The Sacramental Text Reconsidered

Let’s begin with this question: what is the “sacramental text” in this collection of essays? Is it a text in which sacraments are the ostensible theme? Or is the text itself a sacramental medium as is sometimes the claim in more than one essay in this collection? Are these texts doing liturgical work, and if so, what might that look like? Or is a sacramental text to be discerned in a mode of redemptive reading? What kinds of migrations of the holy are happening in the historical transformations under consideration (the collection treats a range of texts from medieval to contemporary) or in the movement between the literary and the theological? ¹

What kind of specificity is there to the “sacrament” in the sacramental text? Is it a claim on our sense of the sacred, our capacity for wonder and love, eased out by the doxic attitude of critical distance towards the texts we encounter in the contemporary academy? In that case, why choose a term in which the relation between the material and the spiritual, between res and verba, between substance and shadow, has been so chronically and consistently disputed, and where it is precisely the efficacy of words and the question of whence that authority derives (ex opere operato/ ex opere operantis) that is the issue? But perhaps our experiential relation to texts is precisely animated by these disputes, woven into the (Western) history of signification and representation. And in that case, what is the difference between a sacramental text and, say, an incarnational poetics which has been claimed as central to medieval drama, to the poetry of William Langland, and to the work of the seventeenth-century devotional poem in recent writing on such matters? ²

For a long time the domain of specialists in liturgical and ecclesiastical history, the sacraments—and especially the Eucharist—have had their history brilliantly illuminated by historians such as John Bossy and Miri Rubin, who traced the contours of the medieval cults and practices of Corpus Christi in Europe. ³ Although the pioneering work was done by medieval historians, the Eucharist now has its own excellent historian to chart its fortunes in the Reformations of Europe. ⁴ By now too an interest in the sacraments in literary history has become a definite sub-field, as this special issue indicates. ⁵

To my mind there are four dimensions of the resurgence of interest in something called “the sacramental text”, evinced in these essays, but symptomatic of the wider sub-field and the larger context of literary studies at present. Those four ways are: the sacrament as a historical trajectory; the sacrament as concept, and also the vehicle of conceptual amnesia; the sacrament as language; the sacrament as literature.

1. “The sacramental text,” however complexly or problematically its criteria are elicited, bespeaks some problems with the historical trajectory of the “secularization thesis,” now widely disavowed or viewed as unsustainable by many of those who spawned it. It is now averred that only from a very partial perspective could it ever have been a surprise to see the “resurgence” of religion in the contemporary world. ⁶ The very concept of religion—as separate from, say, politics, the economy, and even science—is a relatively recent development which has been back-projected on histories to which such a concept is alien. ⁷ When moderns use the term religion they tend to think of personal faith or assent to a set of beliefs or doctrines separated out from interference by the state but also from the complex forms of life and modes of worship that shape and form and craft a character, now treated as mere ceremony. But these very separations come into being only with new concepts of state and sovereignty (Bodin, Locke) and new understandings, deeply implicated in particular sixteenth and seventeenth century Protestant polemics, about ritual as empty or theatrical. The secularization thesis generally covered several interconnected ideas: the “decline” of religious beliefs, the privatization of religion, and the differentiation of religion from the other spheres of economy, science, and state. Only through a separate consideration of those divergent histories in different times and places can we hope to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the transformation of religion.

From this perspective the claim that certain texts are sacramental is an attempt to re-enchant word and world, to see the sacred in the immanent, or to see particular words as efficaciously transforming their recipients, and it thus both supports and resists the secularization thesis. It supports it in that some of the writers in the field of “sacramental poetics” can make large claims about God leaving the world in the move from Catholic immanentism (in the confected bread on every altar in Christendom), to a so-called Protestant semiotics of representation rather than presence (where Zwingli-ism stands in for the wider complex terrain of versions of the real presence in Reformed traditions. ⁸ And it resists that thesis in finding the world, and the things of the world—bread or wine, naturally, but also bulls’ ears, bullfights or even Chancery, capable of carrying sacred meaning. The sacramental text then here too finds the pre-modern in the modern, working against the separation of subject and object that has underwritten modern philosophy since Descartes. ⁹

If stories about the sacramental text are going to exist in a consciously reflexive relation to the stories about the secular, though, they might want to consider the Eucharist as a counter-narrative to the stories about the state and toleration at the heart of the liberal narratives. In a series of important books, William Cavanaugh, for example, has argued that the “theopolitical imagination” has got lost in the reigning story about modern politics and the state as the terminator of endemic religious violence. In this reading, the body of Christ is a spatio-temporal narrative that, theologically speaking, tells a story about mutual participation in God, and each other, and the ontological priority of peace over violence. ¹⁰ A sacrament has been conventionally defined as the sign of a sacred thing, the visible sign of an invisible grace. ¹¹ The very contours of this visibility or invisibility, though, are to be imagined—or occluded and obscured—in the ecclesia as a manifestation of that body, a performance of the faithful in bonds of love. ¹² But such an imagination of the body of Christ resists the reification implicit in some of orthodoxy’s own version of the sacrament. In this understanding Eucharist cannot be divorced from repentance, for the body of Christ is not simply the host but the entire Christian community, separated from each other through sin. In this understanding too, the Eucharist is understood eschatologically; it is realized at the end of time and so the exact contours of who is in and who is out, who is a part of the visible church cannot ever be established with certainty.

I am suggesting that any historical trajectory mapped onto the concept of Eucharist and sacrament must reckon with the complexity of that history; and in so doing must reckon with the kinds of conceptual amnesia in the history of the idea of the sacrament.

2. For clearly and secondly, the concept of the sacrament has fascinated critics precisely because it allows ways of thinking about questions of presence and representation, of sign and thing, of symbol and reality. Henri de Lubac’s important book, Corpus Mysticum, written in occupied France, was a vital text for tracing the ways in which the body of Christ had been assimilated to the idea of a fetishized host and away from a worshipping community, and his work had a wide and lasting influence on a variety of scholars who also helped to work out the implications of this conceptual loss. ¹³ This history cannot be fully comprehended without seeing the deep transformations in understandings of grace and nature, and in understandings of human agency, and these must be painstakingly traced out, rather than projected or assumed. ¹⁴ If this is not the case, overly easy understandings of continuity or rupture will accrue around such stories.

3. The words of consecration were famously efficacious words. When spoken by an ordained priest they could, by virtue of an ever repeated miracle, confect the host between the priest’s elevated hands into the very body of Christ, such that the mass was a re-enactment of Christ’s sacrifice. The priesthood, as Nancy Warren reminds us in her thoughtful essay, was a masculine preserve, and Warren shows how certain medieval texts, such as the exquisite Pearl or the complex Prioress Tale (an anti-Semitic miracle story), emphasize the feminine in a sacramental context. In the long transformations of the Reformation, a priesthood of all believers rivals the authority of an ordained priesthood, and when orders are no longer understood as sacramental, a whole set of speech acts change their force in a veritable linguistic revolution. ¹⁵ So the long history of the sacraments and their transformation is also a story about language, and the conditions under which it can be efficacious. Such a history can only be understood with an understanding of speech as act and event in the world, not assimilable to the idea of “representation.” This is important because one or two of the essays in this collection become so enamored of the signifying power of sacrament that such power is automatically purloined to something called the sacramental text in which, for example, Romero’s work in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises as “something apart from himself” is likened to the office of priesthood.

4. So fourthly and lastly, the sacramental text offers up the opportunity of redemption through reading. I am very sympathetic to the idea that literature can have a transformative effect on us. And I suspect that part of the power in the very idea of the “sacramental text” lies in the way it can offer up to us some sense of the hopeful conversions literature offers. In this way part of the appeal of the very idea of a sacramental text might reside in its resistance to the doxic mode of critique that is still the default model of reading in literary studies. Is the very idea of a sacramental text then an idea of a text that can encourage us as readers, to paraphrase Augustine, to become what you receive? Does this understanding of the text and the potential of its powers to change the heart of those who properly receive it seem attractive to those who seek to resist the relentless “lure of the negative” in critical paradigms? ¹⁶ Here I cite Oliver O’Donovan’s recent work on suspicion: “One cannot gain a truer understanding of the world by criticism alone, anymore than one can make a dish of mince with a grinder and nothing to put through it. Totalized criticism is the modern form of intellectual innocence—not a harmless innocence, unhappily, for, by elevating suspicion to the dignity of a philosophical principle, it destroys trust and makes it impossible to learn.” ¹⁷

Perhaps sacramental reading evinces a set of longings in contemporary literary criticism—a longing to move beyond critique and suspicious reading, a longing to testify to the community-building practices of reading, to the idea of what it means to be in the presence of voices from the past, what it means for that past to become present for us outside of any pre-emptive theoreticist (Derridean) invocations of absence and presence.

And here I would also want to caution against any suggestion that a literary work could possibly work ex opere operato on any reader, for there is no given, no ordained literary authority, but only a process of finding and discovering grace, and sometimes in the most unexpected of places. Here Matthew Potts’ essay is a model of reading, discovering both theological richness and literary richness in Marilynne Robinson’s exquisite novel, Housekeeping, the one working through the other. I learnt something here about the novel and about the sacrament of baptism in Potts’ deft and tactful handling. What Robinson discloses in Potts’ reading is that sacraments are more than memorial, for “what is real about the sacraments is the love that stirs them.”

Most of the essays here assume the centerpiece of the Eucharist, though there is some attention to last rites (Zysk), baptism (Potts), and at least tangentially, orders (Warren). Perhaps surprisingly, although one of the essayists discusses sin (Cavanaugh), there is no mention of penance or repentance and the role of the sacramental rites of penance. This has consequences, for it is this migration that is arguably one of the most consequential and problematic, as it was arguments over penance that started the Reformation, as every textbook would note, and the central sacrament of Eucharist is inseparable from the work of repentance, for the bond of love that connects soul to God is one and the same bond of love between neighbor and neighbor.

The very nature of the sacrament is belied or overthrown when sacraments are viewed as things and not actions, when they are taken out of the story of an ordering of “God’s ontological and self-effacing love” (Potts). Does a sacramental text reveal writing’s relation to the reality of love? Is that how we know it or come to know it as sacramental? And what—text by text—might that look like, for love is only realized by lovers in loving.