C4CC(19): Hocus Pocus (2)
Re- reading this now (in the light of studying McGilchrist) what most strikes me is how I am describing the same thing as him - I might summarise this bit of the argument as ‘in the Middle Ages the left hemisphere captured theology…’!
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This is symbolised by the feast of Corpus Christi. Corpus Christi is the Latin for 'Body of Christ', and in the understanding of what this phrase refers to that a great mistake was made at this time. In the early church the phrase the Body of Christ refers to two things: the Body of Christ understood mystically (called the corpus mysticum, the mystical body), which is the bread and the wine in the act of communion, and the Body of Christ understood concretely (called the corpus verum, the 'true' or 'real' body), physically understood as the community of the baptised. So there are two senses: a mystical sense understood and appropriated through faith, which is the mystery of receiving the body and the blood of Christ in eating bread and wine, received through faith and ultimately mysterious; and a concrete sense, where the tangible Body of Christ is the community of the baptised, neighbours and friends, who are therefore worthy of reverence as such. (This tied in closely to all that Jesus taught about “what you do for the least of these my brethren you do also for me”.)
One of the great theological mistakes of the Medieval Renaissance was that these two understandings swapped over. So the mystical Body of Christ (that which is understood by faith), becomes our neighbour; conversely, the true Body of Christ (that which is accessible to the senses), becomes the bread used at the Eucharist. This theological shift has had profound and pernicious consequences. To begin with, the understanding of the bread and wine used in communion – and, therefore, the understanding of what is going on in communion – changed out of all recognition. The clearest symbol of this transition is the monstrance, which is an object designed for the display of a consecrated host. What happens with a monstrance is that the consecrated wafer (the wafer that the priest says the Eucharistic prayer over within the service of communion) is placed in a glass cabinet at the centre of an ornate piece of wrought metal-work (often gold). This is then paraded around the town for people to adore, and sometimes it is also placed on the altar for people to adore, in order that people may worship the Body of Christ, understood as the consecrated wafer within this instrument. Now this was a new development – it did not exist in the first thousand years of Christianity. The occasion for the primary use of the monstrance is the Feast of Corpus Christi which is celebrated on the Thursday following Trinity Sunday, and it was instituted at the height of the Medieval Renaissance in 1264 by Pope Urban the Fourth. If the real Body of Christ in the sense of that which is physical and tangible becomes the bread and the wine, then the elements start to become worthy of devotion. Here you have the Body of Christ in a physical and touchable sense: fall down on your knees before it!
The Eucharist has thus become a spectacle. No longer is it principally about the establishment of right human relationships, the healing of creation and the discernment of the Holy Spirit. Now it is a production line of miracles. The role of the priest is to become a miracle worker at the altar: the priest acts and Christ is produced. The priest says the right words and magic happens: hoc est corpus meum becomes hocus pocus. The drama of the liturgy shifts and in popular perception it becomes a magical and superstitious act. (The notorious doctrine of transubstantiation was formulated at this time, which is a good example of the sort of mistake that is made when theology moves out of the monastery into the academy.)
If Jesus can be produced at will then the priest and the hierarchy of the church gain much greater tangible authority, because they are the magic workers, they are the ones who can do hocus pocus. Sadly, as the church is an institution full of sinful human beings, it slowly became more and more conformed to the world and over the next few hundred years the church as an institution became utterly corrupt, until the crisis of the Reformation washed out the Augean stables of the Vatican. Arthur C Clarke once observed that, “Beyond a certain point, science is indistinguishable from magic.” What he is describing is the human consequence of power and spectacle. Where things which are not understood by most people, but there is a person who can 'command the gods', that will be interpreted and understood as magic. That is what magic is: forcing the world to conform to our own will, and therefore the exaltation of the will. When the magician says jump and the chair jumps, or says to the table, rise up in the air and the table rises up in the air, this is about the exaltation of the human will. Magic contains within it all sorts of ideas about control and the role of the human intellect, most especially that the intellect is the master of the world.
Now there is profound continuity in the intellectual expression of magic and the intellectual expression of science. Both are rooted in a desire for intellectual dominance over the creation, and the spiritual roots of both involve not surrendering to the creator. There is a vast difference between someone reading the book of nature as something which God has created – and therefore seeking to discern the nature of the Creator from examining nature – and someone seeking to exploit nature for their own purposes. There is something in the way that the Western culture has pursued knowledge which is profoundly spiritually harmful and it has its roots here. It is about exalting individual intellect and control over the creation. It is about putting a human being as master not as creature. It is why we have found ourselves deeply implicated in an environmental crisis. It is, in short, the abandonment of wisdom and the decision to pursue power. This crippling of our soul and culture has its roots in the same change in understanding that produced Corpus Christi.
A mistake was made at this time which we are only now seeing the full dimensions of, partly because we are only now really moving away from it. In many ways we can look at the period between the Medieval Renaissance and the early twentieth century as forming a coherent whole. Certain patterns of thought were laid down at this time which remained consistent all the way through the next 800 years. The Reformation, very healthy though it was, and far reaching though it was, did not reach all the way down. As a result, the Reformation continued patterns of theological thought that had been established earlier.