Words, wine, and wafers: Eucharistic reflections

"Take this, all of you, and eat of it:

for this is my body which will be given up for you.

Take this, all of you, and drink from it:

for this is the chalice of my blood,

the blood of the new and eternal covenant.

which will be poured out for you and for many

for the forgiveness of sins.

Do this in memory of me.”

– Words of Institution in the Roman Catholic Church

Throughout many mythic traditions, we have countless stories of cultures eating their gods. Sometimes this consumption is violent, as with the omophagia in the Dionysiac cult. Sometimes, it is controlled and metaphorical, like the kykeon in the Eleusinian Mysteries. Always, the participants are changed somehow; they are given a better afterlife, more power, a closer connection with the divine.

At the Catholic mass, the wafers and wine (grain and grapes like the Greeks!) turn into the literal body and blood of Christ. Like Tolkien’s work, it refers to something greater – a moment in the Gospel, the eucatastrophe – but importantly, it is not an allegory. The Eucharistic consecration is not a lovely falsehood or noble lie, but an absolute state of reality. 

Along with being the most true (on a higher plane of truth, really), the Eucharist is also fundamentally mysterious. Mystery in the Christian tradition means something that can only be shown by the revelation of God, not through human reason. Though the framework we usually use to describe Eucharistic theology is pre-revelation (Aristotelian), the substance/accidents concept confounds natural reason. It is only through Christ revealing this truth at the Last Supper that this understanding becomes possible.

At the moment of consecration, so that the bread and wine may become body and blood, the priest says these Words of Institution (above, required words bolded). As we discussed, language begins with incarnation, but language also becomes incarnation. As the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, so too do the words make flesh again at every (valid) mass. Perhaps another reason that ghosts don’t have language is that they are no longer in need of this incarnation; they have either been saved or not. If God became man to teach us, as Augustine said, maybe the ghosts have learned all they can. 

As Tolkien further pointed out in our reading last week, these words are also an act of creation. The priest in persona Christi names the food and drink as the body and blood, thereby creating a new substance through speech. Christ is the new Adam (Romans 5:12-21) and the priest is both Adam and Christ. The priest participates in creation not only like God but also with and through God. This also makes Christ the truest of the Elf-Friends, as He is both “inside and outside the story… both a character in the drama [the body and blood] and a frame for the narrative [the one instituting]” (The Footsteps of Aelfwine, 184). In this way, He is not just a mediator, but the mediator (1 Timothy 2:5) and he mediates during not just any fairy-story, but “a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories” (On Fairy-Stories, 88).

As we discussed in class, language also has a way of transporting us across time. Though this has the anthropological/philological/social explanation we outlined, I also want to highlight the fact that these Words of Institution also have a very literal time-traveling effect in that the mystery of the Eucharist makes each mass also contemporaneous with the Last Supper (and possibly the Wedding Supper of the Lamb, I am not sure). 

There’s also something fundamentally important about the fact that the Eucharist is food. As with Tolkien’s linguistic cellar, language is like wine and language makes wine – both in the consecration and echoing all the way back to Cana. Tolkien’s representation of a priest, as addressed briefly in Shippey, is a cook. In The Lord of the Rings, there’s the very literal sign of the Eucharist in the lembas bread, a wafer that will renew the strength of a man on their journey as they seek the way (John 14:6). However, I feel as if that has been thoroughly covered and I rather want to think about what it means for something salvific to come from food.

As Christ is the new Adam, the redemption of man comes through a feast as the Fall came through one too. Feasting shows the bounty of God’s creation (“the green grass, the large slow oddity of cows,” Mythopoeia) and yet also the creativity of our industry (so many are involved in even the seeming simpleness of a food like bread). Wine, too, remains an important symbol. First, it shows the work of patient cultivation, for the “well-aged wines” of Isaiah 25:6 take many years to make. Likewise, the wine of language in the linguistic cellar combines a mastery of time travel in learning from the past as well as a command of present time in the commitment that is made to learn these languages. Additionally, wine exemplifies the joy of celebration in that abundance and the corporeal pleasure that can be directed to spiritual things: worshiping the Creator through His creation. Finally, eating with others at a feast both fulfills God’s commandment that man not be alone (Genesis 2:8) and, in another way, illustrates Tolkien’s insistence that a value of a story also comes from its transmission (Footsteps, 185). As there is a link between the event and the listener or reader, there is a link between the food and the diner. In the case of the Gospel and the Eucharist, this link is the most important relationship, a salvific relationship between God and man.

I know this was a lot of topics to cover, but I hope this even gestured at some of the thoughts I had after class today. I haven’t read nearly enough Eucharistic theology, but this is super interesting to me and I really hope to learn more about it! — KW

Helpful in the writing of this topic:

The Hungry Soul by Leon Kass

Euripides’ Bacchae

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter

Talking to a bunch of Catholic priests about the Eucharist

A bit of a funny aside: I am not the best at understanding spoken Latin, but I did RCIA at a church that does Latin masses (St. John Cantius) and the way they pronounce Latin is so different than I usually hear it pronounced. I know we talked about how English can be overwritten by Latin and thus gains the character of Latin (especially in the Our Father), but often in ecclesiastical situations, English is overwriting Latin in intonation. This means that the church-spoken Latin gains a character of its own and is recognizable as a dialect or even a separate language from Classical Latin. The most noticeable time to me is when people say “Deo gracias” after the readings.