Chapter 7
Aristotle said that the best activities are the most useless. This is because such things are not simply means to a further end but are done entirely for their own sake. Thus watching a baseball game is more important than getting a haircut, and cultivating a friendship is more valuable than making money. The game and the friendship are goods that are excellent in themselves, while getting a haircut and making money are in service of something beyond themselves. This is also why the most important parts of the newspaper are the sports section and the comics, and not, as we would customarily think, the business and political reports. In this sense, the most useless activity of all is the celebration of the Liturgy, which is another way of saying that it is the most important thing we could possibly do. There is no higher good than to rest in God, to honor him for his kindness, to savor his sweetness—in a word, to praise him. As we have seen in chapter three, every good comes from God, reflects God, and leads back to God, and, therefore, all value is summed up in the celebration of the Liturgy, the supreme act by which we commune with God.
This is why the great liturgical theologian Romano Guardini said that the liturgy is a consummate form of play. We play football and we play musical instruments because it is simply delightful to do so, and we play in the presence of the Lord for the same reason. In chapter one I spoke of Adam in the garden as being the first priest, which is another way of saying that his life, prior to the fall, was entirely liturgical. At play in the field of the Lord, Adam, with every move and thought, effortlessly gave praise to God. As Dietrich von Hildebrand indicated, this play of liturgy is what rightly orders the personality, since we find interior order in the measure that we surrender everything in us to God. We might say that the Liturgy bookends the entire Scripture, for the priesthood of Adam stands at the beginning of the sacred text and the heavenly Liturgy of the book of Revelation stands at the end. In the closing book of the Bible, John the visionary gives us a glimpse into the heavenly court, and he sees priests, candles, incense, the reading of a sacred text, the gathering of thousands in prayer, prostrations and other gestures of praise, and the appearance of the Lamb of God. He sees, in short, the liturgy of heaven, the play that preoccupies the angels and saints for all eternity. For these reasons—and others besides—Vatican II referred to the Liturgy as “the source and summit of the Christian life,” that from which the whole of Christianity flows and toward which it returns. What I should like to do in the course of this chapter is to move through the Mass, the supreme expression of Catholic liturgical life, exploring the dimensions and aspects of this supremely serious form of play.
Basílica de San Francisco el Grande, interior, Madrid. WORD ON FIRE
THE GATHERING
In a certain sense, the Mass commences with a gathering of people. They come from all walks of life, from different social and educational backgrounds, from a variety of economic strata, with differing levels of moral excellence, and from both genders—and they all form the community gathered around the altar of Christ. In this diversity, they form an eschatological icon of God’s holy people. The fallen world is marked by division, separation, stratification; we sinners are intensely interested in questions of priority and exclusivity: Who is in and who is out? Who is up and who is down? But, as Paul told us, in Christ “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female” (Gal 3:28); all are members of the mystical body. As we gather for Mass, we become a great anticipatory realization of this vision. When Dorothy Day was considering her conversion to Catholicism, she would attend Sunday Mass. Though the Liturgy was in a language she didn’t know, and though its central action was surrounded by much baroque decoration, she was deeply impressed by the fact that both the rich and the poor, both the educated and the uneducated, both the housekeeper and the grande dame attended, kneeling side by side. The Catholic historian Christopher Dawson upon telling his mother that he was converting to the Catholic faith from his native Anglicanism was met with this response: “It’s not so much the doctrines that concern me; it’s that now you’ll be worshipping with the help!” Both Dorothy Day and Mrs. Dawson intuited the properly subversive nature of the way Catholics gather for prayer.
Once gathered, we sing. Singing at the Mass should not be construed as merely decorative or incidental, for the harmonizing of the many voices as one is an embodied expression of how we, as children of God, ought to live. The ritual of the Liturgy properly begins with the sign of the cross and the priest’s intonation of the words “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” By this gesture and this simple phrase we announce that we belong to the Triune God. Modern secularism is predicated on the assumption that we essentially belong to no one, that we are self-determining and self-directing, pursuers of happiness according to our own rights. But Paul told Christians long ago, “None of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself. If we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die for the Lord; so then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s” (Rom 14:7–8). In contradistinction to modernity, Catholics say “your life is not about you,” and the Liturgy signals this at the very beginning of the Mass with the sign of the cross. But there is more. To speak of the cross is to reference the great act by which the Father sent the Son into godforsakenness in order to gather us, through the Holy Spirit, into the divine life. Because the Son went all the way down, he was able to bring even the most recalcitrant sinner back into fellowship with God. Thus when we invoke the cross at the beginning of the Liturgy, we signify that we are praying in God and not merely to God.
Just after the sign of the cross, the priest greets the people, not in his own name but in Christ’s: “The Lord be with you” or “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” Garbed in vestments that cover his ordinary clothes and hence, symbolically, his ordinary identity, the priest at the Liturgy is operating in persona Christi and not in his own person, and therefore his gestures, words, and movements are expressive not of his own perspectives and convictions but of Christ’s. This is why the people respond, “And with your spirit,” for they are addressing not the individual man but Jesus in whose person the priest is operating. Immediately after the greeting, the priest invites everyone in attendance to call to mind his or her sins. This simple routine is of extraordinary importance. G. K. Chesterton once remarked, “There are saints in my religion, but that just means men who know they are sinners.” For the great English apologist, the relevant distinction is not between sinners and non-sinners, but between those sinners who know their sin and those who, for whatever reason, don’t. The heroes of the faith—the saints—are precisely those who are ordered toward God and who therefore have a keener appreciation of how far they fall short of the ideal. Saint John of the Cross compared the soul to a pane of glass. When it is facing away from the light, its smudges and imperfections are barely noticeable, but when it is directed at the light, every mark, even the smallest, becomes visible. This explains the paradox that the saints are most keenly aware of their sins, even to the point of describing themselves as the worst of sinners. We might mistake this for false modesty, but it is in fact simply a function of a truly saintly psychology. Therefore as the Liturgy commences and we stand within the embrace of the Trinitarian love, we mimic the saints and become, perforce, not less but more aware of our sin.
In doing so we offer a corrective to the pervasive cultural tendency toward exculpation. “I’m okay and you’re okay,” we tell ourselves. But to subscribe to such a naïve sentiment is, ipso facto, to prove that one is not facing into the clarifying light of God. The calling to mind of sins is but a preparation for the Kyrie, the cry of “Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy.” In saying those words we echo the cri de coeur of the blind beggar Bartimaeus who called out to Jesus, Eleison me (have pity on me). In the presence of the true God, there is no room for self-aggrandizement and self-deception; we know that we are incapable of saving ourselves, that we are beggars before the Lord. The Liturgy places us in this correct and finally liberating attitude, and then we hear the words of the priest: “May Almighty God have mercy on us, forgive us our sins, and bring us to everlasting life.” God has no interest whatsoever in making us grovel before him in self-reproach. He wants to forgive, but it is imperative that we realize that there is something in us that needs forgiving.
After the Kyrie there is the Gloria, which is one of the most magnificent prayers in our liturgical tradition. One can read out of the Gloria practically the whole of Catholic theology, but I will focus only on the first line: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to people of good will.” As we have seen in some detail in chapter two, giving God the glory is a kind of formula for a happy life. When he is clearly the supreme value for us, then our lives become harmoniously ordered on that central love. Peace, as it were, breaks out among us when God—and not pleasure, money, or power—is given glory in the highest. Our term “worship” comes from an older English word “worthship,” designating what we hold dear. The Liturgy is the place where we act out our worship, where we demonstrate, by word and gesture, what is of greatest worth to us—and this is why the Mass is essential to peace. It would be helpful in this context once again to invoke Aristotle. In his Nicomachean Ethics the great philosopher comments that a friendship will endure only in the measure that the two friends fall in love, not so much with each other, but together with a transcendent third. If together they both look with love toward the truth or toward the beautiful or toward their country or their city, then their companionship with each other will deepen. If they look only with affection to each other, their relationship will devolve, eventually, into a kind of shared egotism. In saying (or singing) the Gloria, the gathered community is expressing their shared love of God’s glory—and if Aristotle is right, joining in this prayer will deepen their friendship with one another (“peace to people of good will”).
Altar Mayor, Toledo Cathedral, Spain. WORD ON FIRE
THE TELLING OF THE STORIES
After these extremely significant opening liturgical elements, everyone sits in order to listen to the Word of God, usually on Sunday a reading from the Old Testament, followed by a responsorial psalm, then a New Testament epistle, and finally a Gospel reading that is thematically coordinated to the first reading. The posture of sitting is not to be overlooked. In the ancient world, one would sit at the feet of a master in order to listen and learn. Sitting was therefore universally recognized, from the earliest days of the church, as the proper attitude of the apprentice or student. Seated in silence, prepared to hear the voice of the Lord, Catholics at Mass signal that they are humble learners, apprentices to the Word. Much of modern theology assumes that religion wells up naturally from the depths of human consciousness and experience. Without denying the validity of this perspective altogether, I would insist with Saint Paul that “faith comes from hearing.” A message, a word, a voice comes from outside of our minds and our ordinary experience and tells us something that we would never otherwise know. Whereas both classical and modern philosophers celebrate the confident person, blithely in control of his thoughts and actions, the Bible holds up those figures—Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Peter, Paul—who listened to a puzzling word that came from outside their range of expectation.
Liturgical people listen to biblical texts so that they might be drawn into the peculiar power of the biblical world. J. R. R. Tolkien’s great trilogy Lord of the Rings commences with a lengthy description of Bilbo Baggins’s birthday party. Someone who had been told that this was a roaring adventure story might legitimately wonder when the action will start. But in order to orient his reader to the entirely new world that he was creating—a world of orcs, elves, wizards, humans, and hobbits, a place with distinctive topography, weather, customs, language, and modes of behavior—Tolkien had to take his time. Melville, of course, was doing much the same thing in his long and sometimes tedious examinations of the minutiae of the whale-boating culture in Moby-Dick. Moving into the world of Scripture, cutting through the thick undergrowth of this jungle, we learn to speak, react, and think in a different way. In this sense, the hearing of the Word is something like learning baseball, golf, or theater—or better, like becoming acclimated to a new language or culture. If people listen attentively to the Scriptures at Mass, they are, perhaps despite themselves, leaving the confines of their familiar world and entering a new psychological and spiritual space.
After the readings are proclaimed, the priest rises to preach. I mentioned earlier that the priest at the Liturgy is acting in the person of Christ and not in his own person. This opening up of a deeper identity becomes especially clear (at least in principle) during the homily, for the preacher is not meant to share his private convictions about politics or culture or even religion. He is supposed to speak the mind of Christ. To be sure, he ought to use all of the resources of the church’s theology, spirituality, and biblical interpretation, and he ought certainly to apply the Scriptures to the present cultural situation, but he is not speaking in his own voice or out of his private convictions. Keeping in mind the noncompetitiveness of God, on which we’ve been insisting throughout this book, it might be better to say that the preacher, in surrendering to the divine voice, actually finds his own most authentic voice, and in conforming himself to the attitude of Christ he discovers his own most authentic attitude. The great Protestant theologian Karl Barth said that the Christian preacher or theologian is a sort of mystagogue, drawing his readers into the strangeness and dense texture of the biblical jungle, introducing them to characters such as Isaiah, Abraham, Jeremiah, David, and Jesus himself, figures whose motivations and moves are often inscrutable to us. And through it all, he is speaking of the supremely distinctive character of God himself, this transcendent power who nevertheless speaks and acts in history.
Church of the Dormition, interior, Jerusalem. DENIS R. MCNAMARA
When the homily is complete, the people stand for the recitation of the creed. They can use the ancient and simple formula called The Apostles’ Creed, but customarily they pray the great statement of faith that emerged from the Council of Nicaea in 325. In speaking the lyrical phrases “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father,” they are reiterating the resolution of the battle over the Arian heresy, which arose when a fourth-century Alexandrian priest named Arius denied the divinity of Jesus. “One in being” is the English rendering of the Greek homoousios, a technical term that the fathers of the council coined in order articulately to express their faith that the man Jesus is also fully divine. What the Council of Nicaea intuited was that this issue was decisive for the identity and survival of the church, for if Jesus is not truly divine, then Christianity necessarily devolves into another mythology or another philosophy. Nearly seventeen hundred years later we stand to repeat this same formula in order to ward off the same danger, and in so doing we signal to ourselves who we are. As we have seen in chapter five, there is something properly subversive about the opening declaration of the creed, “I believe in one God,” since it precludes any other pretender to ultimacy—be it country, culture, political party, or charismatic leader. Hence those who state their faith in the one God are standing resolutely athwart all forms of idolatry both ancient and contemporary. When the recitation of the creed is over, the community offers prayers for the living and the dead. These “prayers of the faithful,” to give them their liturgical name, are expressive of the inescapable interdependence of the members of Christ’s mystical body. We pray for one another precisely because we are implicated with one another, connected by the deepest bonds in Christ. One member of the body cannot coherently say to another, “Your concern is not mine,” for, as I have stated in the chapter on the church, we are not a club but an organism. Just as a cancer raging in the stomach profoundly affects the other organs, so the suffering or anxiety of one member of the mystical communion impinges upon all members of that communion. As we act out our faith in reciting the creed, so we act out our mystical identity as we pray for one another.
THE OFFERING
With the prayers of the faithful, the first part of the Mass, called the Liturgy of the Word, comes to a close, and the second part, the Liturgy of the Eucharist, commences. It might be helpful at this juncture to reflect on the Mass as an intense form of encounter. In almost every culture—certainly in ours—a formal encounter with another person involves, typically, two basic things: conversing and eating. At a party, reception, or banquet we greet guests and spend a substantial amount of time talking with them, and then we usually sit down to share a meal. The Mass is an encounter with Jesus Christ, a formal and ritualized act of “staying with him.” In the Liturgy of the Word, we listen to him (in the Scriptures) and we speak back to him (in the responses and prayers); then in the Liturgy of the Eucharist we eat a meal that he prepares for us. Another perspective on the two sections of the Mass is that the Liturgy of the Word corresponds to the Jewish synagogue service, which centered on the reading and explaining of the Torah, while the Liturgy of the Eucharist corresponds to the Temple service at which grain and animal sacrifices were performed. The parallelism I’ve just proposed is not precisely balanced, because I’ve compared the second half of the Mass to both a meal and a sacrifice. But this in fact gets to the heart of the matter, for the Catholic Liturgy of the Eucharist participates in both those dimensions.
At this point I must pause to say a word about this juxtaposition. A fundamental biblical principle is that in a world gone wrong there is no communion without sacrifice. This is true because sin has twisted us out of shape, and therefore intimacy with God will involve a twisting back into shape, a painful realignment, a sacrifice. And this is why, on a biblical reading, covenant is almost invariably associated with sacrifice. God chooses Abraham and establishes a covenant with him—and then he asks him to offer animals as a holocaust; he chooses Moses and through him sets up the Sinai covenant—and then he asks him to slaughter oxen and splash their blood on the altar and on the people; he cuts (the typical biblical word) a covenant with David and then sets up the Jerusalem Temple where hundreds of thousands of animals were, for many centuries, offered up. Mind you, God has no need of these sacrifices; he’s no pagan deity somehow mollified by our liturgical rites. As we have seen in chapter three, the true God has no need of anything at all. The point is that we need sacrifice in order to reorder us and thereby restore communion with God. God is said to be pleased with our sacrifice precisely to the extent that it makes us more fully alive. In an animal sacrifice, a person took one small aspect of God’s creation and returned it to its source in order to signal his gratitude for the gift of his own existence and indeed the existence of the world. This acknowledgment of God’s primacy is not easy for a sinner, and therefore it is entirely appropriate that sacrifice involves blood and death. The one who performs the sacrifice sees acted out in the suffering of the animal his own suffering; he is vicariously being twisted back into right relation with the source of his existence. All of this corresponds to what John Paul II termed “the law of the gift,” the spiritual principle that one’s being increases in the measure that one gives it away. What is given back to God, sacrificed to him, breaks against the rock of the divine self-sufficiency and returns for the benefit of the one who has made the offering. Sacrifice produces communion. This is the distinctive logic that undergirds the Liturgy of the Eucharist.
Tabernacle, Church of the Dormition, Jerusalem. DENIS R. MCNAMARA
At the commencement of the second part of the Mass, small offerings of bread, wine, and water are brought forward so that the priest can offer them to God. To say bread and wine is to imply wheat and vine; and to say wheat and vine is to imply earth, soil, water, wind, and sunshine; and to say earth, soil, water, wind, and sunshine is to imply the solar system and indeed the cosmos itself. The tiny gifts are therefore symbolically representative of the entire creation. Taking these gifts in hand, the priest speaks the “Berakah” prayer, “Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, for through your goodness, we have received the bread and wine we offer you.” In one and the same gesture, he blesses God and offers him a small portion of creation as a gift, thereby giving back to the Giver and establishing the “loop” of grace that I have described previously. The bread and wine, offered to the God who doesn’t need them, will return to the offerers immeasurably elevated as the Body and Blood of Jesus.
After the Berakah prayer the priest moves into the climactic prayer of the Mass, the Eucharistic Prayer, in the course of which Christ becomes really, truly, and substantially present. Just before the commencement of the prayer proper, the priest invokes the song of the angels, “And so we join the angels and saints in proclaiming your glory, as we sing …” It is most important to see that this is not simply a bit of pious boilerplate. At the outset of this chapter I mentioned that the Mass on earth links us to the eternal Liturgy of heaven, the praise of the angels and saints. At this point in the Mass we explicitly join our community and our ritual action to that transcendent play. The song of the angels, which is to say, their harmonious interaction born of shared worship of God, is a model for our own harmonious interaction here below. Therefore, as the gathered people sing, “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of hosts. Heaven and earth are full of your glory,” they are, like the angels, giving glory to God in the highest and hence actually realizing the unity that God desires for them.
The prayer commences with a word of gratitude to the Trinitarian God for the sheer grace of his creation and redemption: “You are indeed holy, O Lord, and all you have created rightly gives you praise, for through your Son our Lord Jesus Christ, by the power and working of the Holy Spirit, you give life to all things and make them holy.” Once again, as the priest utters this prayer he reminds us that we are enfolded in the embrace of the three divine persons. He then beckons the Father to send down the Holy Spirit for the sanctification and transformation of the bread and wine: “Let your Spirit come upon these gifts to make them holy, so that they may become the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.” He then continues with what is termed the “institution narrative,” which is an abbreviated form of the Gospel account of what Jesus said and did at the Last Supper. He recalls how Jesus took bread and gave thanks, but then he moves from third person description to direct quotation, speaking the very words of Jesus: “Take this, all of you, and eat it: this is my body which will be given up for you.” And the priest does just the same in regard to the cup of wine, first recounting how Jesus gave thanks and passed the chalice to his disciples, and then moving into first person he says: “Take this, all of you, and drink from it: this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven. Do this in memory of me.” The faith of the church is that by the power of these words the bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. Jesus becomes “really, truly, and substantially” present to his people under the appearance of the Eucharistic elements.
The Last Supper by Cosimo Rosselli, Sistine Chapel, Vatican City. WORD ON FIRE
EXCURSUS ON THE REAL PRESENCE
The teaching concerning the real presence is so central to the Liturgy and to Catholicism that I will pause at this point and consider it with some care. Though, as I’ve suggested, the institution narratives in the Gospels are key texts in regard to this teaching, I would like to focus on the distinctive Eucharistic theology implicit in chapter 6 of John’s Gospel. That chapter commences with the account of Jesus’s multiplication of the loaves and fishes and his feeding of the multitude, and it continues with a description of Jesus walking on the surface of the water to the other side of the Sea of Galilee. It begins, in a word, with a clear affirmation of the divine power of Jesus as well as the Lord’s intention to feed his people, two powerfully Eucharistic motifs. The crowds, amazed at Jesus’s miracle, follow him to the other side of the lake. Jesus tells them bluntly, “Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life” (Jn 6:27). Then they ask for a “sign” so that they might believe in him, something akin to the manna that God the Father gave the people to eat during their sojourn in the desert. Jesus assures them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst … I am the bread that came down from heaven” (Jn 6:35, 41). They balk at this, wondering how this man whose parents they know could have come down from heaven, but Jesus persists: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world” (Jn 6:51).
St. Monica–St. George Church, detail, Cincinnati. DENIS R. MCNAMARA
One can certainly understand the consternation of Jesus’s followers at this stage of the conversation, for it would be hard to imagine anything more theologically objectionable, and frankly, more disgusting, for a first-century Jew than what Jesus was proposing. Throughout the Old Testament there are clear prohibitions against the eating of an animal’s flesh with its blood. To give just a handful of examples among many, the book of Genesis stipulates, “Only flesh with its lifeblood still in it you shall not eat” (Gn 9:4); the book of Leviticus states, “This shall be a perpetual ordinance for your descendants wherever they may dwell. You shall not partake of any fat or any blood” (Lev 3:17); and the book of Deuteronomy insists, “But make sure that you do not partake of the blood; for blood is life, and you shall not consume this seat of life with the flesh” (Dt 12:23). Yet Jesus is urging pious Jews to eat not only the bloody flesh of an animal but his own flesh and blood. Naturally enough, they protest: “How can this man give us [his] flesh to eat?” (Jn 6:52). At this point, Jesus is being offered every opportunity to soften his teaching or to explain it in a more metaphorical manner, as he did, for example, when Nicodemus balked at the idea that being born again meant crawling back into his mother’s womb. But instead, Jesus intensifies his instruction, saying to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you … For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink” (Jn 6:53, 55). To grasp the full import of this statement we have to attend to the Greek of John’s text. The term that Jesus uses for “eat” here is not the expected phagein, invariably employed to suggest the way human beings eat. Rather he uses trogein, which is customarily employed to describe an animal’s manner of eating, something along the lines of “gnaw” or “munch.” In short, Jesus purposely emphasizes the very physicality to which the crowd was objecting.
St. Maria sopra Minerva, detail, Rome. WORD ON FIRE
We hear that in the wake of this exchange there was a mass defection among Jesus’s followers: “Then many of his disciples who were listening said, ‘This saying is hard; who can accept it?’ ” (Jn 6:60) and “As a result of this, many [of] his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him” (Jn 6:66). It is fascinating to note how often in the history of Christianity the teaching concerning Jesus’s presence in the Eucharist has been a church-dividing issue, a standing or falling point. Plaintively, Jesus asks his remaining circle of followers, the twelve: “Do you also want to leave?” (Jn 6:67). What follows is John’s parallel to Peter’s confession of faith at Caesarea-Philippi: “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God” (Jn 6:68–69). Speaking for the others, Peter confesses that what Jesus has said about the Eucharist is true, and he ties that confession to a declaration of Jesus’s sacred identity. From a Catholic point of view, this coming together of faith in the Incarnation and faith in the real presence is of great significance, for the Eucharist is nothing other than a sacramental extension of the Incarnation across space and time, the manner in which Christ continues to abide, in an embodied way, with his church. At this crucial moment in Jesus’s public ministry, Peter got this, and he spoke his conviction on behalf of the core group of Apostles. It is the Catholic faith that Peter, down through the ages, has continued to get it.
Inspired by this discourse in chapter 6 of John, and sustained by the teaching of the successors of Peter and the apostles, the Catholic Church has held for the past two millennia to the doctrine of the real presence. One of the most articulate defenders of the real presence was Thomas Aquinas. Thomas Aquinas loved the Eucharist. He celebrated Mass every morning, and immediately after his own Mass he would concelebrate at another. It is said that he rarely got through the Liturgy without weeping copious tears, so strongly did he identify with the Eucharistic mystery. It has also been reported that when he was struggling with a particularly thorny intellectual difficulty, he would go to the tabernacle, resting his head on it and begging for inspiration. Toward the end of his relatively short life (he died at forty-nine), Aquinas composed, as part of his Summa theologiae, a treatise on the Eucharist. When he had finished this remarkably thorough and complex text, he was still unconvinced that he had done justice to this great sacrament. Therefore he laid his treatise at the foot of the crucifix in the Dominican chapel in Naples and he prayed. A voice came from the cross: “Bene scripsisti de me, Thoma” (You have written well of me, Thomas), and then, “What would you have as a reward?” Aquinas said simply, “Nil nisi te” (nothing except you).
What do we find when we look at the treatise that Aquinas placed at the foot of the cross? We find that Aquinas analyzed the real presence under the technical rubric of “transubstantiation.” He argued that at the consecration the substance of the bread is changed into the substance of the body of Jesus, and that the substance of the wine is changed into the substance of the blood of Jesus, even as the accidents of bread and wine remain unchanged. If the terms “substance” and “accident” seem odd to us, we can translate them simply and accurately as “reality” and “appearance.” Aquinas taught that the deepest reality of the Eucharistic elements changes into the personal presence of Christ, even as their appearances remain the same. The distinction between reality and appearance is referenced in practically all of the great philosophies of the world. There are references to it in Hinduism, Buddhism, Platonism, and Kantianism, and it also corresponds to our commonsense take on things. We know that most of the time reality (what something is) and appearance (what something looks like) coincide, but we also know that there are exceptions to the rule. If you look up into the sky on a clear night you see what appear to be stars in their present configuration, but the astronomers tell us that you are actually seeing into the distant past, since it has taken thousands of years for the light of those stars to reach your eyes. You are not looking at the stars that are there, but rather at the stars that were there: appearance and reality, in this case, divide. Or suppose you meet a person who makes a very poor first impression and you conclude that he is just not a likable man. But someone who knows him much better, who has watched him under a variety of circumstances and across many years, corrects you: “I know he can seem that way, but he really isn’t.” Once again, appearance and reality do not coincide, and the noncoincidence is pointed out by someone who has more experience than you do. Something very similar is at play in regard to the Eucharist.
But still how does Aquinas explain the change? Like Ambrose of Milan, Aquinas saw the change as a consequence of the power of Jesus’s words: “this is my body” and “this is the cup of my blood.” As the language philosophers of the twentieth century have helped us to see, not only are words descriptive; they can also be, under certain circumstances, transformative: they can change the way things are. If someone walked up to you at a party and said, “You’re under arrest,” you would assume that he was making a joke or was deluded. But if a properly deputized and uniformed officer of the law told you that you were under arrest, you would be, in point of fact, under arrest, his words having effected what they enunciated. Or suppose you are watching a game from third-base box seats at Wrigley Field. One of the Cubs comes around second base and slides into third. You shout, “Safe!” Your exclamation might express your conviction and might even be an accurate assessment of the play, but it wouldn’t affect reality at all. But standing right in front of you is a properly certified umpire of the National League, and he gestures vigorously with his right arm and shouts, “Out!” Whether you or the player who slid into third like it or not, the unfortunate Cub is in fact out. The word of that umpire has changed the reality of the game.
Crucifix, Pantheon, Rome. WORD ON FIRE
But those are only puny human words. Consider the divine Word. In the Bible, God creates the whole of the universe through the power of his word: “Let there be light,” says the Lord, “and there was light” (Gn 1:3). The prophet Isaiah speaks for Yahweh and says, “For just as from the heavens the rain and snow come down and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it fertile and fruitful … So shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; It shall not return to me void, but shall do my will, achieving the end for which I sent it” (Is 55:10–11). God’s speech does not so much describe the world as create it and constitute it. In the first chapter I insisted that Jesus is not simply one spiritual teacher among many but the Son of God, the very Logos of God, the Word by which the universe was made. Therefore what Jesus says is “Lazarus, come out!” (Jn 11:43), and he came out; “Little girl, I say to you, arise!” (Mk 5:41), and she got up; “Child, your sins are forgiven” (Mk 2:5), and they are forgiven. The night before he died, Jesus took bread and said, “This is my body, which will be given for you” (Lk 22:19). In the same way, after the meal, he took the cup and said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which will be shed for you” (Lk 22:20). Since Jesus’s word is the divine Word, it is not merely descriptive but transformative. It creates, sustains, and changes reality at the most fundamental level. When at the consecration the priest moves into the mode of first-person quotation, he is not speaking in his own person but in the person of Jesus—and that’s why those words change the elements.
Notre Dame Cathedral, interior, Paris. WORD ON FIRE
At the very beginning of her career, Flannery O’Connor, who would develop into one of the greatest Catholic writers of fiction in the twentieth century, sat down to dinner with Mary McCarthy and a group of other New York intellectuals. The young Flannery, clearly the junior member of this sophisticated circle, was overwhelmed and barely said a word all evening. McCarthy, a former Catholic, trying to draw O’Connor out, made a few nice remarks about the Eucharist, commenting that it was a very powerful symbol. Flannery looked up and in a shaky voice said, “Well, if it’s only a symbol, I say to hell with it.” I can’t imagine a better summary of the Catholic doctrine of the real presence.
COMMUNION AND SENDING FORTH
At the close of the Eucharistic prayer, Jesus, who is really present under the forms of bread and wine, is offered as a living sacrifice to the Father. Lifting up the elements, the priest prays, “Through him, and with him, and in him, O God almighty Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor is yours for ever and ever.” At this moment the Catholic priest is in the true holy of holies, and what he does is analogous to what the high priest did in the Temple on the Day of Atonement. In ancient times the Jewish priest would enter the holy of holies, which was symbolic of the heavenly realm, and there he would sacrifice an animal to Yahweh on behalf of all the people. Then he would sprinkle some of the blood around the interior of the sanctuary, and the rest he would bring out in a bowl and sprinkle on the people, sealing thereby a kind of blood bond between God and the nation. The Catholic priest, at the climax of the Mass, offers to the Father not the blood of bulls and goats but the Blood of Christ beyond all price. Since the Father has no need of anything, that sacrifice redounds completely to our benefit.
The priest and the other Eucharistic ministers then come down out of the sanctuary, carrying Christ’s Body in the Host and his Blood in chalices and offering it as food and drink for the people. By this act they establish a blood fellowship between God and his people that is, in its intensity, beyond anything dreamed of by the Temple priests of old. We recall Paul’s words to the Corinthians: “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation [a koinonia, or a communion] in the blood of Christ?” (1 Cor 10:16). If our troubles began with a bad meal—seizing at the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—our redemption is affected through a properly constituted meal, God feeding his people with his own Body and Blood.
After the congregation has received communion and given thanks, they are blessed and sent forth. The priest says, “Go forth, the Mass is ended.” It has been said that after the words of consecration these are the most sacred words of the entire Mass. Now that the people have gathered as one family, heard the word of God, professed their faith, prayed for one another, offered sacrifice to the Father, and received the Body and Blood of Jesus, the faithful are, at least in principle, more properly formed and hence ready to go out to effect the transformation of the world. The imagery of Noah’s ark that we explored in an earlier chapter is apposite here, for the Liturgy is the preservation of the form of life that God desires for his people. Just as Noah opened the windows and portal of the ark in order to let the life out, so the priest dismisses the people, scattering them like seed into the fallen world.
In his meditations on the story of the visit of the Magi, Archbishop Fulton Sheen indicated that the three kings, having traversed a great distance, having withstood opposition from King Herod, having found the baby, having opened their treasures for him, and finally, “having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed for their country by another way” (Mt 2:12). Of course they did, Sheen concluded, “for no one comes to Christ and goes back the same way he came!” The liturgy is the privileged communion with the Lord; it is the source and summit of the Christian life. And therefore those who participate in it never leave unchanged; they never go back the same way they came.
St. Patrick’s Cathedral, interior, New York. WORD ON FIRE