Per Caritatem

As Robert Sokolowski explains in his book, Eucharistic Presence:  A Study in the Theology of Disclosure, in the Eucharist past and future are made present.  That is, past events of salvation history such as the Jewish Passover, but especially the Christ-event and future eschatological realities are brought together.  Sokolowski then offers a beautiful reflection on our union with Christ in death.

[W]e in the Eucharist anticipate our own death as to be joined to the death of Jesus.  Our death becomes part of the divine mystery, part of the great saving actions of God, because it can be identified with the sacrificial death of Christ.  [...]  The celebrations of the Eucharist at which we assist are like so many rehearsals of the one transition, the one exodus that is reserved for each of us, the one offering in which we no longer sacramentally but bodily participate in the death of the Lord.  As Jesus acted toward the Father in his death, so we are enabled to make our death an act before God, an act in which life is changed, not taken away. [...] Our death, which is the horizon marking off the edge of our life, becomes a particular image of the final restoration of all things in Christ, an image of the death of things that is now to be understood as a transition into the kingdom of God.  The Eucharist thus presents a double future to each of us as we participate in it:  it presents our own entrance into the death and Resurrection of Jesus, and it presents the more remote setting in which everything will be restored in the kingdom of God.

These enactments of past are future are all woven into the Eucharist we celebrate in the present.  The celebration of the Eucharist is surrounded by temporal ripples through which past and future things are refracted.  The Eucharist does not give us merely images or signs of what is past and future; it presents these things as past and as future to us now. The Eucharist involves memory and anticipation, but it does not involve them as mere psychological states; rather, it reenacts and preenacts things God has done and will do  (104-5).

Sokolowski, a few pages later, says that the Eucharist is from one perspective something that takes place in time.  That is, it takes time to celebrate it; yet, “it also overcomes time as it reenacts an event that took place at another time.  In doing this, the Eucharist calls time into question.  It claims to go beyond time and thereby indicates that time and its succession are not ultimate.  It makes time to be an image; it makes succession to be a representation.  Thus the Eucharist, in its reenactment of the past and anticipation of the future, also enacts for us the context that encloses past, future, and present:  it enacts the eternal life of the God who could be all that he is, in undiminished goodness and greatness, even if the world and its time were not [!].  The Eucharist engages, and perpetually reminds us of, the Christian distinction between the world and God” (107).

According to Nietzsche in his essay, “On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense,”[1] what we take to be knowledge involves two metaphors.  Here metaphor is understood in a broad sense, namely, as transference.  First, we have a transfer that occurs from a nerve stimulus caused by the external world, which is then translated into an image.  Secondly, that image is then transferred into a sound, that is, it becomes language.  Nietzsche’s point is that we construct our knowledge at a distance from (here at least two steps) the flow of life.  For example, when I look out the window and see a tree, a series of brain and nerve activities occurs, but these neural stimulations bear no intrinsic similarities to the tree “out there.”  Thus, we have the first metaphoric-ization or transference.   Then, having received this stimuli, I translate this information into a word, into language, which provides the second transference. From this picture, Nietzsche concludes that there is no natural connection between what is perceived in the external world and knowledge.  Rather, the relation between what is out there and my claims to know it is purely conventional.  According to Nietzsche, language is not a reflection of essences.    Our knowledge does not reflect the deep structures of reality; rather, it is a mere human construct.

Failure to recognize this state of affairs is, for Nietzsche, one of the central problems with the scientist or rational human being in contrast with the artist or intuitive person. That is, the scientist, who, of course, also constructs metaphors, takes his metaphors to be the truth, the way things really are.  According to Nietzsche, the scientist takes his metaphors too seriously; he ossifies them, whereas the artist recognizes their fluidity and transiency.  To be sure, these metaphors do serve practical and pragmatic purposes.  They help us to affirm ourselves and aid in our self-preservation to some degree.  However, when we forget about their provisional nature, we come to believe that our conceptual edifices are immovable.  When this occurs, the metaphors harden, they ossify-rather, we ossify them, and turn them into columbaria.   (A columbarium is a Roman vault for funeral urns!)  So the rational human being has lost touch with the metaphorical origins of human knowledge and lives his life constructing conceptual systems that display “the regularity of a Roman columbarium” (112).  According to Nietzsche, our (rationalistic) tendency to forget the earthy, metaphorical rootedness of human knowledge, moves us to increasing levels of abstraction-abstractions which we then take to be reality.  These systems of abstractions are likened to a columbarium; they are life-denying and lead to death.  (By the way, I think his critique of the scientist also applies to the philosopher and the theologian).

Clearly, Nietzsche values the flow of life and wants us to remain close to our, so to speak, humble origins.  His warnings against taking our conceptual edifices to be the reality and the one and only way to truthfully describe and explain the world are compelling and worthy of our reflection.  Part of his critique also involves cautioning against pride and calling us to acknowledge our finitude-two points that Christians ought to take seriously.  Yet, as a Christian, there are certain matters, which are central to the Christian narrative and understanding of reality, which Nietzsche fails to consider.  For example, according to the Christian tradition, the created order is now not as it originally was.  In fact, St. Paul, employing a number of earthy metaphors, tells us that creation has been subjected to futility and eagerly awaits its eschatological renewal.

The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.  We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.  For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience (NRSV, Rom 8:19-25).

So there is a sense in which, for the Christian, life and the world as now experienced involves a struggle against the natural world-a natural world, which groans and awaits a final release from its dislocation and disintegration.  In other words, something more than a return to the flow of life or even a recognition of the metaphorical origins of knowledge is needed to overcome the prideful tendencies of which Nietzsche speaks.  According to the Christian narrative, a kind of cosmic redemption is needed-a redemption that not only saves us from our pride but also transforms and renews the present state of creation itself.  This is of course precisely what St. Paul claims Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection accomplished and is accomplishing.  St. Paul doesn’t deny that our life in-between Christ’s advents is a life of eschatological tension both within ourselves and with creation as a whole.

In addition to St. Paul’s use of metaphors, we should also consider the use of metaphor and mythical language in the Genesis creation account.  For example, the author of Genesis speaks of a solid dome upon which fixed stars hang (the raqia).  This mythical description, of course, doesn’t square with contemporary science and our current understanding of the sky, stars etc.  Nonetheless, God chose to condescend to the then-current conceptual categories and to use this mythical language to speak of his creation, as his point was not to give us a scientific account of the universe but to proclaim himself as the Creator.  So perhaps we could say that God himself is more like the artist, who plays with metaphor and recognizes its inherent limitations.  Yet, he is unlike the artist (at least the artist in Nietzsche’s description) in that he is in fact trying to teach us something about reality itself, the reality that he himself brought into being and the reality which he is.

Lastly, perhaps participating in liturgical life provides a way to properly acknowledge our finitude and to combat modernity’s “columbaric” tendencies which Nietzsche so aptly describes.  For example, in the Ash Wednesday liturgy of the Anglican/Episcopal Church, as the priest marks our foreheads with ashes, s/he says, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” (Of course, for those in Christ, there’s more to story. We, who are in Christ, shall be resurrected in glorified bodies).  In addition, participation in the Eucharist reminds us through humble material means (bread and wine) of our need for spiritual nourishment, that is, our need to be nourished by Christ’s resurrection life. Confession of sin reminds us of our weakness, our proclivity to idolatry and our continual, moment-by-moment need for God’s grace and forgiveness.  The preaching of the word keeps us rooted in the Christian story and challenges us to submit to God’s, as it were, “interpretation” of reality.

How fitting on this Easter Sunday to allow Nietzsche to teach us about the power and relevance of the Christ-event.  Whether ancient, stone columbariua or modern, conceptual columbaria, neither are able to contain Christus Victor.  He is risen!  He is risen indeed!

Notes

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[1] All citations are taken from an anthology edited by Lawrence E. Cahoone, From Modernism to Postmodernism:  An Expanded Anthology, 2^nd edition, (Wiley-Blackwell, 2003).

Jeremy Begbie, in his book, Resounding Truth:  Christian Wisdom in the World of Music, presents a nice definition of theology, viz., theology is “the disciplined thinking and rethinking of the Christian gospel for the sake of fostering a wisdom that is nourished by, and nourishes, the church in its worship and mission to the world” (p. 19).  Begbie then begins to unpack each part of his definition.  With regard to “disciplined thinking and rethinking,” Begbie emphasizes that theology involves intellectual effort; however, the intellectual activity in view is not a kind of detached, merely cerebral endeavor that fails to affect our willing and acting. Rather, this theological thinking touches every aspect of our humanity and is “inextricably bound up with story (the narrative shape of faith), symbols of various sorts (such as the sacraments), and practical action in the world” (p. 19).  Second, by “of the Christian gospel,” Begbie means “the announcement that in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Triune Creator, the God of Israel, has acted decisively to reconcile the world to himself.  Here is theology’s raison d’être and its loadstar-theology is not a free-floating speculation, but it is disciplined by this gospel and seeks to interpret the whole of reality from this center” (p. 20).  The theologian then ultimately has to answer to his God-a God who is living and personal and actively engaged in the lives of his creatures.  Given that the heart of Christian faith centers on union with the Father through the Son by way of the Holy Spirit, true Christian theology then cannot be done apart from prayer, worship, and submission to Scripture.  Third, by “for the sake of fostering a wisdom,” Begbie wants to stress the practical orientation of theology. Here Begbie appeals to the wisdom literature of the Bible in which to become wise “means being able to discern what is going on in specific, down-to-earth situations and to judge what it is right to say and do in those situations in a way that is faithful and true to God” (p. 20).  Lastly, with the phrase, “nourished by, and nourishes, the church in its worship and mission to the world,” Begbie speaks to the importance of the communal dimension and ecclesial context of theology.    ”Theology that seeks a wisdom true to gospel, [...] cannot take flight from this community [the visible Church]-fallen, compromised and shabby as it is and always has been. [...] Theology’s first calling, I would contend, is to help build up the people of God, to shape the Christian community for the sake of its worship and mission to the world” (pp. 20-21).  

My friends at the Church and Postmodern Culture Blog recently posted my short and very reader-friendly article entitled, “Embodied Human Beings and Our Gravitation Towards Ceremony and Ritual.”  Please join the conversation if you are so inclined.