The Eucharist in Church history

In a 1955 letter to her friend Betty Hester, the American writer Flannery O’Connor described a dinner party she had attended some years earlier.

Conversation had eventually turned to the Eucharist, which O’Connor’s host, who had left the Church in her teens, said that she had come to think of as a symbol, and a fairly good one at that. “Well,” said O’Connor in a shaky voice, breaking the silence that had marked her evening, “if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.”


Unfortunately, if last week’s Ipsos MRBI survey for the Irish Times is to be believed, 62 pc of Irish Catholics share O’Connor’s host’s view that the Eucharist merely represents the body and blood of Christ.

Richard Dawkins’ branding of all such Catholics as dishonest should be recognised as the ignorant smear that it is, given that this is less likely to be the fruit of considered dissent than poor catechesis and human weakness, but the fact remains that in this respect it seems the majority of Irish Catholics are out of step with the Church throughout time.

The Eucharist, described by the Second Vatican Council as “the source and summit of Christian life”, has always been central to the Church’s existence.

Acts 2:46 describes how the early Jerusalem Church celebrated the Eucharist daily, meeting at the Temple for preaching and prayer, but breaking bread in their own homes rather than attending the Temple sacrifices.

Poor translations sometimes make it seem as though the phrase “breaking bread” is just another way of saying that the early Christians ate together, but the original Greek text is unambiguous in its distinction between liturgy and lunch.

Early Church
The first Christians’ devotion to the Eucharist shouldn’t surprise us. Luke 22:19 and 1 Corinthians 11:24-5 record how at the Last Supper Jesus commanded them to celebrate the Eucharist in remembrance of him, while at John 6 Jesus repeatedly describes himself as the bread of life, clearly stating “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.”

It might be tempting to interpret this passage in a symbolic or spiritual way, but the Greek text simply doesn’t allow this.

The passage describes the listening crowd being horrified at Jesus’ words, and asking him to clarify them; he did so by making his language more graphic, emphasising the reality of what he was asking his followers to do by replacing the word phagein – to eat – with the rather more tactile word trogein – to munch, or gnaw, or chew.

Significantly too, the word the passage uses for “flesh” – sarx – is used on six other occasions in John, each time as something emblematic of the physical rather than the spiritual world, beginning with the declaration that “the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us”.

Intolerable teaching
Many disciples left after this, finding Jesus’ teaching intolerable, while those who remained did so in apparent confusion.

It wasn’t until after the Last Supper that the meaning of Jesus’ words became clear and the Eucharist was embraced as a real participation in the body and blood of Christ, such that, as Paul put it in 1 Corinthians 10:27, “Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord.”

The disciples’ own disciples took this to heart, and it seems clear from the writings of St Ignatius of Antioch – a pupil of John, and bishop of the city where Christians first bore that name – that an acceptance of the Eucharist as Christ’s body and blood was the hallmark of orthodox Christianity before the end of the first Christian century.

On his way under armed guard to Rome, where he was to be martyred, he wrote a series of letters to churches including one in which he said that those Gnostics who believed that Jesus’ body was but an illusion were easily identifiable:

“They even absent themselves from the Eucharist and the public prayers, because they will not admit that the Eucharist is the self-same body of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, and which the Father in his goodness raised up again.”

Worship
St Justin Martyr, writing a few decades later in the middle of the second century, gives us the earliest detailed description of Christian worship: the main Christian ceremony took place on Sundays and had two parts: a liturgy of the word with readings from the scriptures and a sermon, and then a liturgy of the Eucharist, in which bread and wine were offered up, blessed, and distributed.

Explaining mainstream Christianity to the Roman emperor, he describes the Eucharist as follows:

“For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these... the food which is blessed by the power of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.”

The Eucharist was so central to early Christianity that it was common for the Church’s Roman persecutors, who scorned that which they couldn’t understand, to describe Christians as cannibals – as well as incestuous atheists!

The early Church was so convinced of the reality of the Eucharist, that it wasn’t even deemed necessary to refer to the Eucharist in the Nicene creed; it simply went without saying that during Mass the Eucharistic elements would become the body and blood of Christ.

Of course, it was obvious that they didn’t appear to change, but the Church was unanimous that Christ’s word was to be trusted.

Metaphorical?
It was not until the ninth century that speculation began about how this change took place.

These debates attracted little attention at the time, but almost two hundred years later n archdeacon named Berengar of Tours began to wonder whether the Eucharistic change was merely spiritual or even metaphorical.

Berengar’s theories were recognised as contrary to the historical teaching of the Church, and were condemned, but further speculation continued and so the Church gradually embraced the idea that “transubstantiation” was the best way of explaining the Eucharistic change.

The language of transubstantiation may have been a medieval innovation, but the idea behind it – that the bread and wine literally change to the body and blood of Christ – stretched back to the foundation of the Church.

If it is true that only a quarter of Irish Catholics really believe that this happens at the Mass, it would seem that the International Eucharistic Congress isn’t happening a moment too soon.

We need to be reminded of what unites us with our fellow Christians throughout the world and throughout time.


-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 14 June 2012.

For a Friend

I've been reading a fair few short stories lately, and reading about them too -- trying to see behind the curtain, if you like, to understand what was in their authors' minds when writing them. It's given me a fine excuse to pore once more over The Habit of Being, that wonderful collection of Flannery O'Connor's letters. Here's one, just as a taster: her very first letter to Betty Hester.

Milledgeville

20 July 1955

Dear Miss A.,

I am very pleased to have your letter. Perhaps it is even more startling to me to find someone who recognizes my work for what I try to make it than it is for you to find a God-conscious writer near at hand. The distance is 87 miles but I feel the spiritual distance is shorter.

I write the way I do because (not though) I am a Catholic. This is a fact and nothing covers it like the bald statement. However, I am a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness, that thing Jung describes as unhistorical, solitary, and guilty. To possess this within the Church is to bear a burden, the necessary burden for the conscious Catholic. It's to feel the contemporary situation at the ultimate level. I think the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it. This may explain the lack of bitterness in the stories.

The notice in the New Yorker was not only moronic, it was unsigned. It was a case in which it is easy to see that the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat on them. This is a generation of wingless chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead.

I am mighty tired of reading reviews that call "A Good Man" brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. I believe that there are many rough beasts now slouching towards Bethlehem to be born and that I have reported the progress of a few of them, and when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.

You were very kind to wrote me and the measure of my appreciation must be to ask you to write me again. I would like to know who this is who understands my stories.

Yours sincerely,

The one frustrating thing about O'Connor's letters to Hester The Habit of Being is that it's just half of a conversation. Although the two didn't meet until a year after they first wrote to each other, they became close friends, and Hester wrote O'Connor hundreds of letters. Many of the letters between the two, not included in The Habit of Being, were made public in 2007. I have no idea of Hester's own letters to O'Connor were among them, or have survived in any sense.

Queen and Country

On Tuesday 15 May, the Norwegian Parliament voted to introduce a constitutional amendment to disestablish the Lutheran state church of Norway. Those besotted with outdated ideas of historical “progress” might cheer such a development, but on the same day in England the BBC published the result of a ComRes poll which found that 79 per cent of people believe Queen Elizabeth II has an important faith role, with 73 per cent believing that she should remain Supreme Governor of the Church of England and retain her title of “Defender of the Faith”.

The monarchy’s not lacked good publicity of late. After sixty years on the throne, the Queen’s more than earned her place with Alan Bennett and Judi Dench as a “national treasure”, and last year’s trip to Ireland won over many of her more sceptical Irish subjects. Prince William’s April 2011 wedding, at which Richard Chartres, the Anglican archbishop of London, preached a sermon that may have been heard by more people than any other in history, was an occasion for national celebration that seemed to go far beyond cynical opportunism at an extraordinary public holiday. And, of course, the public image of the monarchy could hardly have been better served than by 2010’s Oscar-winning film The King’s Speech.

One of the film’s most arresting scenes takes place in Westminster Abbey, when Colin Firth’s soon-to-be-crowned George VI demands that his speech therapist, Geoffrey Rush’s Lionel Logue, vacate the coronation throne, the seat of Saint Edmund the Confessor.

“Listen to me,” cries the king. “Listen to me!”

“Listen to you? By what right?”

“By divine right if you must. I am your king.”

Roles

The idea of kings ruling by divine right may have a rather seventeenth-century air about it, but even now the idea that there is something holy about the monarchy underpins the British constitutional settlement. “The monarchy by its religious sanction now confirms all our political order,” wrote Walter Bagehot in his 1867 classic The English Constitution, still widely regarded as the most insightful book ever written about the structures of the British State.

Bagehot’s book is one of two treated almost as training manuals by young members of the royal family; the other is Elizabeth R: The Role of the Monarchy Today, written in 1992 by Anthony Jay, best known for his work on television’s Yes, Minister. Jay recognised, and the royal family have clearly embraced his explanation, that the monarchy has two roles: the Queen is called upon formally to be “Head of State” and informally “Head of Nation”.

It’s surely in the latter sense that she’s understood her role as “Defender of the Faith” as having developed over the decades. When she was crowned in 1953 she swore to the utmost of her power to maintain the laws of God, the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law, and the settlement of the Church of England.

It seems, though, that she does not regard her role as a narrowly sectarian one; on the contrary, she sees the Church of England as having a role in fostering pluralism. Earlier this year she explained that, “Its role is not to defend Anglicanism to the exclusion of other religions. Instead, the Church has a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths in this country.”

There’s a lot to be said for having a public figure or institution whose role is to stand as a permanent reminder of what religious faith does and has done for the country, especially at a time when, according to a recent parliamentary enquiry, religion is being marginalised in public life.

The report Clearing the Ground found that although Christians are not being victimised in Britain, religious illiteracy has created situations where religious belief is misunderstood and restricted; court decisions have established a hierarchy of rights with the freedom to manifest religious belief and act in accord with one’s conscience being deemed less important than other rights.

Of course, it’s impossible for a Catholic to discuss Britain’s monarchy without acknowledging the fact that, in a sense, Catholics are second-class citizens in Britain, the only people explicitly barred by law from marrying into the line of succession; any royal who wishes to marry a Catholic must abdicate their position in the line. Recognising that this is discrimination, David Cameron has made noises about changing this, in order to make the monarchy more modern, and the Archbishop of Westminster has welcomed this.

I’m not so sure. I think we all know that in a meaningful sense, British Catholics have the same rights as all other British citizens, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to start pulling threads out of Britain’s constitutional tapestry in order to achieve what would be but the tiniest and most cosmetic of symbolic gains.

Besides, Zara Phillips is off the market.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 31 May 2012.

A Republican Abroad: Reflections on Britain's Monarchy

I remember little about my first visit to England: being smacked for swearing, and meeting a cousin who I wouldn’t see again for more than thirty years; but then, I was barely two.

I was four the next time I visited, being roused from my bed in the dead of night by my dad, taken to my older sister’s flat, and bundled onto the boat, to sleep on the floor through the night and tread nervously across the gangway to Liverpool’s Pier Head in the morning, looking down at the Mersey’s dark waters. I wasn’t good at heights, even then.

I’ve clearer memories of that second trip, much of which was spent with a cousin a few years older than me: a taxi from the port to my mum’s elder sister’s house, my cousin teasing his older sister’s ‘yucky’ denim skirt and having his wrist hurt when one of his dogs tugged excitedly on the leash he’d wrapped around his hand, proudly whispering the few Irish words I knew to other cousins, skittering across the gravelled ground in a playground after ignoring instructions not to go on the slide as someone had put wax on it, admiring little rubber dinosaurs and finger monsters in a shop, and eating fish on Good Friday. I had a choice of packets of Monster Munch on the boat back home: not just the ones with the Cyclops on the back, the only ones you could get in Dublin, but ones with pictures and descriptions of the Minotaur and the Harpies too.

I’m not sure if modern crisp packets offer a rudimentary Classical education. I suspect not.

I really liked my knights

While I was there I was given a packet of toy knights by an aunt. Little silver-coloured plastic knights, wielding swords and maces. I was thrilled, and my cousin and I sat playing with them together by the window of the living room. ‘They protect the king,’ I said.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said my cousin, ‘there are no kings anymore. Only queens.’  

‘What,’ I stared, ‘only queens?’

‘Only queens.’

A couple of years later a friend in Dublin earnestly informed me that the Queen had no power and that if she told me to kneel down in front of her then you wouldn’t have to, but that if Mrs Thatcher told me to then I would. That, of course, wasn’t an issue in Ireland, he said: ‘Because Ireland’s a free country.’

I had, it must be said, a somewhat confused childhood view of the British monarchy.

Strange though it seems, there were adverts on the telly when I was a boy, recruiting people for the Household Cavalry. I wanted to join, of course. Swords and breastplates, helmets and boots, black horses and red cloaks: the Life Guards looked like knights, and for a little boy besotted with the legend of King Arthur, this was clearly a career to which one should aspire.

Even now, I reckon the sovereign's escort justifies the monarchy's existence

Being English, my mother approved, though she was far less impressed by my reactions when she made me watch the opening of Parliament one year. The pageantry and the Queen cast no spell over me on that occasion, as I’d have rathered be drawing or reading or playing on the road: ‘Huh,’ I’d scowled, ‘I wish Guy Fawkes had blown it up.’

The years passed, and the British royal family’s shenanigans seemed like one of those soap operas that you never watch but occasionally notice in the background. To this day I’m not sure of the extent to which my memories of Charles and Diana’s wedding are my own or ones manufactured by Sue Townsend and planted in my head by the fictional pen of Adrian Mole. ‘Lady Diana is a commoner,’ I remember my Mam telling me. This mattered, clearly, and was a good thing, though I wasn’t sure why.

We had a Charles and Di tea caddy at home too, acquired at the time of the royal wedding. I think it lasted longer than their marriage. We told scurrilous schoolboy jokes about the royal family at school. ‘Did you hear that Princess Diana is forming a band with Chris Rea? She’s going to call it Diarrhoea!’* ‘Why does Prince Charles have a multicoloured willy? Because he dips it in dye so often!’

None too respectful, you’ll surely agree, but well, we were about ten, and it was no worse than what we sang about what the Queen got up to in 1976. No, I’ll not repeat it here.

A Modern Republic

Curiously, our own largely symbolic head of state, President Hillery, didn’t impinge on my consciousness at all. He met ambassadors, and signed legislation, and inspected the armed forces, and played golf, and generally kept to himself. I remember seeing a red squirrel when peering through the gates of his official residence one day. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one since.

1990 changed that, of course, as we had the first presidential election of my lifetime, with Mary Robinson beating Brian Lenihan and Austen Currie in an AV election.** Robinson changed the Presidency dramatically, expanding the office beyond its official role of ‘Head of State’ to give it a new direction as – to borrow the terminology of Antony Jay’s Elizabeth R – ‘Head of Nation’. She deliberately imbued the office with symbolism, and paved the way for President McAleese’s two terms. McAleese’s presidency, I think most Irish people would agree, was a model of what the presidency can be, and her role in 2011’s visit of the Queen brought that home.

Those English people who seem to think that the only alternative to a constitutional monarchy is an American-style executive presidency merely show how limited their knowledge is of political systems. There are lots of ways to run republics.

Ah, sure, the English are known for the craic...

When I moved to England the first time, back in 2001, I was scornful of the monarchy; it was obviously an anachronism, and an indignified one at that. As the thirtieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday passed I muttered about atrocities being committed against the Queen’s subjects by the Queen’s soldiers, and as the Queen’s fiftieth jubilee approached I scowled and told my friends in halls that there was no way I’d be joining them at the jubilee party at our brother hall.

Minutes before my friends set out I relented, and nine of us headed off, arriving just as one corpulent student – a South African, I think – finished belting out ‘God Save The Queen’. We settled in for an evening of drinking games and even karaoke, with Russell, visiting Dave, insisting that we all join in a rendition of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ that was as energetic as it was surely cacophonous. At the end a drunken undergrad stepped up to join us, so we left him to slur a high-pitched ‘any way the wind blows...’

Afterwards he challenged me to a fight with giant inflatable boxing gloves in the bouncy castle the boys had hired. I smiled and let him charge at me, and stepped aside so that he fell. He struggled to his feet, and I knocked him over again. And again. And again. Letting him steady himself, I waited for his charge once more and again stepped aside so he crashed to the mat. And again I smiled as he wobbled upwards, before knocking him over again.

Afterwards my friend Paul, who died in an accident almost exactly four years later, admiringly said ‘Mister Daly! I’ve never seen such malevolent delight on anyone’s face before!’ He definitely approved.

Back in our own place, we set up a table and chairs and sat drinking and chatting on the lawn till half four. Koji, a Japanese fellow in our hall, joined us and took to running about – for no discernible reason – with his T-shirt drawn over his head. Madeleine rested her head on my shoulder, and we all decided it was time to crash. We planned to rendezvous at breakfast, and belt out at least a bar or two of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ to startle the undergrads, some of whom had witnessed our travesty.

Needless to say, not one of us made it to breakfast.

It had been an absolutely superb night, and the first one we’d had out in weeks where we hadn’t been on edge for half the evening, expecting some kind of trouble. Mary McAleese is great, I thought, but she’s not once given us an excuse for a party.

Not a system I'd establish, but one I can embrace

Last year’s Irish presidential election was a horrible affair, such that I don’t know many people who wouldn’t happily have had Mary McAleese for a third term if only the Constitution would allow it. There was something incredibly unedifying about choosing a head of state – who we’ve now come to think of as a head of nation – through an election that dragged all manner of dirty linen and closet skeletons into public sight.

British republicans who cry out for the glories of an elected head of state seem to be speaking from dogma, not experience; they seem like embodiments of the saying about the grass being greener on the other side. The fact is that there’s something to be said for people being reared and trained through decades for such a role, with there being no question of who the next in line for the job will be.

I’m still a republican, of course; even with nasty elections like the 2011 one I prefer the Irish model of having a largely ceremonial president to a largely ceremonial monarch as head of state, but I’ve come to see that the British solution isn’t that bad, really. It’s not one I’d invent if I were charged with coming up with a political system, but it’s not a bad one to have ended up with, and it's such that I'm wary of attempts to tinker with it. I'm not sure how many wooden blocks can be eased away before the Jenga tower falls.

The monarchy gives constitutional stability, and expresses national unity, and provides a justification for the country being called the United Kingdom, after all. Get rid of the monarchy and the UK would need a new name. For starters.

God save the Queen, so. On balance.



_________________________________________________________________________________
* Yes, I know. Exactly the same joke was made about Chris Rea becoming lead singer of Dire Straits. It makes more sense in that context.
** Yes, because despite the lies of the No lobby in the 2011 AV referendum, more than three countries in the world use AV, with one of the ones using it being the only country with which the UK shares a land border. The first two times I voted it was in AV elections. I still think it's a better system than the absurdity that is FPTP, where the typical MP goes to Westminster having been voted for by fewer people than voted for other candidates.

Bunting

Years ago, some weeks before the last jubilee, I was living in halls when one of my fellow students asked me for help with an essay; I can't remember the topic, but people regularly came to me for advice on essays, whether they were on history, French cinema, Spanish literature, developmental economics, physiotherapy and the mechanics of the human elbow, or whatever.

My own work done for the evening, I ambled down to Sophie's room -- let's call her Sophie, for convenience -- to help her with her work. I knocked, and she answered, and I entered. And stared.

She'd been doing laundry, you see, and was drying it in her room. And not just any laundry, mind. Underwear, of which she appeared to have vast quantities.

She'd drawn lines of twine about her room and hung her laundry from these lines, such that her room was decorated with a multitude of thongs, myriad colourful triangles swaying in the slight breeze her window let in.

To this day I have never seen more pants.

We sat down to work, but after about the fifth time I frowned, restraining an obvious joke about whether she was expecting the Queen to visit, Sophie realised what was bothering me, started to laugh, and suggested we go down to the common room.

Even now, I can't look at bunting without thinking of Sophie's room and shaking my head. This jubilee weekend is proving quite a challenge.