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As someone with a very high view of the Eucharist, I now want to kill everyone involved with this 🤦♀️
I wonder about this; sure, it could be the hunter-gatherer equivalent of window-boxes, where people in apartments will plant a few herbs or something as a fun adjunct, but their primary sources of food are "go to the local grocery store". But for people not living in 21st century urban environment, this is time and effort invested in something that they could use for other purposes. Definitely not the main means of subsistence, but not just 'fun', either; the extra touch of luxury like home-grown herbs from your own garden/window box to add to your meals and make them tastier. Unless they're growing flowers/ornamental plants, it's not simply 'for fun'.
I'd be very curious to read your view on the Eucharist. I haven't read much about it, but am definitely impressed by the sheer symbolic weight of the ritual.
The point of the Eucharist is that it's not symbolic. Filthy Protestants like me think that the bread and wine are merely symbolic reminders of Christ's physical sacrifice. But for actual Catholics, partaking in the Eucharist means eating Jesus' actual body and drinking his actual blood, and it's kind of a big deal.
It can have multiple dimensions to it, being both 100% true and also 100% symbolic, just like Christ is 100% Man and 100% God (it’s a mystery, duh).
I like to think how this worked for the early church: by requiring the believers to believe it is truly the flesh of a man, you are forcing them to commit to a shared social taboo (cannibalism), which works as a strong signal of commitment to the brotherhood and also as an emotionally-powerful way to bond together. It’s noteworthy that cannibalism is a charge against the early Christians, not because they ate the flesh of any man besides Christ, but likely because they refused to deny the charge in reference to this mysterious but real body of Christ. You can make a parallel to early metalhead culture where the bands would have grotesque names and the shirts had grotesque imagery; it creates a strong tight knit affiliation specifically against popular norms. If I recall some Buddhists did something similar but I’m too lazy to look. Another thing you’re doing is testing the initiate’s faith, whether they can see physical bread yet truly believe it is physical flesh, and whether they love God enough to engage in the taboo. So the “literalism” serves a neat psychological purpose. If I had a church I would over-emphasize the cannibalism dimension, maybe even styling the bread as flesh and the wine as blood.
Symbolically it’s rich. For one, breaking bread was the way social connections were formed in the ancient world, shared meals. So Christ is the shared central bond of the community. Bread is the staple crop that contained all necessary nutrients. (When Christ says “man cannot live on bread alone, but every word of God”, he is counterintuitively alluding to the fact that man can physically live on bread alone, and then creating an association between Word and Bread which the discerning reader ought to notice). So bread was had by everyone, signaling the commonality of God to every man. That the bread is eaten is a metaphor for the sacrifice of Christ (which nourishes), and thus becomes a standard for the community sort of like in the book the Giving Tree. There’s an interesting juxtaposition between Christ’s cannibalism where he allows himself to be eaten, and the cannibalism charge against the Pharisees, who “devour widows” — theirs is a cannibalism of self-gain against the poorest members. Blood in the ancient world was considered a kind of life force and elixir, so associating Christ’s blood with wine is also telling, saying that Christ’s life force is conviviality and mirth (the effects of alcohol). And then of course it relates to the miracle of the loaves and (mysteriously) the parables on farming…
Gorsh, those clever priest-types and their innate understanding of human psychology! That Jesus guy really was smart social scientist with His knowledge of taboos, huh? Didn't work on them all, but enough of them were big enough rubes to be fooled and stick around:
I am familiar with the text. Which part of it are you using in the implied disagreement? Unless I am misreading the sarcasm.
Notice how immediately after telling them to eat the flesh to obtain eternal life, he clarifies that the flesh is no use and that it is spirit which gives life, and that the words spoken are spirit. That’s not words spoken in this discourse exclusively, that’s all the words that Christ speaks, hence why the apostles say “you have the words of eternal life” and not “you have the flesh and blood of eternal life”. (Cf “God is spirit and must be worshipped in spirit”.) In my comment I mention how Jesus specifically sets up an association between bread and the word of God during the temptation. For what purpose would Jesus say “eat this flesh for eternal life”, and then in explaining the saying, say “the flesh is no help, the spirit gives life”? This would be nonsensical and contradictory from a strict literalist. But instead there’s a point that he is getting at. Throughout the epistles, “the spirit” is contrasted with two things: the letter and the flesh. Eg the letter kills and the spirit gives life, the flesh avails nothing, etc. That’s because spirit is meaning and significance and understanding; flesh and “letter” are the external appearances of what actually matters which should not be actual spiritual focus.
I don’t think there’s any “innate understanding of psychology”; it’s not as if there weren’t priests and centers of learning in the ancient world. But if you’re a strict literalist I would ask how you interpret such passages as “I come in the sign of Jonah” and “just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up”.
Look, I shouldn't even be let cast my shadow on this place, I'm so distant from rationalism (in religion).
I'm not convinced by proof-texting, especially from denominations which hammer home that every word must be taken literally - except this one bit here, and there, and whatever the Catholics say.
It's entirely possible the Church was mistaken on this for fifteen hundred years until Zwingli and Calvin came along to set us straight that "ha ha, no, it's only bread!" but I'm not Reformed or Calvinist, so I'll stay bogged down here in the mire of Papist idolatry of the bread-god.
You are an i-dough-lator!
insert Basil Brush boom-boom! here
🤣
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