Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

Hierothee suggested I do a post on my research about the connection of sacrifice to consumption.  This is very difficult to do in the space of a standard post so this will necessarily be a broad sketch of what one day may be a much more compelling (I hope) manuscript.

I suppose the place to start is with John Paul’s Trinitarian anthropology.  Man is made in the image of a Communion of Persons.  He explains this Communion, starting from traditional Processional theology, in terms of total self-gift.  Communion is total self-gift.  This total self-gift  is thereby the archetype for the human person in his relationships.

The human person is a hylomorphic entity; that is, a unity comprised of a spiritual soul and a material body.  Man exists at once,  in the realm of the spiritual and the animal.  As a spiritual being man shares in the capacity for communion by use of his rational faculties, intellect and will.  These faculties give him he capacity for total self-gift, for communion.

Animals also, in some way, must reflect God’s perfection.  As fundamental as communion is to God’s being, one might expect that there should be some way in which sub-personal animals participate in communion.  Certainly sub-personal beings do not have the rational faculties necessary for the communion of gift.  They do however, experience a sort of communion in which they join themselves to something of a lower nature (hopefully).  However, this union is through annihilating the lower nature and raising it into a higher nature.  They become one with it, though this is a defective communion because the “other” has lost its being.

Man lives in both of these dimensions.  He experiences both this spiritual communion of persons–most perfectly when the giving accords with the archetype, that is total, disinterested self-gift.  He also experiences the communion of consumption when he eats…though I would argue he can consume in other ways…when he treats another person as a means rather than an end…but this requires more discussion than we have space for.

Man now exists in a deficient condition; he is fallen.  It is very interesting to look at the third book of Genesis and the story of the fall in light of the above discussion.  The mythic (this does not mean untrue of course) imagery shows our first parents with the task of total self-gift–that is, to give themselves in trust and thanksgiving to God, very much the way that John Paul describes the second Procession of the Son.  There is a detailed discussion of the theology of creation in relation to the Son and the second Procession which should be inserted here but neither is there space for that so this might seem less compelling than it should be, but the support will have to wait a longer work.

The Genesis imagery of the fall indicates that the instead of achieving communion through this act of total-self gift, they instead chose consumption.  I would argue that whatever the act of rebellion might have actually been, the choice of the consumption imagery is significant.  It suggests that consumption–communion on man’s terms rather than God’s terms–is to be a perennial problem.  In fact, consumption now often masquerades as communion.  I believe that this is the anthropology behind what we know as “comfort foods” which are standard recourse for many of us, particularly when we have trouble with relationships of communion.

Man’s fallen state means that his capacity for love takes upon itself, potentially a bitter aspect.  It is now the case that one has to die in different ways, when one loves.  In the very least, he must die to himself and his selfish inclinations if he is to love the other for the other’s sake.  This is a type of sacrifice.  In fact, the challenge to love disinterestedly requires varying degrees of sacrifice.  Sacrifice is to give of yourself for the sake of the other to the point that you experience loss in some manner or another.  This is ultimately what the divine Processions are…though it may not be appropriate to use the term sacrifice for the divine Procession because of the attendant connotation of loss in sacrifice and there is no loss in the divine Communion.

However, the remedy to the fall, in which man’s failure to emulate the second Procession, will take on the proper meaning of the term sacrifice.  The Son Incarnate will freely choose to manifest temporally what He does eternally.  He will, in love, trust and thanksgiving, return to the Father all that the Father has given Him…including His human life.  This Sacrifice on the cross will restore the conditions of possibility for communion, but interestingly enough, it does so in a way the redeems the consumption by which man’s initial communion was lost.

Of course we know well the fact that the Cross draws together the eternal with the temporal.  It draws into itself the last Passover seder in the upper room before Christ’s Passion, as He transforms this  seder into the New Testament Passover–the Sacrifice of the Mass.  The Cross also brings forth the economic manifestation of the second Procession, that is Pentecost–in an analogous way in the first Procession brings about the second.

This one Paschal act, beginning with the Incarnation and ending with the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, is liturgically made present in the Sacrifice of the Mass.  The Mass re-presents the Sacrifice of the Cross through the memorial enactment of the New Testament Passover proleptically celebrated in the Upper Room.   It culminates in an efficacious symbol of communion which looks very much like animal consumption–we call it Holy Communion.

The consumption in the Garden of Eden which destroyed man’s communion with God  is now redeemed by the Son.  The Son, who in an act of total self-gift reflective of His eternal gift, continually gives up His Body and Blood in every Mass celebrated throughout the ages, that through an animal act of consumption the faithful are restored by this life-giving communion with the Son and thereby, inserted into Trinitarian Communion.

In a hylomorphic act of love which eclipses Aristotle’s greatest thoughts, both aspects of the human person, animal and spiritual, are incorporated during this divinizing rite we call Holy Communion.  The human person is inserted into the hypostatic order giving him entrance into Trinitarian life when he consumes the Flesh of the Son of Man and drinks His Blood…he now truly has life in him.

Consumption has been redeemed and is immutably implicated in spiritual communion.  This doesn’t mean that consumption no longer masquerades as communion; it does.

It does mean though, that when this masquerading does lead to sin, it is now the source of its own ultimate undoing…because where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more.  The love revealed and effected on the Cross, is poured out in time via the mediation of the Sacrifice of the Mass, restoring communion where souls choose to turn again to God.  Sacrifice has redeemed consumption and made it the material cause of communion.

Edward Oakes has a post up at First Things about Rene Girard. There has been much talk about Girard at First Things lately, as Oakes himself notes, but as well at National Review, where Peter Robinson has an interview up (but which I was unable to find in a quick search). It has inspired me to post a stinging criticism of Girard’s theory of the origin of religious sacrifice taken from Louis Bouyer (Cosmos: The World and the Glory of God, 1988, p. 238, n. 14). In explaining the tenor of the following quotation, I should point out that Bouyer had a strong aversion to theories of the necessary evolution of a religionless Christianity, such as one could find in Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann, and he seems to have seen Girard as a proponent of this sort of thinking. In other words, anathema to him were those who think that Christianity is necessarily secularizing and that Christ’s sacrifice put an end to religion.  Also, he had a strong aversion to annihilationist theories of sacrifice. Sacrifice, he held, is divine self-gift to humanity in which we are ourselves incorporated and made fully self-gift, and it is consummated in the sacred meal, wherein our being comes to fulfillment. Sacrifice is not consummated in the putting to death of a sacrificial victim. The sacred meal is the fundamental activity of man, and the pre-Christian religions pre-figured the Christian Eucharist in this regard, without ever having had access to a truly efficacious communion with deity:

The ideas developed by Rene Girard on the nature of sacrifice have recently created a considerable stir in learned circles. But his brilliant speculations overlook virtually all the contributions made in the last hundred years on this undeniably fundamental aspect of religion. Which may be why he considers supremely indicative of the meaning of sacrifice the apotropaic rites now recognized by all specialists as never having been looked upon as sacrifices by those who practiced these rituals. Quite simply, scapegoats and all variations on the theme, far from ever being considered as sacrifices to God, were always sent to the devil! On the materiality of sacrifices — the necessary starting point before any attempt to unravel their meaning — one may refer to works such as R.K. Yerkes’s Sacrifice in Greek and Roman Religions and in Primitive Judaism. This kind of factual study inevitably leads to a firm conclusion: it is not the killing which determines sacrifice, even when the victim is put to death, which is far from always being the case (see in this respect E.O. James, Origins of Sacrifice, London, 1953, pp. 256 ff.). Neither is its nature established by the oblation to the divinity. Instead, a sacrifice is a meal, but a meal considered as sacred because the divinity partakes of it, whether the sacrifice is exlusively intended for the deity (as in the holocaust), whether priests alone also take part (as in the Hebrew sacrifices for the expiation of sins), or finally whether the entire people participate with them, as in the sacrifice of communion. Or indeed in the Passover, and this seems to have been a characteristic of the very earliest sacrifices, in which all is consumed by the participants, with no role clearly reserved for the divinity.

This explains why, in the most ancient mythic expression of their significance, sacrifices are far from appearing as tremulous attempts of terrified humans to placate a bloodthirsty divinity through some kind of ritual murder. Instead, the gods themselves, acting either directly or through kings deemed to embody or represent them, are the initiators of sacrifices, and thereby show themselves as the quintessential benefactors of mankind, and more particularly the sources of human life in that which maintains it (nourishment) and produces it (sexuality). The idea of sacrifice as a ritual murder is nothing but the fabrication of self-styled scholars, who thus prove that they belong with the pathetic dupes who persist in taking seriously the alleged Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

I thought that I would add a bit to David’s great post on the influence of Saul Alinsky on the CCHD. The whole question opens up profound problems in regard to the history of the conciliar Church in the U.S., for Alinsky’s radicalism is very closely insinuated in the Church of that time and place. But the question is much larger than that, for Alinsky’s radicalism was favored by one of the great heroes of modern Catholic thought: Jacques Maritain. 

It is particularly troubling to consider the spiritual sympathy between Alinsky, a Jewish agnostic/atheist, who was a vulgar ruffian and an agitator of the lowest sort, with Maritain, whom many have assumed to have been a personal bastion of orthodoxy and a lock-step Thomist (do you have an excuse for this, Ralph McInerny?). Maritain was, of course, a close friend and confidant of Garrigou-Lagrange, whom Lefebvrists to this day revere and honor as the one and only twentieth century Catholic theologian worth his salt, and a Catholic philosopher whose idea of a fully Christian, political humanism — an “integral humanism,” as he called it — had a profound effect on the post-conciliar papacy. Indeed, in Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict XVI makes copious use of this expression, which was greatly favored by Paul VI, and which derives ultimately from the pen of Maritain. Maritain is also a favorite, it should be pointed out, of the so-called “neo-conservative” Catholics Michael Novak and George Weigel.

It is instructive to recount a pertinent section from Jean-Luc Barre’s biography of Jacques and Raissa Maritain: Beggars for Heaven, which was a best-seller in France (it went through several printings in the mid ’90s) and which was translated into English by Bernard E. Doering, who himself wrote a book on the close relationship of Maritain with Alinsky entitled The Philosopher and the Provocateur.

Barre points out that Maritain was among the first continental Catholics to express an appreciation for the idea of democratic America, including its principled separation of Church and State, and it is in the context of this love for the “American idea” that Maritain’s relationship with Alinsky is perhaps best understood.

Maritain considered Alinsky to be one of his closest friends, “an indomitable and dreaded organizer of ‘People’s Organizations’ and an anti-racist leader whose methods are as efficacious as they are unorthodox” (quoted from Maritain by Barre on p. 402).

Maritain had met Alinsky during the Second World War and was immediately taken with his “savvy” work in the cause of economic and social justice. Barre describes their mutual sympathy as founded on a profound “shared taste for subversion and irreverence…and a similar confidence in the people” (403). It should be remembered that, on the one hand, Maritain was greatly distrusted by many Church hierarchs prior to the council as a “Marxist.” Indeed, in visiting America, he could find little support among the hiearchy, and in the universities he could find even less support among the authorities, because there was, even in those days, a global antipathy to Thomism. This made him, in Barre’s words, a “desparado,” and a kindred spirit to Alinsky. On the other hand, Maritain was himself, like Alinsky, committed to what he took to be the “democratic ideal” that everyone should be free to question and challenge authority. How interesting, then, that Maritain, who had one great friend in the hierarchy in Garrigou-Lagrange, should play a role in the banishment of “la nouvelle theologie” prior to the council.

And did Saul Alinsky ever look up to Maritain! This is, I suppose, a reminder of the attractive character that the life of grace imparts to the human soul, an attractiveness so compelling that even hardened atheists recognize its appeal. In saying this, I should point out that I would not in any way, in recounting this story, wish to impugn Maritain’s holiness. At any rate, Alinsky was, to quote Barre, a “personage who was known for being aggresive and rude [but] was nothing but modesty and deference toward the intellectual who had come from France and of whom he asked one day, with unexpected timidity, for a signature on a photograph of Maritain” (403).

Indeed, Alinsky loved Maritain as a father. He told Maritain, in seeking to explain his desire for Maritain’s autograph, that he was not prone to idol worship: “…[but] what I am trying to say is that a picture of you with some personal statement on it would be one of my most cherished possessions. There I have said it” (403). Alinsky even dedicated his now-infamous Rules for Radicals to Maritain, with the inscription: “To my spiritual father and the man I love, from his prodigal and wayward son” (403).

Maritain seems to have seen in Alinsky’s work the possibility of imprinting the Christian ideal on movements for social justice and of shaping the creative energy of contemporary history. In a point of particular sympathy, Maritain saw in Alinsky’s community organizations the advent of “mediating structures” between the individual and the State that could buffer the individual from domination by the State.

But herein lies the troubling question of Maritain’s Catholic alliance with Alinsky, which would serve as a model for the post-conciliar Church in the U.S. and which should call the whole socio-political strategy of the post-conciliar Church in America into question. How could Maritain not have seen that Alinsky’s community organizations, his “buffers,” were in fact ordered to becoming functionaries of the State, its repressive arms of authority? Like all American agitators whose work operates in the trajectory of Marx’s nihilism, Alinsky awaited the day when a fully socialist political power would reign in the nation’s capitol. That day has now come, of course, as Saul Alinsky’s spiritual grandchild, and his heir to control of the community organizations in Chicago, Barack Hussein Obama, has now ascended to the presidency of the United States. Community organizations and “buffers,” such as SEIU, have now become potential instruments of governmental coercion.

Maritain could not see that Alinsky’s “community organizations” were always meant to be substitute churches which were ordered by their very essence to the derogation of the proper authority of the most important of the natural and supernatural mediating societies, namely, the natural family and the Catholic Church. Maritain could only see in Alinsky’s work the coming-into-being of new guilds, along the lines of the medieval guilds, that could put a check on the greed and radical individualism that underlies so much of the practice of free market capitalism. He thought that these organizations could embody the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, so that the grave social injustices of capitalism could be held in control without tyranical federal intervention. But he failed to realize that these organizations were in fact meant by Alinsky to be stepping-stones to the advent of, and eventual workers for, a centralized power structure that would coercively bring about his dreary, ugly, a-religious concept of social justice. Maritain seems to have failed, in other words, to recognize that it is perilous indeed to make common cause with those who have rejected the religious essence of man. Social justice without a truly Christian, religious foundation is a perversion of social justice.

And Maritain’s naivete in this regard is nothing if not representative of the attitude of most of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in the post-conciliar age. Perhaps the pre-conciliar hierarchy exercised prudence in keeping its distance from Maritain’s social “do-goodism,” which eventually would aid and abet those forces in society that seek the destruction of the natural family and of the authority and freedom of the Church.

So, what are we to make of this alliance between Maritain and Alinsky? In whose service was it formed?

I would like to end this brief post with a further question and a thought: If Barack Obama is Alinsky’s spiritual grandchild, does that make him in some twisted sense Maritain’s spiritual great-grandchild? The Catholic inspiration of history is so subtle that it often eludes our grasp, and sometimes, upon grasping its influence, we might very well think it better to have remained ignorant of it!