THE
TRANSITION FROM MEDIEVAL TO MODERN
AND THE ROLE OF THE EUCHARIST
( Note: I wrote this essay in 1994.. This essay outlines many of my intellectual, political and ethical objections to Christianity and states that I no longer consider myself a Christian. One philosopher that I started reading in my teens that I still admire for various reasons is Bertrand Russell. I read his History of Philosophy more than once and liked some of his essays on social issues. His book Why I am not a Christian is interesting, and I agree with many of his points. Indeed, Russell outlines something similar to what I have written about at length, namely that systems of knowledge/power create cruelty in order to uphold their authority. He notes for instance that
The more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so called ages of faith,..; there was the Inquisition,...there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches and every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion" 12
In contrast Russell notes, "every improvement in criminal law, every step towards the diminution of the war, every step toward the better treatment of colored races, or every mitigation of slavery...has been opposed by the organized churches of the world" He concludes by saying the Christianity in particular has been "the principle enemy of moral progress in the world". There is truth to this. Even in the current world this is clear. In America in the last 20 years three violent and repressive presidents in the U.S. have been Republican Christians: Reagan and the two Bushes. Between them they killed hundreds of thousands of people in Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, all in the name of "god" or "Jesus". Indeed. The most destructive force in the world today is the largely corporatized Christian right that currently has a decisive influence on the American government.
But though Russell defines very well how Christianity promotes
narrow-minded thinking in terms of Them verses Us and cruelty, he did not go
quite far enough into the ins and outs of scholasticism and how the church
came to be so central to many historical atrocities. Nor did he quite
explain how fundamentally opposed to nature, animals and life much of Christianity
has been. He did correctly show how absurd and destructive Christianity is
on the subjects of sex and womanhood.
The intellectual arguments
that accompanied my abandonment of Christianity is
explored both here and in other essays written between1991 and 97. But what
I did not explain in these essays is what brought this about in my actual life of this
period. I will write a little about that here. When I left the Schuon cult in 1991, two of the of the people that
helped me get out of the cult were Wolfgang Smith and Rama Coomaraswamy, the
son of Ananda Coomaraswamy. I will discuss these men in what follows.
Wolfgang Smith was a scientist and
mathematician as well as an extreme right wing Catholic. Dr. Smith wrote
some reactionary and inaccurate things about the theory of evolution, based
on 1930's creationism. Smith's distorted and false ideas about evolution, along with those of
Schuon, Burckhardt and Guenon are amazingly ignorant. mere dressed up
restatements of creationist doctrine. Smith's abilities as a a biologist are
non-existent, He had no grasp of the of the vast array of evolutionary
evidence. Had he studied the evidence he would have learned that many of the so called
"missing links' in the theory of evolution are no longer missing. He would
also have learned that there is virtually no evidence for the theory of
creationism of so called 'intelligent design". All
of the traditionalists base their criticism of the theory of evolution on
the idea that the "lesser cannot come form the greater" meaning that their
idea of god is greater than nature, so therefore god comes before nature.
This is sophistic logic, of course. the god idea is a constructed thing, not
a fact like dinosaur bones. Dinosaur bones are much older than any idea of
gods or any abstract ideology, Platonic, Taoist or otherwise.
Most of Smith's evidence for his anti-evolutionary thought comes from Douglas Dewar (1875-1957), who was himself, a follower of George McCready Price, a creationist. Dewar helped lunch the launched the “Evolution Protest Movement” (1932) members of which declared the theory of evolution to be the “child of satan” among other silly things. One source states that
"Geologists dismissed Price as a crank and ridiculed The New Geology as being riddled with error and distortion, the book caused a sensation among religious fundamentalists, who cited it as the first book to use science to show that the Bible is literally correct. Price (who was not a geologist) was even cited during the Scopes trial as a scientific expert. For a time, he traveled to England, where a disciple of his, Douglas Dewar, enthusiastically echoed his mentor, saying bluntly, "The Bible cannot contain false statements, and so if its statements undoubtedly conflict with the views of geologists, these latter are wrong." (cited in Numbers, 1992, p. 146) Much of Price's "flood geology" can be found, nearly intact, in the writings of modern creationists.
Dewar is one of Smith’s primary sources of anti-evolutionary thinking. Smith's thesis is basically an attempt to state, on the basis of evidence mostly culled from Dewar's questionable creationist texts, that evolution did not happen. Since Smith shows little understanding of biology or of paleontology, his statements about evolution are mere dogmatic assertions based on discredited writings from the 1930's. Smith claims all species came from humans who represent god on earth. This human centered theory is stated as if it were a fact that requires no proof.
I visited Dr. Smith a few times
at his house in Oregon in the 1980's and early 1990's and learned allot
about him. He was not much of a scientist really. His expertise is in math.
Besides being a 'creationist' who has attacked the theory of evolution
without denting it in the slightest, he imagines that quantum
mechanics somehow justifies Thomas Aquinas views of the universe. I suspect
that Smith's notions on this are as ludicrous as his ill conceived notions
about the theory of evolution. But I don't know enough about Quantum
Mechanics to say. Having read his book on this subject however, I suspect
that what Smith does is project his religious beliefs
onto the quantum mechanics, as have many others. There is in fact no
evidence at all that quantum mechanical ideas support Taoism, Thomism or any
other religion.
Rama Coomaraswamy, like his father Ananda, had developed a backward
looking, right wing and elitist notion of religion. Indeed, what I elarned
from Rama is how political religous ideology really is. Virtually everything
Rama has written trying to justify the Mass proir to Vatican 2 is political,
though it is dressed up as a defense of a ritual.
Rama's his father Ananda was an exiled Hindu
brought up in England, nursed on William Morris and reactionary romantic
ideas. He later returned to Sri Lanka, and became a reactionary aesthete, who wished to revive the medieval caste
system. Coomaraswamy's interest in "sacred art" was
basically political
concern that grew of a nostalgia for lost or dying forms of political power.
This political concern was sublimated and even denied behind a pose of
ultimate spirituality, derived partly from Rene Guenon. Like other forms of
spiritual fascism Ananda Coomaraswamy's ideology is based on a nostalgic,
apocalyptic and gnostic nationalism. Coomaraswamy longed for a return
to the imagined India of his great grandfathers on Sri Lanka and Ancient
India. He also wished to go back to the days of monarchic aristocracy
of Meister Eckhardt's Europe.
Rene Guenon had also longed for the return of the horror
of the European caste system of the Medieval Church of the Inquisition just as
some of the Nazi's had longed to return to the Knights Templar. Indeed,
Guenon and Coomaraswamy, who became friends, were both exiles as well as
political reactionaries who endorsed monarchist and theocratic politics .
Like his mentor René Guenon, Ananda was a "spiritual fascist", and
his son Rama continued this "tradition".
But I did not know this yet in 1991. In 1991 I talked with Rama on
the phone regularly for about a year, with many long and frequent
conversations. I had had the misfortune of having witnessed Schuon molest
some underage girls in secret rituals called "primordial Gatherings". Rama
had pushed me to expose Schuon's crimes. He also advised me to attend
Catholic services, which I tried out for a time. I talked with Dr. Smith
fairly often as well.
They both hated Schuon and said that he was "evil and "satantic" and
supported the idea that he be prosecuted by the law.
I owed these men a certain gratefulness for helping
me, but was soon in conflict about who they were and what they wanted me to
beleive and endorse.
They merely wanted to convert me to their extremist and fanatical beliefs,
and when I did not go along with that, their friendship and well wishes
vanished. I was mere an object of prosyletization.
I could not accept what they thought about evolution or religion. But
it is typical of the traditionalists that they shun or ostracize those who
refuse to think as they do.
They had no interest in me, but were merely using me to exalt their
particular form of fanatical religion.
Rama's
hypocritical and two faced behavior often disturbed me. For instance, Rama
said that if I go to a traditional Catholic Church
I should lie about him in the confessional to the priest. What kind of man
wants you to lie in this context? He said he did not his want 30 year
involvement with Schuon to be known to the priests because that would
compromise his position in the church to which he belonged. I was aghast at
his telling me to lie. I was also aghast at various other things he told me.
For instance he said one day in a conversation that Hitler was 'not that
bad a man' and that the holocaust had been greatly exaggerated. He said that the
Inquisition was not altogether a bad thing. He has since become something of
an Inquisition denier as well as a holocaust denier. He was convinced and
often said that he thought Schuon was an 'evil man', but then he quotes him
liberally in his books. I disliked Rama’s addiction to calling everything he
disliked evil. He
He even said he performed exorcisms, and beleived
these doing these superstitious, medieval rites constituted a sort of
spiritual psychology. I do not believe in "evil". Having seen Schuon's delusions
of grandeur and willingness to use and hurt others, I was quite aware Schuon
was not a good man, But he was not 'evil', as both Rama and Wolfgang Smith
said to me repeatedly on the phone or in writing. Schuon was selfish and vainglorious to the extreme-- Yes. But I soon saw that Rama also wished to vault himself.
He wanted to be the paragon of all truth and was himself head of an
apocalyptic cult. He set himself up as a sort of Pope of the Post-Councilular
Church.
Rama was a surgeon and complained to me on the phone
that he should not have to pay malpractice insurance. He made 1000 dollars
and hour plying his trade, but appeared to think those who might suffer form
the mistake s of his knife deserved no right to sue him for suffering and
punitive damages. I found this greedy. Indeed, Rama was of looking at the
world was greedy and elitist. He was a hypocrite who became a catholic "priest" who was also married.
I have no objection to priests being married, or being homosexual, so long
as they are open about it and obey our societies laws. But Rama was making
up his own religion and then calling it "traditional", while he castigates
virtually everyone else for "picking and choosing" their own religion, when
that is exactly what he does. His particular brand of John Birch Society
catholic fascism did not interest me.
I grew distrustful of Rama and
his ideas during the course of my relation with him. He began to sound
increasingly as like extremist fanatic--- a Torqemada, Savonorola or some
other fire-brand Inquisitor. He was moralistic to the extreme and believed himself to
be in possession of the absolute "truth, capital "T". He reminded me
increasingly of Nazis, fundamentalists, and cult leaders. His ideas against
evolution were creationist, ill researched and absurd, as were the similar ideas of Wolfgang
Smith. Both of them knew almost nothing
about biology, as I have said.
Rama had appointed himself the intellectual leader of a fanatical
right wing religious movement that called itself various names, but which
essentially goes under the rubric, “traditionalist Catholicism”. He was not
in possession of the truth, as he claimed, and I began to see that his
religion was a form of arbitrary dictatorship based on nostalgia for a
traditional church that was not much good 500 years ago and which does not
deserve now to be resurrected. His views of homosexuality were little better
than the Nazi's. He says in his writings that homosexuals should be punished
both in this world and in the imaginary next world of "hell". He also has
supports a wacky conspiratorial smear campaign that seek to brand homosexual
priests as part of a satanic plot. The reasons for homosexuality in the
catholic church are fairly clear. The absurd policy of celibacy, with an
accompanying misogyny is the primary cause. The cause is not Satanism, but
the same old ordinary abuse of power and corruption that has characterized
Catholicism for many centuries.
Moreover, Rama's views on women were reactionary,
sexist and patriarchal. I finally decided that though I was grateful for his
help that he was not going to be my teacher or mentor in any way. Indeed. As
I began to look closely and objectively at the Church that Rama and Dr.
Smith claimed to love, I began to come to a firmer assessment of the reasons why I had doubted the truth of Christianity
for so long.
But for all that I did not leave the church because of Rama. He was
just one of the last instances of Christian hypocrisy and fanaticism that I
finally decided me to leave it. I did not leave the church because I
disliked it as a child. I particularly disliked the use of the crucifixion
as a tool of exploitive sympathy. I was horrified by this image as a child,
and consider that subjecting children to images like that is a kind of
abuse. Nor did I leave the church because my mother was molested by a
priest, which she was, or because I was molested by a priest, which I was,
at age 13. There were other deeper reasons, in addition to these reasons,
that I left Christianity and eventually, religion.
Why did I reject Christianity? Many of the reasons are outlined in
the essay above and other writings of mine. The last time I went to Church
was in 1991. I found myself sitting in church and as the Eucharistic
species was about to be passed out I had a physical feeling of revulsion for
it. I did not want to have anything to do with it. I found the idea of
eating it repulsive. The "mystery" of the Eucharist was a lie about nature
and the world. I did not want to eat the dead body of a man, no matter how
symbolic that body was claimed to be. I did not want to drink his blood. I
did not want to partake of this symbolic cannibalism. There was nothing
"satanic" in this rejection of the Eucharist. Indeed, my objections were all
ethical and moral. The same revulsion would eventually lead me to become a
vegetarian in 1998. I rejected Christianity because it is a gnostic religion
that sees the natural world as “original sin” and is “fallen”. It exalts a
transcendent fiction above the actualities of the real world of nature. It
is human centered. Its hatred of the natural world is repulsive to me.
Eating the Eucharist seems a sort of psychological blackmail. I was supposed
to eat this body and drink this blood to partake of world and life-denying
spirituality. I became a vegetarian for the same reason that I could not
partake of the Eucharist. I could no longer participate in the hatred, abuse
and exploitation implicit in the act of eating animal meat. I left
Christianity and the eating of meat largely because I respect both human and
nature’s rights too much.
I stood up in the pew left the Church shortly after I felt
repulsed by eating the flesh of the dead god and drinking his blood. I never
went back to it. Im sure I never will. I have learned to much about the
history of Christianity and how many lives it has destroyed, both in the
human and animal and natural world to ever be a Christian again.
Of course, their were other reasons I left Christianity. I saw how
deeply Christianity had been involved in harming non Christian peoples; how
Christian missionaries hurt poor and native peoples all around the world;
how deeply Christianity had been involved in fomenting wars and injustices:
how destructive politics in the United States was deeply influenced by right
wing Christians. These and many other reasons decided me to renounce
Christianity.
This essay is a study of the intellectual background of the Eucharist and how Christianity transformed into science. I followed this essay some months later with another essay which is a study of cannibalism, and which takes off from some of the concerns expressed here.
This essay is divided into the following subsections:
Preface
1.Constantine, Charlemagne and Napolean
2.General Observations on the Eucharistic Controversy.
3. Innocent the 3rd and the
Universal Church
4.Plato, Aristotle and the Realist-Nominalist Controversy
5.The Transition from Eucharistic Truth to Scientific Truth
6. Some Observations on Cannibalism and Conclusions
PREFACE
In her monumental study of the Eucharist, Corpus Christi, Muri Rubin has provided a tour de force of scholarship on the history of the idea and practice of the Eucharist in the late medieval culture. She concludes this book with the telling sentence:
"the Eucharist was related to a compelling narrative, to a most powerful ritual, to most useful and familiar practices, and it became a receptacle of power, as well as a way of challenging such power."1
Her thesis is therefore, that the Eucharist enshrines a theory of knowledge, which acts as an organizing power in late Medieval culture, and that contentions about the nature of the Eucharist were also a way of challenging the power and authority of the institutions of the time. My concern here is to take this thesis as a starting point and to show that the transition from a Christian society which had the Eucharist as its central symbol to a secular, scientific society, which had the human reason as its central symbol, is primarily a transition from one kind of power to another. The Eucharist was the central symbol of the power and authority of the Church and the states that served it. With the rise of the Protestant rebellion and the scientific revolution that accompanied this rebellion, the center of power becomes transferred to science, capitalism and the modern state. The Eucharist was supposed to symbolize the "purity" of the Intellect and of Christ who represented this Intellect, and this theory of knowledge presumed to be "disinterested" and objective. The foundations of the scientific presumption to attain disinterested truth through "pure" science has its roots in the Medieval theory of knowledge. I hope to indicate that neither system of knowledge is “pure” or disinterested, quite the contrary.
The thesis in this paper is part of a much larger inquiry of preparatory studies which I hope to pursue further in graduate school. My purpose in this larger inquiry is to explore the relation of theories of knowledge to the social practices and powers and atrocities that result from them, as this relation reveals itself in diverse cultures and environments, philosophies, historical manifestations and practices. Last quarter, Fall 1993, I explored the growth of a totalitarian system of knowledge and power as revealed in the transitional period from Homer to Plato to Christ. I had concluded this paper, which was called "Homer, Plato and the Gnostic Tradition" with the observation that the symbol of "Christ as the Universal Man.., was enormously successful in providing a paradigm of universal power order and the control of men's souls." I came to a similar conclusion in regard to the significance of Plato's philosophy:
"The idea of turning the symbolic and mythological concerns of Homer into ideological and increasingly metaphysical and political, sublimated, rationalistic, explanations in Plato is a process that enormously extends the scope and ambition of Greek culture Plato's abstract conceptions can be applied to society more concretely and uniformly than the local mythology of Homer and this allows of greater precision and control. This tendency to generalize. concepts applied to all areas of interest is furthered by Aristotle, with his tendency to rationalistic catalogue. Both the Empire of Alexander, who was Aristotle's student, and the more distant Roman Empire, which founded itself on the Greek model, are largely the result of the Platonic and Aristotelian liberation of the Greek will to power through knowledge."(pg.20)
The current paper moves
ahead to the later middle ages and assumes that the Christian Apocalyptic
idea of Salvation has already combined itself with the Roman Empire which
itself is a totalistic society whose roots are to be found in the theory of
total knowledge and total social control developed by the Greeks of the time
of Aristotle and Plato. It is not by accident that almost all of the early
Church Father's, from Origin and Gregory of Nyssa, to Dionysius the
Areopogite, Augustine and John of Erigena are Platonists. The Platonic
theory of metaphysics is a theory of the universe as a hierarchy of
knowledge descending from Heaven to earth; and those who represent this
knowledge are the "elite". The Platonic theory was already adapted to
Christianity in the Gospel of John, where he refers to Christ as the
universal "Logos". The Augustinian theory of the Church as the intermediary,
"pontifex" or bridge between God and the world, and therefore claims itself
to be the only truly authentic and legitimate power in the world, is the
natural result of t combination of Christ as the Logos and the cosmological
hierarchy envisioned by Plato. The development of the Eucharist as the
active symbol of the universal Church and its total power over both the
world and the individual human "souls" who lived in this world, was an
inevitable consequence of the Platonic Christian theory of knowledge,
exemplified best in the philosophy of Augustine.
The Augustinian philosophy is the dominant philosophy until the
translation of Aristotle's works from Arabic into Latin at the end of the
12th century. The availability of Aristotle's works, and their manifest
difference from those of Plato, especially on the subject of the theory of
universals, provoked the Nominalist/Realist controversy, and this brought
the nature of the Eucharist, and therefore the Church itself, as the
embodiment of total knowledge, into question. The story of the Nominalist/Realist
controversy is at the center of the debate over the authority of the Church,
and one of the results of this controversy is that the outlines of a new
form of power through knowledge would begin to form, namely, the beginnings
of science, the rise of secularism, nationalism and the concern with man as
3 an individual apart from God and the Church.
***
1. Constantine, Charlemagne and Napoleon
The period in question can be roughly framed by two Coronations, that of Charlemagne and that of Napoleon. The Coronation of Charlemagne is described by Philip Johnson as follows:
"The Pope insisted on performing a Roman ritual under which he placed a crown on Charles' head and then prostrated himself in an act of emperor worship.. .Charles was taken aback by this weird eastern enactment, which was completely alien to anyone coming from north of the Alps, with a Germanic background. It seemed suspicious to him that the crown, which he had won by his own achievements, should be presented to him by the Bishop of Rome as if it were in his gift.'"2
This act, on Christmas day 800, defines the history of the next seven centuries in that it reveals the ambiguity in the struggle for power between the Church and State or the Church and Monarch. The "Holy Roman Emperor", after Charlemagne, would claim, in varying degrees, some measure of divine right, and, both in opposition and complimentarily to the power of the Kings, the Popes would claim their superiority and dependence to the Emperor on the basis of their intermediary position between the "worldly kingdom", which belonged to the King, and the Augustinian "City of God" which the Church was supposed to represent in anticipation of the final apocalypse.
The complex arrangement of worldly and spiritual power lacked the totalistic simplicity of the Constantinian formula of the union of Church and state in one man, namely Constantine himself. The metaphysical enunciation made dogma at Chalcedony, concerning the two natures of Christ, that he is "True man and True God" was a symbolic expression of the unity of Emperor and Church. This formula of Constantine was neat and symmetrical and seemed to justify his rather megalomaniacal claim to an absolute theocratic monarchy such that all enemies of the state were necessarily the enemies of God.
The case of the Coronation of Napoleon represents a complete shift in emphasis from the Coronation of Charlemagne and the monolithic theocracy of Constantine. Napoleon forced the Pope by various means to submit to allowing him to crown himself. This act, which put the Romantic and unique individual, at least symbolically, above the church, and the state, brought to on end to conflict of the Church and state that had concerned Constantine and Charlemagne. After Napoleon, authentic knowledge and power are increasingly less likely to be perceived as coming from the Authority of the Revealed Truth of the Bible and the Church and increasingly from man himself. Napoleon's self crowning is an ironic reversal of the Coronation of Charlemagne. After Napoleon, conflicts in the pursuit of power would concern the relation of states to individuals and the church would be all but replaced by science as the touchstone of the knowledge/power relationship.
The supremacy of Reason, symbolized by science and by the enlightened individual or state, which Napoleon claimed to be when he said "I am France"," had replaced the supremacy of Christ, as the arbiter between the true and the untrue, the real and the unreal. This passage from a world centered on the otherworldly Christ, considered as locus of authentic knowledge and power, to man's reason considered as the authentic locus and determinant of legitimate knowledge and power is the subject of this essay. The consideration of Napoleon is somewhat out of place in an essay concerned with the Medieval period, but I think it is the most expeditious way to express the perimeters of my inquiry.
2.General Observations on the Eucharistic Controversy.
The Eucharistic doctrine of transubstantiation was declared dogma at the Lateran Council of 1215. This Dogma was reiterated and strengthen at the Council of Trent(1554-1560). The dogma states that through the Consecration by the priest at the altar that a "change is brought about of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of His blood."3 This dogma is perhaps the most important in the history of the Church for a number of reasons. First, it reaches back to the essence of the message of Christ. Secondly, it repeats the definition of Christ at Chalcedon that made Christ "true Man and true God". Thirdly, the formation of this dogma between 1215 and 1560 occurs precisely at that point where the Church was in process of creating a world Empire; and fourthly, because the Council of Trent in 1554 primarily a reactionary attempt to curb the rise of Protestantism and secularism which the Church perceived as threats to their total power and control of the faithful. It is this last reason that gives this Council its particular reactionary fervour and it is this fervour which makes the most reactionary of today's traditionalist Catholic Fundamentalists harken back to the Council of Trent as the definitive statement of Church Authority and authenticity.4
In any case, the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 decided the issue of the Church's stand on the subject of universals and this was reinforced by Trent. This subject was the central philosophical issue of the Middle Ages. The Church decided in favor of the Realist position, more or less, rather than the Nominalist position. The Realist position was essentially Platonic, and summarized in the Scholastic formula, Universalia Ante Rem; the universal is prior to the particular thing, or the idea comes before the physical. In the philosophy of Aquinas and others, a more Aristotelian concept of universals would be combined, rather ambiguously, with the Platonic position. It was this ambiguity that lead to the Realist/Nominalist controversy over the subject of universals and made the question of universals central to the controversy over the nature of the eucharist. The Nominalist attacked this very ambiguity, since it was by no means clear how Christ could enter the Eucharistic host and become one with its substance without being contained also in its material substance. The Nominalists asked how Christ could become bread and wine when the bread and wine were not literally Christ. The standard reaction of the Church, as far back as St. Paul and Augustine, was that this paradox was a great mystery and it would be a grave sin, indeed perhaps the unforgivable sin against the Holy Ghost itself, to question this divine mystery. This mystagogic, obscurantist strategy was effective, but appealed more to fear than reason. The Church of this time was fast becoming the central and totalistic power over the entire European continent, while yet the recent translation of Aristotle and new economic benefits had encouraged many to try to reason for themselves. Thus, even while the church was trying to use reason to justify its power and legitimacy, which was based on the Eucharist, others were using this same reason to question the authority of the Church and bring into question the Eucharist.
The Nominalist position, at least in its clearer forms, as in Berengar (c.999-1088), Rocellinus(c.1050-1131) and William of Ockam(d.1347) was derived almost entirely from Aristotle, and tended deny the reality of the Platonic universals, claiming universals were conceptual abstractions from particular things Thus the Nominalists claimed the opposite of the realists and in the corresponding scholastic formula, claimed that “ Universalia Post Rem”—or universals come after things. It is this latter view that is obviously the true one, though, it coan be stated that that was not easy to know in the 14th century. The Nominalist position formed the conceptual basis of what would become science. This is not to say that Nominalism was a scientific position, rather it expressed the possibility in idea form of what would become science in practice two centuries later, between the period of Roger and Francis Bacon, Da Vinci, Galileo and Newton. One of the sub-theses of this paper is that science is a logical conclusion to Medieval Christianity and not its contradiction, as those who believe in a separation of religion and science, or tradition and modernity have maintained. But this will become clearer later.
3. Innocent the 3rd and the Universal Church
Having generally outlined the nature of the Realist/Nominalist controversy and indicated something about its relation to the Eucharist and the dogma of transubstantiation, it would be useful to situate these developments in the context of aspects of the history of the period. The dispensing of the Eucharist was the central rite of the church, over which it exercised complete control. It is difficult to understand this power in our time because, the medievals were convinced by priests, churches, cathedrals, art, government and all the accoutrements of their culture, that to question the church was a sin and to question the Eucharist was the worst of sins, because it amounted to questioning Christ as a savior.. Since, allegedly, the salvation of one's soul depended on the Eucharist as the central sacrament, one stood and fear of the church, and indeed, the church had granted itself not only the power to murder heretics but to pronounce excommunication, which meant that one would be damned, a “fate worse than death” it was claimed. Of course, this is blackmail of a vile kind, basically a form of mind control, and a variation of this effort to demand conformity on pain of death characterize all bad governments and institutions. But it was an effective use of terrorism.
The excommunication of Markward of Anweiler by Innocent the 3rd is typical:
we excommunicate, anathematize, curse and damn him, as oath breaker, blasphemer, incendiary, as faithless, criminal and usuper, in the name of God the Almighty, and of the son and the Holy Ghost by the authority of the blessed Apostles Peter and Paul and by our own [authority]… we order that henceforth anyone who helps him shall be bound by the same sentence. (5)
The Fourth Lateran council, it should be observed in passing also made Confession compulsory for all Catholics. This is not without importance because just as the Eucharistic rite was meant to incorporate the souls of the believers into the Church by communion, the Confessional rite was intended to circumscribe and gain control over the most intimate aspects of individual soul. The rite of confession and the growing power of the Inquisition were both developed under Innocent the 3rd and expanded to create a totalistic society such as both Plato, Hitler and Stalin might admire. They wanted complete control fo individuals from the most intimate aspects of the sexual and psychological selves, to every important act of their lives, birth, puberty, marriage children and death. The Catholic drive for control extended into every area of society, from the interior of houses to the streets and up into the governments and banks.
Innocent the 3rd also consciously turned the Crusades into a campaign of thought control, killing off or inciting lynch mobs to kill groups thought heretical, such as the Albigensians Under his papacy the Church achieved the apogee of its power. Innocent devalued the role of the Monarchs and with the use of the Interdict managed to blackmail Kings into submission to the Papacy by threatening excommunication and therefore hell, if the King did not submit. He compared the Papacy to the Sun and the monarchy to the moon ~.~A He wrote that Christ "left to Peter the governance not of the Church only but of the whole world". The megalomania encountered in a sentence like this is rare; one finds it in an Alexander, Constantine, Hitler, end Stalin, but few others. But the will to power exampled in Innocent is not a unique aberration but part of the very nature of the Church and of Christianity in general.
Augustine, like Innocent, also oversaw the murder of “heretics”, that is people who had valid points of view the Church hated, and promoted various forms of thought control. Indeed, the missionary, crusading, worldwide ambition of the Church was largely inspired by the words of Christ himself; Christ's statement that "he who is not with me is against me" (Luke,11:23) is a statement that is practically the defining characteristic of a paranoid will to power. It is an anti-democratic declaration of Jihad against those who think differently. When such a exclusivist fanaticism is combined with statements like "Go ye unto all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved end he that believeth not shall be damned"(Mark, 16:15-16) one has a formula for a totalitarian state that combines the "Two Swords", the sword of religion with the sword of politics. With these two swords the Church in the east and the west forced submission to worldly and spiritual powers in a way so replete with injustice, fear, coercion and psychological and spiritual blackmail that the world is still recoiling from the excess to this day. Innocent was following long centuries of precedent, end therefore should not be thought of as an anomaly. The ruthless Roman empire had changed into the Christian Empire, and the Empire of science would replace the Christians, despite some hangers on to the old mythologies, now detached from their hegemonic sources of power.
In the use that Innocent the 3rd made of the Eucharist one sees en excellent example of the function of symbols. The Christ symbol is used both by individuals and by the Church for self magnification through a claim to total knowledge. Pope Innocent had control of most of Europe and achieved it through whipping up the self sacrificial and murderous impulse of the Crusades, through mind control techniques exercised through the confessional and the Inquisition, and especially through the Eucharist, with its promise of salvation from a world kept hostage to miserable conditions; where a caste system protected enormous economic disparities; and where the priests and nobles controlled separate legal systems, such that no commoner stood a chance of obtaining justice, and the priests and nobles were largely beyond the law. Anyone who questioned the Pope, the dogmas, the sacraments, or had association with those who questioned these could be killed could be called to the Inquisition and expected to recant or be tortured, and the refusal to recant meant death. The worst of all sins was to question the Eucharist.
The Eucharist embodied the will to power through knowledge of the Church itself. The crushing totalitarian atmosphere of the period forbid any thinking outside of orthodoxy. The rite of confession made the individual soul accountable to the church instead of to itself. The burning of Jon Hus was about this precisely. Like Wyclif, Hus questioned the necessity of priests as intermediaries in the reception of the Eucharist, and implicitly he was affirming the value of the individual conscience above that of the Church. He was right to do so. But he was burned at the stake for questioning Church power, and this power was expressed by the Church's claim to control over the Eucharistic bread and wine, the wine being only allowed to the priests.
Wyclif had questioned transubstantiation. His writings were condemned after his death and his body exhumed and burned without reburial. Hus followed Wyclif and questioned why the laity could not drink the Holy Wine like the priests. Rubin observes that Hus' advocacy of the reception of wine by the "laity" would have "implied that the church possessed no inherent powers denied to the laity" (6) To question the Eucharist was to question the Church and to question the Church was to question God, and this was an unpardonable sin for which burning at the stake was considered fit punishment. It was this sort of barbaric dogmatism that eventually led to the Church declineing in influence and falling into disrepute.
4.Plato, Aristotle and the Realist-Nominalist Controversy
It is indeed extraordinary that a symbol like the Eucharist could become the organizing mythical pivot around which a totalistic society could revolve. The implications of this fact are very far reaching. It indicates, for instance} how the most minimal means, in this case, a small white circle made of bread, can used and exploited to organize an entire society around a symbol in order to preserve a system of knowledge and power for the benefit of an Institution. This indicates that the needs of the people of the time to have promise of release from suffering and death and the oppression of the powerful, was very great; and indeed, this need for redress and justice is expressed in the prevalence of apocalyptic fantasies that accompanies the Eucharistic imagery of the period. Such fantasies of power and the need to escape from the oppression of powers must have then, as now, arisen for quite concrete reasons and purposes. People make up stories for reasons, believe in myths and philosophies for reasons, and are willing to be deceived for reasons. It is frightening that men who desire power can successfully exploit these needs; frightening that a society can be organized around such questionable symbols and that dissent should be so easily and ruthlessly eradicated by the powers of the period. I also find it disillusioning that the philosophy of the period should have been so completely concerned with the maintenance of the elaborate structure of such a manifestly unjust system of knowledge and power; and it may be the case that main-stream academic and scientific philosophy today has the largely the same function of justifying the knowledge system that justifies the powers of our society. I do find small comfort, however, in the fact that there were a few who did dissent.
But those that dissented against the medieval Church laid the foundation for a new form of knowledge and power; science. But this time the apocalyptic threats that the church had used to coerce through fear and psychological blackmail, would become literal apocalyptic threats both to nature and the existence of man. The rather silly apocalypse of St John was born of hatred of the world and desire for change. The same hatred of the world can be seen in Atomic weapons or environmental rapists. Indeed, I think that a case could be made that yesterday's Realist/Nominalist controversy evolved into today's controversies about mathematics and the nature and function of language, and this had a bearing on the creation of atomic weapons. But this is speculative and would take us too far a field.
In any case, it is clear that the Realist/Nominalist controversy was primarily an argument that went on in the Church and universities and concerned the relation of Plato and Aristotle's ideas about universals, which were contradictory. The question was: how could the Eucharist be justified according to the Realist or Nominalist position. Initially, the Nominalist position was developed from the view of Aristotle, “called the “master fo those who know” who denied Plato's belief in universals existing as independent entities, and proposed, instead that they were conceptual abstractions from sensory or phenomenal experiences. Plato begins with the Ideas and descends to matter; Aristotle begins with matter and ascends to "pure forms". The Church saw, rightly, that Aristotle’s philosophy as a threat and condemned Aristotle's Physics and his Metaphysics between 1209 and 1215, under Innocent the 3rd. This foolish move presaged the censure of Galileo some centuries later. But the condemnation of Aristotle was mere demagoguery. It soon became clear that Aristotle would not be gotten rid of so easily.
So the Church adapted,
trying to hold on to its fictive mythology of the Eucharist. It was found
that the Aristotelian doctrine of substance and accident could be applied to
the Eucharist without difficulty, since it meant that one did not have to
affirm that the bread itself become Christ and was eaten and then digested
and excreted, but only that the bread became "transubstantiated" into
Christ. Only the accidents were digested, the substance of Christ joined
invisibly with the individual soul. The substance/accident distinction also
preserved an opening to the Platonic doctrine of the Logos and the ideas.
This was important because the doctrine of Plato affirms the supremacy of
the intellect as a suprarational and supra-mundane faculty which was capable
of realizing God in its own essence. Aristotle did not completely reject
Plato's Ideal Forms, he stressed that ideal forms must be connected to
matter; he maintained that only God is pure form. This stress on the
materialistic aspect of Aristotle's ideas is what would provoke the Realist/Nominalist
controversy, and eventually lead to modern science. The Platonist doctrine
was the basis of the political authority of the Church from the earliest
days of Christianity. Authentic knowledge, for Augustine, who was a
Platonist, was the knowledge of the suprarational intellect, and this
knowledge was knowledge of Christ as the Logos or as the supreme ordering
power of the universe. The Platonic concept of the Intellect, which
Aristotle repeats with a somewhat different accentuation, was the
fundamental basis of both the Eucharist and Church authority. In other
words, in both Plato and Aristotle, the intellect is accorded supremacy, and
this supremacy is both political and metaphysical. Those who represent the
Intellect are those to whom power over the society is granted. The Church
combined Platonist and Aristotelian conceptions of the Intellect with the
millenarian Christian concept
of Christ as the Logos and supra-cosmological King and Exemplar.
Thus, to deny the supremacy of the supra-rational intellect was to question the very foundations of the Church. Plato's ideas could not be entirely denied unless there were some concession towards a universal Substance of which Christ was made. To dethrone Plato, as Aquinas did, was not fatal to the Church, but it did leave the Church in a precarious position. Aristotle's emphasis on matter and quantity left the nature of the Eucharist open to question, whereas Plato's symbolistic, hierarchical, elitist and spiritual view led to a monolithic and totalitarian interpretation of the Eucharist that admitted no questions. To deny both the Universal ideas of Plato or the Universal Substance of Aristotle was tantamount to a denial of the act of transubstantiation. This of course, was the “rankest heresy”. And it is this heresy that created science.
But having said this I must hasten to add, so that there be no confusion, that I have no concept of heresy myself. I am not a Christian and have no belief in the concepts that I am discussing. Heresy presupposes orthodoxy, and though I once believed that the concept of orthodoxy had a meaning that was real and efficacious, I think now that it is merely the codification of a knowledge system created in order to administer and legislate assent or dissent. I am opposed to knowledge systems that do not allow dissent. Dissent from orthodoxy is called heresy. It is clear to me that the primary purpose of the concept of orthodoxy in the Middle Ages was the maintenance of the knowledge/power equation that stained both the Church and the Crown. For myself, I recognize neither the power of the Church nor that of the Crown: I am not a Christian. I believe in the right of individuals to dissent and resist all or any who would use systems of knowledge, be this gnostic, religious or scientific, to impose by force or coercion, systems of knowledge, belief or practice.
To understand the Realist/Nominalist controversy, therefore, one must step outside of the alternative of heresy/orthodoxy as well as the alternative believer/unbeliever, insider/outsider. Any other way of looking at the complex material of this period would lead one into a partisan position and this would make it nearly impossible to assess what happened and why the controversy occurred. Thus, when one reviews the different thinkers of the two sides of the Realist/Nominalist controversy it becomes clear that there were many different answers to the question of the Eucharist. Below I will review some of these positions.
1.Augustine holds that the body and blood of Christ are separate but correlated to the species of bread and wine; this is the Platonist-Realist view. Augustine relates the Eucharist to the Intellect which he envisions as the "pontifex" or bridge between man and God. This identification of Christ and the intellect, and the belief that the Church alone represents Christ as the true and only legitimate power on earth is the view that governs all of Christendom until the Protestant rebellions.
2,Berengar, (c.999-1088), held in contrast, that the substance of Christ must have some relation to the accidental appearance of the bread and wine. This is a more or less Nominalist position. Berengar was declared a heretic.
3. Duns Scotus, a Platonist-Realist; went even farther than Augustine and claimed that the accidental bread was entirely "annihilated" by the substance of Christ. This position pushes the Platonist hatred of the world of matter and flesh to an extreme. How were these thinkers to make sense of the phrase in the gospel of St. John, "the Word became flesh".
4. Aquinas takes the view that "accidents realize Christ's physical presence, but only in an invisible spiritual and non materialist way"8 This does not clarify anything and returns to the obscure mystagogy of the Platonist-Augustinian position, even though an Aristotelian language is employed..
5. In contrast John Quidort (d.1306) held that "the nature of the Bread is assumed into the Word", This is more or less the Nominalist position. Rubin summarizes all the critics of transubstantiation as holding that "quantity must be identical with the substance to which it is attributed"9 This view, implied by Aristotle's philosophy, meant that the bread and wine could not become the body of Christ unless the bread itself also became the body of Christ. Aristotle had provoked an argument about the nature of material substances, and the Church which was taking the Realist position, was put in the difficult circumstance of having to justify what was logically and empirically absurd. This would lead eventually to the protestant reaction, which would hold that faith alone could justify religion, since only blind faith could accept the absurd. Early science, on the other hand, would accept the fact of Christ as Intellect entering directly into matter. Since Christ is human consciousness or reason in its divine personification, the entrance of reason or Intellect into matter meant that matter could be dominated by man literally, and not just symbolically.
5.The Transition from Eucharistic Truth to Scientific Truth
What needs to be grasped in the arguments involved in the Realist/Nominalist controversy that the very foundations of the knowledge system which justified Church social power, the relation of Church and State and the entire hierarchical caste system of medieval society were all at stake. The philosophical battles reflect the battle for social control and hegemony. If the Nominalists were right, and universals were high mythic abstractions and symbols and not real or independent entities, then the Eucharist is nothing more than a magical superstition used to orchestrate social and psychological order. In other words the Eucharist is an exploitive symbolic device. If this were so, the Church was in deep trouble.
Aquinas proved that Aristotle could be adapted to serve the Church, but the adaptation was precarious at best, despite the Summa Theological, whose encyclopedic finality already indicated that something fundamental was ending. The ambiguity of how Christ could be in the bread but not of it remained. The declaration of the dogma of transubstantiation in 1215 was largely a stop-gap measure designed to suppress dissent and control the extent of the damage that was being done by Aristotle and the Nominalist implications of his philosophy. Aristotle's philosophy implied that the material world is not just a corrupted shadow and copy of the world of the Ideas Beyond as both Plato and Christian doctrine held. This meant that power could be gained over this particular material world by categorizing, comparing and inquiring. A new kind of Knowledge/Power relationship was in the making: Science
If one accepts the possibility that the Eucharist is a symbol whose meaning is not literally true, but rather a mythological ritual that has to do with orchestrating social order through a theory of knowledge and power, then one must conclude that Christ himself is not really present in the host. What is present there is a mode of consciousness and a way of knowing that grants access to participation in the social order of Medieval society. The Eucharist becomes a means of participating in a symbolic alternative world of power and knowledge; a world symbolized by Christ's omniscience and omnipotence. When one grasps this, then it is possible to see that the arguments about the Eucharist really concerned the viability of Christianity as a ruling force in society. Aristotle and his influence on the Nominalists, such as Occam and Roger Bacon, had indicated that the power and knowledge symbolised by Christ in the Eucharist must become one with matter itself.
Occam's theory of "consubstantiation" suggested that "things that occupy the same ace are equal... but Christ's body and the bread occupy the same space.. .because where one is the other is, and the one does not contain the other." (10) What this means is that the will to power symbolized by the image of Christ in the Eucharist must enter into matter itself. This is the beginning of philosophical justification for the sciences. Indeed, what this is that the anthropomorphic imagery of Christ and the Eucharist were in process of being thrown off and what was left was the conscious intellect as the supreme embodiment of knowledge, and this intellect could enter into matter itself and take control of it and exercise its power over it. The undifferentiated image of Christ as Savior becomes differentiated into Reason as an activity of gaining power over matter, over nature. This means that science, in fact, is not the irreconcilable enemy of Christianity, but merely the logical unfolding of the inner motivation of the Christ idea, which itself unfolded form the Greek and Roman Empires. The scientific domination of nature is a logical development of the Christian theory of knowledge. "The Word became flesh" is a symbolic statement which expresses a fundamental axiom of Christianity. If one translates this symbolic expression into what the words have actually meant as they were applied in history, then, the Word is the human will to knowledge and power sublimated into an image of the divinity of Christ and the flesh is nature, matter, and the feud of becoming that science exploits to exalt man and gain power for him.
"God became man in order that man could become God" Augustine had said. The first 1400 years of Christianity are Platonist and concern God, that is the Church, remaking man according to its image, its knowledge and its need of power. The second 800 years of western history concerns man trying to become God, at least virtually, through science. When Francis Bacon said that "knowledge is power" and that the scientists must "put nature to the rack and compel her to answer our questions" ahe was expressing consciously the will to total knowledge and power that had been latent in Christianity all along. Science fulfills the program of power and knowledge already symbolically indicated by Christ and Plato. The Christian concept of salvation becomes the scientific drive for total knowledge and power over the earth. The destructive abuse of nature by science and capitalism embody the hatred of life and nature already present in Christianity. Christ was an image of man's purposes, and once the image was brought into question, the purpose of the image of Christ became clear. The symbolistic universe of the Church used the Eucharist as the pivotal symbol around which it orchestrated a theory of knowledge into a system of social control. Science retained the presumption of intellectual supremacy that had been the basis of Plato and Christ and identified the intellect with matter directly, instead of through a mediating symbol, like the Eucharist.
To summarize all this as succinctly as possible; the Realist/Nominalist controversy had stripped the image of Christ and the Eucharist that symbolized him of their mythological dress, and the result of this was to reveal that the real motive behind the image of Christ was the will to power through knowledge. Thus released from the tyranny of the symbolic Christ, the belief of Renaissance man that he was the "measure of all things", followed naturally. Likewise the unmasking of the fundamental motive behind the Christian myth resulted in the Descartean Cogito, which signified that Man's reason was alone independent and the sine qua non of all knowledge and power and that nature was merely a mechanism that must be dominated, controlled and exploited by man. As Christ as symbol is seen more and more as the embodiment of Reason or Intellect, the image of Christ becomes less important. The Eucharistic idea, thus literalized, becomes refashioned as the human reason which can "transubstantiate" matter through science to serve human purposes. The equation of knowledge and power ceases to be symbolized in the Eucharist and begins to be actualized by the reason of man using mathematics as a means of dominating nature. In a certain sense the Eucharist evolves into mathematics. The symbol of the knowledge and power of the Church was the Eucharist; the symbol of the knowledge and power of science becomes mathematics.
Moreover, the implication of the mythological unmasking of the Christian myth released the Monarchy from its ambiguous tie to Christianity and allowed it to develop, eventually, into a nearly independent Absolutism, whose greatest excess would appear under the reign of Louis the 14th. The Church itself was left to adopt and increasingly reactionary position, trying to shore itself against the ruins that it had unwittingly brought upon itself. This led the Church into an effort to impose its authority even as this authority was being seriously undermined. Figures like Savonarola, and his fanatical preaching of hell, his bonfire of the vanities, and his megalomaniac attempt to restore the miraculous power of the Church, merely served to discredit the Church further. Throughout the later Middle Ages, the preaching of apocalyptic consequences reached increasingly hysterical levels of excess. The painting of Bosch, Breugel and the Isenheim Altarpiece of Grunewald indicate the apocalyptic fervor of a civilization in decline. The Praise of Folly by Erasmus indicates the degree to which the Church had failed to recognize the revolution which it had provoked. The uprising of Protestantism was an attempt to preserve Christianity in accord with new developments in the sciences, but even this was not very successful because the image of Christ as the cosmological exemplar of all knowledge and power had been seriously compromised, and would never again be regarded with the same credibility that had been possible with Augustine “ the Hammer of the Donatist and Pope Innocent the 3rd, the Pope of Inquisitorial tyranny.
Galileo
When one questions the Church's need to exterminate heretics it soon becomes clear that the heretical groups, by and large, were groups whose ideas were not in conformity with the Church or who questioned the knowledge system that supported the power of the Church. Galileo's heresy amounted to a direct identification of the Christic substance with matter. This is the moment of transfer and authority of the Church. Many of these groups and individuals had ideas which are commonly accepted today. Science, democracy, communism, nationalism, free market economics, pluralism, relativism, historicism, evolutionary thinking, and many other modern tendencies have their origins or are partially derived from groups or individuals condemned by the Church: such groups as the Albigenses, the Waldenses, the Poor Men of Lyons, the Cathari, Puritans, Anabaptists and others. The Eucharist was the supreme symbol of the Church's authority over life, death and the ultimate fate of souls and society. But once the Platonist-Realist view was brought into question by the Nominalists, and science began to grow, new forms of authority and justifications of knowledge systems and the power they confer came into play.
Perhaps the most important heretic, who in turn would become a martyr for next totalistic program to seek control of society, was Galileo. Rubin observes in an interesting conclusion to her book that Wyclif and Hus were allowed to criticize church wealth and the Pope, and were not condemned until they questioned the Eucharist. So likewise Luther was tolerated until he questioned the Eucharist. Rubin observes that it was Galileo's theory of atoms at " probably convinced the Holy Office that it was necessary to bring Galileo to trial for heresy". Galileo was condemned in 1520 because
"His corpuscular theory of physics threatened to change the way in which substance and accidents were related, and contradicted the Aristotelian foundations which were so necessary for the maintenance of the Eucharist as a mystery of Christ's body with the appearance of bread, Galileo's atomistic theory meant that the color taste, smell and heat, the accidents, were contained in tiny particles of substance which must remain, in the case of bread and wine, even after the consecration to produce the accidents of bread and this was obviously anathema.7
Galileo’s heresy amounted to a direct identification of the Christic substance with matter. This is the moment of transfer from a medieval Christian society to a modern scientific society. The Church saw the nature of the threat much more clearly than did Galileo. But nevertheless, if one understands the symbolism involved here it is quite clear. Christ had been made by the Church into a symbol of the knowledge/power relationship, and had been identified first with the Platonic theory of knowledge/power and then with the Aristotelian theory of knowledge/power. Now, after Galileo, knowledge and power would become transferred from the otherworldly realm of Platonic symbols and Archetypes and the Aristotelian realm of forms and substances to direct identification of knowledge with man's consciousness and his ability to use the Cogito or Reason to exploit matter directly. The relationship of God and man ceased to be a relationship of subservience and became a relation of identity. "God became man in order that man would become God" Augustine had written, and with the advent of science, this Augustinian formula would come to be literalized into 'the power of man's intellect entered into matter in order that matter could become man's intellect', to paraphrase. In other words, the symbolism of the Eucharist would become literalized, and man, as a virtual God over nature, would be the sole power on earth, the "measure of all things".
Science, therefore, was not the enemy Christianity, but only the enemy of the Church. Science is the logical development of the Christian theory of knowledge and it leaves Christianity behind it, while yet it assumes its basic exaltation fo the human over the merely natural.. The totalitarian power of the Church will become, over time, the 'totalitarian power of science’ and the Church will decline and disappear. The sacrifice of Christ in the Crucifixion was a symbolic expression which denoted the Church's power over souls and was symbolized in the Eucharist; the crucifixion of Christ, symbolized in the Eucharist, would become the crucifixion of nature and the conquering of the earth. Christ was a symbol of man's power through knowledge over matter, and science developed this power into the supremacy of human consciousness over the material world. All that was lost in the transfer from Church power to the power of science was the anthropomorphic symbolism of Christ and all the stories that go with it. The myth of human supremacy over matter remains; all that has changed is the symbolism- in other words, just as the Church kept its power over people by threatening apocalyptic consequences, so in our society the apocalyptic threats become concrete in the nuclear or genetic threats. The will to power through knowledge, the missionary expansionism, the apocalyptic fervor to reach perfect otherworldly truth- these are aspects of science that are held over from Christianity.
The locus of the knowledge/power relationship would change from Christ as otherworldly archetype, to Christ as substance, and finally to Christ as knowledge of this world, as joined to the accidental consciences of individuals living in a world ruled by science and not the Church. The Realist/Nominalist controversy had relaxed the Renaissance. A thinker like Machiavelli represents the the will to power of a scientific and Christian civilization that is now shorn of the image of Christ and the control of the Church. Robespierre’s effort to set up an altar to Reason in the Cathedral of Notre Dame during the French Revolution indicates how far this process would go eventually. Man himself, a "Cogitans", ‘a thing that thinks’ as Descartes called him, was taking upon himself the divine function of the Pontifex, the bridge between heaven and earth. Man, it seemed could make a heaven of himself in his own world, and did not need the Church to act as a bridge and intermediary. When Marx finally declares that "Man is God for Man", the logical development of Christianity is completed. The paradox enunciated at the Council of Chalcedon, that Christ is "true man and true god", is finally explored to its logical conclusion in Marx, who in certain respects is the last Scholastic or perhaps the last true catholic.
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6. SOME OBSERVATIONS ON SPIRITUAL CANNIBALISM AND CONCLUSIONS
In conclusion, I was brought up a Catholic, a least until I was 11, when I was told by my parents I could leave the church if I wished. I did and did not return to it till I was nearly 30. I spent a few years as a Christian in my 30’s. I’m glad to have had the opportunity to examine Christianity and its transition into science. I began to have doubts about the Eucharist 3 years ago, and I am now certain that my doubts are reasonably founded. I doubt I will ever be able to consider myself a Christian again. I am not therefore an atheist, but I am an agnostic, which is to say that I know of questions and mysteries, but not of ultimate answers. I accept no gods. I reject the gnostic devaluation of the cosmos that is found in nearly all the religions.
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Rubin's book concludes with a speculation on the relation of cannibalism to Christianity which is psychologically profound and surprising. Speaking of the ambiguity of the Eucharist and the fact that it involved the eating of Christ's body, the body of a man who was supposed to be god, she observes:
"We know too little about the inner workings of minds to be able to asses the impact of the invocation of the taboo of eating human flesh, the fears and desires related to it. But what we can assert is by combining the most holy with the most aberrant/abhorrant- the routine workings of sacramental power- an image of the fullness of live-giving which dwells in the image of utmost transgression- a very powerful symbol was created, as awesome as it was promising. In the elaboration of the perfectly orthodox tales of Eucharistic miracles in which flesh stuck to the believers throats, in which a child appeared in a host poised for the priest's conception, transgression of taboo was sanctioned in limited areas. This area of the symbolic gave the occasion for playing with things dangerous, and going away from them unscathed." 11
The subject of cannibalism has only recently been broached by anthropologists. But it would seem that the popular conception of what was involved in such actions is quite mistaken and involved more with fear and projection than with fact. Most cannibalistic actions appear not to have been motivated by a bestial desire to eat human flesh resulting from an imagined psychopathic or primitive mentality, but by the desire of a member of a tribe to assimilate the spiritual power or physical prowess of an enemy or relative that had died. The cannibalistic act is, as it were, the reverse of the act of offering human sacrifices. These are magical operations which require the superstitious belief in the spiritual possibility that the god requires food to eat and can assimilate the offered victim spiritually even though the actual creature sacrificed is burned or eaten by the priest offering the victim. The Christian Eucharistic ceremony, the Mass, is indeed cannibalistic in this sense, that is, it is the reverse of the sacrifice of Christ. The purpose of the Christian ritual, like ‘primitive’ cannibalistic rituals, is to assimilate the power and knowledge of the victim. This is obvious and undeniable. The moral abhorrence of this act is denied by Christians, even to their own awareness, because the promised benefits of eating the body and blood of Christ fare outweigh any moral scruple or repulsion for such an act. In the minds of Christians union with the imaged god and the promise of eternal life. Being one of the chosen elite matters far more than drinking human blood or eating human flesh. This is a kind of spiritual blackmail In compensation for overlooking the immoral act of the eating of Christ's flesh the communicant receives the promise of a deified body in heaven, and the abhorrence for the actual act of the eating of flesh then becomes projected onto the human body and nature, considered in their materiality. The Christian associates the body with sin and sin with physicality and the natural. From this arises the usual Christian concern with guilt and punishment, particularly addressed against women, who are thought to be closer to nature and closer to the physical than men..
The ambiguity of eating the body of Christ combined with an attitude of holding the world as a place of sin and sacrifice results from the Christian theory of knowledge, which places the locus of knowledge beyond the world, and virtually deifies human consciousness insofar as this consciousness is conformed to the Christian paradigm. It is this which gives Christianity its attitude towards the world as a place of sacrificial violence, symbolized both in the Crucifixion and the apocalyptic expectation. What is involved in the Christian rite is a complex arrangement of symbolic and literal factors which seek to impose a mentality and thereby a knowledge system, and this is accomplished by use being made of both the most exalted symbolisms and the most morally abhorrent actions committed by the communicant at the same time. The paradoxical involvement in the simultaneous partaking of the exalted and the abhorrent in one act of eating creates loyalty, hope, and for some even contemplative exhalation. It is this act, a cultic act if ever there was one, which gives Christianity its peculiar power, and this which the Church exploited for a thousand years in building its empire. It is a powerful form of initiation, in that it encourages people to regularly commit a morally reprehensive act but covers over the act in beatific promises and claims that those who do this will be among the chosen, the special, the exceptional the saved. Those how have not indulged in eating flesh and drinking blood are the damned. Such a strategy might resemble a cruel fraternity house initiation ceremony, but in fact, the Eucharist was much more dangerous and fatal that any such college trick. Millions of people have died because of th e power of the Church.
Rubin, unfortunately, does not follow out any of these conclusions, nor does she seem to see that power is not the principle purpose of the Eucharist. The Eucharist confers power because it represents a system of knowledge. In the scientific world the Eucharist is roughly equivalent to the consciousness of the scientist, who works through mathematical symbolizations to achieve knowledge and power. The church rituals and sacraments, in general, are roughly equivalent to the scientific method, which is to say that they function to establish credibility and to delineate the field of what is considered useful knowledge about the world. What Rubin does not question, and it seems to me the central question, is why human consciousness, conceived in either scientific or Christian terms, should be considered either sacrosanct or supreme. When Erwin Schroedinger said, if I recall correctly, that the thinking ego does not appear in the scientific world picture because it is that picture, he was describing the immersion of human consciousness in matter, as a means of obtaining knowledge and power.
The relation of systems of knowledge and power to violence, ecological disaster, genocide and other aspects of history are almost entirely unexplored. This is because we live in a Christian and scientific society which resists questions about its own drive for knowledge and power. The ordinary Christian or scientist is unaware of living inside a system o£ knowledge and power which is largely mythological or "paradigmatic". Systems of knowledge/power are self-sustaining and self-reflective perimeters of belief, which are very difficult to question because such systems conflate reality with their own view of the world. Questions that fall outside the knowledge/power paradigm are resisted, sometimes with violence. Questions about the Eucharist were resisted in this way, as today questions about science and its social responsibility are strongly resisted.
The process by which human consciousness makes itself transcendental and thereby creates symbols, like Christ, or methods, like the scientific method, is not precisely clear to me. I understand the act of self magnification that is involved. But to understand systems of knowledge and how they generate power would require more research into the nature and role of consciousness, symbolization, power and violence.
Finally, once the basic Christian theory of knowledge and power became sublimated into the scientific world view, the cannibalistic aspect of the Christian ritual was literalized into a form of inquiry that encouraged an attitude towards the earth and the earthly that was rapacious and devouring, “inquisitorial” to be precise. This is quite speculative, but it follows from the arguments I have made throughout this essay and is supported by much historical evidence. The Eucharist is primarily about the physical assimilation, through eating, of knowledge and power. In science, which derives, from the Christian model, the Christian ritual ceases to be a symbolic action and becomes secularized as a devouring of the earth and of nature in order that man might exalt himself. This is my conclusion, which is obviously not very favorable to Christianity or science. But my purpose here is to try to examine the historical record as honestly and as accurately as I can and I do this neither as Christian or a scientist, but as one who wishes to examine the effects of systems of knowledge and power in the belief that human beings and the natural world deserve to be free of coercive and authoritarian impositions, be these religious, scientific, political or otherwise.
FOOTNOTES
1. Rubin, Muri,
Corpus
Christi,
The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture.
Cambridge University Press, 1991, p.
361
2. Johnson, Philip. A History of Christianity, Anteneum,1976, p.126
3.Schroeder, H.L.Rev. The Cannons and Decrees
of the Council of Trent Tan Books, 1978,
pg.75 4. See also Coomaraswamy, Rama. The Destruction of
the Christian Tradition, Perennial, 1979. This book
rather absurdly tries to pander fear and tries to maintain that the
apocalypse is now upon us because the Council of Vatican 2 in 1966 changed
the performance of the Eucharistic rite. It is a book of deep, reactionary
bitterness and hatred of the modern world, that even recommends the
restoration of the "Oath against Modernism" for all Catholics, and also
attacks the theory of evolution and democracy as manifestations of the
devil. Coomaraswamy’s obsession with evil reminds one of reactionaries like
Savonarola. It is a very interesting book however, if one would study the
nature of religious fanaticism and the manner in which the will to power
becomes attached to symbols, such as the Eucharist.
5. Johnson, Philip. A History of Christianity Antheneum,1976, pg.199
6. Rubin, Corpus Christi
p.35
7. Ibid.pg.350
8. Ibid, pg 25
9. Ibid pg.34
10. Ibid, pg.33
11. Ibid pg.36
12. Russell, Bertrand. Why I am not a Christian. Allen and Unwin,
1957, pg. 20