Transubstantiation and Language

Recently I have been picking up more literature from my favorite theological movement – Radical Orthodoxy. Catherine Pickstock, an RO theologian who will never cease to impress me with her rich prose and audacious claims, once again challenged me at the core of my Christian faith. While reading her essay, “Necrophilia: The Middle of Modernity, A Study of Death, Signs, and the Eucharist,” I returned to the days of Northwest when I sat up in the balcony during chapel and consumed her book After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy. Specifically, I recalled how impoverished I found the Protestant view of the Eucharist to be – in particular, the rejection of transubstantiation. Over against the (gnostic?) Protestant view, Pickstock argues that only a doctrine of Transubstantiation can give meaning to not only the Eucharist, but to all of language as well.

Protestants have always found it strange that the sacraments of bread and wine could become the body and blood of Christ. Perhaps this is some sort of fear of cannibalism, or maybe it is just “modernity” and its demands for empirical verifiability. Whatever it is, Protestants hide behind the argument that Jesus did not really mean, “this is my body” when he referred to the bread, but rather, it was some sort of symbolization. Pickstock writes:

I have argued above that in the articulations of the Eucharistic Body, the sign is not left behind. Indeed , this is so extremely the case that is is possible to argue that the theological body turns everything into sign, that the distinction between thing and sign can no longer be sustained. This can be seen in the assimilation of sense and referent in the words “this is my body.” Under ordinary circumstances, one attaches a referential anchor to the ostensive indicator “This,” for whilst the word “This” is demonstratively specific, ye tis is also superlatively indeterminate. If Jesus had said “This is my bread,” we could have consulted the physical bread and understood the sense of the word by looking at the object. But that is impossible here, for we cannot look at the elements in order to expand the meaning of the phrase, which suggests that the levels of sense and referent are fused together, since a bare indication of sense has to do all the referential work. The words underline that things are only ever present in the mode of sign, that there is no leaping over language, for at the beginning of the phrase, the word “This” seems to indicate bread, but where bread is simply referred to, “body” is signified, or evoked as a sense, which assimilates the sense to the referent, or rather, effaces the stage of reference altogether. Whereas one might otherwise consider it a category leap, as if to say, “The bread has so, short of attributing meaninglessness to Jesus’ words, (or claiming in bad faith that they merely ’symbolic’ when elsewhere in the Gospels where this is the case, Jesus always says clearly ‘This is given to you as a sign of x,’ etc) it would seem that the phrase has occluded the distinction between thing and sign.

So my question is, why are Protestants so scared to consume the body of Christ? We are eager to consume the pleasures of daily life; eager to consume each other in capitalist business practices – yet, why the phobia of consuming our savior? Not only does Pickstock think we should embrace the doctrine of Transubstantiation, she also proposes that the Eucharist provides the perfect place for the exchange of meaning in the form of receiving and giving gifts (we receive Christ and give back through worship):

Not only is language that which administers the sacrament to us, but conversely, the Eucharist underlies all language since in carrying the secrecy, uncertainty, and discontinuity which characterize every sign to an extreme (no body appears in the bread), it also delivers a final disclosure, certainty, and continuity (the bread is the Body) which alone makes it possible now to trust every sign. In consequence we are no longer uncertainly distanced from ‘the original event’ by language, but rather, we are concelebrants of that event in every word we speak (the event as transcendental category, whose transcedentality is now revealed to be the giving of the Body and Blood of Christ). The words of institution “This is my body” therefore, far from being problematic in their meaning, are the only words that certainly have meaning and lend this meaning to all other words. This is because they fulfill the contradictory conditions of the beneficent secrecy of every sign (certain/uncertain, continuous/discontinuous, iconic/arbitrary, present/absent) to such a degree of oppositional tense that the inhering of bread in body is not a relation of signification (as for a Zwinglian view) but more like a condition of possibility for all signification.

Pickstock’s argument fits into the larger context of her argument in After Writing, and essentially into the whole project of RO, which is to reestablish the meaning of human existence as a liturgical existence (there are no objects, only gifts, and gifts are given by God and returned through liturgical life):

Transubstantiation saves the meaning of the sign because the element of uncertainty remains and yet this becomes identical with an infinite corporeal presence which, as infinite, does not arrive in the manner of an object’s transferral from one place to another, but rather arrives in and through its supplementations, which effect a return of the sign… As the Church transmits, or supplements Christ, it also receives itself again from without, from the coincidence of what it supplements with that surplus which arrives as body and blood, the surplus which the Church itself is, the ‘body of Christ’.

By not affirming Transubstantiation we are left with the necrophilia/necrophobia of modernity/postmodernity. Our culture is so preoccupied with “beating death” that death is the only thing that defines us; or, we consume and devour ourselves, rather than Christ. The Eucharist offers itself as a place of meaning and life, the very life of the Word of God, which is Christ. After reflecting on this, I think that the Protestant church should rethink the place of the Eucharist in church life. Furthermore, I am also interested in exploring the connection between Pickstock’s liturgical theology and Marx’s critique of capital, or as John Milbank has suggested, we must investigate capitalism as a pseudo-religion, a pagan ritual, and a site of cannibalism rather than the orthodox/orthopraxis embrace of the Eucharist as the only thing that we can consume and be consumed by without death, for the Eucharist overcomes the dichotomy between death and resurrection!