophical interest. And, of course, that faith seeks understanding has over the centuries come to represent both the most convincing motive for the enterprise of theological investigation and the surest test of its religious sincerity.

Curiously, the durability of Anselm’s religious and intellectual legacy is in some measure guaranteed by the nearly limitless openness it offers to interpretation. His argument for the existence of God, for instance, has been viewed as variously as an exercise in logic, a key to mystical experience, a theological exegesis of the divine name, and a species of “Christian gnosticism.”4 That such varied construals are at all possible, however, raises the reasonable suspicion that there is something vague or insufficiently clear about Anselm’s intent, something more fundamental than those natural differences about understanding historical materials most commonly occasioned by the personal interests of interpreters, the increasing sophistication of critical analysis, or the discovery of new texts. And yet Anselm, as the most detailed scholarship shows, seems remarkably clear, coherent, and consistent in his thinking wherever we look, both within individual works and across the span of his writing as a whole.5

One possibility for understanding this seeming contradiction between an overall intent that is difficult to pin down and an unassailable clarity of presentation can be found in the level of generalization involved. In logic, the less specific the meanings or references of terms in a statement, the more widely applicable it will be. The upside of such statements is their great “power” or range of description. The downside is their lack of specificity. The injunction to “do good and avoid evil,” for instance, provides exemplary encouragement to ethical behavior but speaks not at all to what we may think is good or evil in any given situation. Similarly, on the face of it “faith seeking understanding” appears to provide a comprehensive and principled description of theological inquiry, almost an algorithm for it, to which few, if any could object, yet it assumes much but says little about either faith, understanding, or the nature of the quest. The charm this exerts derives in part from the opportunity it allows for each of those terms to resonate with the personal interests or experience of the reader. Such an approach to texts, it should not be forgotten, had long been institutionalized in the medieval world through the practice of lectio divina, a free-associating approach to reading Scripture that encouraged calling to mind whatever other texts might serve to illuminate for the reader a given text under consideration.

It is difficult to put a limit on the number of possible ways that “faith” can be understood in the theological tradition. For Anselm, where doctrine is its object faith consists in the assent to a particular set of authorized propositions about God, world, soul, salvation, and more. Some of these may be understood completely, others less so because of the disproportion between the human ability to know and their divine object. Propositional faith is of itself thus necessarily incomplete, requiring the willing suspension of disbelief in things that cannot be known, including future events in the history of salvation.6 But how, exactly, is such a faith to “seek” understanding other than to improve its parsing of propositions or to hope for future experience to fill in the gaps? While mystical experience would seem to qualify as a solution, it is not clear that indescribable experience of an indescribable object can be scripted to fulfill the requirements of understanding. And although Anselm’s devotional writing rises to a high level of eloquence, there is little if any evidence in it of contact with the literature of the mystical tradition.7 His advice on what to do where the demands of the language of faith exceed the capacities of reason is quite mundane: “A Christian should advance through faith to understanding, not come to faith through understanding, or withdraw from faith if he cannot understand. Rather, when he is able to attain to understanding, he is delighted; but when he cannot, he reveres what he is not able to grasp.”8

If faith is expressed or acted upon in assent to propositions, even those we cannot fully understand, what is faith when not thus occupied? The hub of this dilemma, that faith is somehow prior to and different from moments in speech that confess it appears in Anselm’s initial statement about the aims of his second great project, the Proslogion, and its proof of the existence of God: “Well, then, Lord, You who give understanding to faith, grant me that I may understand, as much as you see fit, that You exist as we believe You to exist, and that You are as we believe You to be.” Lest there be any ambiguity regarding what this might be, he further qualifies: “Now we believe that you are something than which nothing greater can be thought.”9

Considerable theological attention has been devoted to the condition Anselm places on this process, that it must enable us to understand God quod credimus, as we believe...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: “This Is” and the Transience of Intelligibility
• Chapter 3: “Do This”—Text and Repetition
• Chapter 4: Word and Deed
• Chapter 5: Beyond the Body
• Bibliography