Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence: Language, Cognition, and the Body and Blood of Christ 0197580807, 9780197580806

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Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence

Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence Language, Cognition, and the Body and Blood of Christ S T E P H E N R . SHAV E R

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2022 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Shaver, Stephen R., author. Title: Metaphors of eucharistic presence : language, cognition, and the body and blood of Christ / Stephen R. Shaver. Description: New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021027811 (print) | LCCN 2021027812 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197580806 (Hardback) | ISBN 9780197580820 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Lord’s Supper—Real presence. Classification: LCC BV825.3 .S53 2021 (print) | LCC BV825.3 (ebook) | DDC 234/.163—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021027811 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021027812 DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197580806.001.0001 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

Marie Barnett, “Breathe,” © 1995 Mercy/Vineyard Publishing, administered by Capitol CMG Publishing. All rights reserved. Used by permission. “We Love the Church Life!” (No. 43) in Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs (Anaheim, CA: Living Stream Ministry, 2016). © 2016 Living Stream Ministry. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Portions of Chapters 1 and 2 appeared in Stephen R. Shaver, “The Word Made Flesh: Toward a Sacramental Theology of Language,” Proceedings of the North American Academy of Liturgy (2014): 121–139. © 2014 Stephen R. Shaver. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Portions of Chapter 3 appeared in Stephen R. Shaver, “Eucharistic Spirituality and Metaphoric Asymmetry,” in Erin Kidd and Jakob Rinderknecht, eds., Putting God on the Map: Theology and Conceptual Mapping (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018). © 2018 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Portions of Chapter 5 appeared in Stephen R. Shaver, “Radial Extension, Prototypicality, and Tectonic Equivalence,” Open Theology 4, no. 1 (Jan. 2018): 84–98. © 2018 Stephen R. Shaver. Licensed under Creative Commons BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Contents List of Figures  Preface  Abbreviations 

1. Introduction: Theology in Multiple Metaphors 

1.1. Liturgical theology and the embodied mind  1.2. An additive method  1.3. Metaphors of eucharistic presence  1.4. Some notes on scope and standpoint 

ix xi xiii

1

4 6 10 13

2. Metaphor, Embodied Realism, and Sacramental Truth 

21

3. Conceptual Blending and Two Ways of Feeding on Jesus 

58



2.1. Introducing conceptual metaphor theory  2.2. More complex metaphors  2.3. Metonymy  2.4. Polysemy and prototypicality: beyond classical categories  2.5. Beyond objectivism: embodied realism for theologians  2.6. Conclusions  3.1. Conceptual blending  3.2. Asymmetric blends: bread is jesus, jesus is bread  3.3. The Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor: this loaf and wine are jesus’s body and blood  3.4. The Johannine metaphor: jesus’s flesh and blood are heavenly life-​giving bread and drink  3.5. Conclusions 

4. Identity: The Great Divide 

4.1. The identity motif in Christian tradition  4.2. Zwingli: “is” as a trope  4.3. Luther: “is” as literal predication  4.4. Some illustrative exchanges  4.5. A cognitive-​linguistic assessment  4.6. Broader implications of the great divide  4.7. Conclusions 

23 30 40 42 47 51 61 77 81 90 98

106 108 111 115 117 121 122 131

viii Contents

5. Identity: Bridging the Divide 

5.1. Overcoming the dichotomy: Robert Masson and the tectonic process  5.2. Building on Masson’s work: radial extension and prototypicality  5.3. The Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor as a tectonic shift  5.4. Polysemy: identity and distinction in tension  5.5. Conclusions 

6. Representation 



6.1. Symbols as material anchors  6.2. The Y2 construction: a more complex integration network  6.3. Representation and Identity in coexistence  6.4. Revisiting the polysemy networks from Chapter 5  6.5. Conclusions 

7. Change 

7.1. Development and variations of the change motif  7.2. Lutheran and Reformed responses to the change motif  7.3. The eucharistic gifts as bread and wine  7.4. Conclusions 

138 140 142 153 158 163

167

169 171 174 176 178

183

187 191 194 199

8. Containment 

206



215 221



8.1. Development and variations of the containment motif  8.2. Post-​Reformation responses to the containment motif  8.3. Transubstantiation: a special combination of change and containment  8.4. Conclusions 

208 210

9 Conduit 

227



236 238



9.1. Verticality and the emergence of the conduit motif  9.2. Visual conduit language  9.3. Reformed and Roman Catholic visual piety: an unexpected convergence  9.4. Conclusions 

229 234

10. Bringing the Repertoire Together 

243



244 251 255 259



10.1. Affirmations in common: the ecumenical repertoire of metaphors  10.2. Embodied entailments: the duration of Christ’s presence  10.3. Embodied entailments: adoration  10.4. Conclusions 

Recommended Readings in Cognitive Linguistics  References  Index 

265 269 283

Figures 2.1. container image schema

31

2.2. Apple into basket

31

2.3. Ship into view

31

2.4. Snapping out of a funk

32

2.5. From opposing to endorsing

32

3.1. Basic blend diagram

62

3.2. a love relationship is a shared journey

63

3.3. “This surgeon is a butcher”

66

3.4. “Mary is the mother of Jesus”

68

3.5. “Ben-​Gurion was the Washington of Israel”

69

3.6. “The eucharistic bread is the body of Jesus,” step 1

70

3.7. “The eucharistic bread is the body of Jesus,” step 2

72

3.8. a love relationship is a shared journey with vital relations

74

3.9. Ben-​Gurion as Washington with vital relations

75

3.10. “Here is Queen Elizabeth”

75

3.11. “This butcher is a surgeon”

78

3.12. this loaf

83

3.13. jesus’s body

84

3.14. this loaf is jesus’s body

85

3.15. this loaf is jesus’s body with metonymy

88

3.16. jesus’s flesh is heavenly life-​giving bread

91

3.17. Chained megablend

94

3.18. Chained metaphors

95

3.19. Chained metaphors: reverse order

96

3.20. Two modes of communion

98

4.1. Unworthy reception: Roman Catholic, Lutheran

123

4.2. Worthy reception: Roman Catholic, Lutheran

124

4.3. Spiritual communion: Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed

125

x Figures 4.4. Unworthy reception: Reformed

126

4.5. Worthy reception: Zwingli

127

5.1. god is a rock

144

5.2. jesus is the messiah: single-​scope blend

145

5.3. jesus is the messiah: metaphoric extension

146

5.4. jesus is the messiah: metaphoric extension with category expansion

147

5.5. jesus is the messiah: recentering of category

147

5.6. jesus is god: metaphoric extension

149

5.7. jesus is god: metaphoric extension with category expansion

150

5.8. jesus is god: recentering of category

150

5.9. god: category with three central instances

151

5.10. god: Identity relations

152

5.11. Scutum Trinitatis

153

5.12. this loaf is jesus’s body: metaphoric extension

153

5.13. this loaf is jesus’s body: metaphoric extension with category expansion

154

5.14. this loaf is jesus’s body: recentering of category

155

5.15. jesus’s body: Identity relations

155

5.16. jesus’s blood: Identity relations

157

5.17. jesus’s body and blood: Identity relations

157

5.18. A spectrum from signum nudum to Capernaism

162

6.1. “This bread is the symbol of the body of Christ”

172

6.2. jesus’s body and blood: Identity and Representation relations

177

8.1. Substance inside species

217

8.2. Coexistence

218

8.3. Substitution

218

8.4. Transmutation

219

Preface

Our Lord showed me . . . a little thing the size of a hazelnut in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball. I looked on it with the eye of my understanding and thought: What may this be? And it was generally answered thus: It is everything that is made. —​Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

The gift of Jesus Christ’s presence in the eucharist cannot be precisely defined or circumscribed: it can only be received. And yet we who receive it are people who think, talk, and write, and so we think and talk and write about the eucharist, using all the resources of creativity and imagination with which we have been blessed as creatures made in the image of a creative God. Like Julian of Norwich’s vision of all creation as a little ball in the palm of her hand, the eucharist is a mystery of cosmic proportions compressed to an almost shockingly intimate scale. A morsel of bread, a drink of wine, shared in Christian community: here we taste the whole of life and death, suffering and joy, creation and eschaton, Alpha and Omega. The metaphors, metonymies, and conceptual blends that have been provoked by the eucharistic encounter are numberless. They have sustained the spiritual lives of countless disciples. They have shaped prayer, poetry, art, architecture, and song. They have also sparked schisms, and even wars, when Christians have disagreed over which of them were permissible. This book does not seek to define the eucharistic mystery nor to delimit the ways in which it can be conceived. It takes up a more modest and, I hope, a more helpful task: to identify a core repertoire of “metaphors of eucharistic presence” that are scriptural or compatible with scripture, that have nourished the faith of generations of Christians, and that are all, in their own ways, apt—​though never exhaustive—​expressions of that mystery. It does so using the tools of cognitive linguistics, a discipline new to discussions of liturgical and sacramental theology. It is a discipline that holds great promise for exploring the ways in which God speaks to us, and we in return speak to and about God, as the embodied human beings we are.

xii Preface This book is the product of many conversations with more people than I can possibly name or thank adequately. I am grateful to my teachers, including Ruth Meyers, Eve Sweetser, Michael Aune, Gary Macy, George Lakoff, Susanna Singer, Lizette Larson-​Miller, Mary McGann, and James Farwell, and to others who have been mentors to me, including Louis Weil and J. Neil Alexander. I am grateful also to the students of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific who have shared life with me and helped me become a teacher of liturgy and theology. And I am grateful to the people of God at the Episcopal Church of the Incarnation for the eucharistic life we share together—​a life I experience as even more precious after its interruption during a year of pandemic. My mother, Sara Filler, is the first person I ever wrote a prayer with, sometime around age three. She has not only given me a lifelong love of language and wordplay but also modeled for me that scholarly work was something a person might do and something worth doing. My mother-​in-​law, Carolyn Dobervich, traveled over an hour each way to take care of my baby daughter each Monday for most of a year so I could work on this book—​a gift of time and love for which I’m profoundly grateful. Finally, in everything and for everything, I am grateful to Julia, always. I love you.

Abbreviations John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols., Library of Christian Classics 20–​21 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960). Blackfriars Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 60 vols. (London: Blackfriars, 1964). CO John Calvin, Ioannis Calvini Opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. Wilhelm Baum et al., Corpus Reformatorum 29–​87 (Braunschweig: C. A. Schwetschke, 1863–​1900). ET English translation LW Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann, American ed., 55 vols. (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1955–​1986). PG Patrologia Graeca, ed. J.-​P. Migne, 161 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Catholique, 1857–​1866). PL Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-​P. Migne, 217 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Catholique, 1844–​1865). WA Martin Luther, D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 73 vols. (Weimar: Herman Böhlau, 1883–​2009). WA Br Martin Luther, D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Briefwechsel, 18 vols. (Weimar: Herman Böhlau, 1930–​1985). Z Huldrych Zwingli, Huldreich Zwinglis sämtliche Werke, ed. Emil Egli et al., Corpus Reformatorum 88–​101 (Leipzig: Heinsius, 1905–​1991). Battles

1 Introduction Theology in Multiple Metaphors

On October 5, 1529, two groups left Marburg Castle in disagreement. After a lengthy and sometimes heated debate, the parties led by Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli had failed to arrive at an accord. Their host, Philip of Hesse, had hoped the Marburg Colloquy would unite the reform movement sweeping across Europe. Instead, it would mark the formalization of a clear division. At Philip’s insistence, the two parties had managed to cobble together a shared statement outlining many points of agreement: the Trinity, original sin, salvation through faith, and so on. Yet the document ended with an admission that the parties had not been able to reach consensus on one critical issue: “At this time, we have not reached an agreement as to whether the true body and blood of Christ are bodily present in the bread and wine.”1 The question of how the presence of Jesus Christ’s body and blood relates to the eucharistic elements of bread and wine remains a church-​dividing issue to this day. Like Luther, many Christians assert that the consecrated elements truly are Christ’s body and blood: the Roman Catholic Church speaks of “transubstantiation,” Eastern Orthodox theologians prefer less precise terminology of “change” (μεταβολή), and Lutherans speak of a “sacramental union” between bread and wine and Christ’s body and blood. Others, like Zwingli, reject such a direct identification. John Calvin took something of a middle course between Zwingli and Luther, insisting that Christ’s body remained in heaven but that the elements were efficacious signs communicating what they signified. Some Reformed churches today follow Calvin’s lead; others, along with many contemporary evangelical and Pentecostal churches, tend toward a memorialist view more like that of Zwingli that distinguishes strictly between sign and signified. Since the bitter days of the Reformation, significant convergences have taken place. The vituperative mutual condemnations of the sixteenth century are no longer in vogue, and the twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries have seen a number of bilateral and multilateral agreements exploring Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence. Stephen R. Shaver, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197580806.003.0001

2  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence the potential for common ground. The most important of these is surely the 1982 Lima document Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (abbreviated as BEM), which asserts that “the eucharistic meal is the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ, the sacrament of his real presence” and that “the Church confesses Christ’s real, living and active presence in the eucharist.”2 However, the document goes on to recognize that there remain important differences with regard to the elements themselves: “Many churches believe that by the words of Jesus and by the power of the Holy Spirit, the bread and wine of the eucharist become, in a real though mysterious manner, the body and blood of the risen Christ. . . . Some other churches, while affirming a real presence of Christ at the eucharist, do not link that presence so definitely with the signs of bread and wine. The decision remains for the churches whether this difference can be accommodated within the convergence formulated in the text itself.”3 In practice, BEM has not led to mutual recognition of a shared understanding of eucharistic presence. While there is widespread agreement that Christ is present, and present in a unique way, in the eucharistic celebration, the specific question of the elements remains a church-​dividing issue. One clue to a potential way forward lies in BEM’s reference to “the convergence formulated in the text itself.” Here is a brief acknowledgment of a truth often taken for granted: theology relies on words. When it comes to formulating doctrine, language occupies a privileged role among human media. It is difficult to imagine an ecumenical council declaring unity on the basis of a mutually endorsed image, piece of music, or evocative gesture; councils and synods do their work primarily by endorsing texts. Sometimes those texts are carefully crafted to be precise and detailed enough to exclude adversaries. At other times they are written broadly or vaguely enough to include formerly separated fellow believers. In either case, however, it is agreement on language that is generally taken to constitute agreement on truth. Doubtless this is due to the remarkable and unique precision language affords. Although painting, humming, and dance can certainly convey ideas, these modes of expression are typically open to much wider interpretation than words, particularly when those words are fixed on a page. Language is the most sophisticated and nuanced means human beings have to communicate ideas and differentiate concepts from one another. That sophistication makes language a powerful tool indeed. However, it can also be seductive. Taking it for granted can lead to forgetting that language is a tool in the first place. It is a short step from attempting to use language as precisely as

Introduction  3 possible to assuming that the words we use are capable of bearing truth in an exact way. At Marburg in 1529, Zwingli’s ally Oecolampadius argued that “The Holy Scriptures frequently employ figurative speech, metaphors, metonymies, and the like. In such cases words have a meaning different from what they say.” To this Luther rejoined, “There are indeed many metaphors in Holy Scripture. But you have to prove that here, in the words ‘This is my body,’ a metaphor is contained.”4 Despite their differences, Luther and the Swiss reformers shared a common assumption: to agree that the words of institution contained a metaphor would be to agree that they were not, strictly speaking, true. Both parties assumed that there was a clear distinction between literal and figurative language, and that, while figurative language might be useful as a rhetorical adornment or teaching tool, only literal language was appropriate for proper claims to theological truth. This assumption was in fact shared by all the major parties to the eucharistic controversies of the West. Like Luther, the prelates at the Council of Trent rejected the idea that the words of institution contained figurative language (“tropes”): “He testified in clear and definite words that He gives them His own body and His own blood. Since these words . . . embody that proper and clearest meaning in which they were understood by the Fathers, it is a most contemptible action on the part of some contentious and wicked men to twist them into fictitious and imaginary tropes (fictitios et imaginarios tropos) by which the truth of the flesh and blood of Christ is denied.”5 For his part, while John Calvin would develop a much more nuanced and positively stated theology of eucharistic presence than Zwingli and Oecolampadius had, his figurative understanding of the words of institution was similar to theirs. Calvin rebuked his Roman Catholic and Lutheran opponents as “literalists (literales /​ literaux)” who “do not hesitate to assert that, properly speaking (proprie loquendo /​ à parler proprement) the bread is the body.”6 Instead, Calvin writes, “the bread was figuratively (figurate /​ par similitude) called the body because it was the symbol of the body.”7 None of these Reformation disputants thus questioned the assumption that there is a sharp distinction between literal and figurative language—​an assumption that has continued to characterize much theological discourse about eucharistic presence up to the present. Recent advances in linguistic study have challenged this assumption. As Robert Masson writes, the field of cognitive linguistics as it has emerged since the early 1980s suggests “not only that metaphors can make proper and

4  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence irreducible truth claims, but that nearly all truth claims, at the very least, presuppose some underlying metaphorical or figurative conceptualization.”8 In other words, there is no unambiguous division between literal and figurative language. Rather, all human cognition is grounded in sensorimotor experience, and metaphor and related forms of figurative language are basic building blocks of meaning making. Abstract concepts such as quantity or importance are understood primarily through metaphoric extensions of bodily experiences such as verticality, size, or weight. Many everyday assertions, such as “The stock market rose sixty points today,” are both real-​ world truth claims and complex assemblages of metaphors, metonyms, and image schemas drawn from primary bodily experience. This is even truer of theological language, which employs human words and concepts to speak of a transcendent mystery that remains ultimately beyond human description. As Masson puts it, “There is no ‘stepping outside’ our bodily, socially, and culturally constituted conceptual frameworks to gain a God’s-​eye view of reality independent from metaphorical and figurative conceptualizations.”9 In this book I draw upon the field of cognitive linguistics to propose a contemporary theology of eucharistic presence, one that is ecumenical in its intent. Based upon the findings of this field, I contend that eucharistic theology—​like other areas of theology—​relies on metaphoric and other figurative language, reflecting fundamental human processes of cognition. These processes can generate claims that are genuinely truth-bearing, even while they cannot exhaustively describe the fullness of the eucharistic mystery. This is not a defect in clear reasoning. Rather, it is an inherent feature of human beings who think and reason with embodied minds. Because this is the case, inherited models of eucharistic presence are not necessarily mutually exclusive, as they can appear when literalized, but, rather, rest substantially on a shared set of basic cognitive operations. By studying the figurative language that undergirds these models, I will identify a common repertoire of “metaphors of eucharistic presence” and propose a contemporary ecumenical theology of eucharistic presence that sees figurative language as genuinely truth-bearing while being open to multiple metaphors to describe the same transcendent reality.

1.1  Liturgical theology and the embodied mind Liturgical and sacramental theologians in the past several decades have shown increasing interest in the role of figurative language, and specifically

Introduction  5 of metaphor, as a constitutive element of theological reflection.10 It is not particularly controversial today among such theologians to assert that metaphor and figurative language are incapable of substitution by literal equivalents without loss or that they serve as creative means of generating new meaning. Gail Ramshaw, for example, asserts that “Metaphor is not dispensable. Rather, it is the distinctive characteristic of the working human mind. . . . Although some speech is more obviously metaphoric than other, all extension of thought and all accumulation of imagination are at root metaphoric endeavors.”11 In addition to Ramshaw, other liturgical theologians such as David Power, Gordon Lathrop, Louis-​Marie Chauvet, and Hans Boersma have emphasized the partial, yet genuinely disclosive and even creative, role of language and particularly of metaphor.12 A related trend in liturgical theology has been to work against what Graham Hughes calls “the ancient dualism of ideality and materiality” by emphasizing the embodied quality of human experience.13 At times this trend has taken the form of a movement away from the study of rubrics and toward the lived reality of liturgical celebrations.14 At other times it has taken the form of a desire to reconcile a historic theological dichotomy between word and sacrament by insisting on both the indispensable role of language in sacramental rites and the embodied and material character of language itself.15 Today it is common to frame discussion of sacraments within a much wider concept of sacramentality that sees all of material creation as a potential arena for God’s self-​revelation. Maxwell Johnson writes of an “ecumenical-​ liturgical-​sacramental tradition” that “claims that the trinitarian God acts primarily vis-​à-​vis creation and humanity through means, instruments, mediation, in ways that are described as both incarnational and sacramental.”16 This project is in sympathy with both these movements while it seeks to bring something new to the conversation by engaging the field of cognitive linguistics. Chapters 2 and 3 will offer a general overview of the theoretical toolkit and epistemological implications of this field, which I believe offers two particular gifts to liturgical theology. The first of these has to do with its empirical grounding. Previous discussions of metaphor and figurative language among liturgical theologians have tended to draw on insights from fields like semiotics and continental philosophy, which rely largely on introspection.17 Cognitive linguistics explores similar themes and often draws similar conclusions, but it uses observable data from the ways people talk and write; its conversation partners include neuroscience and experimental psychology. This empirical basis both supports and concretizes the assertions

6  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence many liturgical theologians have already made about the indispensable and creative role of metaphor in human thinking. It also offers new avenues of exploration. For example, discussions of metaphor in liturgical theology have often suggested that metaphors must be striking and novel.18 As will be explored in Chapters 2 and 3, however, cognitive linguistics attends both to novel metaphors and to metaphors so familiar as to be employed subconsciously. Far from being “dead,” these metaphors continue to shape our experience of the world. The second gift of cognitive linguistics for liturgical theology is its thoroughgoing insistence on the unity of body and mind. The experiential realism that cognitive linguistics proposes offers an epistemological outlook that is neither positivistic nor relativistic but, rather, takes seriously humans’ creative meaning making while noting the ways our conceptual thinking is circumscribed by our specific embodied experience as the physical beings we are. This focus on embodied materiality is strongly congruent with theological doctrines of creation, incarnation, and sacramentality, all of which emphasize the goodness of the material order and its capacity to be used by God for genuine revelation. This project is the first full-​length cognitive-​linguistic study of the eucharist, and indeed (as far as I am aware) the first integration of much of the contemporary work in cognitive linguistics into liturgical studies.19 However, it is more than simply a study: it is a constructive proposal for a new approach to ecumenical theological work that may aid in the reconciliation of serious and long-​standing disputes, not only regarding eucharistic presence, but potentially in other areas as well. A cognitive approach to metaphor and figurative language allows ecumenical discussion to genuinely affirm a diversity of perspectives without lapsing into relativism. It provides a principled way to explore ongoing areas of disagreement and to discover unexpected points of compatibility. In doing so, it may contribute to greater mutual understanding and eventual reconciliation.

1.2  An additive method In their book Philosophy in the Flesh, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson explore the cognitive underpinnings of abstract thought and find that most abstract concepts are understood not only by means of metaphor but also by means of more than one metaphor at once: “Our most fundamental

Introduction  7 concepts—​time, events, causation, the mind, the self, and morality—​are multiply metaphorical.”20 Consider some of the ways we think about the abstract process of thinking itself. We may imagine an idea as a sort of object that can be given from one person to another, as when we say, “You just gave me a great idea!” or “I’m borrowing an idea from George here.” Because ideas can be understood as objects, they can be not only given and borrowed but also grasped, kicked around, or swallowed, with each of these metaphoric usages conveying something somewhat different (understanding, discussion, and acceptance, respectively). But ideas are objects (as this metaphor is conventionally written among cognitive linguists) is not the only important metaphor we use to describe thought processes. We might alternatively find ourselves saying something like “She covered a lot of ground in that talk—​it ranged from Aristotle to Marx. She took a long detour into Kant but eventually got back on track.” Here, instead of thinking of individual ideas as discrete objects, we are imagining a more extended thought process as a journey through different locations: thought is a journey.21 The metaphors ideas are objects and thought is a journey are different. Each is helpful in some ways, illuminating some aspects of what thinking is like and hiding others. For example, while ideas are objects is helpful in suggesting that one person can give an idea to another, it obscures the fact that when I give you an idea, as opposed to a physical object, I still have it. Meanwhile, thought is a journey is helpful in suggesting that I can give you a tour through an area of scholarship, but it obscures the fact that, while I cannot stand in two places at once, I can entertain two different thoughts at the same time. These two metaphors cannot be harmonized into a single metaphor that is somehow truer than the two taken separately. Rather, they stand alongside one another; they do different things. My ability to think about thinking is strengthened by having both metaphors in my repertoire. My approach in this project is, in Lakoff and Johnson’s phrase, a “multiply metaphorical” one. It presumes that a theology of eucharistic presence with regard to the consecrated gifts is enriched by having multiple metaphors available to describe the eucharistic mystery. These metaphors have differing entailments that would make them mutually incompatible if understood literally. As metaphors, however, each highlights some aspects of truth while hiding others. Using more than one metaphor allows a richer, more comprehensive approach to understanding a divine reality that remains forever beyond exhaustive definition. Recognizing different

8  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence metaphors of eucharistic presence not as mutually exclusive but as complementary can serve as a foundation for an ecumenical understanding of the eucharist that is broader and richer than any single theory or doctrinal formulation would permit. This multiply metaphorical approach is an example of what I would like to call an additive method, in contrast to what I will call a subtractive method that has at times seemed prominent in liturgical theology. A subtractive method abstracts away from the particulars of individual celebrations and specific liturgical families to find a kind of shared core that it then treats as normative. If we imagine that all the Christian liturgical celebrations that have ever taken place could somehow be graphically superimposed onto one another, a subtractive method would cut away all the details particular to only one or a few traditions in order to identify traits common to all. These traits would then become the norm against which to assess individual rites. Yet, in practice, it is difficult to find traits shared by all Christian traditions, and so a subtractive approach often tacitly privileges a certain place, time, or group as standard. One example of such a subtractive method might be the dismissal on the part of mid-​twentieth-​century scholars such as Gregory Dix of early Christian meals that do not fit particular criteria (such as mentioning the Last Supper or following Dix’s four-​action pattern) as noneucharistic—​even in cases such as the Didache where the word εὐχαριστία explicitly appears.22 A more recent example might be Lathrop’s critique of the North American frontier worship tradition as inadequate on the grounds that it fails to instantiate the ordo, a common core of bath, word, and table.23 The additive method I imagine would produce a superimposed picture in which some areas (including the four-​action shape and the ordo) would stand out as very heavily shaded indeed; other areas, representing traditions somewhat less widely shared, would be moderately shaded; and still other areas, representing traditions unique to a particular liturgical family or period, would be shaded quite lightly. Such an approach retains the ability to recognize the value of widely shared elements while avoiding the need to disqualify liturgical celebrations that may not share these elements. From an additive perspective, some traditions will clearly remain more prominent across various times and cultures than others, but minority traditions can be seen as legitimate expressions of Christian worship with their own potential gifts to contribute to the whole. Robert Farrar Capon at one point quipped that liturgists are too prone to go through history ruling things out for not having the right features, while systematic theologians like him go through

Introduction  9 history ruling as many in as possible.24 An additive method is not a free-​for-​ all—​it recognizes that some practices and interpretations are idiosyncratic and contribute only in minor ways to the whole, while others are near universal and deserve to be recognized as central. But it shares Capon’s bias toward finding ways to rule things in. Such a method is not without its limitations. Taken to an extreme, it might create a sort of tyranny of the popular. It is certainly imaginable that wide swaths of the church for long periods of time might hold to a practice or interpretation whose implications are contrary to the gospel. Practices must be assessed not only by prevalence but also by other criteria, among which I would place scripture, the historic creeds, and an ethic of good news for the poor and those who suffer. Still, in assembling an ecumenical repertoire, I believe it is worth having an explicit predisposition toward including models and practices that have been important to many Christians rather than toward ruling them out. One of the beauties of a multiply metaphorical method is that differing motifs can compensate for one another’s overemphases. One that is inadequate when literalized and taken as the only permissible explanation may well be revelatory and liberative when it takes its proper place alongside others. There is wisdom in Leibniz’s maxim that people are often right in what they affirm and wrong in what they deny.25 In this project, then, I seek to present what Michael Aune has called a “plurality of particularities,” in which the contributions of different Christian traditions stand alongside one another as different yet complementary, rather than having to be harmonized into a single, internally self-​consistent model.26 There is precedent for such an approach in recent work in theology. BEM is itself an example of a document in which multiple models (or at least themes) are held alongside one another and treated as complementary: for example, it treats the eucharist as thanksgiving to the Father, anamnesis of Christ, invocation of the Spirit, communion of the faithful, and meal of the kingdom.27 More recently, David Brown has pointed to developments in this direction within the Church of England: “Too often in the past analogies and metaphors have been reified and set in complete opposition to one another, whereas a more realistic option might have been to see them as complementary. A hopeful sign of changing attitudes is to be found in a recent report of the Doctrine Commission of the Church of England. There eight types of approach to atonement with their corresponding images and stories are treated as complementary rather than, as in the past, set in opposition to one another.”28

10  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence A theologian whose work I find helpful as a precedent is Hans Boersma, whose 2004 book Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition also works with the doctrine of atonement. Boersma proposes a theology based on one fundamental metaphor (the reconciling hospitality of God) and three complementary secondary metaphors (the moral influence, penal substitution, and Christus Victor models).29 He notes perceptively that a method based on multiple metaphors cannot mean simply piling up metaphors without constraint but requires a principled approach: We cannot develop an atonement theology by simply listing a number of metaphors. Not every metaphor is of equal significance. Some are only used incidentally in Scripture or the tradition and therefore have no “staying power.” Neither is it a matter of adding up a number of passages and seeing which metaphor has the largest number of occurrences. Some metaphors are particularly useful because they can function as an overall paradigm, an umbrella under which we can place a number of other metaphors that seem to fit in the same group. The complexity of the atonement requires that we use constellations of metaphors.30

Boersma invokes the work of Vincent Brümmer, who has proposed certain criteria for identifying theological “key models” or “root metaphors.”31 The first of these is “consonance with tradition,” including primarily the Bible but also the theological images and models that have been influential among Christians in the past. Next is “comprehensive coherence,” meaning that a good model should do justice to as much of the tradition as possible while retaining logical consistency. Third is “adequacy for the demands of life”: aptness both to the physical world and to the prevailing cultural ways of understanding things at a given time. Brümmer also notes that different individuals will respond differently to different models, so that there is also an element of “personal authenticity” involved.

1.3  Metaphors of eucharistic presence While Boersma does not draw on the tools of cognitive linguistics, his approach may well be called “multiply metaphorical,” and it serves as a useful example for my own project. Like Boersma, I propose a theology based on one fundamental metaphor and several secondary ones. However, I am using

Introduction  11 the term “metaphor” here in a broad sense. As I will make clear, conceptual metaphor is in fact one of several closely related cognitive phenomena (including metonymy, polysemy, and conceptual blending) that interact in each of these ways of thinking about the eucharistic elements. Because “metaphor” is often used as an encompassing term for figurative language and thought in general, I will still sometimes refer generally to these various models as “metaphors of eucharistic presence.”32 However, I will often instead use the term motif as a reminder that each of these motifs involves not only metaphor in the strict sense but also other mental processes as well. For each motif, I will propose a textual affirmation that the various churches could be invited to endorse, sometimes including some slight variations in wording that highlight different aspects of the motif. I will also explore the underlying cognitive phenomena: image schemas, conceptual metaphors, metonymies, multiple-​scope blends, and so on. It will be helpful to distinguish among these three levels at which I am working: the motif, a particular theme or model; the affirmation, a textual formulation that evokes that motif; and the underlying cognitive phenomena.33 The fundamental motif, which I take to be the centerpiece for an ecumenical theology of the elements, is the simplest of all. I call it the motif of identity, and its affirmation is this: The eucharistic bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ. This basic metaphor of eucharistic presence is derived from the Synoptic and Pauline institution narratives, which together evoke the underlying conceptual metaphor this loaf and wine are jesus’s body and blood. Chapter 3 includes a study of this metaphor, together with its close relative from John 6: jesus’s flesh and blood are heavenly, life-​ giving bread and drink. Although they may seem similar, these are in fact two distinct metaphors with opposite directionality—​a fact that accounts for the traditional distinction between sacramental and spiritual communion as well as the striking differences in piety between strands of Christian tradition that have tended to emphasize one or the other. Both metaphors are scriptural, and I believe both have a strong claim to be taken by Christians to be true. Fortunately, there is widespread ecumenical agreement on the validity of the Johannine metaphor. While the Johannine metaphor can be applied to the eucharistic meal itself, it does not demand to be; it can also be understood as referring to the general spiritual communion with Jesus that is an integral part of the Christian life. The metaphor that bears specifically on the meal of bread and wine is the Synoptic/​Pauline one, and so it is this one that serves as the fundamental metaphor for an ecumenical theology of the elements.

12  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence The eucharistic divisions among Christians have been based chiefly on incompatible interpretations of this Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor—​or, rather, on the fact that those traditions that have emphasized the proper truth of this statement have historically denied that it is a metaphor, while those traditions that have held it to be metaphorical (or otherwise figurative) have historically found it difficult to affirm without qualification that it is true. The insights of cognitive linguistics offer a means of transcending this dichotomy in a way that safeguards the legitimate concerns of both high-​sacramental traditions on the one side and Reformed traditions on the other. In Chapter 4 I will trace the emergence of this dichotomy, with particular attention to the eucharistic controversy between Luther and Zwingli, showing that both sides’ positions were grounded in a common assumption that only literal language is capable of proper truth claims. In Chapter 5, drawing on work by Robert Masson, I will argue that a cognitive understanding of language allows us to move past this assumption—​that “This is my body” and “This is my blood” are both figurative statements and also statements that Christians can and should take to be, in the fullest sense, true. While the identity motif is fundamental, there are additional motifs that have developed over time as ways of elaborating on it and that, I propose, are core elements of the ecumenical Christian repertoire. Chapter 6 explores the motif of representation, which can be described with the affirmation The eucharistic bread and wine are the symbols (or signs, figures, antitypes, etc.) of the body and blood of Christ. While representation has often been seen as incompatible with the motif of identity, I will argue that this is not true: it is cognitively realistic and reasonable to assert both that the elements are the body and blood of Christ and that they symbolize them. The final three motifs all draw on spatial imagery to describe the intimate connection between Jesus Christ and those who participate in the eucharist. The first, explored in Chapter 7, is the motif of change, a motif that has historically been central in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions and for which I will propose the affirmation The eucharistic bread and wine are changed into (or become) the body and blood of Christ. Because changes come in many kinds, some permanent and others reversible, this motif has often raised the question of whether, and how, the elements (once changed) are still bread and wine. Thus, an important corollary to this motif provides another affirmation: The eucharistic bread and wine are bread and wine, but not ordinary bread and wine.

Introduction  13 Next, in Chapter 8, is the motif of containment, whose affirmation is The body and blood of Christ are in (or under) the eucharistic bread and wine. This motif has been particularly prominent in Roman Catholic and Lutheran traditions. The doctrine of transubstantiation, which has played such an enormous part in Roman Catholic eucharistic theology, can be seen as a particular combination of the two motifs of change and containment and will be explored here as well. Last, in Chapter 9, is the conduit motif, expressed by the affirmation The body and blood of Christ are received through (or by means of) the eucharistic bread and wine. This conduit motif is something of a distinctively Reformed contribution, although not all strands of the Reformed tradition have always been able to embrace it. Of course, eucharistic theology is not a matter of theory alone but a lived reality. Agreement on a common repertoire of eucharistic metaphors can go only so far if the entailments of those metaphors are not lived out in practice. Historic controversies over matters like reservation and adoration have resulted from different churches’ treatment of different motifs as central. Fortunately, there are ways (grounded less in linguistic theory than in simple charity and mutual forbearance) to honor these conflicting entailments without giving offense to other Christians’ consciences, and in Chapter 10 I will offer some concrete proposals in this regard.

1.4  Some notes on scope and standpoint Like any project, and particularly any interdisciplinary project attempting to bring together two formerly disparate fields, this study has inherent boundaries. For one, cognitive linguistics is not the only way of thinking about language or the mind, and this book is not intended as a conclusive demonstration of its validity. While Chapters 2 and 3 will offer a brief theoretical overview of the field, along with some comments about its compatibility with a sacramental understanding of the world, I seek here primarily to apply the cognitive linguistics toolkit rather than to argue for it. The utility of cognitive linguistics for Christian theology has been argued—​persuasively, in my estimation—​in two recent books by Robert Masson and John Sanders.34 Readers interested in going deeper will find a short list of recommended readings at the end of this volume.

14  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence This book is also not intended to be an overarching historical account of eucharistic presence through the centuries. Fortunately, many studies already exist in this area.35 While I have tried to offer a brief historical overview of the emergence of each of the motifs I cover, my historical examples are intended as illustrative rather than exhaustive. Although I have attempted to give attention to a wide ecumenical scope of material, my primary focus has been on Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, and Reformed traditions since these four have historically represented the most prominent distinct positions regarding eucharistic presence. I have given only limited attention to the non-​Chalcedonian churches of the East, the traditions of the Radical Reformation, the free churches whose origins lie on the North American frontier, and the new churches emerging in the Global South today. I am also mindful of the heavy preponderance of European and male authors among the texts under study here. This project attempts to undo divisions forged in times and places where both Eurocentrism and androcentrism reigned unquestioned, and it does so in the hope of contributing to a situation in which other voices can be heard more clearly. This project deals specifically with the question of eucharistic presence as related to the elements of bread and wine, rather than the nature of Christ’s presence in the assembly, in the reading of scripture, in the meal as event, and so on. Particularly since the Second Vatican Council, these multiple modes of presence have been emphasized in much ecumenical discussion—​and, in my view, rightly so.36 I have focused this study on the elements not because they are the only important locus of Christ’s eucharistic presence, and certainly not because I wish to contribute to an overpreoccupation with them at the expense of these others, but because they have been the particular focus of controversy. There is widespread agreement today that Christ is present in many ways during the eucharistic celebration. The significant disagreements that remain have to do with the elements, and so rather than work around these disagreements—​as has often been a useful ecumenical strategy in its own right—​I will dive directly in and try to chart a new course through them. While the proposal I put forward does not ask any tradition to abandon its long-​held motifs, it asks each to accept the coexistence of those of others. In doing so, it asks for concessions from all parties but probably asks most from members of those traditions that have looked to Zwingli or to the Radical Reformation to inform their eucharistic theology. As an Episcopalian of broadly catholic sensibilities, while I have tried to do justice to these traditions’ deeply held convictions, I cannot claim to be writing from within.

Introduction  15 Christians of these traditions who are committed to a strongly memorialist, anti-​sacramental stance will probably not find my arguments appealing. However, there are a number of contemporary Reformed, evangelical, and Pentecostal voices who articulate an overall approach that is largely congruent with what I am proposing: an embodied account of language, a sacramental understanding of materiality, and a view of the eucharist that follows Calvin more closely than Zwingli (and is even perhaps willing to go beyond Calvin in certain ways).37 My hope is that members of these traditions who see any merit in my proposals will build on my suggestions and improve them. My own Anglican tradition is mentioned relatively rarely in this study—​ largely because any solutions that can reconcile Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, and Reformed positions will likely work for Anglicans as well.38 Yet I write as an Episcopalian, and the theology of eucharistic presence I propose here, while intended as an ecumenical one, inevitably reflects the emphases of my own ecclesial heritage. I believe that this can be a gift—​ that there is something valuable about the particular charism of Anglicanism that can be both its most endearing and its most infuriating quality: its tolerance for ambiguity. If, as Aune suggests, one of the characteristics of Lutheran liturgy is a “hermeneutic of contemporaneity,”39 I would argue that Anglican liturgy tends toward what we might call a hermeneutic of multiplicity. This has sometimes been seen by critics as doctrinal fuzziness or even obfuscation. But from a more appreciative point of view, it can also be seen as a reverence for mystery: an appreciation for both the power and the provisionality of human language, expressed in the disinclination to commit to a single metaphor to explain the transcendent. This multiplicity is at work in Thomas Cranmer’s famous prose style, with his characteristic love of doublets. Cranmer never uses a single word when two will do: “comfort and succor,” “bless and sanctify,” “offer and present.”40 It is at work in the epiclesis of the 1549 Prayer Book, which rather uniquely invokes both Word and Holy Spirit, bringing to mind Irenaeus’s appealing metaphor of them as the two hands of God and in some ways foreshadowing the ecumenical convergences of the twentieth century.41 And it is at work in the words for administering communion. The words of the 1549 prayer book may suggest a more Roman Catholic or Lutheran view of Christ’s presence; the 1552 book replaces them with a more memorialist or receptionist formula. But the 1559 version simply merges the two: “The body of our Lord Jesus Christ which was given for

16  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life; and take and eat this, in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thine heart by faith with thanksgiving.”42 While Anglicans have at times come close to endorsing or rejecting one or another theory of eucharistic presence, as a whole the tradition has avoided making definitive pronouncements. The broad scope for interpretation in the 1559 formula is illustrative of the Anglican hermeneutic of multiplicity: there is always more than one possible metaphor at work for what God is doing. If this inevitably reflects the exigencies of political maneuvering in an established state church, it also reflects a tradition that, when at its best, asserts that God’s self-​communication in liturgy is real while being comfortable with describing that reality in more than one way. A classic formulation of the Anglican trust in God’s mysterious self-​ revelation is a simple four-​line poem alternately attributed to John Donne and to Queen Elizabeth I. Fittingly, it finds the ground for that trust not in a specific theory but simply in God’s incarnate Word: He was the Word, that spake it; He took the bread and brake it; And what that Word did make it, I do believe and take it.43

It is Jesus, the Word made flesh, who is God’s word spoken to us in word and sacrament. The self-​communication of God can never be precisely defined. But it can be grasped through metaphor. This grasping is partial, always, to be sure. But it is reliable enough to live by.

Notes 1. Das Marburger Gespräch und die Marburger Artikel (1529), in WA 30/​3:170; ET The Marburg Colloquy and the Marburg Articles, in LW 38:88. 2. Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, Faith and Order Paper 111 (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1982), Eucharist II.B.13. 3. BEM, Eucharist II.B.13.Comm. 4. Hermann Sasse, This Is My Body: Luther’s Contention for the Real Presence in the Sacrament of the Altar (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1959), 232. Sasse’s reconstruction is based on a synthesis of several accounts of the colloquy. Oecolampadius’s statement (in scriptura sacra figuratas alicubi locutiones esse, ut methaphoras, metonymias

Introduction  17 et id genus alias, in quibus voces aliud significarent quam sonarent) comes from the report of Anonymous, while Luther’s retort (concedit multas esse metaphoras, sed ibi esse hoc probent) comes from that of Hedio. Marburger Gespräch, in WA 30/​3:8; ET Marburg Colloquy, in LW 38:16–​17, 37. 5. Council of Trent, Session 13, October 11, 1551, Decretum de sanctissimo Eucharistiae sacramento, Decree Concerning the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist, chap. 1, in H. J. Schroeder, ed., Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (St. Louis, MO: B. Herder, 1950), 350; ET 73. 6. Institutes of the Christian Religion 4.17.20, in CO 2:1018, 4:1006; ET Battles 2:1383. 7. Institutes 4.17.23, in CO 2:1022, 4:1011; ET Battles 2:1388. 8. Robert Masson, Without Metaphor, No Saving God: Theology After Cognitive Linguistics (Leuven: Peeters, 2014), 11. 9. Masson, Without Metaphor, 55. 10. The distinction between the fields of sacramental and liturgical theology is somewhat nebulous and varies by ecclesial identification, region, and authorial preference. The term “sacramental theology” may tend to suggest a focus on specific sacramental rites but can also include concepts of sacramentality in general, while “liturgical theology” may suggest a focus on the whole liturgical life of the church. Because this project focuses not only on the eucharistic elements but also on the embodied quality of language in worship and theology in general, I see it as belonging to both spheres but will refer most often to liturgical theology. 11. Gail Ramshaw, Liturgical Language: Keeping It Metaphoric, Making It Inclusive (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996), 9. 12. See, e.g., David Power, Unsearchable Riches: The Symbolic Nature of Liturgy (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1994); Gordon W. Lathrop, Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993); Louis-​Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1993); Hans Boersma, Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 13. Graham Hughes, Worship as Meaning: A Liturgical Theology for Late Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 21. 14. See, seminally, Mary Collins, Worship: Renewal to Practice (Washington, DC: Pastoral Press, 1987); Lawrence A. Hoffman, Beyond the Text: A Holistic Approach to Liturgy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). More recently, e.g., Andrea Bieler, “Embodied Knowing: Understanding Religious Experience in Ritual,” in Religion: Immediate Experience and the Mediacy of Research, ed. Hans-​ Günter Heimbrock and Christopher P. Scholtz, Research in Contemporary Religion 1 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), 39–​59. 15. See, e.g., Karl Rahner, “What Is a Sacrament?,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 14 (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), 135–​ 48; Edward J. Kilmartin, Christian Liturgy: Theology and Practice, vol. 1: Theology (Kansas City, MO: Sheed and Ward, 1988), 173; M. Daniel Findikyan, “The Unfailing Word in Eastern Christian Sacramental Prayer,” in Studia Liturgica Diversa: Studies in Church Music and Liturgy: Essays in Honor of Paul F. Bradshaw, ed. Maxwell E. Johnson and L. Edward

18  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence Phillips (Portland, OR: Pastoral Press, 2004), 179–​ 89; Ann R. Riggs, “Word, Sacraments and the Christian Imagination,” Worship 84, no. 1 (January 1, 2010): 2–​25. 16. Maxwell E. Johnson, Praying and Believing in Early Christianity: The Interplay Between Christian Worship and Doctrine (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2013), 140. 17. Particularly influential among theologians has been the work of Paul Ricoeur, such as The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-​Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977). 18. See, e.g., Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), 17; Lathrop, Holy Things, 142; Ramshaw, Liturgical Language, 8–​9. 19. Some of the foundational work in cognitive linguistics by Lakoff and Johnson has made an impression: see Brian A. Wren, What Language Shall I Borrow?: God-​Talk in Worship: A Male Response to Feminist Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1989); Bieler, “Embodied Knowing: Understanding Religious Experience in Ritual”; Frank C. Senn, Embodied Liturgy: Lessons in Christian Ritual (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2016). I have not encountered any liturgical scholarship that draws on developments in cognitive linguistics since about 2000, such as conceptual blending. 20. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 128. 21. On these two metaphors, see Eve Sweetser, “Metaphorical Models of Thought and Speech: A Comparison of Historical Directions and Metaphorical Mappings in the Two Domains,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 13 (1987): 446–​59; Eve Sweetser, “English Metaphors for Language: Motivations, Conventions, and Creativity,” Poetics Today 13, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 705–​24. 22. Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, 2nd ed. (Westminster, UK: Dacre Press, 1945); cf. Paul F. Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Study of Early Liturgy, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 140–​41; Andrew McGowan, “Rethinking Eucharistic Origins,” Pacifica 23, no. 2 (June 2010): 173–​91. 23. See Gordon W. Lathrop, “New Pentecost or Joseph’s Britches? Reflections on the History and Meaning of the Worship Ordo in the Megachurches,” Worship 72, no. 6 (November 1998): 521–​38, along with Melanie Ross’s response: “Joseph’s Britches Revisited: Reflections on Method in Liturgical Theology,” Worship 80, no. 6 (November 2006): 528–​50. Lathrop’s work on the ordo is developed in Holy Things. 24. Robert F. Capon, The Romance of the Word: One Man’s Love Affair with Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 208–​9. 25. From a letter to Nicolas Remond of January 10, 1714. Nicholas Jolley, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 2–​3. 26. Michael B. Aune, “The Current State of Liturgical Theology: A Plurality of Particularities,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 53, no. 2–​3 (2009): 209–​29. 27. BEM, Eucharist II. 28. David Brown, God and Mystery in Words: Experience Through Metaphor and Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 142.

Introduction  19 29. Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 99–​114. 30. Boersma, Violence, 108. 31. Boersma, Violence, 109–​11; Vincent Brümmer, The Model of Love: A Study in Philosophical Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 19–​29. 32. In using “metaphor” broadly in this way, I am following Bonnie Howe and Robert Masson. Howe writes, “Though the tag I am using for this general theoretical position is ‘cognitive’ or ‘conceptual metaphor theory,’ not every linguistic and conceptual relationship within the purview of this study is metaphoric, strictly speaking”: Because You Bear This Name: Conceptual Metaphor and the Moral Meaning of 1 Peter (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 90. Masson writes that his use of “metaphor” in the title of his book is meant to stand “metonymically also for the whole range of conceptual networks (mappings of conceptual spaces) involved in human cognition”: Without Metaphor, No Saving God, 111. 33. For a summary of all five motifs, their affirmations, their underlying cognitive phenomena, and their major entailments, see Table 10.1 in Chapter 10. 34. Masson, Without Metaphor, No Saving God; John Sanders, Theology in the Flesh: How Embodiment and Culture Shape the Way We Think About Truth, Morality, and God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2016). Cognitive linguistics may be less appealing to theologians committed to strong views of linguistic realism. A stimulating recent study of eucharistic presence from the perspective of analytic theology is James M. Arcadi, An Incarnational Model of the Eucharist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 35. E.g., Bryan D. Spinks, Do This in Remembrance of Me: The Eucharist from the Early Church to the Present Day (London: SCM Press, 2013); Paul F. Bradshaw and Maxwell E. Johnson, The Eucharistic Liturgies: Their Evolution and Interpretation (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012); Gary Macy, The Banquet’s Wisdom: A Short History of the Theologies of the Lord’s Supper, 2nd ed. (Maryville, TN: OSL Publications, 2005); Enrico Mazza, The Celebration of the Eucharist: The Origin of the Rite and the Development of Its Interpretation (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999); Edward J. Kilmartin, The Eucharist in the West: History and Theology, ed. Robert J. Daly (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1998); Paul H. Jones, Christ’s Eucharistic Presence: A History of the Doctrine, American University Studies 157 (New York: P. Lang, 1994); William R. Crockett, Eucharist, Symbol of Transformation (New York: Pueblo, 1989). A dated but valuable resource is Darwell Stone, A History of the Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909). While some of its attributions are obsolete, it has the virtue of including lengthy translated excerpts from primary sources on almost every page. 36. See Second Vatican Council, “Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum concilium, December 4, 1963” (https://​www.vatican.va/​archive/​hist_​councils/​ii_​ vatican_​council/​documents/​vat-​ii_​const_​19631204_​s acrosanctum-​concilium_​ en.html, accessed May 21, 2021), 1.7; Pope Paul VI, “Encyclical of Pope Paul VI on the Holy Eucharist, Mysterium fidei, September 3, 1965” (http://​www.vatican.va/​content/​paul-​vi/​en/​encyclicals/​documents/​hf_​p-​vi_​enc_​03091965_​mysterium.html, accessed May 21, 2021), 35–​39.

20  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence 37. Among Reformed theologians, I am thinking here of the aforementioned Boersma; of George Hunsinger, whose Eucharist and Ecumenism plays a major role in Chapter 4; of Martha L. Moore-​Keish, Do This in Remembrance of Me: A Ritual Approach to Reformed Eucharistic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008); and of James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009); Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013). Smith in fact identifies with both Reformed and Pentecostal traditions. Among Pentecostals and evangelicals, see also Simon Chan, Liturgical Theology: The Church as Worshiping Community (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2006); Chris E. W. Green, Toward a Pentecostal Theology of the Lord’s Supper: Foretasting the Kingdom (Cleveland, TN: CPT Press, 2012); Melanie C. Ross, Evangelical Versus Liturgical?: Defying a Dichotomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014); Gordon T. Smith, Evangelical, Sacramental, and Pentecostal: Why the Church Should Be All Three (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2017). 38. I take the same to be true for Methodists, whose eucharistic theologies are nearly as varied as those of Anglicans, although the Oxford Movement has left its mark on Anglican eucharistic piety in a way not true for Methodism. 39. Aune, “The Current State of Liturgical Theology,” 224. Aune borrows the phrase from Timothy Maschke. 40. All from the communion prayer of 1549: Brian Cummings, ed., The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 30–​31; spelling modernized. Later Anglicans would retain Cranmer’s fondness for doublets, as in the General Thanksgiving of 1662 (composed by Bishop Edward Reynolds): “we thine unworthy servants do give thee most humble and hearty thanks for all thy goodness and loving kindness to us, and to all men.” Cummings, ed., The Book of Common Prayer, 268. 41. Paul V. Marshall, Prayer Book Parallels: The Public Services of the Church Arranged for Comparative Study, vol. 1, Anglican Liturgy in America (New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1989), 364–​65. Irenaeus’s image is in Against Heresies 4.Pref.4, 5.6.1. The Word/​Spirit epiclesis appears in both eucharistic prayers of Rite I in the current American prayer book, as well as in the formula for supplemental consecration for both Rites I and II: Episcopal Church, The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church: Together with the Psalter or Psalms of David: According to the Use of the Episcopal Church (New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1979), 335, 342, 408. 42. Cummings, The Book of Common Prayer, 137. The formula for the administration of the cup is similar. 43. Lavonne Neff, The Gift of Faith: Short Reflections by Thoughtful Anglicans (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 2004), 121. For a discussion of manuscript tradition and authorship, see Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose, eds., Elizabeth I: Collected Works (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 47n1.

2 Metaphor, Embodied Realism, and Sacramental Truth If the findings of cognitive linguistics can be summed up in one sentence, it may be this: We think with our bodies. The most fundamental processes of human perception and cognition are grounded in the particularity of our physicality. There is no such thing as mind-​body dualism: the mind is embodied. This should come in some ways as welcome news for Christian theology—​and in other ways as no news as all. For a faith that contends that matter and the human body are fundamentally good, created by God and doubly dignified by the incarnation of Jesus, the idea that the human mind is wholly bound up with and dependent on the particularity of the flesh is a natural one indeed. Yet in practice Christian theological reflection has often been influenced by a dualistic set of assumptions deeply rooted in Western intellectual culture. The embodied-​mind thesis challenges these assumptions in ways that have far-​reaching consequences. It suggests an epistemology that recognizes both human finitude and genuine human knowing based on bodily experience in a physical universe. Christian faith cannot be grounded on the findings of cognitive linguistics, or of any particular scientific result. Nor indeed can particular scientific results be predicted on the basis of Christian faith: theological reflection must work with the data as they are found. What cognitive linguistics brings to the Christian theological enterprise is not a matter of proof (in either direction) but one of congruence. It is a set of tools, methods, and data that point toward a way of understanding the world, and human beings’ place within it, that is consistent with a Christian account of reality (though by no means only with that account). And these tools, methods, and data—​like those of other intellectual paradigms throughout history—​can in turn be useful in framing the Christian theological conversation in new ways.

Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence. Stephen R. Shaver, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197580806.003.0002

22  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence In this chapter I present an overview of some of the foundational tools and findings of cognitive linguistics, including conceptual metaphor theory, metonymy, polysemy, and prototype theory. (Conceptual blending theory, a development that represents something of a second generation within cognitive linguistics, will be explored in Chapter 3.) These findings strongly suggest that the function of language is not to correspond referentially to states of affairs but, rather, to prompt for the construction of embodied simulation on the part of the reader or hearer. In other words, meaning is located not “out there” nor “in the text” but, rather, within the embodied cognition of language users. Much of the language we often think of as “literal” in fact rests on processes of figurative thinking, often below the level of conscious awareness, such that there is in fact no way to make a definitive separation between “literal” and “figurative” modes of expression. This is true of language in general, from the highly imaginative discourse of poetry and literature to the specialized technical language of mathematics and the sciences. Theological language is no exception, since it draws upon the same cognitive and linguistic apparatus we use to discuss other areas of existence. It is important to acknowledge this continuity between everyday language and theological language: we think and speak of God using the same embodied minds we use to think and speak of our whole lives. And yet, since God is greater than all our imaginings, it is also true that if even ordinary language depends so strongly on figurative processes like metaphor, theological language by necessity does so even more. A cognitive understanding of language implies a particular epistemology: one that has been called embodied realism. Embodied realism excludes any type of naive objectivism: we have no access to a kind of “God’s eye view” of the universe independent of finite human bodily experience.1 Yet it does not imply a radical subjectivism in which individuals construct their own reality either, because cognition is constrained by a shared physical universe, shared human physiology, and shared cultural structures. One metaphor really can be better than another: the test of a truth claim is its aptness to lived bodily experience in the world and its ability to evoke similarly apt embodied understanding on the part of others. From a Christian point of view, such an embodied understanding of language and thought is not only epistemologically sound but can also be understood as incarnational, relational, and sacramental.

Metaphor, Embodied Realism, and Sacramental Truth  23

2.1  Introducing conceptual metaphor theory Metaphor as embodied thought Human thought is not just embodied; it is human-​bodied. As John Sanders writes, “The particular kind of body we have, with our specific sensory and motor systems, constrains our cognitive abilities. What we are able to perceive and conceive is deeply shaped by the kinds of bodies we have.”2 Even abstract concepts—​from those we use each day, like “democracy” or “beauty” or “friendship,” to highly specialized scientific or theological technical vocabulary—​rely on metaphorical understandings drawn from human physical experience, often so familiar as to go unnoticed. Consider the following set of sentences: (1) a. b. c. d. e.

I’m really warming up to her. He behaved quite coldly to me. She gave me an icy stare. There was a thaw in bilateral relations. Their chance encounter kindled their affections.

Each of these sentences relies on a common underlying conceptual metaphor, one that has been shown to exist in a wide variety of cross-​cultural settings: affection is warmth. In each, the experience of interpersonal affection (or the lack of it) is thought of in terms of physical warmth (or the lack of it). This phenomenon of understanding one concept, usually a more abstract one, in terms of another, usually a more concrete one accessible to direct sensory experience, is at the heart of the cognitive process of metaphor, and it is basic to how human beings create meaning. Now consider these: (2) a. b. c. d.

God will wash away your sins. The incident was a stain on her character. It was really a sordid affair. He’s as pure as the driven snow.

Here another metaphor, morality is cleanliness, is at work. Once again a less tangible area of human experience, one less amenable to direct sensorimotor interaction, is being understood in terms of a more concrete one. One of the most important findings of cognitive linguistics is that metaphor

24  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence is not merely a matter of language, a surface-​level rhetorical flourish, but a matter of the underlying thought process at work. In other words, physical experiences like warmth and cleanliness are not only creative examples by which we express our insights about affection and morality; they actually structure and organize our understandings of them. There is an increasing body of experimental evidence to support this claim. One study at Yale found, for example, that volunteers given a warm cup of coffee to hold while they read a description of an imaginary person were more likely to describe that person as friendly than volunteers who held a cold cup. Similarly, in a Toronto study, volunteers who were asked to remember a time when they had felt socially included later estimated the room to have been five degrees warmer than volunteers who had been asked to remember a time they had felt left out. A third study offered students the choice of a small gift at the end of the experiment: a pencil or an antiseptic hand wipe. Subjects who had been asked to remember a time they did something wrong, such as cheating, were significantly more likely to choose the wipe than those who had been asked to remember a good deed.3 It seems that metaphors like affection is warmth and morality is cleanliness are at work on a subconscious level even when not explicitly invoked: rather, basic body-​level experiences are building blocks with which we conceptualize more abstract dimensions of our lives. As George Lakoff puts it, “The structures used to put together our conceptual systems grow out of bodily experience and make sense in terms of it; moreover, the core of our conceptual systems is directly grounded in perception, body movement, and experience of a physical and social character.”4 Both linguistic and experimental data suggest that what our brains do when making sense of language is very similar to what they do when our bodies are perceiving and interacting with objects in the world. In other words, understanding language is a matter of embodied simulation. In Benjamin Bergen’s words, “Shortly after the sound waves of spoken words hit our ears or the light of written characters hits our eyes, we engage our vision and motor systems to recreate the nonpresent visions and actions that are described.”5 This understanding of meaning is very different from referentialism, the idea that the meaning of a word lies in its direct correspondence to a concept, which in turn refers directly to an object in the universe. On a referential account of language, meaning lies “in the words.” On an embodied account, meaning is something our minds and bodies

Metaphor, Embodied Realism, and Sacramental Truth  25 do in response to the words. As Bergen writes, “Meaning, according to the embodied simulation hypothesis, isn’t just abstract mental symbols; it’s a creative process, in which people construct virtual experiences—​embodied simulations—​in their mind’s eye.”6 Experimental evidence suggests that reading and understanding a sentence like “I reached out and grasped the glass of water” activates the same neural connections in the brain as actually performing the action, though to a lesser degree.7 Moreover, this is true not only for such literal sentences but also for metaphorical ones like “I finally grasped his argument.”8 While this line of research remains at an early stage, it appears clear that some degree of neural simulation is involved in the process of understanding language and that this simulation draws on basic sensorimotor experience. As Barbara Dancygier and Eve Sweetser write, “This embodied view of meaning—​that meaning is made of the same stuff as bodily experience—​challenges the idea of language and thought as abstract.”9

Primary metaphors Certain metaphors—​affection is warmth is one example—​are grounded in early childhood experiences so common as to be nearly universal. A young child experiences affection together with the warmth of being held by a caregiver. The recurring conflation of these two domains of experience creates a neural link between them, a mechanism known as Hebbian learning: as neuroscientists say, “Neurons that fire together wire together.”10 A similar process happens with a metaphor like knowing is seeing. As Mary Therese DesCamp, summarizing work by Christopher Johnson, writes: “See the duckies! or Let’s see what is in this box are common examples of early uses both to and by young English-​speaking children. In these instances, knowledge actually co-​occurs with and depends on vision.”11 Early on, in fact, the two concepts in these conflations are not even distinguished as separate. As Jean Piaget showed in a famous experiment, very young children do not distinguish between the height of a liquid and its quantity (more is up).12 Only with time do they come to learn that water poured from a taller, narrower container into a shorter, wider one remains the same amount of water. Similarly, over time a child will have more complex experiences of affection and warmth, knowing and seeing, not always

26  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence necessarily conflated with one another, and will develop distinct mental concepts for each. Yet the neural connections between these regions remain active, so that the metaphorical associations between them continue to form part of the child’s thinking. These basic and near-​ universal metaphors rooted in early childhood conflations are known (in a phrase coined by Joseph Grady) as primary metaphors. As Grady writes, primary metaphors are “simple patterns . . . which map fundamental perceptual concepts onto equally fundamental but not directly perceptual ones.”13 Some of the primary metaphors that have been identified by Grady and others are important is big, happy is up, intimacy is closeness, difficulties are burdens, help is support, similarity is closeness, understanding is grasping, states are locations, and change is motion.14 There is an abundance of linguistic evidence for each of these: (3) a. This deal is going to be huge for her career. (important is big) b. You’re flying high today! (happy is up) c. We were tight in college, but we’ve drifted apart over the years. (intimacy is closeness) d. I can’t carry this project all by myself—​you all need to pull your weight! (difficulties are burdens) e. I’m in a real funk today. I wish I could snap out of it. (states are locations) f. I’ve gone from opposing this proposal to endorsing it. (change is motion)

It is important to remember that these example sentences are not themselves primary metaphors: they are linguistic manifestations of the underlying primary metaphors, which are not made of words but of mappings in the brain. Conceptual metaphor is a matter of concepts, not of the particular words used in any given expression. As Zoltán Kövecses writes, “Metaphor is only derivatively a linguistic phenomenon. It exists in language only because it exists in the body/​brain and thought.”15 For this reason, conceptual metaphors are conventionally written in small capital letters to distinguish between the concept (affection) and the word (“affection”). A phrase like “affection is warmth” or “states are locations” need not appear as such: in fact, we rarely do say these things explicitly, since the underlying conceptual mapping in a primary metaphor is so well entrenched as to go without saying.

Metaphor, Embodied Realism, and Sacramental Truth  27

Conceptual metaphor: an asymmetric mapping between two frames George Lakoff defines conceptual metaphors in this way: “Conceptual metaphors are frame-​to-​frame mappings, with the roles of the source frame mapping to corresponding roles of the target frame.”16 The term frame describes “a structured mental representation of a conceptual category,”17 or, as Dancygier and Sweetser put it, a “tightly linked [chunk] of conceptual structure which [gets] evoked together.”18 The word “waiter,” for example, cannot be understood apart from a restaurant frame, which includes linked concepts such as customers, tables, menus, and checks. Thinking of a waiter activates the entire frame, giving quick and easy cognitive access to the other concepts involved in it. Frames can exist at various levels of specificity: one might have a chinese restaurant subframe, a fast food restaurant subframe, and so on. In a conceptual metaphor, the target frame is the concept that is being understood in terms of the source frame. So, in affection is warmth, affection is the target frame and warmth is the source frame. (In the formalism used by cognitive linguists, conceptual metaphors are conventionally written as target is source.)19 A key feature of conceptual metaphors is that they are asymmetric mappings. For example, we think of affection in terms of warmth, but not of warmth in terms of affection: (4) a. * Is the oven friendly enough yet? b. * It’s twelve below zero out—​Brr, I’m standoffish!20

This principle of metaphoric asymmetry is one of the most important observations in support of the embodied mind thesis: we draw upon our concrete sensorimotor experience to conceptualize more abstract realities. In the primary metaphor affection is warmth, it is the more concrete concept, the one more amenable to direct sensory experience, that serves as the source frame and is mapped onto the more abstract target. A handful of examples illustrating the asymmetric character of some additional primary metaphors follow, and the reader is invited to come up with others: (5) a. This acquisition is huge for the corporation. (important is big) b. *Four foot two! Honey, you’re so much more important than you were last year!

28  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence (6) a. You’re really flying high today! (happy is up) b. *After takeoff, the plane felt better and better until it reached cruising altitude. (7) a. My college roommate and I used to be tight, but eventually we drifted apart. (intimacy is closeness) b. * I’m glad you moved home—​it’s so good having you dearer to me. (8) a. I just can’t quite get a handle on integral calculus. (understanding is grasping) b. *Okay, understand the handlebars and pedal!

Metaphoric asymmetry is, as Grady writes, “evidence against a traditional and still common view of metaphor, in which a metaphorical usage is most fundamentally a reflection of ‘similarity’ between the source and target ideas.”21 There is no “similarity,” independent of embodied human experience, between the concepts of affection and warmth, and if there were, we would expect the metaphor to work equally well in both directions. This metaphor arises on the basis not of some type of abstract similarity but of an asymmetric experiential correlation between these frames in childhood primary scenes.

Metaphors and cross-​cultural variation Not all metaphors are equally widely shared, and even metaphors that are cross-​culturally common may be emphasized more strongly in some cultures than others. morality is cleanliness is a good example. It is easy to imagine early childhood experiences that may give rise to conflations of this type (being scolded for smearing food on one’s clothes, say). But, as Mark Johnson has pointed out, this metaphor is entrenched to a particularly high degree in Western societies.22 In some cultures, other metaphors (e.g., morality is balance, morality is harmony, morality is uprightness, morality is health) may play a more prominent part. In such cultures morality is cleanliness might be less important for thinking and reasoning—​ though it would still likely be available, or at least comprehensible, because of its basis in shared human physical experience. This is an example of what cognitive linguists call motivation: conceptual metaphors are neither wholly

Metaphor, Embodied Realism, and Sacramental Truth  29 arbitrary nor predictable in a deterministic sense. Rather, they are motivated by human bodily characteristics.23 People of different cultures may rely on very different clusters of metaphors and reason very differently from one another, yet the scope of variation is far from absolute. Kövecses writes of a “relative universality,” one subject to wide variation across different cultures and communities but also constrained by “basic bodily processes and action, such as physiological processes, perception, motor activities, and the like. These are all processes that human beings share.”24 A good example of this relative universality is the use of spatial metaphors for time.25 This near-​universal phenomenon is a clear instance in which people draw upon a more tangible domain (orientation and movement in space) to understand a less tangible one (the passage of time). English speakers typically use two major variants on a single metaphor. The first is the Moving Observer metaphor, in which the subject is imagined as moving through a landscape of events: (9) a. We’ve almost reached spring break. b. He’s approaching his fortieth birthday.

The second is the Moving Events metaphor, in which it is the events that move toward and then past the subject: (10) a. Spring break is almost here. b. His fortieth birthday is approaching.

The difference between the two is only one of relative motion: both variants draw upon a common set of underlying mappings such as future is ahead, past is behind, and now is here. Still, the two are different enough to cause occasional confusion. Consider the sentence “Next Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward two days.” In the Moving Observer metaphor, “forward” would mean later in time, so that the meeting has been moved to Friday; in the Moving Events metaphor, “forward” would mean earlier, or Monday. In several experiments in 2002, Lera Boroditsky and Michael Ramscar asked people in places like a cafe line, an airport, and a moving train what this sentence meant. People who had been primed to think of themselves as moving forward—​such as those who had just gotten off airplanes—​were significantly more likely to say that the meeting had been rescheduled to Friday. People primed to think about objects moving toward them—​such as those waiting

30  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence for someone to arrive—​were more likely to say it had been rescheduled to Monday.26 Most cultural groups seem to conceptualize time in a similar way as do English speakers, with the future in front of the speaker and the past behind. However, there are exceptions. Speakers of the South American language Aymara, for example, speak of (and gesture toward) the past as ahead of them and the future as behind them. While this is a very different mapping from the one familiar to English speakers, it too has a clear bodily motivation. After all, past events are known and can therefore be metaphorically “seen” (knowing is seeing), while the future cannot. More unusually still, speakers of another South American language, Amondawa, seem not to use any spatial metaphors for time at all. Nonetheless, Amondawa speakers who learn Portuguese have been able to begin using these metaphors without apparent difficulty.27 This is thus an example at once of the considerable degree to which cultures differ in their metaphors and of the considerable commonality that nonetheless exists across cultures due to the shared experience of human embodiment.

2.2  More complex metaphors Image schemas The difference between the English and Aymara mappings for time has to do with another basic building block of cognition, one even more basic than primary metaphors: the perceptual primitives known as image schemas. These, in Lakoff ’s words, are “relatively simple structures that constantly recur in our everyday bodily experience: containers, paths, links, forces, balance, and in various orientations and relations: up-​down, front-​back, part-​whole, center-​periphery, etc.”28 Image schemas are preconscious abstractions from repeated sensory experience. For example, young children regularly experience various kinds of containers: boxes, bottles, baskets, cups, bowls, and so on. These differ considerably in detail but have a shared basic structure: an inside, an outside, and a boundary (which may have an opening). The mental representation of container, then, is a very schematic abstraction that we might represent with something like Figure 2.1. Here the X represents a trajector, the focus of attention, while the circle represents a landmark, the background scene against which the trajector is profiled.

Metaphor, Embodied Realism, and Sacramental Truth  31

X

Figure 2.1.  container image schema

Notice the way each of these sentences draws conceptual content (whether literal or metaphorical) from the scene of a trajector against a container landmark: (11) a. Put the apple into the basket. (literal containment in a physical container; Figure 2.2)

X

Basket

Figure 2.2.  Apple into basket

b. Finally the ship sailed into view. (the visual field conceptualized as a container; Figure 2.3)

X

View

Figure 2.3.  Ship into view

32  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence c. I’m in a real funk today. I wish I could snap out of it. (the primary metaphors states are locations and change is motion; Figure 2.4)

X

Funk

Figure 2.4.  Snapping out of a funk

d. I’ve gone from opposing this proposal to endorsing it. (again states are locations and change is motion; Figure 2.5)

X

Opposing

Endorsing

Figure 2.5.  From opposing to endorsing

Johnson has pointed out just how pervasive the container schema is in everyday perception, thought, and language, in both more literal and more metaphorical uses: Consider, for example, only a few of the many in-​out orientations that might occur in the first few minutes of an ordinary day. You wake out of a deep sleep and peer out from beneath the covers into your room. You gradually emerge out of your stupor, pull yourself out from under the covers, climb into your robe, stretch out your limbs, and walk in a daze out of the bedroom and into the bathroom. You look in the mirror and see your face staring out at you. You reach into the medicine cabinet, take out the

Metaphor, Embodied Realism, and Sacramental Truth  33 toothpaste, squeeze out some toothpaste, put the toothbrush into your mouth, brush your teeth in a hurry, and rinse out your mouth. At breakfast you perform a host of further in-​out moves—​pouring out the coffee, setting out the dishes, putting the toast in the toaster, spreading out the jam on the toast, and on and on. Once you are more awake you might even get lost in the newspaper, might enter into a conversation, which leads to your speaking out on some topic.29

Another prominent image schema identified by Johnson is called the path schema, also often called source-​path-​goal. This schema is the basis for the Moving Observer time metaphor, in which the subject is imagined as the trajector moving along a linear path, with past events already behind the subject, while future ones are farther ahead, yet to be reached.

Image schemas and primary metaphors as building blocks for more complex metaphors Image schemas give structure to primary metaphors. Since the source domain in a primary metaphor is taken from direct sensorimotor experience, it maps its image-​schematic structure onto the target domain. In this way image schemas and primary metaphors are the building blocks out of which more complex metaphors are formed. Even as these metaphors may become very complex indeed, they remain constrained by the structure of their underlying image schemas. For example, consider the metaphor at work in the following sentences:30 (12) a. We’re riding in the fast lane on the freeway of love. b. Look how far we’ve come together. c. We’re at a crossroads. d. We’re stuck. e. I don’t think this relationship is going anywhere. f. We’ll just have to go our separate ways. g. We can’t turn back now. h. It’s been a long, bumpy road. i. We’re just spinning our wheels. j. We had some troubles, but now it’s smooth sailing.

34  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence Most analysts call this metaphor—​ quite familiar to most English speakers—​love is a journey. A more precise name for it would actually be a love relationship is a shared journey, since it is not love as a general concept onto which the source frame of a journey is being mapped, but, rather, a specific relationship between two people. In any case, the mapping between the journey and relationship frames is extensive and systematic, as seen in Table 2.1.31 Table 2.1.  A love relationship is a shared journey relationship

←

journey

Two lovers Start of the relationship Coupled status Difficulties in the relationship End of the relationship

← ← ← ← ←

Two travelers Start of the shared journey Shared vehicle Obstacles on the journey End of the shared journey; going separate ways

This systematicity of mappings has to do with the preservation of image-​ schematic structure. It is no accident that the start of the journey is mapped onto the start of the relationship and not, say, the middle or end. The idea of a journey is structured by a source-​path-​goal schema, and this schema is preserved in the metaphor. As Lakoff writes, “Metaphorical mappings preserve the cognitive topology (that is, the image-​schema structure) of the source domain, in a way consistent with the inherent structure of the target domain.”32 He calls this the Invariance Principle: “What the Invariance Principle does is guarantee that for container-​schemas, interiors will be mapped onto interiors, exteriors onto exteriors, and boundaries onto boundaries; for path-​schemas, sources will be mapped onto sources, goals onto goals, trajectories onto trajectories, and so on.”33 In some ways this principle may seem obvious. After all, to speak of the end of a relationship as the start of a shared journey would be a very poor metaphor, confusing at best and perhaps even incomprehensible. But it is precisely the cognitive process of fitting together image schemas into conceptual metaphors that produces that sense of obvious “fit.”34 Because a relationship has a beginning and end, it is amenable to being conceptualized as a source-​ path-​goal schema, and this structure is therefore preserved from the source frame. Similarly, because of the primary metaphor states are locations,

Metaphor, Embodied Realism, and Sacramental Truth  35 the couple’s relational status can be conceptualized as a container (they are “in” a relationship). The existence of a container in the source frame (the vehicle) maps conveniently onto this container in the target frame, so that choosing whether or not to stay in the car together is choosing whether or not to stay in the relationship. a love relationship is a shared journey is a single coherent metaphor, then, but not one that stands on its own. Rather, it is composed of several more basic primary metaphors such as states are locations, change is motion, difficulties are obstacles, and intimacy is closeness. Notice that the first three of these are also part of a number of other similar culturally familiar metaphors: a career is a journey, a spiritual life is a journey, and so on. In fact, all these are subcases of a more general metaphor that has been called the Event Structure metaphor. This is a frequently co-​occurring set of primary metaphors, including the following: • states are locations • change is motion • causes are forces • actions are self-​propelled movements • purposes are destinations • means are paths • difficulties are impediments to motion • external events are large, moving objects.35 The Event Structure metaphor does not intrinsically make use of the primary metaphor intimacy is closeness. However, in the metaphor a love relationship is a shared journey, the specific structure of both source and target frames as we know them from our real-​world experience allows this primary metaphor to be invoked: journeys are often shared, with more than one person in a vehicle together; romantic relationships have to do with intimacy. Thus, although intimacy is closeness is not an integral part of the Event Structure metaphor, it can successfully be combined with it to form a coherent variation on it. As Dancygier and Sweetser put it, “A more complex expression may thus activate many mappings at once—​and we will not accuse it of being a ‘mixed metaphor’ as long as those mappings are compatible with each other. Rather, it is a compositionally complex metaphor, built up of compatible components.”36

36  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence

Different metaphors, different entailments Since metaphor is a cognitive phenomenon and not simply a rhetorical one, we do not simply express our thoughts metaphorically: we reason metaphorically, drawing conclusions and taking actions in our target frames based on implications drawn from our source frames. These implications are called entailments, and the entailments of different metaphors can be quite different. If I worry that my romantic relationship is stalled, I may well decide it needs to be jump-​started—​in other words, I need to put more effort into it to get it going faster again, perhaps by buying flowers and making plans for a special date night. But if a love relationship is a shared journey is not my most important metaphor for a relationship, I may reason quite differently. Mandarin speakers in Taiwan, for example, have the cultural metaphor managing a love relationship is flying a kite.37 If my relationship is encountering unfavorable winds, I may not need to reel my partner in—​perhaps instead I need to play out some slack. A common metaphor among English speakers is anger is a hot pressurized fluid, as expressed in sentences like “I was boiling with rage,” “Don’t blow your top,” and “He exploded at me.” An entailment of this metaphor is that it is a good idea to reduce one’s anger by expressing it in a controlled way—​by “letting off steam.”38 On the other hand, as Dancygier and Sweetser point out, another metaphor for anger is an angry person is a wild beast, as in “She snarled at him with rage” or “He was foaming at the mouth.” This metaphor suggests not that one should express one’s anger but, rather, that one should contain it carefully: “You won’t make a wild beast less dangerous by letting it growl. . . . You just have to protect people from it, or cage it. So the inference here might be that people should not show anger.”39 Zoltán Kövecses describes the way different source frames affect their targets with the terms “highlighting” and “hiding.” To rely on a certain metaphor to understand a target concept is to bring certain aspects of that target into focus while simultaneously rendering other aspects invisible. Consider these examples representing different metaphors English speakers commonly use to think about the process of formulating an argument: (13) a. Your argument has a lot of content. What is the core of the matter? (an argument is a container) b. We have a lot of ground to cover. We will proceed in a step-​by-​step fashion. (an argument is a journey)

Metaphor, Embodied Realism, and Sacramental Truth  37 c. She won the argument. I couldn’t defend that point. (an argument is a war action) d. She constructed a solid argument with a good foundation. (an argument is a building)40

Kövecses points out that each of these metaphors has unique entailments: “Different metaphors highlight different aspects of the same target concept and at the same time hide its other aspects.” The container metaphor highlights the “content and basicness” of an argument but “hides such other aspects as progress, control, construction, and strength.” The journey metaphor highlights “progress and content”; war highlights the debater’s control of the developing argument and frames the process in an adversarial light; and building highlights the idea of the argument’s strength and the process of creating it, with one part of an argument depending on another.41 Different metaphors, then, have different entailments. They actually structure the ways we think, reason, and act in different ways. Most complex or abstract concepts—​in other words, most concepts not amenable to direct sensorimotor interaction—​must be thought about with reference to more than one source frame. Metaphorical thinking can lead us astray when one metaphor is relied on too heavily at the expense of others that might illuminate different aspects of the same reality. But, by the same token, metaphorical thinking can bring remarkable richness and versatility to our understanding when we are able to bring multiple source frames to bear on a given aspect of experience. In any case, there is no alternative to metaphorical thinking: it is an inherent part of human cognition, a corollary of embodied consciousness.

Not dead metaphors but conventional metaphors An important difference between the cognitive understanding of metaphor and traditional treatments of metaphor as a rhetorical device has to do with the idea that metaphoric meanings “die” and become literal as they become conventionalized. On this account, metaphor is primarily a matter of creative, novel use of language, and to say “I grasped her argument” would no longer be considered an instance of metaphor but, rather, a literal use of “grasp” as a conventional synonym for “understand.” Both linguistic and experimental evidence, however, disproves this hypothesis.

38  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence On the linguistic side of things, the continuing existence of the metaphorical mapping is shown by the fact that so-​called “dead” metaphors are actually easily reawakened: we might say, for example, “You may have thought you grasped it, but are you sure it didn’t slip through your fingers?” As Dancygier and Sweetser put it, “In such cases, the opaque conceptual pattern is revived to be enhanced—​reactivated—​with a level of detail not typically present in the expression.”42 On the experimental side, Raymond Gibbs and Jennifer O’Brien have shown that subjects activate rich source frame imagery when processing even very conventionalized idioms like “spilling the beans” and “letting the cat out of the bag,” and the experiments described at the beginning of this chapter show that the neural links in primary metaphors like affection is warmth and morality is cleanliness are still very much active.43 From the point of view of cognitive linguistics, the only truly “dead” metaphors are those for which language change has made an original source frame no longer comprehensible to present-​day speakers. An example of this genuinely dead metaphor is the word “pedigree.” While today’s English speakers are generally unaware of the term’s origin, it derives from the similarity of the shape of a family-​tree diagram to that of a grouse’s foot (ped de gris in archaic French). The image metaphor was obvious for the first users of the term but has ceased to exist today.44 This is not true for metaphors like understanding is grasping or sharing a secret is spilling the beans, which continue to draw upon source frame knowledge. As DesCamp and Sweetser write, such familiar, everyday metaphors “are not described as ‘dead’ by cognitive linguists: rather, they are deemed the most lively and powerful of metaphors because of their ability to shape thinking. Their use is unconscious and effortless.”45

Nonmetaphorical language and basic-​level categories This is not to say that there is no such thing as “literal” language. Cognitive linguistics does not propose that all thinking and speaking are metaphorical. A statement can be said to be literal for most purposes when it has to do with a basic-​level category: a concept with which we have direct sensory and motor interaction, such as cat or chair.46 For most English speakers it is easy to form a mental image of a generic cat or chair, while it is much more

Metaphor, Embodied Realism, and Sacramental Truth  39 difficult to form a mental image of a generic mammal or piece of furniture. We tend to have specific motor programs for interacting with objects at the basic level—​petting cats, sitting in chairs—​and these motor programs are basically consistent despite minor variation at the level of subordinate categories like tabby, siamese, desk chair, and rocking chair. On the other hand, mammal and furniture are superordinate categories, existing at a higher level of abstraction. Our mental representations of these categories are much more vague. The basic level, then, is “the highest level of categorization that shares a common mental image and interactional affordances.”47 Basic-​ level words tend to be shorter than both superordinate-​and subordinate-​level words (as with “cat” and “chair” vs. “tabby” or “furniture”). They tend to be taught to children earlier. They are also used preferentially in neutral contexts (“Look, there’s a cat on the lawn” rather than “Look, there’s a tabby on the lawn” or “Look, there’s a mammal on the lawn”).48 This priority of basic-​level categorization is further evidence for the embodied nature of cognition, since these categories arise directly from sensorimotor experience. As Jesper Sørensen writes, “Basic-​level categories get their prominence from human interaction with and perception of the world, and not from disembodied logical properties of category relationships. Basic-​level categorisation is in this respect strongly constrained by human physiology, perception and neural systems giving rise to gestalt perception and general motor programs guiding interaction with objects in the world.”49 Certain statements, then, such as “The cat is on the mat” and “the chair is on the stair,” can be said to be literal statements—​or, at least, to fall toward the more literal end of a continuum.50 This continuum runs from language that prompts for direct sensorimotor simulation of a basic-​level scenario (more literal) to language that prompts for more elaborate assemblages of mappings across frames (more figurative). The insight of conceptual metaphor theory is not that all language is equally figurative. Rather, it is that, without metaphor and other figurative thought processes, human thought would be drastically reduced. The farther a concept gets from direct embodied experience, the more difficult it is to think about it without using cross-​frame mappings. Referring to abstract concepts like causation, identity, and ethics, Lakoff and Johnson write, “So much of the ontology and inferential structure of these concepts is metaphorical that, if one somehow managed to eliminate metaphorical thought, the remaining skeletal concepts would be so impoverished that none of us could do any substantial everyday reasoning.”51

40  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence

2.3  Metonymy Up to this point we have been focusing primarily on conceptual metaphor: thinking about one concept in terms of another by means of a mapping across frames. However, there are also times when we think about one concept in terms of another within a single frame. This is the mental operation known as metonymy. Like metaphor, metonymy has traditionally been classified as a rhetorical trope—​an essentially substitutional practice, in which one word is used to stand in for a related one. As with metaphor, however, cognitive linguists have found that the linguistic phenomenon is actually evidence of a much more basic cognitive process. In metonymy a mapping is created either between two elements of a single frame (Part for Part) or between an entire frame and one of its elements (Whole for Part, or Part for Whole). Some examples are quite conventional: (14) Table 5 wants her check [said from one waiter to another].

Here we see a Part for Part mapping: specifically, within a restaurant frame, we see the Table element mapped to the Customer element. (15) The Pentagon has had major budget increases recently.

Here the mapping is Part for Whole: a Building element is used to stand in for the whole united states military frame, which contains many additional elements such as troops, bases, aircraft, officers, and so on. (16) Give me a hand with this, will you?

This is another Part for Whole mapping: in this case a salient Body Part is evoking the frame of physical help. Note that if the assistance being asked for is not physical (e.g., “Give me a hand with this research project”), there is a metaphoric mapping here as well: nonphysical help is physical help. (17) Let’s open the presents.

Here we see a Whole for Part mapping where present is used to refer to the specific elements of Boxes or Wrappings.

Metaphor, Embodied Realism, and Sacramental Truth  41 However, metonymic thinking goes beyond these conventional examples to operate in deeper ways that may be less noticeable at first glance. The Part for Whole metonymy Face for person is at work not only in certain idiomatic expressions (“He’s just a pretty face”) but also in some of our most basic assumptions about social life. As Lakoff and Johnson write, “If you ask me to show you a picture of my son and I show you a picture of his face, you will be satisfied. You will consider yourself to have seen a picture of him. But if I show you a picture of his body without his face, you will consider it strange and will not be satisfied. You might even ask, ‘But what does he look like?’ ”52 Face for person is not just a conventional rhetorical expression: we rely for everyday social interactions on the idea that seeing a face can for most intents and purposes constitute seeing the entire person. Similarly, metonymy is at work when a single moment of a complex process is used to refer to the whole process, as when someone responds to “How’d you get to work today?” with “I hopped on a bus.”53 Here the beginning of the journey conventionally stands in for the whole, evoking the whole bus journey frame without needing to explicitly mention all the steps involved: paying the fare, finding a seat, watching for the right stop, getting off, and so on. Metonymy is not arbitrary: like metaphor, it functions under certain inherent constraints. As Kövecses points out, we do not generally see examples of metonymy in which “nose” is used to refer to a person’s mouth, or vice versa, even though both nose and mouth are certainly elements of a face frame: (18) * Okay, open your nose and say ahhh!54

A shared frame is not enough to motivate metonymy: what is needed is a relationship of salience, or what Gilles Fauconnier has called a “pragmatic function.”55 This may be a relationship of cause and effect, agent and action, abstract entity and physical attribute, producer and product, or some other way in which the metonymic mapping renders the target concept more cognitively accessible. The Pentagon, for example, is a visible physical building many people have seen; it thus serves as a good anchor for the more nebulous concept of the overall military as an institution. The hand and face are particularly salient body parts for physical help and unique interpersonal identifiability, respectively. Table 5 in a restaurant is a permanently accessible physical landmark, even as its customer occupants change constantly.

42  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence Like metaphor, metonymy functions continually, often subconsciously, in structuring the ways we perceive and conceive the world. Often metaphor and metonymy coincide, mutually reinforcing one another (as in the example of “Give me a hand with this” for nonphysical help). Both are core processes of figurative thought.

2.4  Polysemy and prototypicality: beyond classical categories Two additional areas of focus in cognitive linguistics that offer further evidence against the idea that language is capable of direct reference to reality independent of embodied minds are polysemy and prototypicality. These concepts are related: polysemy is the phenomenon in which a given word has multiple related meanings, while prototypicality is the phenomenon in which different instances of a given category are treated as better or worse examples of that category. In both these areas, linguistic evidence strongly suggests that meaning is not a fixed property of words but a dynamic construction that arises out of usage in context.

Polysemy How is it that a single word can have more than one meaning, and how are those meanings related? These are questions of considerable interest to cognitive linguists, and the answers are different in different situations. Consider the word “seal,” which can refer to either a marine mammal or a wax stamp. As it happens, those two meanings are unrelated: the first derives from early Germanic roots, the second from Latin. On the other hand, consider the word “crane.” This can mean a kind of bird or a large piece of construction equipment. As a verb, it can refer to the action of stretching out one’s neck to get a glimpse of something. All these senses are connected by image-​ schematic relationships: a mechanical crane bears a physical resemblance to a long-​necked bird, as does a rubbernecking human. The relationships among various senses of words exist on a continuum from homonymy, on one end, to monosemy, on the other.56 Homonymy occurs when a word has multiple unrelated meanings, as with “seal.” At the other end of the spectrum, monosemy is the name for a situation in which a

Metaphor, Embodied Realism, and Sacramental Truth  43 word has only a single meaning. From the perspective of cognitive linguistics, however, there is practically no such thing as monosemy, at least not permanent monosemy: the senses of a word are not fixed but emerge dynamically with usage. Any word is at least potentially capable of taking on new meanings at almost any time. Consider, for example, the word “mouse,” which gained a new meaning in the second half of the twentieth century: a handheld tool used to control a computer. As with “crane,” this coinage was an example of image metaphor based on a similar size and shape (with the device’s cord serving as the tail). Today, even though the prevalence of wireless mice has reduced the resemblance, “mouse” has become entrenched as the word for the tool. The territory between homonymy and monosemy is called polysemy. This is the situation in which a word can be used in multiple, but mutually related, ways. The concept of motivation plays an important role again here: the various uses of a given word are neither arbitrary, on the one hand, nor wholly predictable, on the other. They emerge dynamically in ways that are shaped and constrained by the realities of embodied cognition. This results in what cognitive linguists call radial extension: the extension of a word’s semantic range to include a new usage. Radial extension can take place on the basis of literal shared features. It can take place via metaphor, including both image metaphor (as with the example of the computer mouse) and deeper conceptual metaphor (as when a verb originally meaning “to see” comes over the course of centuries to mean “to know”).57 It can arise via metonymy, as when a word originally meaning “eye” comes over time to mean “face.”58 Or it can arise on the basis of more complex conceptual blends, such as those that will be explored in Chapter 3. By any of these avenues, radial extension can take place at any time as a word is applied to a new situation, meaning that word meaning is almost endlessly productive. Polysemy as a phenomenon is hardly a new discovery. After all, dictionary compilers have been including multiple senses of words for centuries. A new insight cognitive linguistics has brought, however, is that in many cases it is impossible to separate a word’s range of meaning into unambiguous, discrete senses.59 Some words are closer to homonymous: most English speakers would probably say that a “mouse” (the rodent) and a “mouse” (the computer device) are two different things rather than two subcases of the same concept. Others are closer to monosemous: most English speakers would likely identify “aunt” (a mother’s sister) and “aunt” (a father’s sister) as referring

44  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence to the same concept, although there are other languages that give different labels to these two roles and whose speakers would consider them two different things entirely.60 There are certain basic tests that can distinguish between these stronger cases of homonymy and monosemy. For example, I can say “My aunt came to the party, and so did Julia’s,” thinking of my father’s sister and Julia’s mother’s sister, without provoking any sense of oddness or unacceptability on my hearer’s part. On the other hand, if I say “I saw a mouse today, and so did Julia” when I mean that I went to the pet store while Julia worked on the computer, my hearer is likely to find my statement either facetious or simply odd. This sense of oddness (technically called zeugma) is why we find puns humorous.61 Zeugma in a parallel construction like these indicates relative homonymy, while its lack indicates relative monosemy. However, there are also many cases of true polysemy that fall in between the two. Consider the English word “virus,” which originally referred only to a biological pathogen but from the early 1980s onward began to be used also to refer to a malicious, self-​replicating computer program.62 This usage began as a straightforward metaphorical extension that was at first still novel enough to feel self-​consciously “nonliteral” to most English speakers. Over time, however, repeated usage allowed this extension to become entrenched enough in the language community to become the proper term for this type of program. As Fauconnier writes, “We no longer feel ourselves to be talking about certain programs ‘as if ’ they were viruses; rather, our subjective and not very conscious impression is that we are now using the term virus to speak of such programs.”63 Now biological viruses and computer viruses have several things in common: both are opportunistic, self-​replicating, and generally harmful. They are also quite different: the former occur naturally, while the latter are designed by humans. The former infect physical cells, while the latter are made up only of data. It is in many ways unclear whether most English speakers today experience the term “virus” as having two separate senses or as a single sense covering both cases. The standard linguistic tests offer conflicting results for a word like this: we may feel that “I got a virus last week, and so did my computer” carries a note of facetiousness, but “This new statistical package could help us track the spread of viruses in both people and computers” may sound somewhat more acceptable. This situation is in fact quite common. In an extensive study of the English verb “paint,” linguist David Tuggy has shown that the standard tests give

Metaphor, Embodied Realism, and Sacramental Truth  45 differing results depending on context and relative difference in meaning.64 Imagine, for example, that Leonardo has spent the day painting a picture of Julius’s villa from the outside, while Michelangelo has been inside decorating the interior walls with frescoes. What do they tell their friends that evening? For me, at least, “We both spent the day painting” is completely unobjectionable, while “We both spent the day painting Julius’s house” provokes considerable zeugma. Yet taken independently, each can say “I spent the day painting Julius’s house” with no difficulty at all. The same is true for many other words. As Tuggy writes, “A chess set, a set in tennis, a set of dishes, and a set in logic; or breaking a stick, a law, a horse, water, ranks, a code, and a record; in each case the meanings are clearly rather different from each other, but do they not have something in common as well? Our seeing the differences between them does not cancel out our ability to see them as the same thing.”65 As it turns out, clear cases of homonymy and monosemy are less the rule than the exception; like many other cognitive realities, these are not completely discrete phenomena but, rather, two ends of a spectrum, with the ambiguous territory of polysemy in between. In Paul Deane’s words, “Polysemy seems somehow to straddle the border between identity and distinctness.”66 In it, there is a lasting and unresolved paradox by which multiple concepts are perceived as the same thing in some contexts and one concept is perceived as multiple different things in others.

Prototypicality There are times when it is possible to identify a single discrete sense for a word. Yet it is frequently the case that not all instances will be perceived as equally good examples of the concept represented by that word. In a 1987 study, George Lakoff observed that the concept mother displays a radial structure. In other words, there is a prototypical, or central, case that is easiest for users to identify, but users also readily extend the category to account for variations.67 For English speakers in modern Western society, a prototypical mother may be one “who is and always has been female, and who gave birth to the child, supplied her half of the child’s genes, nurtured the child, is married to the father, is one generation older than the child, and is the child’s legal guardian.”68 However, not all of these features need to be true for a person to be called a mother. Nonprototypical examples (adoptive mother, birth mother, stepmother, etc.) can also be treated as members

46  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence of the category: each of these people might rightly and uncontroversially, in various contexts, be able to say, “I’m this child’s mother.” New instances may also arise over time: for example, the development of egg donation has given rise to the concept of a genetic mother. The category is not structured by a single set of necessary and sufficient conditions that must be true for all its members. Instead, it is a network of instances, each of which is linked to at least one other instance by a radial extension.69 Most English speakers would not think of all these instances of “mother” as representing altogether separate “senses” or “meanings” of the word “mother.” However, they might consider some instances to be more central examples of the concept mother than others. The groundbreaking 1970s work of psychologist Eleanor Rosch demonstrated that cognitive categories generally demonstrate prototype effects: for example, English speakers consistently identify sparrows and robins as “best examples” of birds. Chickens and penguins, while still birds, are identified as less “birdlike.” Certain category members are privileged over others, serving as mental “anchors” for the category as a whole and as reference points for determining the typicality of other members.70 Some categories (such as bird) exhibit fairly discrete boundaries: a penguin may not be as central as a robin, but it is still uncontroversially a bird. Other categories, however, have fuzzy boundaries in which edge cases are hard to classify. Individuals may disagree, for example, over whether a stepmother or a genetic mother is “really” a mother.71 Users may find it difficult to decide whether such edge cases fit within a category; they may resort to expressions like “Technically, she’s his mother,” “Strictly speaking, I guess she’s not his mother,” or “That’s on the edge of what I’d call a mother.”72 In some cases, different communities apply different boundaries to a category. Many cases may fit within both, but others are excluded from one or the other. For example, in the United States today, the federal government recognizes same-​sex marriages as full members of the category marriage, while certain religious groups restrict the definition of marriage to different-​sex couples. Even scientific categories are based in fact not on precise correspondence to an external reality independent of human bodies and minds but on consensus within a particular community. A category like bird relies on the common acceptance of taxonomic criteria among biologists—​but, as paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould has shown, these taxonomic criteria are hardly unambiguous. In many cases, ancestral branching and physical similarity produce very different results, so that any single set of definitional conditions

Metaphor, Embodied Realism, and Sacramental Truth  47 would exclude members who should intuitively be included. There is no one set of criteria that strictly identifies the category fish or zebra.73 The physical world does not come pre-​organized into objective categories: rather, it is human beings who build categories on the basis of our human-​bodied experience of that physical world.

2.5  Beyond objectivism: embodied realism for theologians Meaning as embodied simulation From this overview of some of the foundations of cognitive linguistic theory, we are now in a position to draw some overall conclusions about the function of language. First of all: language does not “mean” but prompts us to generate meaning.74 Words do not “have” meanings as fixed properties referring directly to objective reality. Rather, as we have seen, words and grammatical constructions serve to cue hearers and readers to generate arrays of blended spaces drawing upon embodied experience. Language comprehension is not a matter of deciphering an abstract proposition but of generating an appropriate imaginative simulation that is close enough to the speaker or writer’s own to enable mutual recognition. In Tim Rohrer’s words, “The primary purpose of language is not the objective description of the world, but instead to communicate and share experiences.”75 Rather than being “in” the words themselves, the meaning of words is generated by the listener or reader, in response to the words, as part of a dynamic and productive process. It is not algorithmic or wholly predictable, yet it is also far from arbitrary or unconstrained. Next, meaning is a matter of embodiment—​and that means specifically human embodiment. Basic image schemas like up/​down, front/​back, inside/​outside; color concepts like red, green, or blue; primary metaphors like change is motion and causation is applying a force—​all these are meaningful because of particular properties of human bodies. As John Sanders points out, “If we had bodies like jellyfish, yet retained our enhanced cognitive capacities, then our cognition would be very different than as is the case with our present bodies. We would not, for example, have the concept in front of since jellyfish have no faces nor would we use seeing or hearing to mean understanding something.”76 Sanders goes on to cite James Geary’s observation that, if crabs were intelligent, “they would undoubtedly describe

48  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence progress in difficult negotiations as sidling toward agreement and express hope for a better future by saying their best days are still beside them.”77 An embodied account of meaning has major epistemological implications. In particular, it undermines a set of assumptions that have been, if not unquestioned, at least widespread in Western culture particularly since the Renaissance and in some ways since the time of ancient Greece. Mark Johnson calls this set of assumptions “objectivism” and describes it this way: “The world consists of objects that have properties and stand in various relationships independent of human understanding. . . . To describe an objective reality of this sort, we need language that expresses concepts that can map onto the objects, properties, and relations in a literal, univocal, context-​ independent fashion.”78 In an objectivist understanding, language and thought are fundamentally literal, since truth is a matter of referential correspondence between a statement and a state of affairs in the world. While figurative language such as metaphor might have poetic or rhetorical value for its power to entertain or to stimulate creative thinking, any figurative statement can in principle be reduced to a literal meaning for the purpose of determining its truth value. This view is still operative in many places today, particularly among philosophers influenced by the analytic tradition.79 The findings of cognitive linguistics do not support an objectivist paradigm. Since thought and meaning are embodied, human beings have no direct access to reality: both perception and cognition are structured by the specific qualities of our bodies. Language is not capable of direct, one-​to-​one correspondence to categories and concepts existing in the world. Rather, language is inherently polysemous, and the categories and concepts for which it prompts are products of human interaction with the world instead of inherent in the world itself. For example, Gallese and Lakoff write, “A simple sentence like Some chairs are green is not true of the world independent of us, since there are neither chairs nor green things independent of us.”80 To be a chair means to be an object suitable for human bodies to sit on, and to be green means to reflect light at wavelengths that stimulate a certain set of cones in human retinas. Such categories are experientially meaningful for human beings; without respect to human embodiment, they have no meaning whatsoever. Yet embodied cognition does not imply a radical subjectivism either. As Gallese and Lakoff go on to point out, Some chairs are green is, in fact, “true relative to our body-​based understanding of the world.”81 Meaning

Metaphor, Embodied Realism, and Sacramental Truth  49 is not arbitrary nor internal; it is subject to the constraints of shared human embodiment—​our biological similarity grounded in our genetic relatedness—​and a shared physical universe. Embodied cognition suggests that our cognitive categories are neither inherent in the world as it is nor purely arbitrary and personal. We do not have unmediated access to reality, but the access we have, mediated by our human bodies, is enough to construct understandings that allow us to live successfully in the world. Some metaphors really are better, and some statements truer, than others. This position is what Lakoff and Johnson call embodied realism: “a realism grounded in our capacity to function successfully in our physical environments.”82 From an embodied-​realist point of view, truth is not a matter of referential correspondence but a matter of aptness to reality. In many cases this aptness is simple, uncontroversial, and (for all intents and purposes) literal, such as when basic-​level categories are in view: the cat really is, or isn’t, on the mat. In others such aptness is the product of complex processes of figurative thought such as metaphor and metonymy: “If food costs more this year than last year, then it is true to say the price of food rose or went up this year and false to say that prices have fallen or gone down. If we think of love as a Journey, then it can be true to say We’ve come a long way in our relationship and it could be false to say Our relationship did not go anywhere.”83 There are many truths—​including very ordinary ones—​that can only be expressed in figurative language. If this is the case with ordinary, everyday truth claims, it is certainly even more so with theological claims. Having completed this first tour through the foundational theoretical toolkit and epistemological implications of cognitive linguistics, we can consider the role of figurative language and thought in dealing with ultimate questions of meaning, faith, and God.

Embodied realism and theology The “embodied realism” for which Lakoff and Johnson argue on the basis of linguistics has much in common with the “critical realism” espoused by an increasing number of theologians in the late twentieth and early twenty-​ first centuries and associated in particular with the work of Ian Barbour.84 Like Lakoff and Johnson’s embodied realism, Barbour’s critical realism is an epistemological position that explicitly seeks to position itself between the extremes of naive realism and naive relativism. In Barbour’s words, “A

50  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence ‘critical realism’ must acknowledge both the creativity of man’s [sic] mind, and the existence of patterns in events that are not created by man’s mind. . . . Critical realism acknowledges the indirectness of reference and the realistic intent of language as used in the scientific community.”85 While respecting the differences between scientific and theological discourse, Barbour’s approach, and that of theologians influenced by him, seeks to find commonality between the two, insisting that in both science and theology humans use language that is inevitably to some extent subjective to attempt to describe objectively existing realities. As Hans Boersma puts it, “Human language may be inherently metaphorical and may thus require a humble epistemology, but this does not mean that there is no objective world that can, in some indirect fashion, be interpreted. In other words, while our language and interpretive process are necessarily metaphorical, the created order itself is not.”86 For Boersma this necessitates “some kind of ‘critical-​ realist’ epistemology that claims there truly is an objective world out there and that also asserts that some understandings are better than others.”87 This widespread theological consensus that human knowledge is partial yet genuine, and that metaphor is truth-bearing and irreducible, is eminently congruent with the insights of cognitive linguistics. As Masson and Sanders have argued at greater length than I can do here, embodied realism is an appropriate stance for Christians, who celebrate the goodness of the material creation and of the human body.88 In contrast to a theological approach that would claim that revealed truth is different from other propositions, a theology based on embodied realism posits that there is no separate “God module” dedicated to processing language and thought about the divine: in experiencing and thinking about God, we draw upon the same image schemas and primary metaphors we draw upon for everything else.89 This is hardly inconsistent with God’s dignity, as Sanders points out: “This approach coheres nicely with the doctrine of creation common in Western religions in which humans are physical beings with finite capacities. In relating to us, God does not bypass our creaturely cognitive structures. Rather, God works through them.”90 A theology informed by cognitive linguistics can combine Barbour’s critical realism with Lakoff and Johnson’s embodied realism. Perhaps such a theological perspective might be called sacramental realism. Here I use the word “sacramental” in the broad sense, referring not only to specific sacramental rites but also to what the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer calls “countless ways by which God uses material things to reach out to us.”91

Metaphor, Embodied Realism, and Sacramental Truth  51 A sacramental-​realist epistemology takes critical realism and grounds it in flesh, noting that our thought processes are shaped by our embeddedness in muscle, nerve, and bone and that it is in our bodies, not via disembodied minds, that God interacts with human beings. Our deepest questions, fears, joys, and thanksgivings are experienced and expressed in terms of image schemas and primary metaphors drawn from bodily human experience. As Andrea Bieler and Luise Schottroff have put it, “We cannot separate ourselves, our minds, or our spiritual lives from our bodily existence. In that sense, it is really true that we do not have bodies—​rather, we are bodies.”92 Even language itself is a bodily reality. Far from being disembodied, words are made out of stuff: out of breath, as with speech; or out of ink, as with written text; or out of gesturing bodies, as with sign language. Its purpose is not to encode propositional truths that map perfectly onto reality but to prompt another’s own bodily acts of meaning making—​in other words, to afford an interpersonal encounter, whether with another human being or with God. Conceptual language is indispensable in theology. What is crucial is to acknowledge that its truth lies in aptness rather than in categorical, complete correspondence. The goal of theological language is not to be exhaustively, univocally true, but to disclose aspects of reality that can be understood only through figurative thought. Language that is apt can thus serve alongside other material things as a genuine means of relational encounter with the living God. Not that this encounter is guaranteed against misinterpretation or misuse: human beings are not only finite but also fallen. There is an apophatic “no” to every theological assertion: as Lathrop insists, theological language always consists in some sense of “the wrong words.”93 And yet, through nothing but God’s own grace, we human beings are also sometimes enabled to say things about God that are true—​true enough to live by.

2.6  Conclusions The fact that the function of language is not referential correspondence but aptness of embodied simulation is the basic warrant for a multiply metaphorical theology of eucharistic presence. Human language can never exhaustively describe or define the mystery of Christ’s presence in the eucharist, though it can say things about it that are, to the extent appropriate for human language, true. And, because different metaphors can have different

52  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence entailments, using them alongside one another can illuminate different truths about the eucharist. In the next chapter we will dive deeper into the field of cognitive linguistics by exploring conceptual blending theory. This body of work, which emerged in the 1990s and early 2000s, brings metaphor, metonymy, and other operations together in a common framework that can account for more subtle and varied phenomena than can any of these by itself. Using this framework, we will begin to turn specifically to questions of eucharistic presence by examining two metaphoric blends, both drawn from scripture, that lie at the heart of eucharistic theology: the Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor this loaf and wine are jesus’s body and blood, and the Johannine metaphor jesus’s flesh and blood are heavenly, life-​giving bread and drink.

Notes 1. On embodied realism, see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 74–​93. The phrase “God’s eye view” is originally Hilary Putnam’s; see George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 260–​65. 2. John Sanders, Theology in the Flesh: How Embodiment and Culture Shape the Way We Think About Truth, Morality, and God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2016), 6. 3. Lawrence E. Williams and John A. Bargh, “Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth,” Science 322, no. 5901 (October 24, 2008): 606–​7; Chen-​Bo Zhong and Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, “Cold and Lonely: Does Social Exclusion Literally Feel Cold?,” Psychological Science 19, no. 9 (September 1, 2008): 838–​42; Chen-​Bo Zhong and Katie Liljenquist, “Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing,” Science 313, no. 5792 (September 8, 2006): 1451–​52; all cited in George Lakoff, “Explaining Embodied Cognition Results,” Topics in Cognitive Science 4 (2012): 782. For a brief summary of experimental support for conceptual metaphor, see Barbara Dancygier and Eve Sweetser, Figurative Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 36–​38. 4. Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, xiv. 5. Benjamin K. Bergen, Louder than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 223. 6. Bergen, 16. 7. Bergen, 78–​86. 8. Nicole L. Wilson and Raymond W. Gibbs, “Real and Imagined Body Movement Primes Metaphor Comprehension,” Cognitive Science 31, no. 4 (July 8, 2007): 721–​31; cited in Bergen, Louder than Words, 199–​200.

Metaphor, Embodied Realism, and Sacramental Truth  53 9. Dancygier and Sweetser, Figurative Language, 2, emphasis original. 10. Some cognitive scientists, such as Srini Narayanan and Jerome Feldman, have begun attempting to develop models for how the mental processes studied by cognitive linguists might take place at the neural level: see Jerome A. Feldman and Srini Narayanan, “Embodied Meaning in a Neural Theory of Language,” Brain and Language 89, no. 2 (2004): 385–​92; Jerome A. Feldman, From Molecule to Metaphor: A Neural Theory of Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); George Lakoff, “The Neural Theory of Metaphor,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, ed. Raymond W. Gibbs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 17–​38. However, this research remains at an early phase. While processes like conceptual metaphor, metonymy, and blending undoubtedly have underlying anatomical and biochemical instantiations, cognitive linguistics relies primarily on linguistic evidence for how thought happens, and its theoretical apparatus (such as mental space diagrams, which will be seen in the chapters that follow) should not be taken to represent brain structures directly. 11. Mary Therese DesCamp, Metaphor and Ideology: Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum and Literary Methods Through a Cognitive Lens (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 22; Christopher Johnson, “Learnability in the Acquisition of Multiple Senses: SOURCE Reconsidered,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 22, no. 1 (September 1996): 469–​80. 12. Jean Piaget, The Equilibration of Cognitive Structures: The Central Problem of Intellectual Development (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); cited in Dancygier and Sweetser, Figurative Language, 25. 13. Joseph E. Grady, “Metaphor,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, ed. Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 192. Grady’s original study was “Foundations of Meaning: Primary Metaphors and Primary Scenes” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1997). 14. See the list in Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 50–​54. 15. Zoltán Kövecses, Language, Mind, and Culture: A Practical Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 122. 16. Lakoff, “Explaining Embodied Cognition Results,” 776. 17. Kövecses, Language, Mind, and Culture, 64. 18. Dancygier and Sweetser, Figurative Language, 18. Following Dancygier and Sweetser, I have chosen to treat metaphors as mappings between frames rather than domains (the terminology used in most earlier literature); see 17. 19. There are variations in the literature: sometimes an arrow is used (target ← source); sometimes only the initial letter of a concept is capitalized (Target is Source). 20. In linguistics, an asterisk before an example traditionally indicates an anomalous or unacceptable usage. 21. Grady, “Metaphor,” 191. 22. Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 50–​52. 23. See Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, 113, 146–​47. 24. Kövecses, Language, Mind, and Culture, 332–​33.

54  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence 25. For a summary of work on this much-​studied topic, see Vyvyan Evans, “Time,” in Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, ed. Ewa Dąbrowska and Dagmar Divjak (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2015), 509–​27. The seminal discussion is George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 41–​45. 26. Lera Boroditsky and Michael Ramscar, “The Roles of Body and Mind in Abstract Thought,” Psychological Science 13, no. 2 (March 1, 2002): 185–​89. 27. On Aymara, see Rafael E. Núñez and Eve Sweetser, “With the Future Behind Them: Convergent Evidence from Aymara Language and Gesture in the Crosslinguistic Comparison of Spatial Construals of Time,” Cognitive Science 30, no. 3 (May 6, 2006): 401–​50. On Amondawa, see Chris Sinha et al., “When Time Is Not Space: The Social and Linguistic Construction of Time Intervals and Temporal Event Relations in an Amazonian Culture,” Language and Cognition 3, no. 1 (2011): 137–​69; cited in Evans, “Time,” 519–​21. 28. Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, 267. Some additional image schemas identified by Mark Johnson include object, mass-​count, near-​far, merging, splitting, full-​empty, superimposition, surface, and contact: The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 126. 29. Johnson, The Body in the Mind, 30–​31. 30. These examples are adapted from George Lakoff, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor,” in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 202–​51, and from Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5. 31. Cf. Kövecses, Metaphor, 7. 32. Lakoff, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor,” 215. 33. Lakoff, 215. 34. Mary Therese DesCamp writes, “When something feels absolutely obvious, it is an indicator that the cognitive blend has been appropriately analyzed.” She and Bonnie Howe refer to this jocularly as the “Well, duh!” test. Metaphor and Ideology, 27n24. 35. Abridged from Lakoff, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor,” 220. 36. Dancygier and Sweetser, Figurative Language, 47, emphasis original. 37. Dancygier and Sweetser, 8. 38. Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, 380–​409. 39. Dancygier and Sweetser, Figurative Language, 29. Dancygier and Sweetser also note that both these anger metaphors rely on a common more basic mapping: the self is a container (whether pressure cooker or cage). 40. Kövecses, Metaphor, 80. The example sentences here are only slightly adapted from Kövecses’s. 41. Kövecses, 80–​81. 42. Dancygier and Sweetser, Figurative Language, 35. 43. Raymond W. Gibbs and Jennifer E. O’Brien, “Idioms and Mental Imagery: The Metaphorical Motivation for Idiomatic Meaning,” Cognition 36, no. 1 (1990): 35–​68; cited in Raymond W. Gibbs, Embodiment and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 182.

Metaphor, Embodied Realism, and Sacramental Truth  55 44. Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 124–​25. 45. Mary Therese DesCamp and Eve E. Sweetser, “Metaphors for God: Why and How Do Our Choices Matter for Humans? The Application of Contemporary Cognitive Linguistics Research to the Debate on God and Metaphor,” Pastoral Psychology 53, no. 3 (January 2005): 224. 46. The theory of basic-​level categorization arises from the work of Eleanor Rosch in the 1970s. For an overview, see Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, 12–​57; cf. Kövecses, Language, Mind, and Culture, 21–​28. More recently, see Michael Ramscar and Robert Port, “Categorization (Without Categories),” in Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, ed. Ewa Dąbrowska and Dagmar Divjak (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2015), 75–​99. 47. Benjamin K. Bergen, “Embodiment,” in Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, ed. Ewa Dąbrowska and Dagmar Divjak (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2015), 13. 48. Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 27–​28. 49. Jesper Sørensen, A Cognitive Theory of Magic (Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2007), 40. 50. Although even simple sentences like “the cat is on the mat” can exhibit remarkably broad ranges of meaning in practice; see Seana Coulson, Semantic Leaps: Frame-​ Shifting and Conceptual Blending in Meaning Construction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 4–​10. 51. Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 128. 52. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 37. 53. Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, 79. 54. Kövecses, Language, Mind, and Culture, 99. 55. Gilles Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 11; see also Antonio Barcelona, “Metonymy,” in Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, ed. Ewa Dąbrowska and Dagmar Divjak (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2015), 149. 56. See Barbara Lewandowska-​ Tomaszczyk, “Polysemy, Prototypes, and Radial Categories,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, ed. Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 152–​54. 57. This particular pattern of meaning change is well attested in the Indo-​European family of languages and also provides evidence for the asymmetric nature of conceptual metaphor, since the reverse phenomenon of verbs of “knowing” coming to mean “seeing” is not found. Eve Sweetser, From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 32–​34. 58. Dancygier and Sweetser, Figurative Language, 108. 59. This section relies substantially on David Tuggy, “Ambiguity, Polysemy, and Vagueness,” in Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings, ed. Dirk Geeraerts (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006), 167–​84. 60. “Mouse” is my own example; “aunt” is Tuggy’s, at 167. 61. Tuggy, 168. 62. See Fauconnier’s study of meaning change in “virus,” Mappings in Thought and Language, 18–​25.

56  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence 63. Fauconnier, 21–​22. 64. Tuggy, “Ambiguity, Polysemy, and Vagueness,” 169–​72. 65. Tuggy, 171. 66. “Polysemy and Cognition,” Lingua 75 (1988): 345, quoted in Tuggy, 168. 67. Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, 74–​76, 80–​86, 91. 68. Lakoff, 83. 69. This is the phenomenon of “family resemblances” described by Ludwig Wittgenstein in the mid-​twentieth century. On Wittgenstein and other forerunners of cognitive linguistics, see Lakoff, 12–​57. 70. These results are replicated by many different experimental methods: direct questioning, identification response times, and even asymmetry in similarity ratings (chickens are seen as more similar to robins than robins are to chickens). On Rosch’s work, see Lakoff, 39–​55. 71. Cf. Dirk Geeraerts’s analysis of the category fruit in Dirk Geeraerts, Diachronic Prototype Semantics: A Contribution to Historical Lexicology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 12–​17. 72. On hedges like “strictly speaking,” see Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, 122–​25. “On the edge of ” draws upon the primary metaphors categories are bounded regions and similarity is closeness—​metaphors that also inevitably underlie much of my own discussion here, including the phrase “edge cases.” It is almost impossible to talk about categories without invoking some spatial metaphors—​ a good example of how our most basic ways of thinking are grounded in bodily experience. 73. Stephen Jay Gould, “What, if Anything, Is a Zebra?,” in Hens’ Teeth and Horse’s Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1983), 355–​65; Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, 119–​21. 74. “Language does not represent meaning directly; instead, it systematically prompts the construction of meaning.” Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 142. 75. Tim Rohrer, “Embodiment and Experientialism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, ed. Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 26. 76. Sanders, Theology in the Flesh, 23. 77. James Geary, I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World (New York: Harper Collins, 2011), 100; quoted in Sanders, Theology in the Flesh, 24. 78. Johnson, The Body in the Mind, x. 79. John Searle, while acknowledging that figurative statements carry emotional resonances beyond what their literal equivalents might offer, still argues that their truth value is essentially translatable, so that “Sally is a block of ice” can be represented by the literal paraphrase “Sally is an extremely unemotional and unresponsive person”: “Metaphor,” in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 87. Donald Davidson takes a

Metaphor, Embodied Realism, and Sacramental Truth  57 somewhat different tack, contending that metaphors have no truth value; they “mean what the words, in their most literal interpretation, mean, and nothing more” but are used nonpropositionally: “What Metaphors Mean,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 245. See Johnson, The Body in the Mind, 71–​73. 80. Vittorio Gallese and George Lakoff, “The Brain’s Concepts: The Role of the Sensory-​ Motor System in Conceptual Knowledge,” Cognitive Neuropsychology 22, no. 3–​4 (2005): 466. 81. Gallese and Lakoff, 466. 82. Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 95. 83. Sanders, Theology in the Flesh, 91. 84. See Ian G. Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-​ Hall, 1966); Ian G. Barbour, Myths, Models, and Paradigms: A Comparative Study in Science and Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). For a few examples of “critical realism” from theologians in my own Anglican tradition, see N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992), 32–​37; Paul Avis, God and the Creative Imagination: Metaphor, Symbol and Myth in Religion and Theology (London: Routledge, 1999), 137–​51; Robert Davis Hughes, Beloved Dust: Tides of the Spirit in the Christian Life (New York: Continuum, 2008), 57. On the history of the term, see Andreas Losch, “On the Origins of Critical Realism,” Theology and Science 7, no. 1 (February 1, 2009): 85–​106. 85. Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion, 172. 86. Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 106. 87. Boersma, 106. 88. Robert Masson, Without Metaphor, No Saving God: Theology After Cognitive Linguistics (Leuven: Peeters, 2014); Sanders, Theology in the Flesh. 89. See DesCamp and Sweetser’s rebuttal of Roland Frye in DesCamp and Sweetser, “Metaphors for God,” 215. 90. Sanders, Theology in the Flesh, 98. 91. The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church: Together with the Psalter or Psalms of David: According to the Use of the Episcopal Church (New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1979), 861. 92. The Eucharist: Bodies, Bread, & Resurrection (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), 133. 93. Gordon W. Lathrop, Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), 50. Gail Ramshaw writes of a “yes, no, yes” process that acknowledges both metaphoric limitation and metaphoric truth: God Beyond Gender: Feminist Christian God-​Language (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995), 96.

3 Conceptual Blending and Two Ways of Feeding on Jesus At the heart of historic ecumenical disputes over eucharistic presence is the question of how it is that Christians feed on the body and blood of Jesus, and, in particular, how that feeding is related to the consecrated elements of bread and wine. For Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Lutherans, those elements are Christ’s body and blood, and so to eat and drink them is to eat and drink the body and blood of Christ. On the other hand, Reformed and most modern free-​church traditions have often been reticent about identifying the elements as Christ’s body and blood in an unqualified way. Instead, they have generally agreed that Christians feed on Jesus not with their mouths but, in the words of Thomas Cranmer, in their hearts by faith.1 This basic difference regarding the identity motif is linked to a noticeable difference in piety. On one end of the Christian spectrum lies a piety that places a strong emphasis on the sacred character of the consecrated elements. Because these elements are understood to be the body and blood of Jesus, they are treated with reverence. Leftover elements are carefully consumed or may in some traditions be reserved. Practices of adoration (such as genuflection or prostration) may take place within the eucharistic liturgy or even outside it.2 Concerns about mishandling or spilling the sacred gifts may lead to the use of special linens to catch stray crumbs and drops; special practices of administration, such as placing the bread on the tongue or using reeds or spoons to administer the wine; and even the withdrawal of the cup from the laity altogether. In many periods of history, fears of unworthy reception have discouraged the faithful from frequent communion; however, where this form of piety has prevailed, the eucharist has tended to remain the normative liturgical action for Sundays and feast days, even if only the presiding priest communicates. On the other end of the spectrum lies a piety in which the elements of bread and wine are treated with little or no particular reverence. Rather, eucharistic piety centers on the act of prayer and worship, with the elements themselves Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence. Stephen R. Shaver, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197580806.003.0003

Conceptual Blending and Two Ways of Feeding on Jesus  59 seen primarily as signs of an invisible and spiritual reality. Reservation and adoration are not practiced, and in many cases the elements may be treated as ordinary food and drink once the liturgy is over. With concerns about crumbs and spillage less significant, methods of administration may be more informal. While concerns about appropriate preparation and the dangers of unworthy participation have been present in traditions emphasizing this form of piety as well, their effect has been different: unwillingness to hold eucharistic liturgies in which only the clergy communicate has led to the more infrequent celebration of the eucharist. Only a few traditions (such as the Society of Friends and the Salvation Army) have actually ceased eucharistic celebration; more common has been a situation in which the eucharist is celebrated monthly or quarterly, and may well be highly valued, but is not seen as a sine qua non of Sunday worship. Many churches tend to find the primary emotional and spiritual focus of worship instead in practices like reading scripture, singing hymns or praise music, or praying in tongues.3 Yet, as Sarah Koenig has noted, such practices can be spoken of in strikingly eucharistic-​sounding terms.4 As one popular praise song puts it: This is my daily bread This is my daily bread Your very word spoken to me.5

Neither of these pieties exists in isolation, and the two have always coexisted and interacted. Certainly, the first is more closely identified with Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions and the second with many Protestant traditions. But there are Roman Catholics of an evangelical piety and Pentecostals and Presbyterians of a high sacramental one. Traditions like Lutheranism, Anglicanism, and Methodism have seen one piety or the other become more prominent in different times, places, and subgroups. Moreover, there are a few striking exceptions to the overall pattern: the churches of the Stone-​Campbell movement, for example, combine a low understanding of the elements themselves with a strong emphasis on weekly communion.6 Still, the overall difference in ethos between these two strands of Christian eucharistic spirituality remains clear, especially at the level of local practice and popular devotion.7 These two strands of piety are in fact grounded in two distinct core metaphors. The first, which arises from the Synoptic and Pauline account of the Last Supper, is this loaf and wine are jesus’s body and blood.

60  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence The second, which arises from Jesus’s discourse in John 6, is jesus’s flesh and blood are heavenly life-​giving bread and drink. At first glance these two metaphors may appear almost identical. Both invoke very similar frames: food and drink on one hand, Jesus’s body (or flesh) and blood on the other. From a cognitive standpoint, however, they are different metaphors with opposite directionality. The first maps attributes of Jesus’s body and blood onto (earthly) elements of food and drink. The second maps attributes of heavenly food and drink onto Jesus’s (crucified and risen) flesh and blood. It is this critical difference that gives rise to two very different experiences of eucharistic spirituality and practice. However, to account more thoroughly for the nuances of each and the complicated interactions that can form between the two, we will need an expanded toolkit. This toolkit comes from conceptual blending theory, a development that emerged within the field of cognitive linguistics a decade or two after the foundational work of Lakoff, Johnson, and others. Blending theory brings metaphor, metonymy, and other operations together in a common framework that can account for more subtle and varied phenomena than can any of these by itself. As Barbara Dancygier and Eve Sweetser write, blending theory is “a general theory of meaning emergence, of which metaphor is a subcase.”8 The title of this project is Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence, and I have described my approach, using Lakoff and Johnson’s phrase, as “multiply metaphorical.”9 As I noted in Chapter 1, however, in adopting this terminology I am using “metaphor” in a broad sense. I do not mean to suggest that conceptual metaphor is the only process at work in the various eucharistic motifs under study. Rather, each evokes blends that are metaphorical—​that is to say, that include metaphoric components, often alongside metonymy and other relationships. Eucharistic theology has conventionally made a distinction between sacramental communion and spiritual communion: the former takes place only in the act of receiving the eucharistic gifts, while the latter can take place anywhere and at any time. The Synoptic/​Pauline blend, which emphasizes the role of the elements, is at the root of the former; the Johannine blend, which requires no tangible elements at all, of the latter. Happily, all Christian traditions in fact agree on the validity of spiritual communion and thus on the aptness—​which is to say, the truth—​of the Johannine blend. The divisions that remain have to do with the Synoptic/​Pauline blend and the question of whether, and in what sense, it can be taken to be true—​a question that will be addressed in Chapters 4 and 5.

Conceptual Blending and Two Ways of Feeding on Jesus  61

3.1  Conceptual blending Conceptual blending theory takes its point of departure from Gilles Fauconnier’s concept of mental spaces.10 Fauconnier and Mark Turner define mental spaces as “small conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk, for purposes of local understanding and action.”11 Mental spaces, as Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green have helpfully suggested, are something like the “thought bubbles” used by cartoonists: each represents a discrete thought, scene, or act of imagination, and at any given time we may have many of them active at once.12 Some are evanescent, serving only to allow us to think about an idea for a moment; others become entrenched in long-​term memory. Mental spaces are different from frames in that frames are enduring constructs, while mental spaces are dynamic, continually being constructed, altered, combined, and abandoned. However, mental spaces can be structured by frames. For example, although I have never eaten at Alice Waters’s famous restaurant Chez Panisse, I can conjure up an imaginary scene of myself eating there with my wife. Since I know it is a restaurant, my imaginary Chez Panisse mental space is structured according to the restaurant frame: it includes waitstaff, menus, dishes, customers, and so on, without my having to make a special effort to add these elements. I can also switch my attention away from that mental space and instead imagine eating at a burrito shop. This mental space, too, is structured according to the restaurant frame. I can add a friend or two to the scene, change my imaginary order, or even transform the burrito shop into a sushi bar. Mental spaces, then, are online constructions that change moment by moment, while frames are enduring pieces of long-​term memory that provide preorganized structure upon which mental spaces can draw. Mental spaces can also be brought into interaction with one another. For example, I can take my Chez Panisse mental space and combine it with my burrito shop mental space to imagine a burrito shop—​let’s call it Casa Panisse—​where I dine on burritos of quail and arugula. The speed, flexibility, and creative potential of the human imagination is in large part a matter of this type of conceptual blending, in which two or more mental spaces are combined to yield another space, which inherits structure and content from each and which can itself become the arena for further imaginative development. The simplest way to think of a blend is as a combination of two mental spaces, the input spaces, into a third, the blended space (or, simply, the blend).

62  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence However, the theoretical apparatus of blending theory also includes a fourth space: the generic space. This is a schematic space generated automatically as part of the blending process and composed simply of whatever structure the two input spaces have in common.13 While the generic space may at first seem superfluous, it in fact plays an important role in constraining the mappings that are possible between the two input spaces and the blend. In the Chez-​Panisse-​as-​burrito-​joint blend, for example, the restaurant frame is shared by both input spaces, is thus also part of the generic space, and is inherited by the blend. This places a strong constraint on the blended space not to violate restaurant frame structure: like its parent spaces, it includes cooks, dishes, food, customers, payments, and so on. The basic diagram for illustrating a blend is shown in Figure 3.1. Each space is represented by a circle; solid lines indicate mappings between elements in the two input spaces, and dotted lines indicate connections between the input spaces and the generic space or the blended space. Generic Space

Input Space 1

Input Space 2

Blended Space

Figure 3.1.  Basic blend diagram

Consider the metaphor a love relationship is a shared journey. Here, as diagrammed in Figure 3.2, the generic space contains two human beings (we can call them Mary and Joe), who are the lovers in the target frame and the travelers in the source frame. However, Mary and Joe are not the only things these frames have in common. The target frame of a love relationship includes a beginning, middle, and end in time, which (since time in our culture is conventionally understood in terms of space) can be modeled as a source-​path-​goal schema. There is also a source-​path-​goal schema in the source frame, journey, representing the course of the journey in both

Conceptual Blending and Two Ways of Feeding on Jesus  63 time and space. Finally, by way of the primary metaphor states are locations, a relationship can be thought of as a kind of container (we speak of being “in” a relationship), and there is also a container schema available in the journey domain: the vehicle in which the travelers ride. The generic space, then, includes not only Mary and Joe but also a source-​path-​goal schema and a container schema. Generic Space

Mary

Joe

Input Space: SHARED JOURNEY

Input Space LOVE RELATIONSHIP

Mary

Joe

Mary

Joe vehicle

relationship status as CONTAINER

duration

path

Mary

Joe

relationship status as vehicle duration as path

Blended Space: A LOVE RELATIONSHIP IS A SHARED JOURNEY

Figure 3.2.  a love relationship is a shared journey

The final space is the blended space (or, simply, “the blend”), which contains the new cognitive content that emerges from the combination of the two input spaces. In other words, the blended space is not simply love relationship or shared journey; it is love relationship as shared journey. It is in the blended space that the source and target frames are merged and emergent structure is formed. Consider the sentence “That weekend away really got Joe and Mary back on track.” There is no romantic weekend inherent

64  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence in the shared journey frame, and there is no track in the love relationship frame. Only in the blend can the lovers actually be travelers who have again found the right path. This does not negate the ongoing existence of the input spaces: an important principle of conceptual blending is that the entire network remains active and cognitively accessible. It is still possible to think of the lovers without thinking of them as travelers, for example. Yet conceptual work done in the blend can have implications for the input spaces. If a friend of mine and his spouse come back from a romantic weekend and tell me it got them “back on track,” the conclusions I draw in the blend (perhaps that they were having some difficulties but things in their relationship are now going well) will apply to my idea of their relationship even if I stop thinking about it using this particular blend.

Blending and metaphor: emergence in “This surgeon is a butcher” Blending theory is useful not only because it provides a more explicit formal apparatus for understanding conceptual metaphors but also because it facilitates the analysis of certain phenomena more complex than conceptual metaphor theory by itself can account for. For example, consider the sentence “This surgeon is a butcher.” Presumably this is a negative assessment of a surgeon who fails to exhibit the delicate precision needed and instead attacks the hapless patient with the cleaving strokes of a butcher. Certainly, this is an example of a metaphor: there is an asymmetric mapping from a butchery to a surgery frame. In particular, the butcher’s goal and manner of action are mapped over to the target frame to override what we might expect to be the surgeon’s (see Table 3.1). But, as several analysts have pointed out, the implication—​that the surgeon is incompetent—​is actually nowhere to be found in the source domain.14 A butcher who acts like a butcher is perfectly competent. Conceptual metaphor theory here seems to omit this important implication. From the standpoint of conceptual blending theory, metaphor is what is known as a single-​scope blend: one in which the blend is asymmetrically structured by one of the two input spaces (i.e., the source frame). The generic space contains whatever schematic structure the two input frames have in common. The blended space combines content from both input spaces,

Conceptual Blending and Two Ways of Feeding on Jesus  65 Table 3.1.  “This surgeon is a butcher” surgery

←

butchery

Agent: Surgeon Instrument: Scalpel Object of action: Patient Goal: Healing Manner: Small precise movements Skill level: Competent (??)

← ← ← ← ← ←

Agent: Butcher Instrument: Cleaver Object of action: Animal carcass Goal: Dismemberment Manner: Big cleaving movements Skill level: Competent

inheriting some structure from the target frame but allowing some elements of the source frame to override their target frame counterparts. Importantly, in a single-​scope blend, while the source frame remains unaltered, inferences from the blended space can be “floated” up to the target frame.15 This means that reasoning done in the blend can result in new conclusions being drawn about the target frame. As diagrammed in Figure 3.3, the generic space for this surgeon is a butcher contains what the two input spaces have in common: several basic roles shared by both the butchery and surgery frames as well as a basic shared image structure.16 Although the detailed visual scene of a surgeon’s operating room is different from that of a butcher’s workroom, there is considerable similarity between the two at a more abstract level.17 In each, a standing human agent wields a sharp instrument on a person or animal stretched out on a table. This shared image structure is a major factor enabling the mappings in this metaphor. The target space includes “this surgeon” acting in a surgery frame, while the source frame draws from a prototypical scene of butchery. In the blend, this particular surgeon is envisioned as a butcher, mapping content from the source frame onto the target and overriding some of it. Precisely how much content is overridden will be individual to each hearer: for example, some may conjure up an image of the surgeon-​as-​butcher still dressed in surgical scrubs, while others may import some material from the source frame and imagine a figure wearing a butcher’s apron. The imagined surgeon-​as-​butcher may continue to hold a scalpel or may wield a butcher’s cleaver. Blending is not deterministic: rather, clashes between source and target frame structure are resolved creatively, drawing upon the individual’s encyclopedic knowledge about both input spaces as well as the pragmatic situation at

66  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence Generic Space Direction of Metaphor

(shared image structure)

Target Space:

SURGERY frame

Agent (human) Activity (some form of cutting) Implement (some kind of knife) Object of Action Purpose

Agent: “this surgeon” Activity: precise cutting Implement: scalpel Object of Action: sedated person Purpose: healing

(floated inferences) Activity incompatible with the purpose (Incompetence?) (Malevolence?)

Source Space:

BUTCHERY frame

Agent: a butcher Activity: forceful hacking Implement: cleaver Object of Action: dead animal Purpose: carving up flesh

Agent: this surgeon as a butcher Activity: forceful hacking Implement: scalpel/cleaver (?) Object of Action: sedated person Purpose: healing

Blended Space:

THIS SURGEON IS A BUTCHER

Figure 3.3.  “This surgeon is a butcher”

hand. However, the more salient and prototypical a feature is to the source frame, the more likely it is to be mapped over. In this case, almost all hearers are likely to map the butcher’s prototypical manner of activity—​forceful hacking—​into the blend, overriding the surgeon’s ordinary careful precision. This leads to an inference not available in the source frame. A butcher practicing butchery is just doing a butcher’s job. But a surgeon who acts this way is doing surgery in a way that cannot possibly achieve the goal of healing. In other words, this surgeon is either incompetent or perhaps even actively malevolent. This inference is an example of emergence: structure that “arises

Conceptual Blending and Two Ways of Feeding on Jesus  67 in the blend that is not copied there directly from any input.”18 It does not arise from either target or source frame alone but only from the combination of the two. This is part of what makes blending such a powerful meaning-​ making process: things can happen in the blended space that would not happen in either input space by itself. The blending process recruits our encyclopedic knowledge about the real world to generate a rich imaginary scene: this is what Fauconnier and Turner call “running the blend.” It is only in the blend that the inference of incompetence can arise: it is in mentally simulating this scene that we realize that a surgeon who acted this way would not be a good one. Having emerged, the inference of incompetence is now available to be floated back to the target frame. The real-​world surgeon does not wear a butcher’s apron or wield a cleaver, but the speaker does indeed believe she is a very poor surgeon. This process in which emergent structure is mapped back to one or both input spaces can also be called “backward projection.”19

Nonmetaphorical and metaphorical blends: the XYZ construction Not all blends are metaphorical. In fact, blending is at work in many basic grammatical constructions. The English-​language construction “X is the Y of Z,” or what Fauconnier and Turner call the XYZ construction, conventionally prompts the listener or reader to set up a blend between two spaces, one of which contains the elements X and Z and the other of which contains Y. Next, the listener creates a mapping between X and Y; finds an appropriate mapping counterpart for Z in the space containing Y; then, finally, runs the blend and generates any appropriate inferences.20 Sometimes this is a very simple process. In “Mary is the mother of Jesus,” for example, the word “mother” evokes a kinship frame that includes conventional roles like Mother and Child.21 The blend created is what Fauconnier and Turner call a simplex blend, one in which one input space simply provides elements to be mapped into the frame structure of the other.22 Because Mary and Jesus are both people and thus fit the roles of Mother and Child, the blend is straightforward: the values of Mary and Jesus are mapped into these two roles, with no metaphoric mappings or further elaboration necessary (see Figure 3.4).23

68  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence Generic Space

Input Space: Mary and Jesus

Input Space: KINSHIP frame Mother

Mary

Jesus Child

Mary

Jesus

Blended Space: Mary is the mother of Jesus

Figure 3.4.  “Mary is the mother of Jesus”

On the other hand, the same construction can prompt for a much richer blend, as in the sentence “David Ben-​Gurion was the George Washington of Israel” (Figure 3.5).24 The construction again generates the same array of input spaces, with one space containing X (David Ben-​Gurion) and Z (Israel), the second containing Y (George Washington), and a mapping between Washington and Ben-​Gurion. However, unlike Mother, George Washington is not a role in a convenient, preexisting, basic-​level frame. In order to run the blend, the listener must call upon broader encyclopedic knowledge about both source and target spaces. Specifically, to find an appropriate mapping counterpart for Z (“Israel”) in the George Washington mental space, the listener must invoke existing prior knowledge that George Washington was from the United States. In the diagram, I have put “U.S.” in a dashed cloud to reflect the fact that, while not

Conceptual Blending and Two Ways of Feeding on Jesus  69 Generic Space

Input Space: David Ben-Gurion and Israel Ben-Gurion Israel

Input Space: George Washington

Country

U.S.

Washington

Founding leader Military commander Wore dentures Cherry tree legend Gilbert Stuart portrait On one-dollar bill

Ben-Gurion as Washington Israel as U.S. Emergent content: Founding leader? Military commander? On currency? Dentures?

Blended Space: Ben-Gurion was the Washington of Israel

Figure 3.5.  “Ben-​Gurion was the Washington of Israel”

explicitly specified by the words of the sentence itself, this value “pops into mind” as the listener explores the George Washington mental space for a suitable analog for Israel. Once this happens, both input spaces now also include a Country role, and so this role becomes part of the generic space as well. The blended space, in which Ben-​Gurion is Washington and Israel is the United States, is far more complex and less predictable than that created in the simplex kinship blend. It is, in fact, metaphorical: it calls for attributes of George Washington to be mapped onto David Ben-​Gurion, and precisely which of these attributes are mapped will depend to a great extent on the listener’s prior knowledge as well as on context. Someone hearing the sentence “David Ben-​Gurion was the George Washington of Israel” as part of a history lecture might think about how Ben-​Gurion, like Washington, went from being a military leader to being the head of a newly independent nation. On the other

70  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence hand, someone hearing this sentence in a different context might imagine that Ben-​Gurion was a subject of moralizing legends for children, that he is depicted on a one-​shekel bill, or even that he wore false teeth! The point is that blending is not an algorithmic, predictable process. It is creative and productive because it draws upon all the available salient attributes of both input spaces and then allows these to be combined and elaborated in the blend, sometimes in very conventional ways and sometimes in very striking ones. The two statements “The eucharistic bread is the body of Jesus” and “The eucharistic wine is the blood of Jesus” are in fact XYZ constructions. On the scale of complexity, they are in between the two examples discussed. Consider the first sentence, “The eucharistic bread is the body of Jesus,” as diagrammed in Figure 3.6 (the second can be analyzed in the same way). The word “body” does invoke a common frame, that of a person. We conventionally think of a human being as having various elements: a core identity Generic Space

solid bounded object

Input Space: Eucharistic bread and Jesus

a person

Input Space: PERSON frame Life experiences Body

eucharistic bread

Temperament Mind Person

Jesus Skills

Spirit

Life experiences Temperament Body Mind Jesus

Skills

Spirit

Blended Space (Step 1, simplex): The eucharistic bread is the body of Jesus

Figure 3.6.  “The eucharistic bread is the body of Jesus,” step 1

Conceptual Blending and Two Ways of Feeding on Jesus  71 that is the Person himself or herself, but also a Body, a Mind, perhaps a Soul or Spirit, and so on. In this mapping, Jesus fits the Person role perfectly, and so there is an uncomplicated, simplex character to this aspect of the blend. Because Jesus has successfully been mapped into the Person role, the listener’s encyclopedic knowledge about Jesus can be brought to bear on this mental space. However, mapping the eucharistic bread into the Body role is not as easy. Jesus already has a body, a physical body about which a Christian listener already knows a great deal: it was born, ate, drank, preached, healed, suffered, died, was buried, rose, ascended into glory, is seated at God’s right hand, and so on. The eucharistic bread cannot be simply mapped as a value into a Body role in the way Jesus could be mapped into a Child role. Instead, a more complicated metaphoric mapping must be generated between the eucharistic bread with its own characteristics and the Body role that now exists not only as part of a more generic person frame but also as part of a jesus frame. The blended space from this first step, in effect, becomes the source space for a second step of blending. With jesus as the source frame and bread as the target frame, a creative metaphoric blend can take place, as depicted in Figure 3.7. We will encounter this blend again shortly.

Multiple-​scope blending: the Grim Reaper Some blends combine more than two input spaces to produce very complex results indeed; this is known as multiple-​scope blending. The familiar European cultural figure of the Grim Reaper is a good example.25 Traditionally, the Grim Reaper is a skeletal figure, dressed in a monastic cowl and carrying a scythe, who knocks at people’s doors when their time has come to die, crooks a bony finger, and leads them away. How might the Grim Reaper be analyzed, cognitively speaking? There is certainly metaphor at work here: we might say the basic metaphor is death is a reaper. This sets up a number of systematic mappings and invokes in turn several related, culturally familiar metaphors such as people are plants (cf. Isaiah 40:6–​8). Sowing corresponds to birth and reaping to death. death is a reaper also accounts for the scythe. Yet generally the Grim Reaper is not imagined actually cutting his victims down with the scythe. Instead, he leads them away. Here we have a different cluster of metaphors: states are locations, change is motion, existence is being here/​nonexistence is being somewhere else. Moreover, none of the metaphors so far account for the skeletal body or

72  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence Generic Space

solid bounded object

Input Space: Eucharistic bread

Size, color, taste, etc. Nutritious; a staple food

Input Space: Body of Jesus Height, hair color, etc. Crucified and risen; immortal Mind Jesus Spirit Lord, Messiah, Son of Man, son of God, Second Person of Trinity . . .

Size, color, taste, etc. Nutritious; a staple food? Height, hair color, etc.? Crucified and risen? Immortal? Is Jesus (by metonymy): Son of Man, Son of God, Second Person of Trinity . . . ?

Blended Space: The eucharistic bread is the body of Jesus

Figure 3.7.  “The eucharistic bread is the body of Jesus,” step 2

the monastic cowl: real reapers are not skeletons and do not dress as monks. These features arise not via metaphor but via metonymy: skeletons are part of a death frame, and in the medieval Western imagination so are chanting monks (perhaps at the bedside or in the funeral procession). The Grim Reaper blend harnesses all these metaphors and metonymies and, in multiple acts of blending, combines them all into a single scene pregnant with meaning—​what Fauconnier and Turner sometimes call a “megablend.”26 In the blend, metaphors can be combined freely, as long as no core image-​schematic structure is violated: a person can be a plant while also being a person departing on a journey. Metonymic relationships can be tightened: death is no longer vaguely associated with skeletons and cowls but is a skeleton and wears the cowl.27 This is an extraordinarily complex set of cognitive operations—​yet one that takes place “backstage” and seemingly almost effortlessly. For a person familiar enough with the cultural assumptions

Conceptual Blending and Two Ways of Feeding on Jesus  73 it draws upon, the Grim Reaper scene is readily comprehensible. Moreover, it takes a complicated and varied assemblage of metaphors and metonymies and integrates them into a single, easy-​to-​visualize scene. This compression to human scale is one of the most powerful and important aspects of multiple-​ scope blending: it shrinks complex ideas and long-​term processes down to manageable proportions amenable to embodied simulation.28

Vital relations Another important aspect of Fauconnier and Turner’s work on blending is the attention they give to the nature of the relationships between counterpart elements in input spaces. They refer to these relationships as vital relations; among the most common vital relations are Uniqueness, Identity, Representation, Change, Time, Space, Analogy, and Disanalogy.29 Because blends attempt to compress ideas into scenes imaginable at human scale, it is common to find that the relation that holds between two counterpart elements in the two input spaces is compressed into a closer relation in the blend. For example, consider again the metaphorical blend a love relationship is a shared journey, as shown in Figure 3.8. (For space’s sake, the generic space is not depicted here, but it is still active in shaping the blend.) There is a relationship of Identity between Mary in the target space and Mary in the source space. Although they are being imagined in two different mental spaces, one structured by love relationship and one by shared journey, they are understood as the same person. Yet this does not mean that they are indistinguishable. Outside the blend, Mary the lover does not drive in a vehicle; Mary the traveler does not kiss Joe. The vital relation of Identity links entities that have differences as well as similarities. As Fauconnier and Turner write, “Identity is taken for granted as primitive, but it is a feat of the imagination, something the imagination must build or disassemble.”30 This is a crucial quality to understand about the Identity relationship: it is an assertion that two distinct entities are to be understood as identical across two distinct mental spaces.31 The vital relation of a single entity to itself, in contrast, is called Uniqueness. In the blend, the relation of Identity is compressed into the closer relationship of Uniqueness: in the blended space there are not two Marys but one single Mary who is both lover and traveler. The Ben-​Gurion blend demonstrates a different vital relation: rather than being linked by Identity, Ben-​Gurion and Washington in the target and

74  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence Input Space:

Input Space:

LOVE RELATIONSHIP

SHARED JOURNEY Identity Mary (as traveler)

Mary (as lover) Identity

Joe (as traveler)

Joe (as lover) Uniqueness

Mary as lover-traveler Uniqueness

Joe as lover-traveler

Blended Space: A LOVE RELATIONSHIP IS A SHARED JOURNEY

Figure 3.8.  a love relationship is a shared journey with vital relations

source spaces are linked by Analogy. Where Mary the lover and Mary the traveler are understood as the same person despite their differences, Ben-​ Gurion and Washington are understood as different people who occupy the same role (something like Citizen or National Leader) in a shared frame. Nonetheless, the Analogy relation too can be compressed into Uniqueness: in the blend David Ben-​Gurion is George Washington (see Figure 3.9). A third vital relation that can be compressed into Uniqueness is called Representation. Representation is a relation that underlies all sorts of artistic depictions: from early childhood on, we routinely and almost effortlessly compress Representation into Uniqueness and decompress it back into Representation.32 As Fauconnier and Turner write, “We look at the painted canvas and say ‘Here is Queen Elizabeth. She is dressed as Empress of India.’ . . . We enter the ‘world of representations’ by constructing blended spaces in integration networks. We do not lose sight of the inputs. We keep active the mental spaces in which the paint is just paint and not the Queen.”33 As shown in Figure 3.10, in the input spaces for this blend, the relationship between the Queen, on one side, and the splotches of paint on canvas that make up the painting, on the other, is one of Representation. In the blended space the painting prompts us to construct, that Representation mapping

Input Space:

Ben-Gurion and Israel

Input Space:

Washington and U.S.

Analogy

David Ben-Gurion

George Washington Analogy

Israel

U.S.

Uniqueness

Ben-Gurion as Washington Uniqueness Israel as U.S.

Blended Space: Ben-Gurion was the Washington of Israel

Figure 3.9.  Ben-​Gurion as Washington with vital relations

Input Space:

Input Space:

Paint on a Canvas

Queen Elizabeth

Representation Queen Elizabeth

paint canvas paint on of aa canvas

Uniqueness

paint on a canvas as Queen Elizabeth

Blended Space: Here is Queen Elizabeth

Figure 3.10.  “Here is Queen Elizabeth”

76  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence is compressed into Uniqueness: the person depicted in the world of the painting is the Queen.

Blending in the real world Blending is an imaginative process that can have very real consequences. The now-​familiar “desktop” interface for computers is a good example.34 Before the Apple Macintosh was created, people interacted with computers by typing text-​based commands on a keyboard. In a creative act of blending, Apple’s designers imagined a blend between computer and office workspace frames that proved remarkably productive: suddenly, in the blend, a computer could have things like “folders” that could be moved around on a “desktop.” “Files” could be visually represented as icons that looked like paper documents, and when no longer needed they could be placed in a “trash can.” Over the past thirty years this blend has gone from being a creative act of imagination to being a tangible reality: virtually every personal computer in the world today is a “material anchor” for it, an object that instantiates and stabilizes the blend in physical form.35 Many real-​world activities depend on blends, and blends can make truth claims. The sentence “The market is up sixty points today” relies on an intricate multiple-​scope blend that compresses millions of individual transactions into a single entity, metonymically associates it with an index like the Dow Jones or S&P 500, and harnesses the primary metaphor more is up to place it on a scale image schema.36 It is a figurative statement: there is no basic-​level physical interaction going on here. But the rise and fall of the stock market is also a very real phenomenon with profound effects on billions of people’s lives. Examples of blending like these illustrate just how difficult it really is to draw a hard and fast distinction between “literal” and “figurative” language. Calling a computer interface a desktop clearly invokes a metaphorical blend, yet it is also true that “desktop” is now the correct and proper word for the blank space on one’s computer screen upon which icons can be dragged around. There is no other, better term for it. We might even be tempted to call it the “literal” word—​except that to do so would obscure the fact that the metaphorical mapping between the physical office desktop and the computer desktop is still very much active. Blending can easily lead to emerging polysemy: what begins as a novel blend becomes entrenched over time as a new word meaning, related to previous ones by radial extension.

Conceptual Blending and Two Ways of Feeding on Jesus  77

3.2  Asymmetric blends: bread is jesus, jesus is bread In Chapter 2 I introduced an important principle of conceptual metaphor theory: metaphorical thinking is directional. A conceptual metaphor takes one area of human experience (the source frame) and uses it to understand another (the target frame). Often, as in primary metaphors, this is because the source frame is more amenable to direct sensory experience, while the target frame is more abstract. However, it is not only primary metaphors that exhibit asymmetry: novel and creative metaphors are equally directional. As an example, take the sentence examined earlier, “This surgeon is a butcher,” and invert it: “This butcher is a surgeon.” Reversing the direction of the metaphor produces a very different set of implications! The difference lies in which of the two frames (surgery, butchery) is having its attributes mapped onto the other. In this new metaphor, the characteristics of a surgeon—​who, prototypically at least, makes careful and precise incisions—​are being mapped onto a butcher, as diagrammed in Figure 3.11. Again, there are emergent inferences—​although this time they are perhaps more ambiguous: is this butcher-​surgeon’s precise cutting a sign of great skill, or of overcaution? Depending on the situation, the speaker’s tone of voice, and so on, “This butcher is a surgeon” might be understood in either way.37 In either case, however, the inferences become real-​world assertions about the behavior of this particular butcher.

bread is jesus and jesus is bread It is the same type of asymmetry that accounts for the significant difference between the Synoptic/​Pauline and Johannine scriptural metaphors. While they operate on similar frames, they create very different mappings between them. Consider this portion of a sixth-​century communion instruction by the Syrian bishop Philoxenus of Mabbug: When you have extended your hands and taken the body, bow, and put your hands before your face, and worship the living Body whom you hold. Then speak with him in a low voice, and with your gaze resting upon him say to him: “I carry you, living God, who is incarnate in the bread, and I embrace you in my palms, Lord of the worlds whom no world has contained. You have circumscribed yourself in a fiery coal within a fleshly palm—​you, Lord, who

78  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence Generic Space Direction of Metaphor

(shared image structure) Agent (human) Activity (some form of cutting) Implement (some kind of knife) Object of Action

Target Space:

Purpose

BUTCHERY frame

Agent: “this butcher” Activity: forceful hacking Implement: cleaver Object of Action: dead animal Purpose: carving up flesh

(floated inferences) Precision (Skill?) (Overcaution?)

Source Space:

SURGERY frame

Agent: a surgeon Activity: precise cutting Implement: scalpel Object of Action: sedated person Purpose: healing

Agent: this butcher as a surgeon Activity: precise cutting Implement: cleaver/scalpel (?) Object of Action: dead animal Purpose: carving up flesh

Blended Space: THIS BUTCHER IS A SURGEON

Figure 3.11.  “This butcher is a surgeon” with your palm measured out the dust of the earth. You are holy, God incarnate in my hands in a fiery coal which is a body. See, I hold you, although there is nothing that contains you; a bodily hand embraces you, Lord of natures whom a fleshly womb embraced. Within a womb you became a circumscribed body, and now within a hand you appear to me as a small morsel. As you have made me worthy to approach you and receive you—​and see, my hands embrace you confidently—​make me worthy, Lord, to eat you in a holy manner and to taste the food of your body as a taste of your life.38

The governing metaphor in this passage is striking. The presence of Jesus is so strongly identified with the morsel of consecrated bread that the faithful recipient can “worship the living Body whom you hold.” To hold the bread

Conceptual Blending and Two Ways of Feeding on Jesus  79 (“God incarnate in my hands”) is to hold Jesus. To look at the bread (“your gaze resting upon him”) is to look at Jesus. To eat the bread is to eat Jesus and thus to partake of his immortality (“to taste the food of your body as a taste of your life”). Philoxenus’s prayer rests on a metaphoric blend in which the attributes of Jesus are mapped unidirectionally onto the eucharistic bread: bread is jesus. A profoundly different type of spirituality is at work in this modern evangelical song: 1. Some, these days, would tell us that our Jesus is not food, That we only need to know about Him and do good, But we’re glad to tell you, brothers, it’s just not that way—​ Jesus is the bread of life; we eat Him every day. Refrain: We love the church life, eating, drinking, breathing Jesus. We love the church life, taking in God’s Word. We love to hear those “O Lord, Amen, Hallelujahs!” We love the church life, feasting with the Lord. 2. When He fills our inward parts, we’re never quite the same, So much richness we can taste by calling on His name. “Services” but once a week for us will never do. Every day we need the fellowship to take us through. (Refrain)39

Like Philoxenus’s prayer, this song is about Jesus, bread, and eating: the frames involved here are very similar. But the direction of the metaphoric mapping is completely the reverse. No consecrated morsel of bread is being addressed. No particular eucharistic meal is mentioned. Instead, feeding on Jesus is a matter of the whole “church life”: hearing scripture proclaimed (“taking in God’s Word”), shouts of praise (“O Lord, Amen, Hallelujah!”), acts of prayer and “calling on His name.” Formal worship “services,” while not ruled out, are clearly treated as secondary. Eating Jesus every day is not a matter of attending a daily eucharistic celebration but of having an intimate relationship with Jesus in the texture of one’s daily life. The metaphoric mapping in this song is as clear as in Philoxenus’s prayer, but instead of mapping the characteristics of Jesus onto bread, it maps the characteristics of bread onto Jesus: jesus is bread. Jesus is nourishing; believers hunger after him and are satisfied by him; he is a daily requirement to sustain life.40

80  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence

Getting more precise At one level, then, the two pieties I described at the beginning of this chapter are grounded in a set of metaphors that can be treated as direct opposites: bread is jesus/​jesus is bread (or, to include the cup in the equation, bread and drink are jesus/​jesus is bread and drink).41 This difference in directionality goes far toward explaining the different “feel” of these two strands of eucharistic piety. Yet there is more to be explored here. These frames are too broad to explain how eucharistic practice and spirituality actually work. It is not all bread and drink, for example, that is identified with Jesus in Philoxenus’s piety; the metaphor applies only to those particular portions that have been blessed in the eucharistic prayer. And in the piety represented by “We Love the Church Life,” Jesus is not identified simply as ordinary bread and drink: eating and drinking Jesus does not simply sustain mortal existence but actually bestows eternal life. To account more fully for how these metaphors function, the frames involved need to be elaborated more specifically. Dancygier and Sweetser demonstrate this process of elaboration by examining closely how modern English speakers use the metaphors people are computers and computers are people.42 Both frequently occur in everyday speech: (1) a. My memory banks are scrambled. (people are computers) b. My computer is being cranky and stubborn today. (computers are people)

At first glance, the two metaphors appear to be straightforward opposites. On closer inspection, however, they create two different sets of mappings. The first sentence maps the information-​processing capabilities of a computer onto a human. The second, on the other hand, maps the emotional moods of a human onto a computer. The salient features of each frame are different depending on the direction in which the metaphor is invoked. A more precise way to name these two metaphors, Dancygier and Sweetser argue, would be human cognitive processing is computer information processing and apparently erratic aspects of computer behavior are emotional mood-​based aspects of human behavior.43 Both metaphors are useful in their own ways—​but they are used in different situations to understand different experiences. The same is true of the two eucharistic metaphors.

Conceptual Blending and Two Ways of Feeding on Jesus  81

3.3  The Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor: this loaf and wine are jesus’s body and blood The Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor arises from five different texts: Matthew 26:26–​29, Mark 14:22–​25, Luke 22:17–​20, 1 Corinthians 10:16–​17, and 1 Corinthians 11:23–​29. Examining Mark’s and Paul’s versions is sufficient for our purposes, since Matthew’s version is only lightly adapted from Mark, while Luke’s is a combination of Markan and Pauline language.

Mark Mark’s story of the institution of the eucharist is simple and straightforward: While they were eating, after taking a loaf and blessing it, [Jesus] broke it and gave it to them and said, “Take; this is my body.” And after taking a cup and giving thanks, he gave it to them, and they all drank from it. And he said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. Truly, I say to you, I will never again drink from the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.”44

We have already seen that conceptual metaphor theory involves not only sentences expressed explicitly in the form “X is Y” but also the conceptual mappings that underlie any number of different textual formulations. In the case of this passage, however, we do in fact see the form “X is Y,” or what linguists call the copula construction.45 The key clauses are “this is my body” (τοῦτό ἐστιν τὸ σῶμά μου) and “this is my blood of the covenant” (τοῦτό ἐστιν τὸ αἷμά μου τῆς διαθήκης). What exactly is meant by “this” in the subject of each sentence? In the first case, the referent seems clear: “this” is the broken loaf (ἄρτον) Jesus is giving to his disciples. The metaphor evoked, then, is linked specifically to one specific loaf: not just bread in general, but this loaf is jesus’s body.46 “This” in the second sentence is perhaps somewhat more ambiguous: the only antecedent noun actually to appear in the text is ποτήριον, “cup.” this cup is jesus’s blood is not an attractive metaphor, cognitively speaking. Metaphoric mappings are strongly constrained by a tendency to preserve image-​schematic topology from the source into the blend, and so it is difficult to sustain a mapping from a fluid to a solid object like a cup.47

82  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence However, a more promising possibility is available. Referring to a container while intending to indicate its contents, as in “He drank the whole glass,” is a common form of metonymy.48 Here in Mark, then, it is easy and intuitive for a reader to understand “cup” as a metonymic reference to the liquid inside (identified in verse 25 as “the fruit of the vine”). This provides a much more compatible target for the metaphor: this wine is jesus’s blood, rather than this cup is jesus’s blood. Both blood and wine are liquids, able to be “poured out” (v. 24), and if the wine is imagined as red, there is a color correspondence as well.

Paul Paul, writing to an early Christian community in Corinth, explicitly applies the symbolism of Jesus’s body and blood not only to the past event of the Last Supper but also to the ongoing meal practice of Christians in his own time. In 1 Corinthians 11:27 he warns the Corinthians that “whoever eats the loaf and drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will be liable for the body and the blood of the Lord,” and in 10:16 he asks rhetorically, “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not the sharing of the blood of Christ? The loaf that we break, is it not the sharing of the body of Christ?” As part of Paul’s argument, he retells the Last Supper narrative itself, reporting Jesus’s words over the loaf in a format nearly identical to those in Mark: “This is my body that is for you” (τοῦτό μού ἐστιν τὸ σῶμα τὸ ὑπὲρ ὑμῶν). Paul’s version of Jesus’s words over the cup, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood” (τοῦτο τὸ ποτήριον ἡ καινὴ διαθήκη ἐστὶν ἐν τῷ ἐμῷ αἵματι), is even more indirect than Mark’s in evoking the metaphor this wine is jesus’s blood. Instead of Mark’s ambiguous “this,” the subject is clearly “this cup.” Moreover, instead of “my blood of the covenant,” the predicate is “the new covenant in my blood.” Based on this observation, some commentators have suggested that Jesus’s intention in this passage is not to evoke the wine/​blood metaphor at all but simply to indicate that the act of drinking the cup is a commemoration of the new covenant soon to be inaugurated by the literal shedding of Jesus’s blood on the cross.49 Such an interpretation represents a choice to recognize the cup as a metonymic pointer to Jesus’s shed blood (both occurring as elements within a shared passion narrative frame) while rejecting any metaphoric blend between them. Yet to constrain the blend in such a way fails to take account of the powerful,

Conceptual Blending and Two Ways of Feeding on Jesus  83 metaphor-​facilitating effect of the shared image structure between wine and blood. When a well-​structured metaphor hovers close at hand, it is likely to arise in the mind of the reader even if implied obliquely.50 A reader of Paul’s letter—​even a first-​century one who has never seen Mark’s version—​is still likely to generate this wine is jesus’s blood, at least as an implicit cognitive construct, based on image mappings alone. This is even more true in light of the fact that Paul goes on in verse 27 to make an explicit parallel between “the bread and . . . the cup” and “the body and blood of the Lord.”

Diagramming the Synoptic/​Pauline blend All in all, then, the basic metaphor evoked by the Synoptic and Pauline Last Supper passages can be written more specifically not just as bread and wine are jesus but as this loaf is jesus’s body and this wine is jesus’s blood, or in combination, this loaf and wine are jesus’s body and blood. Both Mark and Paul apply it specifically to the loaf and cup of wine of the Last Supper, and Paul applies it also to those of later Christian eucharistic meals. This sets up a unidirectional mapping, a single-​scope blend, which can be used to think and reason about the target frame. For simplicity’s sake, I will diagram only this loaf is jesus’s body; a similar diagram could be drawn for this wine is jesus’s blood, with adjustments for image structure. The target input space includes basic properties and background knowledge about bread in general as well as about the qualities such as size, color, and taste of this specific loaf (Figure 3.12). Target space: THIS LOAF solid bounded object Size, color, taste, etc. Nutritious A staple food

Figure 3.12.  this loaf

84  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence The source input space (see Figure 3.13) harnesses the whole range of an individual reader’s or hearer’s encyclopedic knowledge about the body of Jesus. As with any human body, we can imagine the source frame including basic physical characteristics: height, hair color, and so on. However, from a believing Christian’s point of view, Jesus’s body also has certain unique qualities: it has been crucified, buried, and raised into immortal life. Moreover, a person’s body is that person: Body for Person is a conventional Part for Whole metonymy. Although we commonly think of dimensions of personhood that are conceptually distinguishable from the body—​mind, spirit, etc.—​to see or touch a person’s body is truly to see or touch that person. Philoxenus’s prayer shows this metonymy at work in the way it alternates between calling the morsel of bread “the body” and simply calling it “you, Lord.” Theologically, Jesus is identified as Lord, Messiah, Son of Man, Son of God, Second Person of the Trinity, and so on, and so all these attributes of Jesus as a whole person can also be linked to his body via the Body for Person metonymy. Source Space: Jesus’s body

Immortal

Height, hair color, etc. Crucified and risen

Mind

Jesus Spirit Lord, Messiah, Son of Man, son of God, Second Person of Trinity . . .

Figure 3.13.  jesus’s body

The generic space, containing what these two input spaces have in common, is quite minimal in this case. Where the butchery and surgery frames shared several conventional roles (Agent, Implement, Activity, Object of Activity, Purpose) and an abstract but fairly detailed image mapping, the concepts of bread and Jesus’s body have less immediately apparent shared structure. Still, there is one important similarity at a basic image-​schematic level: both a loaf of bread and a person’s body are solid bounded objects.51 While this may seem so obvious as to be trivial, this shared structure is in fact critical to the success of the metaphor. Even this very minimal generic space is enough to support the creation of what will prove to be a richly populated blend. In that blend, encyclopedic knowledge about Jesus’s body is mapped onto the eucharistic loaf, as in Figure 3.14.

Conceptual Blending and Two Ways of Feeding on Jesus  85 Generic Space Direction of Metaphor

solid bounded object

Source Space: JESUS’S BODY

Target Space: THIS LOAF

Height, hair color, etc. Crucified and risen; immortal Mind

Size, color, taste, etc. Nutritious; a staple food

(floated inferences) Physical qualities? Crucified and risen? Immortal? Is Jesus (by metonymy): Son of Man, Son of God, Second Person of Trinity ...?

Jesus Spirit Lord, Messiah, Son of Man, son of God, Second Person of Trinity . . .

Size, color, taste, etc. Nutritious; a staple food Height, hair color, etc.? Crucified and risen? Immortal? Is Jesus (by metonymy): Son of Man, Son of God, Second Person of Trinity ...?

Blended Space: THIS LOAF IS JESUS’S BODY

Figure 3.14.  this loaf is jesus’s body

The implications of this blend, in which the eucharistic loaf is Jesus’s body, are rich and complex. Just as with the surgeon/​butcher blends, running the blend is a creative process in which target and source frame structure interact dynamically and nondeterministically, with plenty of potential for clashes. Which attributes of Jesus’s body from the source frame should be mapped into the blend? The answers will depend not only on individual believers’ encyclopedic knowledge about both input spaces but also on theological traditions and cultural influences. For example, the eucharistic loaf clearly already has its own sensory characteristics (appearance, taste, size, etc.), which clash with those that might otherwise be mapped from the body domain. While church leaders and theologians have generally resolved this clash by teaching that the sensory characteristics of the body domain are simply not mapped into the blend, popular piety has occasionally resolved the clash in the opposite direction, resulting in medieval visions of the consecrated bread as bleeding flesh, the Christ child, or the Lamb of God.52

86  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence Some elaborations have been ruled out by a broadly shared theological consensus. In the source frame, eating Jesus’s body would be cannibalism. In the blend, however, Christians do not understand themselves to be eating Christ’s body for physical nutrition, or as Martin Luther colorfully put it, “like a piece of beef ”: that view, called Capernaism, is rejected by every major Christian tradition.53 On the other hand, communicants whose piety draws on the Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor do generally understand themselves to be engaged in an act of intimate union with Jesus, one that draws upon the primary metaphor intimacy is closeness and the container image schema: the closest a person can possibly get to Jesus is to take Jesus’s body—​ which, by way of the Body for Person metonymy, is Jesus—​into one’s own self. The Body for Person metonymy is crucial to a spirituality based on the Synoptic/​Pauline blend, since in receiving Christ’s body Christians believe themselves to be in union not only with a body but with the living person of Jesus in his fullness.54 In doing so, many Christians may also understand themselves to be taking in some of Jesus’s unique attributes, such as immortality. In the source frame, the body of Jesus is immortal. In the blend, however, the point is not that the eucharistic bread should be immortal but, rather, that those who partake of it should share in Jesus’s own immortal existence. By taking Jesus’s body into themselves, Christians in turn take his qualities into themselves. As Jesper Sørensen writes, “The essence of Christ, present in the bread, is transformed into a quality of the subject ingesting the bread . . . [this] is an act in which one container (the subject) absorbs and dissolves another container thereby releasing the essence it contains.”55 The prayer of Philoxenus alludes to this idea: “Make me worthy . . . to taste the food of your body as a taste of your life.” There is still more going on in this blend, cognitively speaking. In both the Synoptic gospels and 1 Corinthians there is a complex interplay between the Last Supper story, which takes place on the eve of Jesus’s arrest, and the rest of the passion story with which it is closely intertwined. The words “body” (σῶμα) and “blood” (αἷμα) create an almost unavoidable metonymic association between the meal elements to which they are applied and Jesus’s body and blood as they feature in the passion narrative: Jesus’s body is crucified, dies, is buried, and then is mysteriously raised from death. Jesus’s blood is shed on the cross. This metonymy both reinforces and adds new associations to the mappings already created by the metaphors this loaf is jesus’s body and this wine is jesus’s blood. While the metaphors map structure across two distinct frames, the metonymy takes elements from a single frame

Conceptual Blending and Two Ways of Feeding on Jesus  87 (earlier I called this frame passion narrative) and creates links between them: Loaf for Body and Wine for Blood. The result is what Fauconnier and Turner call a multiple-​scope blend, or megablend, one which draws from more than just two input spaces. This megablend further strengthens the association between the eucharistic loaf and Jesus’s body, between eucharistic wine and Jesus’s blood: not only are they linked by a cross-​frame mapping, but they can also stand for one another within a single shared frame. Sørensen has pointed out that the two cognitive operations of metaphor and metonymy lie behind James Frazer’s classic typology of ritual magic as governed by two laws of similarity and contagion.56 An example of similarity (based on image metaphor) would be venerating a saint’s image; an example of contagion (based on metonymy) would be venerating a saint’s relic. A major part of the enduring cognitive strength of the Synoptic/​ Pauline eucharistic blend comes from the fact that it partakes of both operations. Figure 3.15 adds this metonymy to the blend (with dashed lines indicating the metonymic connections). All in all, a eucharistic piety that assigns a high degree of sanctity to the consecrated elements is grounded in a single-​scope blend, or metaphor, strengthened by a concurrent metonymy to create a megablend. In this blend, which arises from the Synoptic and Pauline institution narratives, the most salient attributes of Jesus’s body and blood—​Jesus’s personhood, his crucified and risen status, his immortality, his divinity, and so on—​can be mapped onto the specific loaf and wine of the eucharistic meal. Meanwhile, the metonymic association between the loaf and wine of the Last Supper and the role of Jesus’s body and blood within the passion narrative frame connects this sacred meal particularly closely with the climactic moments of Jesus’s death and resurrection.57 In a piety based on this metaphor, because the eucharistic bread and wine are Jesus’s body and blood, to receive the eucharist is to feed upon Jesus in a way that is qualitatively unique. Consuming these elements can offer union with Jesus and can bestow Jesus’s own risen life. It is easy to understand how, in some forms of piety influenced by this metaphor, practices of reservation for the sick, adoration of the consecrated species, ocular communion, and so on can arise: to be in the presence of these holy elements is to be in the presence of Jesus. None of these practices are demanded by the blend, of course. The specific mappings and elaborations produced in a blend are not deterministic; they are heavily influenced by individuals’ and groups’ preconceptions, associations, and general background knowledge. The point

88  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence Additional Input Space: PASSION NARRATIVE

Direction of Metaphor

Judas’ betrayal Peter’s denial Pontius Pilate Last Supper: bread wine

Women at the cross Centurions

Jesus’ blood, shed on cross Jesus’ body: crucified, buried, missing from tomb

Generic Space solid bounded object

Source Space: JESUS’S BODY

Target Space: THIS LOAF Size, color, taste, etc. Nutritious; a staple food

(floated inferences) Physical qualities? Crucified and risen? Immortal? Is Jesus (by metonymy): Son of Man, Son of God, Second Person of Trinity ...?

Height, hair color, etc. Crucified and risen; immortal

Mind

Jesus Spirit Lord, Messiah, Son of Man, son of God, Second Person of Trinity . . .

Size, color, taste, etc. Nutritious; a staple food? Height, hair color, etc.? Crucified and risen? Immortal? Is Jesus (by metonymy): Son of Man, Son of God, Second Person of Trinity ...?

Blended Space: THIS LOAF IS JESUS’S BODY

Figure 3.15.  this loaf is jesus’s body with metonymy

is not that these entailments are mandatory but that the mechanisms by which they arise are understandable. They are not predetermined, but they are far from arbitrary: rather, they are motivated.58

The threefold schema A cognitive perspective on this Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor of eucharistic presence allows a reappropriation of a traditional Western model: the threefold schema of sacramentum tantum, sacramentum et res, and res tantum.

Conceptual Blending and Two Ways of Feeding on Jesus  89 This model, which makes use of terminology used by Augustine, began to emerge explicitly in the eleventh century in connection with the Berengarian controversy and took its standard form in the twelfth with the work of scholars like Hugh of St. Victor and Peter Lombard.59 In general, this schema distinguishes between the sacramentum tantum (“sacrament alone”), the elements of bread and wine; the sacramentum et res (“sacrament and reality”), the real presence of Christ’s body and blood in connection with the elements; and the res tantum (“reality alone”). This last element is defined differently by different authors: some identify the res as the historic, risen, or glorified flesh and blood of Christ, others as the union between the believer and God, and still others as Christ’s mystical body the church.60 For all, however, the res is the ultimate purpose of the eucharist. From the standpoint of conceptual blending theory, this threefold schema maps neatly onto the Synoptic/​Pauline blend. The res, in this version of the schema, can be identified simply as the source input to the blend: the body and blood of Jesus. The sacramentum is the target: the eucharistic bread and wine. This target space is structured only by a food and drink frame, meaning that, when considered on their own (tantum), the elements are bread and wine. In the blend, however, while remaining what they are, they are also Jesus Christ’s body and blood. Once the blend is established, the input spaces do not disappear: it is still possible to think of the sacramentum as bread and wine. Yet it is also possible to float inferences up to the sacramentum, as we have seen earlier, and the choice of which elements are floated is nondeterministic and will depend to a great extent on individuals’ and communities’ contexts. It is important to reiterate that the existence of a metaphoric blend does not imply anything about the relative truth values of the different mental spaces involved. We may be tempted to assume that the target space always represents “the real world” and that the blended space is “imaginary,” serving only as a means of generating implications to be floated back up to reality. While that may have been more or less the case for the surgeon/​butcher blends, it is not always so simple. In some situations the blended space itself is the most apt space from which to think about reality. In the Computer Desktop blend, for example, working with folders and documents requires us to stay in the blend. Not only would trying to contemplate the underpinnings of circuitry and machine code while trying to work with a document be counterproductive, but there is also a very real sense in which this particular portion of binary code really is a document. The blend provides a layer of

90  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence meaning atop the physical universe that is both useful and, in its own right, true. Blending theory helps us understand how the mind generates complex concepts and integrates them into scenes at a human scale; it cannot serve as the arbiter of which of these scenes is most apt for the purpose of embodied life in the universe. That is discovered only in the living.

3.4  The Johannine metaphor: jesus’s flesh and blood are heavenly life-​giving bread and drink Unlike the three Synoptic gospels, John contains no eucharistic institution narrative. However, John 6 includes a lengthy discourse in which Jesus identifies himself with food and drink. He begins by calling himself “the bread of God . . . that comes from heaven and gives life to the world” and “the bread of life.”61 This discourse clearly establishes the metaphor jesus is bread—​but it is also clear that this is no ordinary bread but a heavenly bread. While reminiscent of the heavenly bread with which God fed the ancient Israelites, it is something more as well: the manna sustained only temporary mortal life, but Jesus as heavenly bread will confer eternal life: “Your forebears ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat from it and not die. I am the living bread that has come down from heaven; whoever eats from this bread will live into eternity.”62 So far, then, we have not just jesus is bread but jesus is heavenly life-​giving bread. At the end of verse 51 Jesus adds more specificity to the metaphor: “And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” Now it is not simply Jesus but specifically his flesh that is being identified as bread. In Greek as in English, the Johannine term “flesh” (σάρξ) is a near-​synonym of the Synoptic/​Pauline term “body” (σῶμα), with the difference that the former is a mass noun (one that refers to a substance) while the latter is a count noun (one that refers to a discrete object). Soon Jesus also introduces the idea of his blood as life-​giving drink. No specific type of drink is named, although a reader influenced by the Synoptic and Pauline narratives might presume that wine is in view: Truly, truly, I say to you, if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and

Conceptual Blending and Two Ways of Feeding on Jesus  91 drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them.63

Diagramming the Johannine blend On the whole, then, this discourse from John 6 evokes the metaphors jesus is heavenly life-​giving bread and jesus’s blood is life-​giving drink, or in combination, jesus’s flesh and blood are heavenly life-​giving bread and drink. Figure 3.16 is a diagram of the blend created by the flesh half of the metaphor; again, a similar diagram could be constructed for jesus’s blood is drink. Generic Space Direction of Metaphor

solid mass substance

Source Space: HEAVENLY LIFE-GIVING BREAD

Target Space: JESUS’S FLESH Crucified and risen; Immortal

Size, color, taste, etc. (??) Mind

Jesus

Lord, Messiah, Son of Man, Spirit Son of God, Second Person of Trinity ...

Nutritious, a staple food From heaven Gives not just ordinary but eternal life

Crucified and risen; Immortal; Is Jesus (by metonymy): Lord, Messiah, Son of Man, Son of God, Second Person of Nutritious? Trinity ... A staple food? Size, color, taste, etc. (??) From heaven? Nutritious; a staple food? Gives not just ordinary From heaven? but Gives not just ordinary eternal life? but eternal life? (floated inferences)

Blended Space: JESUS’S FLESH IS HEAVENLY LIFE-GIVING BREAD

Figure 3.16.  jesus’s flesh is heavenly life-​giving bread

92  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence The generic space is again fairly minimal and based on image-​schematic compatibility. In this case, the target domain (jesus’s flesh) is not a single bounded object but a solid mass substance. This does not present a problem for the mapping, however, since what is in view here is not ἄρτος as a specific “loaf ” but ἄρτος as an imagined heavenly “bread.” The blended space represents a mapping of the most salient attributes of the source frame (heavenly bread) onto the target (jesus’s flesh). Again, some target attributes are retained: the sensory characteristics of heavenly bread would not only clash with those of Jesus but may not be particularly clearly imaginable anyway. In the blend, Jesus’s flesh retains all its essential qualities (crucified and risen, immortal, metonymically identified with Jesus himself, etc.); however, it is also (as bread) nutritious, a life-​sustaining staple, satisfying to hunger, and so on. Moreover, as the Johannine text stipulates, it sustains not only ordinary life but also eternal life. All these attributes are available to be floated back up to the target space as implications about the nature of Jesus. Vital to the difference between this metaphor and the Synoptic/​Pauline one is that no physical food or drink is required by this blend. Instead of functioning as the target frame onto which the properties of Jesus’s body and blood are mapped, food and drink function in this metaphor as the source frame, supplying the properties that are mapped onto Jesus’s flesh and blood. The implications for piety are enormous: all the eating and drinking here is metaphorical! In offering to give his listeners life-​giving bread and drink, Jesus is drawing upon a metaphor already well established in the Hebrew scriptures: spiritual necessities are food and drink. Consider the following passages:64 (2) a. One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. (Deut. 8:3) b. As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. (Ps. 42:1–​2) c. O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. (Ps. 63:1)

None of these passages presume any physical eating and drinking: rather, the satisfaction of the spiritual need for God’s word and presence is understood

Conceptual Blending and Two Ways of Feeding on Jesus  93 metaphorically as the satisfaction of the physical need for food and drink. Similarly, in this Johannine blend, any act of spiritual union with Jesus (who has himself already been identified in John 1:1–​14 with God’s Word) can be understood as a metaphorical eating and drinking of his heavenly, life-​ giving flesh and blood. The observance of the Lord’s Supper might indeed be an occasion for this spiritual feeding, but it is not the only one, nor even necessarily a privileged one. Prayer itself is a feeding on Jesus, and this can happen at any place and time: as the song “We Love the Church Life!” puts it, “ ‘Services’ but once a week for us will never do. Every day we need the fellowship to take us through.”

Combining the metaphors Analyzing these two metaphors separately is helpful in illustrating their very different cognitive bases and implications. Yet metaphors do not exist in isolation. What we actually experience moment by moment is a rapidly shifting array of megablends combining primary metaphors, cultural assumptions and motifs, past experiences, encyclopedic knowledge about various frames, and so on. It should not be surprising, then, that the Synoptic/​Pauline and Johannine metaphors can interact with one another. In particular, it is possible to feed the blended space of the Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor (this loaf and wine are jesus’s body and blood) into the Johannine metaphor (jesus’s flesh and blood are heavenly life-​giving food and drink) as the target frame. In this arrangement, shown in Figure 3.17, the two metaphors (one of which is already a megablend) are chained together into a more complicated megablend still. The result is that instead of being mapped simply onto the personhood (flesh and blood) of Jesus, the attributes of heavenly, life-​giving bread and drink are being mapped onto the eucharistic bread and wine understood as the body and blood of Jesus. In this megablend, then, it is not simply Jesus in heaven but, rather, the eucharistic Jesus in the consecrated gifts who is the bread of life, food indeed, drink indeed. Note that this arrangement works only because the two different image schemas involved are not actually incompatible. The first blended space, this loaf is jesus’s body, envisions a bounded object, a specific piece of bread. But because the interior of that loaf is a consistent mass substance, it

94  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence

(also includes metonymic input from PASSION NARRATIVE frame)

a solid and a liquid

JESUS’S BODY AND BLOOD

THIS LOAF AND WINE

Step 1: Synoptic/Pauline blend

Synoptic/Pauline blend: THIS LOAF AND WINE ARE JESUS’S BODY (or FLESH) AND BLOOD

Step 2: Johannine blend

HEAVENLY LIFE-GIVING BREAD AND DRINK

Combined Blend: THIS LOAF AND WINE, WHICH ARE JESUS’S BODY (or FLESH) AND BLOOD, ARE HEAVENLY LIFE-GIVING BREAD AND DRINK

Figure 3.17.  Chained megablend

can easily also be imagined as jesus’s flesh and re-​blended with heavenly life-​giving bread. The solid object in the blended space is a mass substance that is also bounded. The possibility of chaining these metaphors means that one’s reading of John 6 can be very different depending on whether or not one comes to the passage with ritual eucharistic practice already in mind. A Christian with a

Conceptual Blending and Two Ways of Feeding on Jesus  95 devoutly Johannine piety can read John 6 on its own with no thought given to a ritual meal whatsoever. Such a believer can experience the entire passage as prompting jesus’s flesh and blood are heavenly, life-​giving drink. On the other hand, a Christian with a devoutly Synoptic/​Pauline piety may well combine the two metaphors without even thinking about it and experience John 6 in such a way that the entire passage is understood to be about the eucharistic meal. Context, of course, can highlight one reading or the other. When “This is my daily bread: your very word spoken to me” is sung during a service of praise, preaching, and prayer, the Johannine metaphor on its own is likely to dominate.65 When “My flesh is food indeed and my blood is drink indeed” is sung during a eucharistic liturgy, the chained megablend will likely prevail.66 The question may arise: Can the two metaphors also be combined in the reverse order? At first glance, it might seem as if this should be possible given their opposite directionality. If one can serve as an input to the other, why not the reverse? Yet as we have seen, there are subtle but important differences in the way the input frames are structured in the two metaphors. Chaining them together in one direction works because the source frame of the Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor is near-​synonymous with the target frame of the Johannine metaphor, and the combined metaphors result in additional meaning, identifying this loaf and wine with the Johannine heavenly bread and drink (Figure 3.18). THIS LOAF AND WINE

JESUS’S BODY AND BLOOD (≈ JESUS’S FLESH AND BLOOD)

HEAVENLY LIFE-GIVING BREAD AND DRINK

Figure 3.18.  Chained metaphors

This is not the case in the opposite direction. The Johannine source frame (heavenly life-​giving bread and drink) is not readily synonymous with the Synoptic target frame (this loaf and wine). The Last Supper sayings demand a specific loaf and cup as target rather than the generalized, abstract reality of Jesus-​as-​metaphorical-​heavenly-​bread-​and-​drink. Moreover, even if the two metaphors could be forced into a chain, the result would be tautological (jesus’s flesh and blood are jesus’s body and blood), as in Figure 3.19.

96  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence JESUS’S FLESH AND BLOOD

HEAVENLY LIFE-GIVING BREAD AND DRINK (≠ THIS LOAF AND WINE??)

JESUS’S BODY AND BLOOD

Figure 3.19.  Chained metaphors: reverse order

The Synoptic/​Pauline and Johannine metaphors can combine, but not in just any way. Their interactions are constrained by the mechanics of the blending process and the particular characteristics of the input frames involved.

Sacramental and spiritual communion Having analyzed both metaphors in their scriptural settings, we are now in a position to consider the traditional distinction between sacramental communion and spiritual communion—​a distinction closely related to the threefold schema of sacramentum tantum, sacramentum et res, res tantum. While here too there is variety among theologians, the general shape is clear: sacramental communion is the reception of both the sacramentum and the sacramentum et res when believers eat and drink the consecrated elements of the eucharist, while spiritual communion is the reception of the res tantum. By the eleventh century it was widely agreed that worthy reception entailed both spiritual and sacramental communion, while unworthy reception entailed sacramental communion alone: an unrepentant hypocrite coming to communion would receive the elements (the sacramentum), and with them the real presence of Christ (the sacramentum et res), but would fail to receive the saving fruits of communion in the res tantum. While eleventh-​century theologians used this distinction only in connection with the actual eucharistic meal, twelfth-​century scholars like Anselm of Laon extended it to suggest that it was also possible to engage in spiritual communion outside that meal through prayer and devotion.67 While this idea of spiritual communion apart from sacramental communion was not at first universally accepted, it soon became commonplace and played a major part in late medieval lay piety.68 By the time of the Reformation, all the major parties in the West were agreed not only that spiritual communion without sacramental reception was possible but also that it might take place without reference to any actual

Conceptual Blending and Two Ways of Feeding on Jesus  97 eucharistic liturgy whatsoever. In other words, a believer might receive spiritually while attending a eucharistic liturgy without communicating, or when prevented from attending a particular liturgy by sickness or other cause, but might also feed on Jesus in a more general sense at any time purely by faith and love. Martin Luther put it this way: “A man can have and use the word or testament apart from the sign or sacrament. ‘Believe,’ says Augustine, ‘and you have eaten.’ But what does one believe, other than the word of the one who promises? Therefore I can hold mass every day, indeed, every hour, for I can set the words of Christ before me and with them feed and strengthen my faith as often as I choose. This is a truly spiritual eating and drinking.”69 For his part, Luther’s adversary Cardinal Cajetan also affirmed this type of spiritual communion. A believer, he wrote, could commune spiritually in three ways: one was by worthily receiving the sacrament itself (both spiritual and sacramental communion). Another was by making a spiritual act of union with the eucharist without receiving it (spiritual communion alone, but connected to a specific eucharistic celebration). However, the most basic means of feeding on Jesus was simply faith in Christ’s saving death: “It is clear that the literal sense of the saying [‘Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life in you’] is not concerning eating and drinking the sacrament of the Eucharist, but concerning eating and drinking the death of Jesus. . . . To feed on the death of Jesus is to have eternal life.”70 This distinction between sacramental and spiritual communion is not an arbitrary development. On the contrary, from a cognitive point of view, it is strongly motivated by the existence of the two scriptural blends. The two modes of communion correspond to the two metaphors: sacramental communion, to the Synoptic/​Pauline; spiritual communion, to the Johannine. In the former, Jesus’s body and blood serve as the source domain and are received by means of the specific, tangible bread and wine of the target domain. In the latter, Jesus’s flesh and blood are the target domain and can be accessed directly (through faith, prayer, and so on) to serve as metaphorical heavenly food and drink. John 6 is the charter passage for spiritual communion, while the institution narratives in the Synoptics and 1 Corinthians are the charter passages for sacramental communion. We can model these two modes of communion according to the two scriptural blends as in Figure 3.20 (note that the generic spaces for both blends are omitted here to save space but remain active in structuring each blend). On the left, sacramental communion is an encounter with Jesus by means of the Synoptic/​Pauline blend. Faithful believers receive the sacramentum et res, the

98  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence bread and wine, which are (metaphorically and truly) the body and blood of Christ. Meanwhile, on the right, spiritual communion is an encounter with Jesus by means of the Johannine blend. Faithful believers directly receive the res, Jesus’s flesh and blood, which are (metaphorically and truly) heavenly, life-​giving food and drink.

THIS LOAF AND WINE (sacramentum)

JESUS’S BODY (or FLESH) AND BLOOD (res)

HEAVENLY LIFE-GIVING BREAD AND DRINK

Synoptic/Pauline blend:

Johannine blend:

THIS LOAF AND WINE ARE JESUS’S BODY AND BLOOD (sacramentum et res)

JESUS’S FLESH AND BLOOD ARE HEAVENLY LIFE-GIVING BREAD AND DRINK

Spiritual Communion Direct reception of the res, which is (by virtue of the blend) truly heavenly and life-giving bread and drink

Sacramental Communion Reception of the Sacramentum et res, the bread and wine which are (by virtue of the blend) truly Christ’s body and blood

Figure 3.20.  Two modes of communion

3.5  Conclusions This chapter has offered both an introduction to conceptual blending theory and a thorough examination of the two central scriptural metaphors that have to do with feeding on Jesus: this loaf and wine are jesus’s body and blood and jesus’s flesh and blood are heavenly life-​giving drink. At a higher level of abstraction, these two metaphors can be expressed as exact opposites: bread and drink are jesus and jesus is bread and drink. The difference in directionality between them is at the heart of the basic difference between two strands of piety, one of which emphasizes the role of the eucharistic elements as a means of feeding on Jesus, while the other

Conceptual Blending and Two Ways of Feeding on Jesus  99 emphasizes feeding on Jesus in a spiritual way through prayer and devotion. The Synoptic/​Pauline blend maps beautifully onto the classic Western model of sacramentum tantum, sacramentum et res, res tantum and can be used to interpret that model in a new light. In sacramental communion, believers encounter Jesus by means of this blend, eating and drinking the consecrated elements that are the body and blood of Christ. In spiritual communion, on the other hand, believers encounter Jesus by means of the Johannine blend, receiving the res tantum directly by the metaphorical eating and drinking that are faith, prayer, and devotion. The point of all this, in the end, is a simple one. I believe an ecumenical theology of eucharistic presence needs to accept and celebrate both the Synoptic/​Pauline and Johannine metaphors. Both are scriptural. Both make important and irreplaceable contributions to Christian theology and spirituality. Neither is reducible to the other, and neither can legitimately be used as a proof text to render the other superfluous. Both should be considered fundamental truths of eucharistic faith and practice. Happily, there is not, and as far as I know never has been, any challenge to the Johannine metaphor. Christians of all traditions can agree that jesus’s flesh and blood are heavenly, life-​giving bread and drink; that feeding on Jesus is a central and necessary part of the Christian life; and, moreover, that this feeding can take place anywhere and at any time, both within the eucharistic meal and outside it. Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Anglicans, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, free-​church evangelicals, Pentecostals, and others—​all Christians can agree that they are called to feed on Jesus in intimate fellowship day by day, living eucharistically in all of life. This is a remarkable truth and one worth celebrating.71 The issue, then, lies with the Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor—​and it is this metaphor that needs to be explored at greater length. Here, the conflicting positions established at the time of the Reformation are still in many ways with us today. Despite the ecumenical advances of the past century, several questions remain sources of serious division: Is there a qualitative distinction between sacramental and spiritual communion? Are the body and blood of Christ received by mouth (the manducatio oralis)? Do unbelievers receive the body and blood of Christ (the manducatio impiorum)? At the root of all these questions lies a more basic one: Is the Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor true? Are the eucharistic elements the body and blood of Christ? Or, to put the matter in a more nuanced way, in what sense, if any, is it legitimate to call the

100  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence elements the body and blood of Christ? It is to these basic questions that we now turn: first, in Chapter 4, to an exploration of the Reformation-​era eucharistic controversies that produced a great divide among Christian traditions, and then, in Chapter 5, to a proposal for a cognitively informed way to bridge that divide.

Notes 1. From the words of administration in the 1552 service of Holy Communion. See Brian Cummings, ed., The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 137, 732n137. 2. On Eastern devotion to the elements within the liturgy, see Robert F. Taft, “‘Communion’ from the Tabernacle: A Liturgico-​Theological Oxymoron,” Worship 88, no. 1 (January 1, 2014): 13–​ 16. On Western extraliturgical devotion, see Nathan Mitchell, Cult and Controversy: The Worship of the Eucharist Outside Mass (New York: Pueblo, 1982), 3–​198. 3. E.g., Telford Work, “Communion: A Pentecostal Perspective,” in What Does It Mean to “Do This”?: Supper, Mass, Eucharist, ed. Michael Root and James J. Buckley (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014), 121–​43. 4. Praise and worship music “not only replaces the service of the Table as a primary ordering liturgical element, it also in some sense functions eucharistically for its participants”: Sarah Koenig, “This Is My Daily Bread: Toward a Sacramental Theology of Evangelical Praise and Worship,” Worship 82, no. 2 (March 2008): 147. 5. Marie Barnett, “Breathe,” © 1995 Mercy/​Vineyard Publishing. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Barnett’s song features prominently in Koenig, “This Is My Daily Bread.” 6. See Paul M. Blowers and Byron C. Lambert, “The Lord’s Supper,” in The Encyclopedia of the Stone-​Campbell Movement, ed. Douglas A. Foster et al. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 489–​96. 7. Mark Stamm recounts several anecdotes illustrating the challenges of very different eucharistic pieties for ecumenical worship in “‘What Are We Doing?’ Thoughts About a Seminary Chapel Program in an Ecumenical Setting,” Worship 84, no. 2 (March 1, 2010): 121–​37. See also Peter Bouteneff, “What Do We Do with This? Ecumenical Implications of the Handling of the Eucharist,” in What Does It Mean to “Do This”?: Supper, Mass, Eucharist, ed. Michael Root and James J. Buckley (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014), 74–​87. 8. Barbara Dancygier and Eve Sweetser, Figurative Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 75n2. 9. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 128. 10. See Gilles Fauconnier, Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Gilles Fauconnier,

Conceptual Blending and Two Ways of Feeding on Jesus  101 Mappings in Thought and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Fauconnier begins to explore the concept of blending in the second work; it comes to much fuller expression in Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 11. Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 40. 12. Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green, Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 369. 13. As David Tuggy has pointed out, the fact that the generic space is a schema abstracted across both input spaces allows blending theory to be integrated with Ronald Langacker’s work on schemas. See “Schematicity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, ed. Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 109–​10. 14. See Joseph E. Grady, Todd Oakley, and Seana Coulson, “Blending and Metaphor,” in Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics: Selected Papers from the 5th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Amsterdam, 1997, ed. Raymond W. Gibbs and Gerard J. Steen (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 1999), 101–​24; Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 297–​98; Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 28, 313–​21; Zoltán Kövecses, Language, Mind, and Culture: A Practical Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 275–​76. 15. For the term “float,” see Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Language, 61, 112. 16. For the sake of clarity, I have omitted the conventional dotted lines connecting the counterpart roles of agent, activity, implement, object, and purpose in the generic, input, and blended spaces. 17. On image mappings, see George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 89–​96. 18. Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 48. 19. Fauconnier and Turner, 48–​49. 20. See Fauconnier and Turner, 144–​59. 21. The name of this frame is taken from the FrameNet database of the International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, CA: https://​framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/​ fndrupal/​, accessed February 26, 2021. FrameNet seeks to build a lexical database of English drawn from actual texts. The names and roles it assigns to particular frames represent the judgments of its analysts and should not be seen as fixed and incontrovertible, but it serves as a useful reference. 22. Fauconnier and Turner identify four major subtypes of blend: simplex, mirror, single-​ scope, and double-​scope. These should not be taken to be discrete phenomena so much as convenient heuristic descriptors that help organize a continuum of complexity. See The Way We Think, 139. 23. See the similar diagram in Fauconnier and Turner, 120–​22. 24. Heard on Forum on San Francisco’s KQED Public Radio, September 28, 2016. 25. Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 291–​95. 26. Fauconnier and Turner, 151–​53, 165–​66, 284–​89.

102  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence 27. On metonymic tightening, see Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, “Conceptual Integration Networks,” in Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings, ed. Dirk Geeraerts (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006), 349. 28. Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 312. 29. Fauconnier and Turner, 93–​102. 30. Fauconnier and Turner, 95. 31. See Fauconnier, Mental Spaces, 154–​55. 32. See the examples from children’s cartoons in Mark Turner, “Compression and Representation,” Language and Literature 15, no. 1 (February 1, 2006): 22–​26. 33. Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 97. 34. Fauconnier and Turner, 22–​24, 340–​42. 35. Edwin Hutchins, “Material Anchors for Conceptual Blends,” Journal of Pragmatics 37, no. 10 (October 1, 2005): 1555–​77. Hutchins’s concept of material anchors will be important to my treatment of symbols in Chapter 6. 36. The stock market example is inspired by George Lakoff, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor,” in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 241. 37. Various analysts have worked on this particular set of paired sentences. See Grady, Oakley, and Coulson, “Blending and Metaphor,” 104–​6; Kövecses, Metaphor, 24–​25; George Lakoff, “The Neural Theory of Metaphor,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, ed. Raymond W. Gibbs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 32–​33. Interestingly, Grady, Coulson, and Oakley treat “This butcher is a surgeon” as criticism, while Kövecses and Lakoff treat it as praise. 38. Aelred Cody, “An Instruction of Philoxenus of Mabbug on Gestures and Prayer when One Receives Communion in the Hand, with a History of the Manner of Receiving the Eucharistic Bread in the West Syrian Church,” in Rule of Prayer, Rule of Faith: Essays in Honor of Aidan Kavanagh, OSB, ed. Nathan Mitchell and John F. Baldovin (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996), 62–​63. The reference to the eucharistic bread as a “fiery coal” is characteristic of Syrian liturgy and derives from Isa. 6:6–​7. 39. “We Love the Church Life!” (No. 43) in Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs (Anaheim, CA: Living Stream Ministry, 2016), © 2016 Living Stream Ministry. Used by permission. This song, associated with the local church movement, was written in the 1960s or 1970s and inspired by conference messages given by Witness Lee. For a recording, see NYCYPCD, “We Love the Church Life!,” track 4 on I Love Thy Kingdom, Lord!, streaming audio, Apple Music, accessed February 28, 2021, https://​music.apple.com/​ us/​album/​i-​love-​thy-​kingdom-​lord/​513066247, © 2012 NYCYPCD, Inc. 40. Interestingly, both this song and Barnett’s “Breathe” add a metaphor—​jesus is air—​ which further strengthens the believer’s dependence on Jesus: not only daily, but every single minute. This metaphor does not appear in scripture but seems to be a creative elaboration of jesus is food and drink. 41. drink is used instead of the more specific wine because John 6 does not in fact specifically identify the “drink indeed” as wine.

Conceptual Blending and Two Ways of Feeding on Jesus  103 42. Dancygier and Sweetser, Figurative Language, 30–​31. These two example sentences are drawn directly from Dancygier and Sweetser. 43. Dancygier and Sweetser, 30. 44. Mark 14:22–​25. All scripture translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 45. For an exploration of the role of the copula construction in evoking metaphoric blends, see Karen Sullivan, Frames and Constructions in Metaphoric Language (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2013). 46. The suggestions occasionally advanced that Jesus is referring not to the bread but to the gathered group of disciples at the table, to the meal event as a whole, or simply to his own physical body, which is about to be sacrificed, are cognitively unconvincing for the same reasons explored later with regard to the wine. For the first two interpretations, see, e.g., Vernard Eller, In Place of Sacraments: A Study of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1972), 89–​90. The third was the position of the sixteenth-​century radical reformer Andreas Karlstadt: see The Eucharistic Pamphlets of Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, trans. and ed. Amy Nelson Burnett (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2011). 47. This preservation of schematic topology is known as the Invariance Principle. See Lakoff, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor,” 215–​16. On image schemas as the building blocks for more complex image mappings, see Lakoff and Turner, More than Cool Reason, 97–​99. The seminal work on image schemas is Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 48. The FrameNet database at the University of California, Berkeley, includes an entry for a container frame with a Contents element. In formal terms, then, this can be thought of as a Whole for Part metonymy in which the name of the whole container frame is used to indicate the contents alone: https://​framenet2.icsi.berkeley.edu/​ fnReports/​data/​frameIndex.xml?frame=Containers, accessed February 26, 2021. 49. See Eller, In Place of Sacraments, 93–​101. 50. Consider André Breton’s line “My wife . . . whose waist is an hourglass,” analyzed by Lakoff and Turner in More than Cool Reason, 90–​95. It is not the entire hourglass, but the narrow part of the hourglass, that is mapped onto the woman’s waist in this image metaphor. Shared image structure allows readers to process instances like this effortlessly and often even unconsciously. 51. On image schemas as the building blocks for more complex image mappings, see Lakoff and Turner, 97–​99. 52. See Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 108–​41. The Western doctrine of transubstantiation, addressed in Chapter 8, arose as a response to this clash at the level of academic theology. 53. Daß diese wort Christi (Das ist mein leib etce) noch fest stehen widder die Schwermgeister (1527), in WA 23:242–​43; ET That These Words of Christ, “This is my Body,” etc., Still Stand Firm Against the Fanatics, in LW 37:124. The name Capernaism comes from the people of Capernaum in John 6:52, who ask, “How can this person give us his flesh to eat?”

104  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence 54. The Body for Person metonymy thus provides the cognitive basis for the doctrine of concomitance, the teaching that a believer who receives only one of the elements still receives all of Jesus—​in other words, in receiving his body one also receives his blood, and vice versa. Concomitance has had a checkered history, pastorally speaking: it supplied the grounds for withholding the chalice from the laity in the medieval West, a practice that is still widespread (though no longer universally normative) in today’s Roman Catholic Church. The traditions of the Reformation, scandalized by this practice, tended to reject the idea of concomitance altogether. However, it seems to have made something of a comeback in some of these traditions over the past century out of pastoral sensitivity to believers who receive in one kind due to celiac disease, alcoholism, or other dietary restrictions. 55. Jesper Sørensen, A Cognitive Theory of Magic (Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2007), 105–​6. Sørensen notes that this idea of “forward contagion” by which symbolic attributes are gained by ingestion is common across cultures. See the discussion of container motifs in Chapter 7. 56. Sørensen, 95–​96. See also Sørensen’s less detailed diagram of a blend involved in the theory of transubstantiation, 98–​102. 57. The blend can in fact get even more complicated as individuals and communities bring their own background knowledge and creative elaborations to bear. For example, Eve Sweetser (personal conversation) recently drew my attention to the fact that this metonymy within the passion narrative frame can itself be reinforced by a metaphoric mapping between Jesus’s giving the bread and wine to the disciples at the Last Supper and his giving himself up to a sacrificial death. 58. On motivation, see Section 2.1, “Metaphors and cross-​cultural variation,” 28–29. 59. For Berengar’s use of sacramentum and res, see Gary Macy, The Theologies of the Eucharist in the Early Scholastic Period: A Study of the Salvific Function of the Sacrament According to the Theologians, c. 1080–​c. 1220 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 39; for that of his opponents Lanfranc and Alger, 46–​53; Hugh, 82–​6; Peter Lombard, 122–​ 4. On Augustine’s earlier terminology, see William R. Crockett, Eucharist, Symbol of Transformation (New York: Pueblo, 1989), 89; Edward J. Kilmartin, The Eucharist in the West: History and Theology, ed. Robert J. Daly (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1998), 24–​28. 60. See Kilmartin, Eucharist in the West, 62–​63, 119–​20; and Macy’s discussion of the Paschasian, mystical, and ecclesial schools, Theologies of the Eucharist in the Early Scholastic Period, 44–​132. 61. John 6:33, 35, 48, 50, 51. 62. John 6:49–​51. 63. John 6:53–​56. Some scholars hypothesize that John’s gospel may have arisen in a community that used water for its eucharistic meals, at least at some stage of its life. See Margaret Daly-​Denton, “Drinking the Water That Jesus Gives: A Feature of the Johannine Eucharist?,” in A Wandering Galilean: Essays in Honour of Seán Freyne, ed. Zuleika Rodgers, Margaret Daly-​ Denton, and Anne Fitzpatrick-​ McKinley (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 343–​66, and my own essay “A Eucharistic Origins Story, Part 2: The Body and Blood of Christ,” Worship 92, no. 4 (July 2018): 298–​317.

Conceptual Blending and Two Ways of Feeding on Jesus  105 64. These three translations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version. 65. Barnett, “Breathe.” 66. Episcopal Church, The Hymnal 1982: According to the Use of the Episcopal Church (New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1985), S168 and S169. 67. Gary Macy, Treasures from the Storeroom: Medieval Religion and the Eucharist (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), 37. 68. Macy, 179. 69. De captivitate Babylonica ecclesiae praeludium (1520), in WA 6:518; ET The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, in LW 36:44. 70. Commentary on John 6:54–​55 (6:53–​54 in today’s numbering), in Thomas de Vio Cajetan, Opera omnia quotquot in Sacrae Scripturae expositionem reperiuntur, vol. 4 (Lyon: Jacob & Peter Prost, 1639), 333–​34; ET Darwell Stone, A History of the Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), 2:66–​67. 71. See Robert J. Daly, Gary Macy, and Jill Raitt, “The Ecumenical Significance of Eucharistic Conversion,” Theological Studies 77, no. 1 (March 2016): 7–​31.

4 Identity The Great Divide

The eucharistic bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ.

The identity motif is at the heart of all ecumenical discussions of eucharistic presence. Unlike all the other motifs in this study—​representation, change, containment, and conduit—​it can fairly be said to arise directly from the text of scripture. All the others have developed over the centuries as ways of elaborating on it (or, in the case of the conduit motif, as a possible alternative to it). This is why I have called it the fundamental motif of eucharistic presence, with all others being secondary. The Presbyterian theologian George Hunsinger has identified agreement on this motif as the “irreducible minimum” for an ecumenical convergence regarding eucharistic presence. He writes, Putting aside for the moment all questions of theoretical elaboration—​like “transubstantiation” or “transelementation”—​a specific assertion is ecumenically necessary for all churches to make about the consecrated elements of bread and wine. It pertains to the liturgical use of the statement “This is my body.” Ecumenically, it is not enough to interpret it either as “This signifies my body” or as “This contains my body,” even if, at some level, the ideas of signification and containment need not be entirely ruled out. It must be possible for all traditions to assert—​without equivocation—​ at the level of first-​order discourse as found in the liturgy, that the relation of “This bread” to “my body” is actually one of real predication.1

James M. Arcadi has expanded on Hunsinger’s phrase “real predication”: “Real predication works something like this. When the minister refers to a consecrated piece of bread, the minister aptly says, ‘this is the body of Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence. Stephen R. Shaver, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197580806.003.0004

IDENTITY: THE GREAT DIVIDE  107 Christ,’ and the minister must do so really. . . . Consequently, we have to ask the faithful, when holding a piece of communion bread, ‘is this the body of Christ?’ If the answer is ‘no,’ then real predication has not obtained.”2 Of course, many Christian traditions already make this assertion. For Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Lutherans, many Anglicans, and other Christians of a high-​sacramental piety, the assertion of identity is not only uncontroversial but also essential. However, such an affirmation has historically been more difficult for many Christians of Reformed traditions, and for those of free-​church traditions whose eucharistic understandings look primarily to Zwingli or the Radical Reformation. This difficulty emerged at a particular place and time, in a Europe where Renaissance humanism had awakened a new interest in language and rhetoric. For Zwingli in particular, the denial that the eucharistic bread and wine are, strictly speaking, the body and blood of Christ was grounded in a specific understanding of language in which metaphor, metonymy, and other figurative forms of speech are understood as primarily decorative enrichments, usefully evocative but incapable in themselves of making proper truth claims. While Bullinger, Calvin, and various other Reformed successors would adopt somewhat higher views than Zwingli about the role of the elements in the eucharistic celebration, they tended to accept his characterization of the words of institution as a nonliteral figure of speech that was fundamentally translatable into an underlying literal statement such as “This signifies my body” or “This is the sign of my body.” Thus, the Reformed tradition has often tended to prefer the representation motif over the identity motif and to see the two as incompatible. However, there are voices within that tradition today that call for moving past this historic understanding. Hunsinger calls on his fellow Reformed Christians to “retain their traditional view that the eucharistic sign is indeed a sign, but . . . stretch to adopt the position that the sign, without ceasing to be a sign, also becomes primarily—​in the Word and by the Spirit—​the reality that is signified.”3 This would be a “symbolic realism” in which “the word this is related to the word body by a pattern of identity and difference. . . . The bread would be identical with the body in one way while remaining different from it in another.”4 He finds precedent in the 1536 Wittenberg Concord by which Luther, Melanchthon, Bucer, and Calvin were all able to agree in stating that “through sacramental union the bread is the body of Christ.”5 While Hunsinger does not use the terminology of cognitive linguistics, his language of symbolic realism and simultaneous identity and difference

108  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence puts his proposal squarely in the realm of embodied realism and conceptual metaphor. Using the tools of cognitive linguistics offers a way forward that can affirm the Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor as both figurative and, in the fullest sense, true. It is important to note that this requires a readjustment of thinking not only on the part of many Reformed and free-​church Christians but also on the part of Lutherans, Roman Catholics, and others whose traditions have insisted with equal vigor that the words of institution are not figurative. The Swiss Reformers’ firm insistence that they are figurative rests, as we will see, on a concern for embodied sense experience and on a genuine recognition that both metaphor and metonymy are at work. A cognitive linguistics–​informed understanding of eucharistic presence offers a way forward that can respect the Reformed insight that the words of institution are, indeed, figurative—​that is, they evoke a blend that, as we saw in Chapter 3, evokes both metaphor and metonymy—​while asserting with the high-​sacramental traditions that they are also true, really true, true at the level of Hunsinger’s “real predication.” This chapter focuses on the great divide between Christian traditions that have asserted that the identity motif is true, and therefore literal, and those that have asserted that it is figurative, and therefore not—​at least strictly speaking—​true. At the center will be a close reading of the eucharistic controversy between Luther and Zwingli, showing how both parties assume an essentially decorative understanding of figurative language, which is seen as translatable to an underlying literal equivalent. This leaves Zwingli insisting that the words of institution (and other scriptural texts) are figurative and Luther that they are literal—​positions that would become entrenched among their respective successors, as well as among those Christian traditions farther away from the center on either side. In Chapter 5 I will propose a constructive alternative based on a cognitive understanding of language. For now, we need to take a closer look at the breach.

4.1  The identity motif in Christian tradition The identity motif is not only grounded in scripture but is also received without apparent significant contradiction until well into the second millennium. In the second century, Justin Martyr writes, “The food which has been eucharistized (εὐχαριστηθεῖσαν) through a word of prayer which comes from him is the flesh and the blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.”6

IDENTITY: THE GREAT DIVIDE  109 At about the same time, Irenaeus writes, “The cup of created wine . . . He acknowledged as His own blood; and the created bread . . . He affirmed to be His own body.”7 In the third century Tertullian can refer to the consecrated bread simply as the Lord’s body, as can Origen.8 From the fourth century onward, this motif of identity is so pervasive that a few examples will have to suffice: (1) a. “Since then He declared and spake of the bread, ‘This is My body,’ who will dare to doubt any longer? And since He affirmed and said, ‘This is My blood,’ who will ever hesitate so as to say it is not His blood?” (Cyril of Jerusalem)9 b. “The bishop gives them the body of Christ, saying, ‘This is the body of Christ.’ They reply, ‘Amen.’ He who gives them from the cup says, ‘This is the blood of Christ.’ They reply, ‘Amen.’ ” (Canons of Hippolytus)10 c. “How can what is bread be the body of Christ? By what words and whose speech is the consecration? Those of the Lord Jesus. . . . It was not the body of Christ before consecration; but after consecration, I tell you, it is now the body of Christ.” (Ambrose of Milan)11 d. “That bread which you see on the altar, having been consecrated by means of the word of God, is the body of Christ. That cup, or rather what the cup contains, having been consecrated by means of the word of God, is the blood of Christ.” (Augustine of Hippo)12 This motif coexists in the first millennium with the secondary motifs of representation, change, and containment. What is important here is simply to note that the motif of identity has a strong prima facie claim to ecumenical acceptance based on its scriptural status, its antiquity, and its prominence. It dates back at least to Paul (writing in about AD 55), who attributes it to Jesus himself; it spread rapidly among the early churches, and it appears to have been essentially unanimously accepted from at least the fourth century onward.13 In the East it was taken for granted by both iconoclasts and iconophiles; in the West, it was affirmed by both Paschasius Radbertus and Ratramnus, and both Berengar and Lanfranc.14 Although he is writing polemically, Luther makes a reasonable observation when he remarks, Of all the fathers, as many as you can name, . . . none of them uses such an expression as, “It is simply bread and wine,” or, “Christ’s body and blood

110  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence are not present.” Yet since this subject is so frequently discussed by them, it is impossible that they should not at some time have let slip such an expression as, “It is simply bread,” or, “Not that the body of Christ is physically present,” or the like, since they are greatly concerned not to mislead the people; actually, they simply proceed to speak as if no one doubted that Christ’s body and blood are present. Certainly among so many fathers and so many writings a negative argument should have turned up at least once, as happens in other articles; but actually they all stand uniformly and consistently on the affirmative side.15

Indeed, it is difficult to find an outright denial of the proposition that the consecrated elements are Christ’s body and blood until the fourteenth century with the work of John Wyclif. Wyclif himself is in many places able to affirm quite strongly that the elements are Christ’s body and blood: “Christ, who could not lie, said that the bread, which He took in His hands, was really His body, and He did not err in this, nor falsely assert anything, so truly it was thus.”16 He even asserts, “Just as it is granted through the power of the words of the faith of Scripture, that the sacrament is the body of Christ, and not only that it will be or it figures sacramentally the body of Christ, so by the same authority ought it be granted simply, that this bread, which is this sacrament, is truly the body of Christ.”17 Yet, Wyclif argues, the word est can have more than one meaning. In the case of the words of institution, est creates a “habitual predication” (predicatio habitudinalis) rather than a “formal” or “essential” predication. This, for Wyclif, places “This is my body” on the same level as the texts “John is Elijah” or “The rock was Christ.”18 While Wyclif still considers habitual predication to express real truth, he describes this in a qualified way: “The catholic mind does not take it that the bread would be the body of Christ, save understood figuratively, because identity could not be possible.”19 Wyclif goes on to argue that “there is no identity of the bread with the body of Christ” because there simply can be no real identity between any two things that remain numerically distinct: “Any remaining differences would be contradictory to identity.”20 On the basis of this understanding of predication, Wyclif is in some places able to state that the elements are not Christ’s body and blood: for example, he can write that what the priest blesses is “a consecrated host which is not the Lord’s body but the efficacious sign of it . . . a consecrated host, and not the body of Christ, but the sign or garment of it.”21

IDENTITY: THE GREAT DIVIDE  111 Wyclif was not a Renaissance-​or Enlightenment-​era humanist, and the categories in which he thinks are not those of later times. The complexity of his own understanding is summed up in this passage from his treatise De apostasia, in which he affirms that the bread is the body of Christ, that this predication is figurative, and yet that it is also true and proper (proprie): In a certain way the body of the bread, retaining the substance of the bread, is miraculously made the body of the Lord along with this; I do not dare to say identically, according to substance or nature, but rather as a trope (tropice) according to a signification or a figure (signanciam vel figuram). Nevertheless, it is not falsely and improperly (false et improprie) called the body of Christ, but truly and properly (vere et proprie), just as Christ truly and properly says that this bread is his body.22

Wyclif ’s ideas about the figurative interpretation of the words of institution would filter down through the centuries, passing through the Lollard movement and parts of the Hussite movement to radical reformers like Cornelius Hoen—​and from Hoen to Huldrych Zwingli.23 To Zwingli, however, Wyclif ’s idea that a statement could be both figurative and true in the proper sense no longer seemed plausible. In part this was because of an increasing Enlightenment interest in language and rhetoric, sparked by the rise of Renaissance humanism: Zwingli drew on an education in classical Latin rhetorical manuals to distinguish between literal language and “tropes” or figures of speech. In part it was also because a figurative understanding of the words of institution lent itself to another emerging characteristic of Zwingli’s thinking: a sharp distinction between the physical and the spiritual.

4.2  Zwingli: “is” as a trope Huldrych Zwingli did not always see the words of institution as figurative. His early works did not repudiate the corporeal presence of Christ in the eucharistic elements, and as late as 1523, well into his career as a reformer at Zürich, he prepared a draft of a lengthy eucharistic prayer that suggests a fairly robust idea of eucharistic presence and even hints at the possibility of a manducatio impiorum.24 However, Zwingli had come to be powerfully affected by the words of John 6:63, “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is of no

112  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence use at all,” which he interpreted to mean that material objects could not serve as vehicles for spiritual grace. Zwingli began to wrestle with his growing conviction that the feeding on Jesus “is a spiritual thing, and has nothing to do with bodily things.”25 He came to believe that the bread and wine were not in fact Christ’s body and blood but merely signs of them. However, he was at first unable to justify this with a specific argument. Looking back on this time, he wrote, “I realized long ago that there was a trope in these words . . . but I did not see which word I could use to explain the trope.”26 At some point in 1523 or 1524, Zwingli came across a letter by Hoen that supplied the argument Zwingli needed: in the words of institution, the word “is” should be understood to mean “signifies.”27 Zwingli, a humanist with a substantial education in classical rhetoric, would later write of this moment, “I was not ignorant of tropes at that time. I had read Fabius [Quintilian] and Cicero and even Plutarch as given in the introduction to Homer. But that simple explanation which anyone could understand pleased me: ‘This bread signifies my body which is given for you.’ ”28 Hoen’s interpretation provided the missing link in Zwingli’s eucharistic theology, and in November of 1524 Zwingli wrote that he was glad his previous attempt to change the eucharistic liturgy had failed, since he now had a more thoroughgoing reform in mind.29 The specific trope at work in the words of institution, Zwingli believed, was catachresis, or metaphor.30 As he understood it, this was primarily a linguistic phenomenon by which one word or phrase was being substituted for another. In this case, “This signifies my body” was the underlying, literally true, sentence: “This verb ‘is’ . . . is in my judgment used here for ‘signifies.’ ”31 For this reason, the phrase “This is my body” should be understood to mean “This . . . is the symbol of my body which is given for you.”32 Uncovering the truth of a figurative statement, in Zwingli’s view, meant finding the appropriate literal equivalent for it—​translating it, so to speak: “It is not enough to say ‘This is a trope,’ unless at the same time you reveal the trope using other words. So when Christ says, ‘I have a baptism with which to be baptized’ (Luke 12:50), and ‘I have food to eat’ (John 4:32), I will not satisfy my listener if I say, ‘It is a trope.’ Rather, I have to open up the trope in more familiar words. So I might explain ‘a baptism with which to be baptized’ with ‘a cross to carry’ or ‘to die’ or ‘to suffer.’ ”33 As Zwingli suggests, there might at times be more than one such possible translation. Zwingli’s colleague Oecolampadius preferred to classify “This is my body” not as metaphor but as metonymy, which meant to him

IDENTITY: THE GREAT DIVIDE  113 that the trope was to be located not in the word “is” but in “my body.”34 In Oecolampadius’s view, “my body” had been substituted for the underlying literal phrase “the sign of my body.” Zwingli was at first critical of this variant interpretation but later embraced it as a reasonable alternative.35 While formal classifications of tropes could vary, the crucial thing was to recognize that a trope was present: “One and the same form of expression may be explained by different kinds of figures, and these may also be considered from different points of view. Hence even among the rhetoricians we very often find the same form of expression elucidated by different tropes.”36 It was in the end immaterial whether the underlying sentence was “This signifies my body” or “This is the sign of my body”; more than one correct literal equivalent might be acceptable. The point was that literal language was capable of direct reference to reality, while figurative language was a matter of substitution, replacing literal language for a rhetorical effect. Zwingli found support for his figurative interpretation of the words of institution in a number of additional scriptural examples.37 Had not Joseph used figurative language in saying, “The seven good oxen are seven years”?38 Were Christ’s own statements “I am the vine” and “The seed is the word of God” not figurative?39 Had God not used figurative language in saying to Moses, of the paschal lamb, “It is the Passover of the Lord”?40 This last example was of particular importance to Zwingli because it was used not in a parable or dream interpretation but in reference to a tangible material object, the lamb, just as the words of institution were used in reference to tangible material objects of bread and wine. Noting the typological relationship between the Passover and the eucharist, Zwingli concluded that God had providentially caused the scriptures to use figurative language for both: Who, therefore, will be so slow, not to say dull or obstinate, as not to see that “is” is used in this passage for “signifies” or for “it is a symbol” or “it is a figure of speech.” That lamb, eaten by all the descendants of the Hebrews, signifies nothing else than that their fathers had been passed over when the Lord slaughtered all the first-​born in Egypt. “Is,” therefore, cannot be understood in any other way than that mentioned, namely as for “it is a symbol” or “figure.” . . . But why do I attempt to compare the shadow with the substance in detail, when, as soon as the name “passover” is heard, the faithful heart takes in the commemoration of Christ’s death? Why, then, are we so bold as to deny in the light the trope that we see so plainly in the shadow?41

114  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence Zwingli’s understanding of figurative language thus assumes that it is fundamentally translatable. He never questions the premise that there is a clear and readily discernible distinction between literal and figurative language and that figurative language can be rendered back into its literal equivalent. His primarily decorative understanding of figurative language is apparent in an explanation of why the scriptures use so much of it: “After the human tongue began, by means of tropes and figures and varieties of expression, to season its speech with sweet-​smelling spices, or paint it with varying hues, as it were, then the divine Goodness (which everywhere babbles to us like parents to their infants, and uses our own language), condescended in talking with us, to use our own tropes and figures. Hence we learn beyond doubt that a knowledge of tropes and figures is above all things necessary to those who have determined to busy themselves with the sacred writings.”42 This strict understanding of literal predication is not limited to questions about the eucharist: it has major implications for Zwingli’s Christology as a whole. Zwingli rejects the communicatio idiomatum, the teaching that Christ’s divine and human natures are so intimately joined that what is predicated of the one can truly be predicated of the other. While he acknowledges that it is permissible to say “The Son of God was slain” or “The Lord of Glory was crucified,”43 he argues that such statements, like the words of institution, are based on a trope. In this case he identifies the trope as alloeosis, relying on Plutarch to define this as “a trope by which an interchange takes place between members of a category or scheme of things where, namely, on account of some affinity in the grammatical phenomena, a leap or interchange is made from one to the other.”44 For Zwingli, then, alloeosis is a matter of language, of rhetorical elegance, but not of the underlying reality. With this in mind, Zwingli emphasizes the importance of maintaining the distinction between Christ’s human and divine natures: he cautions unwary readers against believing “that what applies to only one of his natures applies to the other also” and warns, “We must not confuse the understanding of the properties, even if we interchange the names!”45 Based on this strict distinction between Christ’s natures, Zwingli insists that Christ’s body—​which pertains to his humanity alone—​is as finite and circumscribed as any human body and so cannot possibly be anywhere but in heaven, at God’s right hand: “As a human being, therefore, Christ was received up into heaven, who as God had never gone away from there.”46

IDENTITY: THE GREAT DIVIDE  115

4.3  Luther: “is” as literal predication Martin Luther was diametrically opposed to Zwingli’s figurative interpretation of “This is my body.” Rather than take John 6 as his starting point for a theology of eucharistic presence, Luther began with the words of institution themselves: “Because in the sacrament Christ says in clear words: ‘Take, eat, this is my body, etc.’ it is my duty to believe these words, as firmly as I must believe all the words of Christ. If he handed me a mere straw and spoke those words, I should believe it.”47 Luther agreed with Zwingli that John 6:26–​58 was about spiritual rather than sacramental eating.48 However, he argued that John 6:63 (“the flesh is no use”) referred to “the flesh” in the sense of human fallibility. Christ’s flesh could hardly be of no use, since it was precisely Christ’s fleshly incarnation, death, and resurrection that were salvific.49 In general, Luther emphasized the unity between matter and spirit, while Zwingli tended to divide them: as William Crockett has put it, “The whole cast of Zwingli’s thought is spiritualistic. . . . The whole cast of Luther’s thought is incarnational.”50 While Luther acknowledged that scripture at times used figurative language, he insisted that figurative interpretations should only be sought as a last resort: “Every single word should be permitted to stand in its natural meaning; no deviation should be allowed unless faith compels it.”51 Luther mocked Zwingli and Oecolampadius, along with his own former colleague Andreas Karlstadt, for what he saw as their desperate attempts to parse Christ’s words out of existence: There are only three words: “This is my body.” So the one [Karlstadt] turns up his nose at the word “this” and severs it from the bread, claiming that one should interpret it thus: “Take, eat,—​this is my body”; as if I were to say: “Take and eat; here sits Hans with the red jacket.” The second [Zwingli] seizes upon the little word “is”; to him it is the equivalent of “signifies.” The third [Oecolampadius] says, “this is my body” means the same as, “this is a figure of my body.” They set up these dreams of theirs without any scriptural basis. These fanatics do not disturb me, and are not worthy that one should fight with them. Some of them are crude, grammatical fanatics; the others are subtle, philosophical fanatics. Let them go, therefore, and let us adhere to the words as they read.52

116  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence Luther would eventually be willing to describe the words of institution as a synecdoche but would claim, against Zwingli and the Swiss, that synecdoche is in fact a form of literal speech. In synecdoche, he argues, “we speak of the containing vessel when we mean the content, or the content when also including the vessel, as e.g. when we speak of the mug or of the beer, using only one of the two to denote also the other. Or, to take another example, if the king tells his servants to bring his sword, he tacitly includes the sheath. . . . The metaphor does away with the content, e.g. as when you understand ‘body’ as ‘figure of the body.’ That the synecdoche does not do.”53 Like Zwingli’s, Luther’s understanding of predication has implications that go beyond the eucharist to the heart of Christology. Luther is scandalized by Zwingli’s concept of alloeosis: “If I believe that only the human nature suffered for me, then Christ would be a poor Savior for me, in fact, he himself would need a Savior. In short, it is indescribable what the devil attempts with this alloeosis!”54 Luther insists that the communicatio idiomatum is not a linguistic convenience but a matter of proper predication. Since Christ is one person, anything he is or does in one nature is true also of the other. “You must say that the person (pointing to Christ) suffers, and dies. But this person is truly God, and therefore it is correct to say: the Son of God suffers. Although, so to speak, the one part (namely, the divinity) does not suffer, nevertheless the person, who is God, suffers in the other part (namely, in the humanity).”55 This too, for Luther, is a synecdoche, a kind of trope that is nonetheless true in the proper sense.56 Luther rejects Zwingli’s insistence that because Christ’s body is a human one it must be locally present only in one place. In the first place, Luther argues, Zwingli is wrong in assuming “that the right hand of God is a particular place in heaven.”57 Instead, God’s right hand is everywhere: “God has and knows various ways to be present at a certain place, not only the single one of which the philosophers prattle, which the philosophers call ‘local.’ ”58 Because of this—​and because Christ’s humanity is so intimately united with his divinity as to be inseparable—​his humanity must also be present everywhere. “No, comrade, wherever you place God for me, you must also place the humanity for me. They simply will not let themselves be separated and divided from each other. He has become one person and does not separate the humanity from himself as Master Jack takes off his coat and lays it aside when he goes to bed.”59 Luther’s doctrine of the ubiquity of Christ’s body is thus directly dependent on his understanding of the communicatio idiomatum and, in turn, of literal predication.

IDENTITY: THE GREAT DIVIDE  117

4.4  Some illustrative exchanges Certain exchanges between Luther and Zwingli are particularly helpful for assessing their positions, and the dichotomy between them, from the point of view of cognitive linguistics. In one, Luther emphasizes the need to take Christ’s words at face value: We are not so simple-​minded that we do not understand the words. If these words are not clear, I do not know how to speak German. Would I not understand, if someone were to place a roll before me and say: “Take, eat, this is white bread”? Or again, “Take and drink, this is a glass of wine”? Therefore, when Christ says, “Take, eat, this is my body,” even a child will understand perfectly well that he is speaking of that which he is offering.60

In a sarcastic riposte, Zwingli points out that the difference between Luther’s example and the words of institution is that the evidence of the senses agrees with “This is white bread,” but not with “This is my body.” Because the eucharistic elements look and feel like bread and wine, not like Christ’s body and blood, it should be clear that some sort of figurative meaning is involved: You offer bread and say it is bread. Who would find anything absurd here? But in the Lord’s words you offer bread and say it is the physical body. . . . If you wanted to present something like this you ought to have said, “Who does not know that the words are clear when I offer a bread roll and say, ‘Eat. This is a watermelon or a cucumber’? Who, I say, does not know what I have offered is a watermelon or a cucumber?” I should say nobody would know it unless you should explain the things by some figure, for instance, that the bread roll was spoken of as a watermelon or a cucumber from its shape, but was nothing but a bread roll, or that having been given the price of a watermelon, you had bought what was called a watermelon but was not one, or in some similar fashion.61

For Zwingli words have fixed meanings that correspond to the evidence of the senses: a bread roll is a bread roll; a watermelon is a watermelon. When words are used in ways that go beyond these fixed meanings, it is a sure sign that a trope is at work. Zwingli perceptively suggests that a bread roll might be called a watermelon or cucumber on the basis of what cognitive linguistics

118  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence would call image metaphor (similar shape) or metonymy (Goods for Money within a commerce frame). For Luther, on the other hand, word meanings can be dynamic and flexible. Luther develops a radically different theory of predication from that of Zwingli, arguing in effect that the word “is” is never figurative; rather, it serves as a means of creating new senses of words: If the fanatics, in any one of all the languages on earth can produce one saying in which “is” means the same as “represents,” then they may claim to have won their case. But they refuse the challenge. These lofty spirits fail to take proper consideration of the art of language, grammar, or as they call it, tropus, which is taught in elementary schools. This art teaches how a child may make two or three words out of one, or how he may give to a single word a new application and several meanings.62

Luther boldly claims that “all grammarians” share his understanding, alluding perhaps to the Christmas hymn Es ist ein Ros entsprungen to provide an example: If I wish to glorify Christ with an elegant eulogy, seeing that he is born as a beautiful child of the Virgin Mary, I may take the word “flower” and make a trope, that is, give it a new sense and application by saying, “Christ is a flower.” All grammarians say that “flower” here has become a new word and has acquired a new meaning, and now no longer means the flower in the field but the child Jesus. They do not say that the word “is” here has become metaphorical, for Christ does not represent a flower but is a flower, yet a different flower from the natural one.63

Although Luther here rejects the idea that “is” is metaphorical, it is noteworthy that he is elsewhere at times willing to use the words “trope” and “metaphor” to describe such usages: “Even school children say that [these] are tropes (tropi) or words with a new application, according to the nature of a metaphor (Metaphora). For a simple word and a metaphorical word (vocabulum simplex et metaphoricum) are not one, but two words.”64 For Luther, then, metaphor is not necessarily, as Zwingli believes, a rhetorical device incapable of bearing proper truth. Rather, it can be a means of generating new senses that are every bit as valid as those that preceded them. Instead of relying on the classical rhetoricians beloved by Zwingli, Luther buttresses his

IDENTITY: THE GREAT DIVIDE  119 argument with a line from the poet Horace: “You will have expressed yourself admirably if a clever setting gives the spice of novelty to a familiar word.”65 Thus, for Luther there is no question of translating a phrase like “John is Elijah” or “Christ is a rock” into a putative literal equivalent: these phrases are already literal. The predicate noun has taken on a new meaning, which now stands alongside its earlier meaning: “Here ‘Elijah’ has become a new word, and does not mean the old Elijah but the new Elijah. We Germans would say, ‘John is the true Elijah,’ ‘John is a second Elijah,’ or ‘John is a new Elijah.’ Similarly it is said, ‘Christ is a rock,’ that is, he has the nature of a rock and is truly a rock, but a new rock, a second rock, a true rock. Likewise, ‘Christ is a true vine.’ ”66 Luther goes on to apply this principle to several other examples. A carved wooden rose, he argues, is not merely a representation of a rose but actually is itself a rose. It may well represent a living rose in a garden somewhere, but it really is a rose as well, although one of another kind: There are different kinds of roses, wooden, silver, golden, etc., and yet each one truly, in its own right, is and bears the name of rose. Just so also does the word “rose” become a new and different word according to its signification (although the spelling remains unchanged) every time the essence or kind of rose changes from one to another. Thus no one needs to use Oecolampadius’ tropes and say, “This is the image of a rose.” It is not even true, when one says, “This is a rose,” that he wishes to be understood as saying, “This is a likeness of a rose.” He wishes to say what it is in its essence. And if he wishes to say further what it signifies, he uses two different expressions: “This is a rose, and represents a rose.”67

Here Luther comes close to the cognitive linguistics idea of radial categories. In cognitive-​linguistic terms, Luther is arguing that a radial extension on the basis of image metaphor legitimately broadens the category rose to include the carvings he describes. While not all readers might find such an extension acceptable, Luther’s intuition that metaphor can create genuinely new meanings for words foreshadows the perspective of cognitive linguistics in an intriguing way and is very different from Zwingli’s fixed view of word meaning. As Luther continues describing his understanding, however, some of his examples may strike readers as forced. Regarding a picture of St. Paul, to which one could point and say, “This is St. Paul,” Luther argues that this

120  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence too is properly true: “It is St. Paul, i.e. a wooden St. Paul, a silver St. Paul, a golden St. Paul, a painted St. Paul. . . . Here ‘St. Paul’ has become a new word, not meaning the living St. Paul.”68 Elsewhere Luther suggests that Joseph’s interpretation of Pharaoh’s dream, “The seven good oxen are seven years,” is equally literal because the word “oxen” takes on a new meaning: “The words ‘seven oxen’ . . . must be regarded as metaphors and new words (metaphore und newe worter), and must mean precisely the same as the words ‘seven years.’ Thus those words, ‘seven years,’ according to their ordinary sense, and these words, ‘seven oxen,’ according to a new sense, mean one and the same thing. For the seven oxen do not signify seven years, but are themselves essentially and truly seven years.”69 Perhaps sensing that these examples feel strained, Luther is in the end unwilling to use this principle to defend his view of the words of institution. While he can concede that “John is Elijah” and “Christ is a rock” are examples of this metaphorical generation of new senses, he draws the line at “This is my body” and “This is my blood,” noting that to do so would invite his Swiss opponents to turn his own logic against him. After all, they might simply argue that “the sign of my body” is a new proper sense for “my body”: But here, perhaps, the other faction will strut and exclaim, “Now you are substantiating Oecolampadius’ concept of ‘sign,’ for he, following Horace, also makes a new word or trope out of an ordinary word, and says: ‘my body’ here means ‘the sign of my body.’ ”70

In the end, then, Luther simply reasserts that it is illegitimate to interpret a scriptural text as containing a new meaning for a word “unless the text and the sense require it, or unless it is irrefutably proved by other passages of Scripture.”71 While other passages may have to be interpreted this way, the words of institution remain simply literal: When Christ says, “John is Elijah” [Matt. 11:14], the text and the faith compel one to regard “Elijah” as a new word, because it is certain that John neither is nor can be the old Elijah. Similarly, “Christ is a rock” [1 Cor. 10:4]: again the text itself and the faith compel one to treat “rock” in this instance as a new word, because Christ neither is nor can be a natural rock. But when Oecolampadius in this instance makes “sign of the body” out of the word “body”—​this we will not grant him, for he does it arbitrarily and cannot prove that the text or the faith require it.72

IDENTITY: THE GREAT DIVIDE  121 Zwingli’s reaction to Luther’s theory of predication again shows his commitment to the view that word meanings are fixed: “Why do you maintain so stoutly that the expression ‘Christ was the rock’ is not figurative? Do you not thereby make of the Son of God a stone?”73 In response to Luther’s contention that Christ is, literally, a rock, but a spiritual one, Zwingli writes, “Who does not know that there is no trope in the expression, ‘Christ is the spiritual rock,’ and, on the other hand, who does not know that there is a trope if you do not add the word ‘spiritual’?”74

4.5  A cognitive-​linguistic assessment On one important point, cognitive linguists today would agree with Zwingli: sensory experience matters. To say of a bread roll “This is white bread” is a basic-​level statement describing a human-​scale scene easily accessible to sensorimotor interaction, and it evokes no cross-​ frame mappings. To say of a bread roll “This is my body,” on the other hand, inevitably prompts for such mappings, setting up a metaphoric blend. In the sense in which cognitive linguistics uses the term, the words of institution cannot be considered literal. Cognitive linguists would disagree with Zwingli, however, in his claim that “Christ is a spiritual rock” is literal. On the contrary, “Christ is a spiritual rock” prompts for an even more elaborate blend than “Christ is a rock,” since it first requires a reader or listener to blend the adjective “spiritual” with “rock” and only then to blend the complex result with “Christ.” On another important point, cognitive linguists would agree with Luther: word meanings are not fixed. Where Zwingli’s understanding of language tends toward monosemy, Luther explicitly acknowledges the reality of polysemy: words can be used in new ways that develop into genuinely new senses. Where cognitive linguists would disagree with Luther, however, is in his assumption that all such senses are equally central. Luther’s theory of word meaning—​like most classical theories of word meaning—​lacks an account of prototypicality. Because Luther still operates within a dichotomous paradigm in which statements are either literal or figurative, he has no readily available criteria to govern how distant a new meaning can be from a previous one. He is forced to assert that there is no difference between “St. Paul” as applied to a painting and “St. Paul” as applied to a person, between “oxen” as applied to livestock and “oxen” as applied to years. Luther’s position

122  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence is open to the critique of leading to an uncontrolled proliferation of only very loosely related senses, and in this way it tends toward homonymy, the situation in which a single word has multiple unrelated meanings. Aware of this problem, Luther turns back to an assertion of literalism to defend the truth of the words of institution. On a third point, cognitive linguists would disagree with both reformers: both accepted a view of language in which there is a clearly identifiable distinction between literal language, which refers directly to reality, and figurative rhetorical embellishments, which do not (although they may be translatable into literal language). If, instead, there is not always a clearly identifiable distinction between the literal and the figurative, and if figurative thought processes such as metaphor and metonymy are fundamental to humans’ perception and conception of reality, then a new account of how predication works—​one not imaginable by Zwingli or Luther—​is possible.

4.6  Broader implications of the great divide The eucharistic controversies of the Reformation led to the emergence of twin doctrines that function essentially as test cases for whether the identity motif can be understood in terms of Hunsinger’s real predication. One is the manducatio oralis: the idea that Christ’s body and blood are received by the mouth. The other is the manducatio impiorum, the idea that nonbelievers who come to communion nonetheless truly receive the body and blood of Christ.75 These test cases were upheld by Lutherans (as they would be also by Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox) and rejected by the Reformed. At Marburg Luther and Oecolampadius, Zwingli’s colleague, acknowledged their frank disagreement on whether Jesus was to be eaten only spiritually or both corporeally and spiritually: Oecolampadius: As we have the spiritual eating, why should there be any need for bodily eating? Luther: Your argument implies this idea: Since we have the spiritual eating (manducatio spiritualis), there is no need of a bodily eating (manducatio corporalis). To this I reply: We do not deny the spiritual eating; on the contrary, we teach and believe it to be necessary. But from this it does not follow that the bodily eating is either useless or unnecessary.76

IDENTITY: THE GREAT DIVIDE  123 Despite their significant differences, both Luther and his Roman Catholic adversaries agreed with the broader medieval tradition that, since the eucharistic bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ, anyone who receives them, worthily or unworthily, is receiving the body and blood of Christ. In other words, in this shared understanding derived from medieval scholastic theology, the res is always received together with the sacramentum, whether or not the res tantum is also received. An unrepentant sinner who comes to communion with improper intentions still receives sacramentally but fails to receive the fruits of communion—​true union with Jesus and the church. We can diagram this situation according to the Synoptic/​Pauline blend as in Figure 4.1.

THIS LOAF AND WINE (sacramentum)

JESUS’S BODY (or FLESH) AND BLOOD (res)

Synoptic/Pauline blend: THIS LOAF AND WINE ARE JESUS’S BODY AND BLOOD (sacramentum et res)

HEAVENLY LIFE-GIVING BREAD AND DRINK

Johannine blend: JESUS’S FLESH AND BLOOD ARE HEAVENLY LIFE-GIVING BREAD AND DRINK

Unworthy reception: Sacramental communion without spiritual communion and thus without its fruits

Figure 4.1.  Unworthy reception: Roman Catholic, Lutheran

In contrast, faithful believers receive not only sacramentally but also efficaciously, since they are engaged in an act of true faith, receiving the res tantum along with the sacramentum et res. They receive Christ in two ways at once: spiritually, just as they do at all times and in all places, and also sacramentally, adding a qualitatively different mode of encounter with Jesus that takes place only in the rite. This encounter is not objectively better than the other, nor is it necessary to salvation, but it is distinct. From the standpoint of the two

124  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence scriptural metaphors, it takes place by means of the Synoptic/​Pauline blend, while spiritual reception takes place by means of the Johannine (Figure 4.2).

THIS LOAF AND WINE (sacramentum)

JESUS’S BODY (or FLESH) AND BLOOD (res)

Synoptic/Pauline blend: THIS LOAF AND WINE ARE JESUS’S BODY AND BLOOD (sacramentum et res)

HEAVENLY LIFE-GIVING BREAD AND DRINK

Johannine blend: JESUS’S FLESH AND BLOOD ARE HEAVENLY LIFE-GIVING BREAD AND DRINK

Worthy reception: Sacramental communion with spiritual communion, resulting in the fruits of communion—union with Christ and the church

Figure 4.2.  Worthy reception: Roman Catholic, Lutheran

Finally, there is of course also the spiritual communion that can take place anywhere and anytime without sacramental reception—​receiving the res tantum directly, without the sacramentum (Figure 4.3). Zwingli’s eucharistic theology is quite different from this medieval consensus. Influenced by John 6:53, he concludes that feeding on Jesus “is a spiritual thing, and has nothing to do with bodily things.”77 He rejects the idea that the tangible elements of bread and wine can be a vehicle for a genuine encounter with Christ. Rather, to eat and drink Jesus’s flesh is simply to believe in his saving death. For Zwingli, then, the only true communion is spiritual communion. This does not make the celebration of the sacrament worthless in Zwingli’s eyes. Zwingli takes seriously Christ’s command to “do this in my remembrance.” However, this does not mean that the sacrament offers any qualitatively different mode of encounter with Jesus. It is instead a commemorative act on the part of believers: “The ‘Eucharist,’ then, or ‘Synaxis,’ or Lord’s

IDENTITY: THE GREAT DIVIDE  125

THIS LOAF AND WINE (sacramentum)

JESUS’S BODY (or FLESH) AND BLOOD (res)

Synoptic/Pauline blend: THIS LOAF AND WINE ARE JESUS’S BODY AND BLOOD (sacramentum et res)

HEAVENLY LIFE-GIVING BREAD AND DRINK

Johannine blend: JESUS’S FLESH AND BLOOD ARE HEAVENLY LIFE-GIVING BREAD AND DRINK

Spiritual communion alone: true feeding on Jesus through faith, without sacramental communion

Figure 4.3.  Spiritual communion: Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed

Supper, is nothing but the commemoration by which those who firmly believe that by Christ’s death and blood they have become reconciled with the Father proclaim this life-​bringing death, that is, preach it with praise and thanksgiving.”78 Sacramental communion, for Zwingli, is simply what happens when a believer who already enjoys spiritual communion with Christ observes the external rite of the supper: “When you come to the Lord’s Supper with this spiritual eating and . . . you share in the bread and wine which are now the symbolic body of Christ, then you eat properly (proprie) sacramentally, when you do inwardly the same as you do outwardly, when the mind is refreshed by this faith to which you testify by the symbols.”79 Zwingli asserts that both sacramental and spiritual communion are acts not of the body, but of the mind: “We believe that the real body of Christ is eaten sacramentally and spiritually in the Supper by the religious and faithful and holy mind.”80 Since in Zwingli’s view the eucharistic bread and wine are not, properly speaking, the body and blood of Christ, to eat and drink the former is not to eat and drink the latter. What the recipient eats and drinks by mouth is simply bread and wine. For an unworthy recipient this is all that is received: “They are said improperly (improprie) to eat sacramentally who publicly partake

126  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence of the visible sacrament or symbol but do not have faith. For these provoke judgment, that is divine vengeance, on themselves by partaking. . . . Therefore those are said to eat only sacramentally (sacramentaliter tantum) who use the symbols of thanksgiving in the Supper but do not have faith.”81 Zwingli’s use of the term improprie shows that, although he is willing to speak of sacramental reception alone for convenience, he believes that strictly speaking there is no such thing as sacramental communion without spiritual communion. Rather, those who partake without faith receive the sign (“visible sacrament or symbol”) alone (Figure 4.4).

THIS LOAF AND WINE (sacramentum)

JESUS’S BODY (or FLESH) AND BLOOD (res)

Synoptic/Pauline blend: THIS LOAF AND WINE ARE JESUS’S BODY AND BLOOD (sacramentum et res)

HEAVENLY LIFE-GIVING BREAD AND DRINK

Johannine blend: JESUS’S FLESH AND BLOOD ARE HEAVENLY LIFE-GIVING BREAD AND DRINK

Unworthy reception: the unrepentant sinner receives nothing but bread and wine

Figure 4.4.  Unworthy reception: Reformed

For a worthy recipient, however, the body and blood of Christ are eaten as an act of the mind and spirit at the same time as the visible symbols of bread and wine are being eaten as an act of the body. Because those symbols are not, strictly speaking, the body and blood of Christ, the actual res is received only by the mind and spirit (Figure 4.5). Since the Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor is figurative—​and thus in Zwingli’s understanding not properly true—​ it offers no qualitatively distinct mode of encounter with Jesus. There is, effectively, no sacramentum et res, no reception of the res tantum by means of the sacramentum. Only the Johannine metaphor is in the end valid as an approach to the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ.

IDENTITY: THE GREAT DIVIDE  127

THIS LOAF AND WINE (sacramentum)

JESUS’S BODY (or FLESH) AND BLOOD (res)

Synoptic/Pauline blend: THIS LOAF AND WINE ARE JESUS’S BODY AND BLOOD (sacramentum et res)

HEAVENLY LIFE-GIVING BREAD AND DRINK

Johannine blend: JESUS’S FLESH AND BLOOD ARE HEAVENLY LIFE-GIVING BREAD AND DRINK

Worthy reception: spiritual communion while also receiving the earthly signs of bread and wine, although these are not a qualitatively distinct means of receiving Jesus’s flesh and blood

Figure 4.5.  Worthy reception: Zwingli

It would hardly be fair to take Zwingli as solely representative of the Reformed tradition, which has not as a whole been so radical in rejecting any distinct role for sacramental communion. Zwingli’s successors in the Swiss Reformation held a range of opinions with regard to the relationship between the sacramentum and res. Brian Gerrish has classified these into three major categories.82 The first of these is symbolic memorialism, typified by Zwingli. Here, as we have seen, the signs of bread and wine are not intrinsically connected with the reality of Christ’s flesh and blood, which are received only spiritually, although the signs do provide a powerful stimulus to faith and devotion as well as a means of obedience to the dominical command to “do this.” Another of Gerrish’s categories is symbolic parallelism, typified by Heinrich Bullinger. In the Second Helvetic Confession, Bullinger writes, Besides the spiritual eating mentioned above there is also a sacramental eating of the Lord’s body, in which a believer not only spiritually and internally partakes truly of the body and blood of the Lord, but outwardly also, approaching the Lord’s table, receives the visible sacrament of the body and

128  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence blood of the Lord. Earlier, indeed, when the believer believed, he took the life-​giving food, and he still benefits from it, but now that he is also receiving the sacrament, he is not receiving nothing. For he continues in the communication of the body and blood of the Lord, and therefore faith is kindled and grows more and more, and he is refreshed with spiritual food.83

Bullinger’s description here is reminiscent of Zwingli’s: sacramental communion is spiritual communion plus the sacrament. However, Bullinger hints, if only minimally, that there may be some qualitatively unique dimension to sacramental communion: the believer “is not receiving nothing.” What the believer does receive appears to be a strengthening or intensification of the spiritual communion already enjoyed (“continues . . . is kindled and grows more and more”). To be sure, there is no question of a manducatio oralis: elsewhere Bullinger asserts, “Neither did pious antiquity believe nor do we believe that the body of Christ is bodily or essentially eaten by the mouth of the body.”84 However, for Bullinger the elements of bread and wine serve as more than mental symbols that prompt spiritual communion: they are not only a sign but also a “sealing” (obsignatio) of the spiritual gift of Christ’s body and blood.85 As Gerrish’s term “symbolic parallelism” suggests, God feeds the believer with Christ’s body and blood at the same time the believer eats and drinks the eucharistic bread and wine in faith. Gerrish’s remaining category, symbolic instrumentalism, is typified by John Calvin. For Calvin the elements are not only stimuli to believers’ faith nor even seals of God’s promise to feed believers when they are eaten and drunk. Rather, they are actually “instruments” by which God does that feeding: “If it be asked nevertheless whether the bread is the body of Christ, and the wine his blood, we should reply that the bread and the wine are visible signs, which represent to us the body and blood; but that the name and title of body and blood is attributed to them, because they are as it were instruments by which (instrumens par lesquelz) our Lord Jesus Christ distributes them to us.”86 Calvin, more than Zwingli and Bullinger, emphasizes that the eucharistic signs are inherently joined with the reality: “The sacraments of the Lord ought not and cannot at all be separated from their reality and substance. To distinguish them so that they be not confused is not only good and reasonable but wholly necessary. But to divide them so as to set them up the one without the other is absurd.”87 Calvin does not accept the idea of a manducatio oralis: for him, as for the Reformed tradition as a whole, Christ’s body and blood are eaten and drunk

IDENTITY: THE GREAT DIVIDE  129 only by the spirit and not by the mouth: “We become partakers of the flesh of Christ—​not that any carnal mixture takes place, or that the flesh of Christ brought down from heaven penetrates into us or is swallowed by the mouth, but because the flesh of Christ, in virtue of its power and efficacy, vivifies our souls just as the substance of bread and wine nourishes our bodies.”88 For Calvin, as for the Swiss Reformers in general, the true body and blood of Christ are located only in heaven, and the designation of the bread and wine as Christ’s body and blood is figurative. Still, Calvin is more willing than Zwingli and Bullinger to affirm that this figurative designation is both legitimate and valuable: “It is therefore with good reason that the bread is called body, since not only does it represent it to us, but also presents it to us. Hence we shall readily concede that the name body of Jesus Christ is transferred to the bread, as it is the sacrament and figure of it.”89 Calvin’s insistence that the sign (sacramentum) cannot be separated from the reality (res) and that God actually works through the signs themselves in feeding believers with Christ’s body and blood suggests that for him there may in fact be a qualitative distinction between sacramental and spiritual communion. In his Second Defense against his Lutheran opponent Joachim Westphal, Calvin writes, Spiritual eating is held by us in such a manner as by no means excludes sacramental eating. . . . We maintain that in the sacrament Christ is eaten in no way but spiritually, because that gross gulping down which the Papists devised . . . is abhorrent to our sense of piety. . . . But although believers have spiritual communion with Christ without the use of the sacrament, still we distinctly declare that Christ, who instituted the supper, works effectually by its means.90

In terms of the two blends, then, it seems legitimate to argue that Calvin, more than Bullinger or Zwingli, envisions the Synoptic/​Pauline and Johannine metaphors as two genuinely complementary modes of feeding on Jesus. For Calvin there is a true encounter with the res by means of the sacramentum, which Christ truly uses to feed believers with his body and blood. There is ambiguity as to whether Calvin sees sacramental communion as qualitatively distinct from spiritual communion: while his consistent assertion that this feeding is spiritual and not bodily (“Christ is eaten in no way but spiritually”) sometimes tends to suggest that he does not, his insistence on the utility of the signs (“Christ . . . works effectually by its means”) suggests that he may.

130  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence Calvin is similarly more positive about the legitimacy of calling the elements Christ’s body and blood than is Zwingli: “On account of the affinity which the things signified have with their symbols, the name of the thing was given to the symbol—​figuratively, indeed—​but not without a most fitting analogy.”91 Even as he upholds the use of the names “body” and “blood” in this figurative sense, he emphasizes that there remains a clear distinction between the elements and what they represent, yet also that the representation is efficacious: “Though the symbol differs in essence from the thing signified (in that the latter is spiritual and heavenly, while the former is physical and visible), still, because it not only symbolizes the thing that it has been consecrated to represent as a bare and empty token, but also truly exhibits it, why may its name not rightly belong to the thing?”92 Following Oecolampadius in his grammatical analysis, he identifies the specific rhetorical figure in the words of institution, along with other scriptural expressions, as metonymy: “I say that this expression is a metonymy, a figure of speech commonly used in Scripture when mysteries are under discussion. For you could not otherwise understand such expressions as “circumcision is a covenant” [Gen. 17:13], “the lamb is the passover” [Ex. 12:11], “the sacrifices of the law are expiations” [Lev. 17:11; Heb. 9:22], and finally, “the rock from which water flowed in the desert” [Ex. 17:6] “was Christ” [1 Cor. 10:4], unless you were to take them as spoken with meanings transferred.”93 One statement of Calvin’s suggests that he likely would not be able to affirm Hunsinger’s concept of real predication: “I do not know what it can mean when they admit bread and body to be different things yet assert that one is used in speaking of the other, properly and unfiguratively (proprie et sine figura /​ proprement . . . sans nulle figure).”94 It is noteworthy that he couples these two concepts so closely: to predicate something properly (proprie) is to do so without a figure. Here is the basic assumption at the heart of the ecumenical divide—​and, once again, it is an assumption shared on both sides. Despite their many differences, Luther and his Roman Catholic opponents were at one in rejecting a figurative interpretation of the words of institution. The rejection of what the Council of Trent called “fictitious and imaginary tropes” became part of Roman Catholic as well as Lutheran apologetics. As the English bishop Cuthbert Tunstall put it, These words, which from the first beginning of the Catholic Church after the passion of Christ have always been understood by the consent of all the orthodox without any allegory or metaphor or trope or figure, clearly

IDENTITY: THE GREAT DIVIDE  131 declare that the body of Christ, not only figuratively, not only by way of representation (as the authors of perverse opinions say), but the very real and natural body of Christ, although now spiritual, is under the species of bread; and that the real and natural blood of Christ, although now spiritual, is present under the species of wine in fact, actually, and in reality.95

4.7  Conclusions The eucharistic controversies of the Reformation have left a great divide in place. On one side are those Christian traditions that affirm Hunsinger’s concept of real predication and have tended to do so by insisting on a literal understanding of the words of institution. On the other are those traditions that recognize figurative language at work in the words of institution and for that reason have found it difficult or impossible to affirm real predication. This dichotomy between true and figurative arose in a context in which all the major players took for granted an understanding of language in which figurative language was considered a rhetorical substitute for literal language, with only the latter being capable of direct, proper claims to truth. Fortunately, a contemporary understanding of cognition can transcend this dichotomy. It is precisely through the metaphoric process that one thing can be understood in terms of another and can in fact truly and properly be said to be that other, while remaining itself. Such an understanding of the metaphor this loaf and wine are jesus’s body and blood would permit an affirmation of the distinctive nature of sacramental communion and the acknowledgment of real predication on all sides without threatening the recognition of the figurative thinking that underlies this blend. It is now necessary, however, to show just how this can happen when it comes to theological truth. The fact that a metaphor exists, after all, does not make it true. As Zwingli never tired of reminding Luther, scripture is full of figurative expressions: “I am the vine”; “The Lord is my shepherd”; “God is a rock.” These metaphoric blends surely contain spiritual truth—​yet it would be hard to argue that Jesus is a vine “strictly speaking,” or that the Lord is “properly” a shepherd, or that God is a rock in the sense Hunsinger calls “real predication.” Is there really a difference between these statements and a statement like “This is my body”? By what criteria can a blend be judged as true, as Hunsinger puts it, “without equivocation”? Responding to this question will be the focus of Chapter 5.

132  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence

Notes 1. George Hunsinger, The Eucharist and Ecumenism: Let Us Keep the Feast (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 60. 2. James M. Arcadi, An Incarnational Model of the Eucharist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 43–​44. 3. Hunsinger, The Eucharist and Ecumenism, 92. 4. Hunsinger, 62–​63. 5. Hunsinger, 60. 6. First Apology 66.2, in Denis Minns and Paul Parvis, eds., Justin, Philosopher and Martyr: Apologies, Oxford Early Christian Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 256; ET 257. 7. Against Heresies 5.2.2–​3, in Irenaeus of Lyon, Contre les hérésies: Livre V, Tome II, ed. Adelin Rousseau, Sources chrétiennes 153 (Paris: Cerf, 1969), 32; ET Darwell Stone, A History of the Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), 1:35. Also of note is Ignatius of Antioch, who calls “the eucharist” Christ’s “flesh” (Smyrnaeans 7.1; cf. Romans 7.3, 20.2), although as Frederick C. Klawiter has pointed out, Ignatius’s realistic language can be read as alluding to the meal event as a whole rather than the elements themselves. “The Eucharist and Sacramental Realism in the Thought of St. Ignatius of Antioch,” Studia Liturgica 37, no. 2 (2007): 129–​63. 8. Tertullian: On Prayer 19, in De Oratione et De Virginibus Velandis, ed. G. F. Diercks, Stromata Patristica et Mediaevalia 4 (Utrecht/​ Antwerp: Spectrum, 1956), 28. Origen: Homilies on Exodus 13.3, in Homélies sur l’Exode, ed. Marcel Borret, Sources chrétiennes 321 (Paris: Cerf, 1985), 386; ET mine. See also Against Celsus 8.33, in Contra Celsum: Libri VIII, ed. M. Markovich, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 54 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 549; ET Stone, History, 1909, 1:38. 9. Mystagogical Catecheses 4.1, in Catéchèses Mystagogiques, ed. Auguste Piédagnel, reprint of 2nd ed., Sources Chrétiennes, 126 bis (Paris: Cerf, 2004), 134; ET Stone, History, 1909, 1:71. 10. Canon 19, in Paul F. Bradshaw, ed., The Canons of Hippolytus, trans. Carol Bebawi, Alcuin/​GROW Liturgical Study 2 (Bramcote, England: Grove, 1987), 24. 11. On the Sacraments 4.14, 16, in Ambrose of Milan, Des sacrements; Des mystères; L’Explication du symbole, ed. Bernard Botte, 2nd ed., Sources chrétiennes 25bis (Paris: Cerf, 1961), 138; ET mine. 12. Sermon 227, in PL 38:1099; ET Stone, History, 1909, 1:95. 13. This does not mean that the identity motif was known to, or used by, all first-​or second-​century communities. See my article “A Eucharistic Origins Story, Part 2: The Body and Blood of Christ,” Worship 92, no. 4 (July 2018): 298–​317. 14. For theologians of the iconoclasm controversy, see Jaroslav Pelikan, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600–​1700), The Christian Tradition 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 93–​94, 109–​10. On Paschasius Radbertus and Ratramnus, see Edward J. Kilmartin, The Eucharist in the West: History and Theology, ed. Robert J. Daly (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1998), 82–​89. For Berengar’s affirmation of

IDENTITY: THE GREAT DIVIDE  133 the identity motif, see his letter to Adelmann, in Hans Geybels, Adelmann of Liège and the Eucharistic Controversy, Dallas Medieval Texts and Translations 16 (Paris: Peeters, 2013), 86–​95. 15. Daß diese wort, in WA 23:129; ET That These Words, in LW 37:54. 16. Trialogus 4.2, in Trialogus cum supplemento trialogi, ed. Gotthard Lechler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1869), 250; ET Trialogus, trans. Stephen E. Lahey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 200. 17. Trialogus 4.2, in Trialogus cum supplemento trialogi, 255; ET Lahey, Trialogus, 204. 18. Trialogus 4.7, in Trialogus cum supplemento trialogi, 266–​67; ET Lahey, Trialogus, 212–​13. 19. Trialogus 4.7, in Trialogus cum supplemento trialogi, 268; ET Lahey, Trialogus, 213–​14. 20. Trialogus 4.8, in Trialogus cum supplemento trialogi, 270; ET Lahey, Trialogus, 215. 21. De eucharistia 1, in De Eucharistia Tractatus Maior, ed. Johann Loserth (London: Trübner & Co., 1892), 16. 22. De apostasia 9, in John Wyclif, De Apostasia, ed. Michael Henry Dziewicki (London: London, Pub. for the Wyclif Society by Trübner, 1889), 106; ET mine, adapted from that of Ian Christopher Levy, John Wyclif ’s Theology of the Eucharist in Its Medieval Context, 2nd ed. (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2014), 327. 23. On Wyclif ’s influence on later movements of reform, see Bart Jan Spruyt, Cornelius Henrici Hoen (Honius) and His Epistle on the Eucharist (1525): Medieval Heresy, Erasmian Humanism, and Reform in the Early Sixteenth-​Century Low Countries (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 127–​65; Amy Nelson Burnett, Karlstadt and the Origins of the Eucharistic Controversy: A Study in the Circulation of Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 77–​90. 24. De canone missae epichiresis (1523), in Z 2:606, suggests that unworthy communicants might “eat the flesh and drink the blood of your son in vain”; ET Attack on the Canon of the Mass, in R. C. D. Jasper and G. J. Cuming, eds., Prayers of the Eucharist: Early and Reformed, 3rd ed. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990), 184. 25. De vera et falsa religione commentarius 18, in Z 3:782; ET On True and False Religion, in The Latin Works of Huldreich Zwingli, ed. Samuel Macauley Jackson and Clarence Nevin Heller, trans. Henry Preble and George William Gilmore, vol. 3 (Philadelphia: Heidelberg Press, 1929), 208. 26. Responsio ad epistolam Ioannis Bugenhagii (1525), in Z 4:559–​560; ET mine. 27. Responsio ad epistolam Bugenhagii, in Z 4:560. On Hoen, see Spruyt, Cornelius Henrici Hoen (Honius) and His Epistle on the Eucharist (1525). 28. Amica exegesis, id est: expositio eucharistiae negocii ad Martinum Lutherum (1527), in Z 5:739; ET Friendly Exegesis, That Is, Exposition of the Matter of the Eucharist to Martin Luther, in Huldrych Zwingli: Writings, trans. H. Wayne Pipkin, vol. 2 (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1984), 357. Zwingli refers to classical rhetorical manuals such as Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, Cicero’s Orator, the Rhetorica ad Herennium (then attributed to Cicero), and De vita et poesi Homeri (then attributed to Plutarch). 29. “I had at least decided to abolish the old ritual of the mass with something new, but here again it has happened by the gift of God that things turned out differently. If I had

134  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence had my way, I would simply have driven out one nail with another. A newly accepted ritual might have been harder to abolish than one that came down from antiquity.” Ad Matthaeum Alberum de coena dominica epistola (1524), in Z 3:336–​37; ET Letter to Matthew Alber Concerning the Lord’s Supper, in Zwingli, 2:132. 30. The classical rhetoricians Zwingli cites are inconsistent in their definitions of metaphor and catachresis and the distinctions between them; Zwingli seems to use the two interchangeably. He calls the trope in the words of institution metaphora in Subsidium sive coronis de eucharistia (1525), in Z 4:475; catachresis in Amica exegesis, in Z 5:735–​ 742; ETs Subsidiary Essay on the Eucharist and Friendly Exegesis, in Zwingli, 2:203, 355–​59. A convenient overview of classical authors’ use of the terms can be found in Patricia Parker, “Metaphor and Catachresis,” in The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice, ed. John Bender and David E. Wellbery (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 60–​73. 31. De vera et falsa religione commentarius 18, in Z 3:798; ET On True and False Religion, in The Latin Works of Huldreich Zwingli, 3:227. 32. De vera et falsa religione commentarius 18, in Z 3:798; ET On True and False Religion, in 3:228. 33. Responsio ad epistolam Bugenhagii, in Z 4:560; ET mine. 34. Amica exegesis, in Z 5:740–​41; ET Friendly Exegesis, in Huldrych Zwingli: Writings, 2:357–​58. 35. Compare Subsidium sive coronis, in Z 4:474–​75 (ET Subsidiary Essay, in Huldrych Zwingli: Writings 2:203) with Amica exegesis, in Z 5:740–​42 (ET Friendly Exegesis, in Huldrych Zwingli: Writings 2:357–​59). 36. Amica exegesis, in Z 5:741; ET Friendly Exegesis, in Huldrych Zwingli: Writings, 2:357. 37. See De vera et falsa religione commentarius, in Z 3:796–​797 (ET Commentary on True and False Religion, in The Latin Works of Huldreich Zwingli, 3:224–​27. Subsidium sive coronis, in Z 4:482–​87 (ET Subsidiary Essay, in Huldrych Zwingli: Writings, 2:209–​213). 38. Gen. 41:26. 39. John 15:5; Luke 8:11. 40. Exod. 12:11. 41. Subsidium sive coronis, in Z 4:485–​87; ET Subsidiary Essay, in Huldrych Zwingli: Writings, 2:211–​13. 42. Amica exegesis, in Z 5:729–​730; ET Friendly Exegesis, in Huldrych Zwingli: Writings 2:350. 43. Amica exegesis, in Z 5:687; ET Friendly Exegesis, in Huldrych Zwingli: Writings, 2:324. 44. Amica exegesis, in Z 5:679; ET Friendly Exegesis, in Huldrych Zwingli: Writings, 2:319. 45. Amica exegesis, in Z 5:683–​84; ET Friendly Exegesis, in Huldrych Zwingli: Writings, 2:321. 46. Amica exegesis, in Z 5:696; ET Friendly Exegesis, in Huldrych Zwingli: Writings, 2:332. 47. Sermon von dem Sakrament des Leibes und Blutes Christi, wider die Schwarmgeister (1526), in WA 19:496; ET The Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ—​Against the Fanatics, in LW 36:345. 48. De captivitate Babylonica, in WA 6:502; ET Babylonian Captivity, in LW 36:19. 49. Daß diese wort, in WA 23:193–​205; ET That These Words, in LW 37:95–​101.

IDENTITY: THE GREAT DIVIDE  135 50. Eucharist, Symbol of Transformation (New York: Pueblo, 1989), 142–​43. 51. Von Anbeten des Sakraments des heiligen Leichnams Christi (1523), in WA 11:436; ET The Adoration of the Sacrament, in LW 36:281. 52. Sermon von dem Sakrament, in WA 19:498–​99; ET The Sacrament—​Against the Fanatics, in LW 36:346. 53. From Sasse’s reconstruction of the Marburg Colloquy, in This Is My Body: Luther’s Contention for the Real Presence in the Sacrament of the Altar (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1959), 254. Cf. WA 30.3:133–​34; ET LW 38:30, 47, 59. 54. Vom Abendmahl Christi, Bekenntnis (1528), in WA 26:320; ET Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, in LW 37:210. 55. Vom Abendmahl Christi, Bekenntnis, in WA 26:321; ET Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, in LW 37:210. 56. Vom Abendmahl Christi, Bekenntnis, in WA 26:322; ET Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, in LW 37:211. 57. Vom Abendmahl Christi, Bekenntnis, in WA 26:325; ET Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, in LW 37:213. 58. Vom Abendmahl Christi, Bekenntnis, in WA 26:326–​27; ET Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, in LW 37:214. 59. Vom Abendmahl Christi, Bekenntnis, in WA 26:333; ET Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, in LW 37:219. 60. Sermon von dem Sakrament, in WA 19:485; ET The Sacrament—​Against the Fanatics, in LW 36:337. 61. Amica exegesis, in Z 5:664–​65; ET Friendly Exegesis, in Huldrych Zwingli: Writings, 2:310. On the melon, cf. Tertullian, Against Marcion 4.40, in Tertullian, Contre Marcion: Tome IV (Livre IV), ed. Claudio Moreschini, trans. René Braun, Sources Chrétiennes 456 (Paris: Cerf, 2001), 498. 62. Vom Abendmahl Christi, Bekenntnis, in WA 26:271; ET Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, in LW 37:171. 63. Vom Abendmahl Christi, Bekenntnis, in WA 26:271–​72; ET Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, in LW 37:171–​72. 64. Vom Abendmahl Christi, Bekenntnis, in WA 26:277; ET Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, in LW 37:175. 65. Vom Abendmahl Christi, Bekenntnis, in WA 26:272; ET Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, in LW 37:172. The quotation is from Horace, Ars poetica, 47–​48. 66. Vom Abendmahl Christi, Bekenntnis, in WA 26:274–​75; ET Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, in LW 37:173–​74. 67. Vom Abendmahl Christi, Bekenntnis, in WA 26:384; ET Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, in LW 37:256. 68. Vom Abendmahl Christi, Bekenntnis, in WA 26:384; ET Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, in LW 37:257. 69. Vom Abendmahl Christi, Bekenntnis, in WA 26:277–​78; ET Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, in LW 37:175. 70. Vom Abendmahl Christi, Bekenntnis, in WA 26:278; ET Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, in LW 37:175–​76.

136  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence 71. Vom Abendmahl Christi, Bekenntnis, in WA 26:279; ET Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, in LW 37:176. 72. Vom Abendmahl Christi, Bekenntnis, in WA 26:279; ET Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, in LW 37:176. 73. Amica exegesis, in Z 5:648–​49; ET Friendly Exegesis, in Huldrych Zwingli: Writings, 2:299. 74. Amica exegesis, in Z 5:649; ET Friendly Exegesis, in Huldrych Zwingli: Writings, 2:299. 75. A third doctrine, the manducatio indignorum, is identical to the manducatio impiorum except that the unworthy recipient is envisioned as an unrepentant Christian rather than as a nonbeliever. 76. Sasse, This Is My Body, 236. Again, Sasse’s reconstruction is drawn from multiple accounts; cf. WA 30.3:115–​16 (ET LW 38:19, 38–​39, 54). 77. De vera et falsa religione commentarius 18, in Z 3:782; ET On True and False Religion, in The Latin Works of Huldreich Zwingli, 3:208. 78. De vera et falsa religione commentarius 18, in Z 3:807; ET On True and False Religion, in Zwingli, 3:237. 79. Christianae fidei brevis et clara expositio, in Z 6.5:149–​150; ET mine. 80. Christianae fidei brevis et clara expositio, in Z 6.5:92–​93; ET Stone, History, 1909, 2:43. 81. Christianae fidei brevis et clara expositio, in Z 6.5:150–​51; ET mine. 82. B. A. Gerrish, “The Lord’s Supper in the Reformed Confessions,” Theology Today 23, no. 2 (July 1, 1966): 224–​43. See also John Riggs’s more recent argument that Zwingli himself was less “Zwinglian” than his later followers: The Lord’s Supper in the Reformed Tradition: An Essay on the Mystical True Presence (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), 113–​14. Riggs would rename Zwingli’s own view “symbolic anamnesis,” reserving “symbolic memorialism” for what has become known as Zwinglianism; while sympathetic to Riggs’s argument, I retain Gerrish’s three categories here for simplicity’s sake. 83. Chapter 21, in Philip Schaff, ed., The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 3 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1882), 294; ET mine. 84. Chapter 21, in Schaff, 3:292; ET Stone, History, 1909, 2:60. 85. Sermon on the Supper, quoted in Riggs, The Lord’s Supper in the Reformed Tradition, 106, 223n180. 86. Petit Traicté de la Saincte Cene de nostre Seigneur Iesus Christ (1541), in CO 5:439; ET Short Treatise on the Holy Supper of Our Lord and Only Saviour Jesus Christ, in Theological Treatises, trans. J. K. S. Reid, Library of Christian Classics 22 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), 147. 87. Petit Traicté de la Saincte Cene, in CO 5:439; ET Short Treatise on the Holy Supper, in 147–​48. 88. Optima ineundae concordiae ratio, si extra contentionem quaeratur veritas (1561), in CO 9:521; ET The Best Method of Obtaining Concord Provided the Truth Be Sought Without Contention, in 329. 89. Petit Traicté de la Saincte Cene, in CO 5:439; ET Short Treatise on the Holy Supper, in Calvin, 147. 90. Ultima admonitio ad Ioachimum Westphalum (1557), in CO 9:162; ET Last Admonition to Joachim Westphal, in Tracts and Treatises on the Doctrine and Worship of the Church, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1958), 373–​74.

IDENTITY: THE GREAT DIVIDE  137 91. Institutes 4.17.21, in CO 2:1019, 4:1007; ET Battles 2:1385. 92. Institutes 4.17.21, in CO 2:1020, 4:1007; ET Battles 2:1385. 93. Institutes 4.17.21, in CO 2:1019, 4:1007; ET Battles 2:1385, with bracketed insertions those of the editors. 94. Institutes 4.17.23, in CO 2:1022, 4:1012; ET Battles 2:1389. 95. Cuthbert Tunstall, De veritate corporis et sanguinis Domini nostri Iesu Christi in Eucharistia (Paris: Michel de Vascosan, 1554), 9b–​10a; ET Stone, History, 1909), 2:170.

5 Identity Bridging the Divide

The eucharistic bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ.

The fact that a blend can be produced does not mean it has any direct relationship to reality. As Gilles Fauconnier puts it, “The construction of spaces represents a way in which we think and talk but does not in itself say anything about the real objects of this thinking and talking.”1 Human beings are capable of imagining all kinds of things: flying zebras, leprechauns, counterfactual situations in which the British won the Revolutionary War, and so on. Yet it is also the case that blends can be true, insofar as they are apt for reasoning and acting in our embodied lives, and that many truths can only be conceived and expressed by means of figurative thought and language. As Fauconnier writes elsewhere, blends “are not just conceptual constructions. They are genuine domains of mental exploration—​running blends can lead to deep discoveries that were not anticipated in setting up the blend.”2 Scientific discovery is one particular arena where this happens. In 1855, for example, James Clerk Maxwell imagined electric current as a kind of fluid and found that this blend enabled him not only to model the “flow” of electricity but also to create a unified theory applicable to electricity, heat, magnetism, and electromagnetism.3 More recently, with the discovery of electrons, this blend in which electricity is a fluid has been supplemented by another in which electricity is the movement of tiny solid particles. But truth claims in blends are also pervasive outside the physical sciences. “The Dow fell by 1.37 points on March 6, 2017” and “The Dow rose by 3.6 points on March 6, 2017” are both statements that make use of figurative thinking: each compresses millions of transactions into a human-​scale scene in which a single entity moves up and down on a vertical axis (more is up). But the first is true and the second is false.4 Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence. Stephen R. Shaver, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197580806.003.0005

IDENTITY: BRIDGING THE DIVIDE  139 It is also the case that some blends are experienced as truer than others. Many metaphors, such as Zwingli’s examples of christ is a vine, the lord is my shepherd, and god is a rock, are useful, productive, and irreducible to a single “literal” equivalent; they convey real truth. Yet most Christians would find it difficult to call these true in the proper sense. To be sure, Christ might be said to be “a kind of vine,” “a spiritual vine,” or the like—​and indeed, as we saw in Chapter 4, Martin Luther used this strategy to argue that these constructions were in fact “literal.” But without such modifiers these metaphors stretch the meanings of “vine,” “shepherd,” and “rock” past their usual range. Such metaphors, while they may be valuable and indeed true as far as they go, fall short of Hunsinger’s “real predication.” If the Synoptic/​ Pauline metaphor is to be accepted as properly true, it must function in a different way than these. In this chapter I will propose that the Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor is best understood as what Robert Masson has called a “tectonic equivalence”: a metaphoric blend that produces (for those who accept it) a lasting reconfiguration of the field of meanings associated with a concept. For example, as Masson notes, in the assertion “Jesus is the Messiah,” Christians reconfigure the field of meanings associated with an existing concept from the Hebrew scriptures (messiah) by asserting its identification with Jesus. Such an assertion results in a claim to proper truth: for Christians, Jesus really is the Messiah. It is thus different from a statement like “God is a rock,” which serves as an illustrative metaphor but does not result in a lasting modification of the concept rock to refer primarily to God.5 For Christians, the blend jesus is the messiah is not just an illustrative metaphor. It is an invitation into a whole new understanding of what the concept messiah might mean. In the same way, this loaf and wine are jesus’s body and blood can be seen as an invitation into a new understanding of what jesus’s body and blood might mean. Such a blend can be accepted as both genuinely figurative (addressing historic Reformed concerns) and, simultaneously, properly true (addressing historic Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Lutheran concerns). Understanding the Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor as the kind of blend Masson refers to as a tectonic equivalence can pave the way for an ecumenical consensus that accepts the motif of identity—​that is, the simple assertion that the eucharistic bread and wine are the body and blood of Jesus Christ—​as the central metaphor of eucharistic presence with regard to the consecrated elements.

140  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence

5.1  Overcoming the dichotomy: Robert Masson and the tectonic process In his 2014 book Without Metaphor, No Saving God: Theology After Cognitive Linguistics, Robert Masson brings the toolkit of cognitive linguistics into systematic theology. One of Masson’s most important contributions is to describe a metaphoric process by which newly accepted truths emerge, both in theology and in other areas of life. On some accounts of language, “Jesus is the Messiah” might be understood as literal and “God is a rock” as metaphorical. However, as Masson argues, from a cognitive linguistics perspective both must be seen as metaphorical, since both involve cross-​frame mappings. Because conceptual metaphor theory on its own does not easily account for the difference between the two, Masson introduces the idea of a “tectonic equivalence” or “tectonic shift” to describe the process of meaning change involved in a claim such as “Jesus is the Messiah.”6 Such a claim, for those who accept it, can be understood as true in the strongest sense—​what is often called “literally” true, but what Masson prefers to call “properly” true, or true proprie (a term drawn from scholastic usage).7 This allows the term “literal” to be reserved, as it generally is in cognitive linguistics, for concepts that do not require mappings or blending and that are amenable to direct sensorimotor experience.8 Masson’s work offers a way to distinguish between those figurative statements that remain at the level of first-​order conceptual metaphor and those that become true proprie by means of a tectonic shift in meaning. As we have seen, neither Zwingli nor Luther was able to make such a distinction. For Zwingli “Christ is the vine” and “This is my body” were both figurative; for Luther they were both literal. On Masson’s cognitively informed account, in contrast, both are figurative, yet a principled distinction between the two is still possible. A statement like “God is a rock,” as Masson observes, is a straightforward example of a conceptual metaphor, a single-​scope blend. In the blend, attributes from the source frame rock are mapped unidirectionally onto the target frame god. Appropriate inferences generated in the blended space can be floated up to the target space: perhaps that God is strong, immovable, a source of shelter or defense, and so on. “The Lord is my shepherd,” “Christ is the vine,” and other similar statements work in the same way. In each of these, the target space is conceptualized in terms of the source, but the source frame itself remains unaltered.

IDENTITY: BRIDGING THE DIVIDE  141 The affirmation “Jesus is the Messiah” is different in a very important way: if accepted as true, it forces a reassessment not only of the target frame but also of the source frame. Not only is jesus understood in a new way by being thought of as messiah; for Christians the concept messiah is also permanently altered by its association with jesus. As Masson writes, By ordinary logic [Jesus] was not a victorious King of Israel; he was not a Son of Man who descended gloriously from the heavens; he was not acknowledged by his people nor did he vanquish their enemies. To affirm that Jesus is the Messiah is to force an equivalence between him and Israel’s expressions of hope and trust in God. . . . It is not simply a case of mapping some of the things known about the Messiah to Jesus. The claim tectonically reconfigures the meaning of “Messiah,” the identity of Jesus, and the field of meanings associated with messianic hope and God’s relation to Israel.9

Masson’s proposal makes an important breakthrough in that it offers a clear way to describe how figurative language is capable of what Hunsinger calls “real predication.” “Jesus is the Messiah” is an example of just such a statement that is both figurative and, in the understanding of Christians, properly true. It expresses meaning by means of a blend, and for Christians this is “a meaning that within the blended space is semantically proper, logically warranted, and factually the case.”10 As Masson notes, Christians do not affirm that Jesus is like the Messiah, or a kind of Messiah, but that Jesus is the Messiah.11 Moreover, while ordinary illustrative metaphors like “God is a rock” are not reversible (Christians do not say “A rock is God”), a claim like “Jesus is the Messiah” actually is reversible: for Christians it is also true to say that the Messiah is Jesus.12 A tectonic shift, for those who accept it, makes a very real change in the world. As Masson puts it, a successful tectonic shift “has the character of a ‘speech act’ in the sense of ordinary language philosophy—​that is to say, a speaking such as a marriage vow or judge’s pronouncement that has some practical effect.”13 This is true not only of theological assertions like “Jesus is the Messiah” but also of other paradigm shifts in science, art, and other areas of human experience. One example is the way the concept of an atom has changed between the classical era and today. In 1803, John Dalton announced that he was embarked on a study of “the ultimate particles of bodies.”14 Soon Dalton would choose a term coined by the ancient Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus to refer to these

142  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence particles as “atoms.”15 Dalton’s use of this term can at first be seen as a simple metaphorical extension of an existing concept; we might imagine his audience in 1803 saying, “What Dalton is suggesting seems to be something like an atom.” With the success of Dalton’s atomic theory, however, what he described has become the central example of the category atom. Today we can take for granted that what Dalton discovered was what Democritus had in mind all along. We might say, “Democritus never knew it, but we know now that there are many more than four types of atoms.” Yet it is perfectly possible to imagine an alternate reality in which Dalton had used a different term, so that today we would say, “Democritus believed in atoms, but now we know there are no such things: matter is composed of blickets.” The fact that it is true to say “Democritus and Dalton both believed in atoms” is not an observer-​independent reality about the physical universe. Rather, it is the result of a successful tectonic shift. Dalton’s use of the term “atom” was a performative act that both claimed and created continuity with a previously existing concept—​and, by successfully doing so in the minds of enough of his audience, changed that concept itself. A tectonic shift, then, is not simply a metaphor in which a target concept is understood in terms of a source concept. Rather, in a shift like the one described for atom, both the target and source concepts come to be understood in new ways. In order to account for this, Masson has recourse to Fauconnier and Turner’s concept of double-​scope blending. Whereas a single-​scope blend (the type of blend involved in a standard conceptual metaphor) is asymmetric, a double-​scope blend is more unpredictable, drawing structure from both inputs and allowing for implications to be projected back to each. As Fauconnier and Turner write, “In such networks, both organizing frames make central contributions to the blend, and their sharp differences offer the possibility of rich clashes. Far from blocking the construction of the network, such clashes offer challenges to the imagination; indeed, the resulting blends can be highly creative.”16

5.2  Building on Masson’s work: radial extension and prototypicality As is no doubt clear, I regard Masson’s work as groundbreaking and important. In what follows I will seek to build on it by drawing upon the concepts of radial extension and prototypicality, which were introduced in

IDENTITY: BRIDGING THE DIVIDE  143 Chapter 2. I believe these concepts offer a way of thinking about tectonic shifts that complements Masson’s account, which is based on conceptual blending theory. Because a conceptual blend can form the basis for a radial extension, it is possible to describe a tectonic shift as the creation of such an extension in a way that substantially alters the category structure of the original source frame, so that the blended space comes to be understood as a central example of that category. In other words, to accept a metaphor as true proprie is to have incorporated the blended space of that metaphor as an instance of the category represented by the source frame, and such a metaphor can be understood as more or less tectonic to the degree that that source category is reorganized around the blended space as a new prototype. This can happen to a greater or lesser extent: a given blend may be understood by some hearers or readers as evoking a simple first-​order metaphor, by others as creating a legitimate new edge case that is nonetheless far from prototypical, and by others still as reconfiguring the entire field of meanings of the source category around this new instance that has come to be understood as central. The question of whether or not a given blend remains an ordinary conceptual metaphor or provokes a strong tectonic shift is fundamentally, as Masson points out, a question of reception.17 A few worked examples will make my argument clearer.

god is a rock Consider, first, the statement “God is a rock,” which, as already noted, sets up a metaphoric or single-​scope blend with god as the target frame and rock as the source frame. In the blend (Figure 5.1), aspects of a rock are mapped onto God. Many readers or hearers will draw inferences from the metaphor such as “God is strong,” “God is indestructible,” “God is a good source of shelter,” and so on. Once these inferences have emerged in the blend, they can be floated back up to the target domain, influencing readers’ or hearers’ understandings of God even when they are no longer consciously using this particular metaphor. Yet this process is not deterministic but dynamic and emergent, so that there is no question of eliminating the metaphor in favor of a more precise literal equivalent. The range of possible entailments is constrained only by the pragmatics of the situation and by each individual’s encyclopedic knowledge about rocks and God.

144  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence Direction of Metaphor

Target Space: GOD

Source Space: ROCK

Creator of all Loving and wise Has a covenant with Israel Etc.

(floated inferences) Strong, hard to destroy Hard to move (Unchanging? CHANGE IS MOTION) Provides shelter or defense

Strong, hard to destroy Heavy, hard to move Provides shelter or defense Etc.

Creator of all Loving and wise Has a covenant with Israel Strong, hard to destroy Heavy, hard to move Provides shelter or defense

Blended Space: GOD IS A ROCK

Figure 5.1.  god is a rock

However, most readers and hearers will not come away from this blend with their concept of rock significantly modified. In other words, they will not create a lasting radial extension of the concept rock to include the blended space. Outside the context of the metaphor, the word “rock” still prompts primarily for a mental image of a piece of stone, not of God; their prototype structure of rock remains what it was. Many Christians might very naturally say something like “Yes, my God is a rock, but of course God is not really (or literally) a rock.”

jesus is the messiah Now consider the blend set up by the statement “Jesus is the Messiah” as it might have been heard by a first-​century disciple. In the blend, attributes of the Messiah are mapped onto Jesus: it is Jesus who is king of Israel, an

IDENTITY: BRIDGING THE DIVIDE  145 eschatological victor figure, the restorer of God’s reign, the savior of the oppressed, and so on (Figure 5.2). There are likely to be clashes as expected aspects of the messiah frame conflict with truths about Jesus: Jesus was not a military victor, for example, nor did he sit on a royal throne. As always with the blending process, these clashes are resolved creatively and non-​ deterministically. For example, the Messiah’s expected literal victory over foreign armies may in the blend become metaphorical victory over the spiritual power of evil. Direction of Metaphor

Target Space: JESUS

Source Space: MESSIAH

Believed to be a chosen leader from God Crucified as a criminal Not a king or military victor Disciples encountered him risen from the dead

Believed to be a chosen leader from God Victorious over all his enemies Sets God’s people free from oppression Restores Davidic kingship Ushers in eschatological age of righteousness

Believed to be a chosen leader from God (floated Crucified, yet victorious? inferences) Not a king or military victor, yet Victorious over sets God’s people free and restores Davidic kingship? all his enemies, sets God’s Risen from the dead, people free, ushering in eschatological restores Davidic age or righteousness? kingship, ushers in eschatological age of Blended Space: righteousness?

JESUS IS THE MESSIAH

Figure 5.2.  jesus is the messiah: single-​scope blend

It is quite possible that, for some hearers of this assertion, the blend remains an ordinary conceptual metaphor, a single-​scope blend similar to “God is a rock.” In this scenario, the messiah frame remains essentially unaltered and the mapping remains unidirectional: insights about Jesus are drawn from the blend, but the previously existing concept of messiah remains unchanged. The radial category structure of messiah for these hearers might be depicted as in Figure 5.3: the blend of Jesus-​as-​Messiah creates a

146  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence radial extension from the prototype, but it is one that falls outside the boundaries of the category itself and is thus clearly perceived as “nonliteral” (i.e., as true improprie). Someone accepting the metaphor in this way might say something like, “Yes, you could call Jesus a Messiah of sorts, although of course he’s not really (or literally) the Messiah.”

Prototypical Messiah: Military liberator, king at Jerusalem JESUS as MESSIAH blend MESSIAH

Figure 5.3.  jesus is the messiah: metaphoric extension

As noted earlier, however, a core principle of the cognitive linguistics understanding of categorization is that categories are often flexible. A metaphorical radial extension can become entrenched enough to constitute an expansion of the category boundary. In a second reception scenario, then, an individual or group might actually incorporate the Jesus-​as-​Messiah blend into their mental category of messiah—​but without displacing the Davidic military liberator as the prototypical instance. Like Cyrus, the Persian king referred to as Messiah in Isaiah 45:1, Jesus might be seen as a secondary but legitimate bearer of a title still meant primarily for another. Someone for whom this scenario was the case might say something like, “Well, I’d call Jesus a sort of Messiah” or “Yes, I guess Jesus really is a Messiah, although maybe not the Messiah.”18 Such a development would represent a sort of midway point on the spectrum between first-​order metaphor and strong tectonic equivalence, in which “Jesus is the Messiah” might arguably be seen as true proprie, albeit only as an edge case (Figure 5.4). A very different possibility for reception is the path taken by historic mainstream Christianity. Christians do not simply assert that Jesus is called Messiah because the church names him as Messiah in a new, peripheral sense, as would be the case in the second scenario described. Rather, they assert that in Jesus they discover a fuller, deeper central meaning for a concept they had previously understood only in part. In other words, to accept Jesus

IDENTITY: BRIDGING THE DIVIDE  147

Prototypical Messiah: Military liberator, king at Jerusalem JESUS as MESSIAH blend

MESSIAH

Figure 5.4.  jesus is the messiah: metaphoric extension with category expansion

as Messiah is to restructure the prototype structure of the category messiah so that the blended space, Jesus-​as-​Messiah, is placed at the center. We might imagine a first-​century Christian preacher exhorting a church community, “Zechariah told us the Messiah would be humble and ride on a donkey. Listen! This means that Jesus really is the Messiah!”19 This member is making a claim not only that the Jesus-​as-​Messiah blend should be included within the category messiah but that the prototype structure of the category itself should be recentered around this very instance. For believers who do accept it, Jesus becomes the central example of the category against which other examples are to be measured, and the concept messiah can no longer be adequately understood without reference to Jesus (as in Figure 5.5).

JESUS as MESSIAH blend

Previously prototypical Messiah: Military liberator, king at Jerusalem

MESSIAH

Figure 5.5.  jesus is the messiah: recentering of category

It is this restructuring of the prototype structure of the source frame that accounts for the bidirectionality Masson observes in the tectonic process.

148  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence Because Jesus-​as-​Messiah is, in this scenario, not a temporary metaphoric extension of messiah, nor even simply a peripheral member, but enshrined as the central instance of the category, it becomes true to say not only “Jesus is the Messiah” but also “The Messiah is Jesus.” Moreover, attributes of Jesus can now be predicated of the Messiah: “The Messiah is a Galilean carpenter’s son”; “The Messiah is a crucified victim.” It is important to note that the three scenarios just explored are not sequential stages in a linear process. While an individual or group might conceivably pass through all three understandings over time, it is at least as likely that they might take “Jesus is the Messiah” to be fully tectonic from the outset, placing Jesus directly at the center of the category in a sudden flash of insight rather than undergoing a gradual process of seeing him first as “a sort of Messiah” and only later as “the Messiah.”20 Nor are these three meant as the only possible options. Rather, they are illustrative points along a spectrum of possibilities by which a metaphoric blend might be taken to fit outside or inside a given source category, and if inside, might be incorporated into its prototype structure as a more or less central member. One noteworthy feature of both the second and third scenarios I have described (as well as all the possibilities that lie between them) is that they result in a situation of polysemy, in which the previously existing prototypical sense (an earthly Davidic king as Messiah) now exists alongside a newly accepted sense (Jesus as Messiah). In the second scenario, the former prototype remains prototypical, while in the third it is displaced by a new prototype. Yet some tectonic shifts remain somewhere in between. A new sense can also become a central member of a category without displacing the previous prototype, as can be seen in another example: jesus is god.

jesus is god Like “Jesus is the Messiah,” but even more radical in its implications, “Jesus is God” is an assertion that Christians take to be not only a first-​order metaphor but properly true. Once again, the assertion prompts for a blend, here one in which qualities of God mingle with qualities of Jesus in a blended space representing Jesus-​as-​God. As always, this is a dynamic rather than an algorithmic process, but some salient attributes of God likely to be mapped into the blend might include God’s power, immortality, infinite love, and omniscience. Certain clashes are likely to arise: Jesus as portrayed in the New

IDENTITY: BRIDGING THE DIVIDE  149 Testament is a finite physical being, seems to have limited knowledge, can suffer and die, and so on. And, as always, these clashes are resolved in creative and non-​deterministic ways. Various ways of accounting for these clashes animated several of the Christological controversies of the first four centuries: for Docetists, for example, to assert that Jesus was God meant that divine attributes trumped human ones to the extent that Jesus’s humanity was only illusory. In contrast, mainstream Christian orthodoxy came to assert that both human and divine attributes were fully true of Jesus, held together in paradox. Despite their disagreements over Jesus’s humanity, docetists and proto-​ orthodox Christians agreed that he was truly God—​in other words, that the blend jesus is god was to be understood as properly true. Yet not all members of the early Christian movement agreed. For Arius and his followers, for example, Jesus was a created being, albeit the first and greatest of all created beings and one who shared uniquely in many of the divine attributes. To Arians, while the blend jesus is god expressed genuine truth, it did so in essentially the same way as god is a rock: at the level of single-​scope blending. It was not true proprie; the blend Jesus-​as-​God had not come to be incorporated into their cognitive category of god (Figure 5.6).

Prototypical God: God the Father JESUS as GOD blend

GOD

Figure 5.6.  jesus is god: metaphoric extension

The Christological perspective known as semi-​Arianism would seem to represent an intermediate position, one in which Jesus may well be seen as truly divine—​truly God—​and yet to a lesser extent than God the Father. In this scenario, the category structure of the concept god has been expanded

150  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence to include Jesus as a genuine instance, but an edge case. God the Father remains the single prototype, and Jesus’s divine status is seen as clearly derivative. This second possibility is represented in Figure 5.7.

Prototypical God: God the Father JESUS as GOD blend

GOD

Figure 5.7.  jesus is god: metaphoric extension with category expansion

In a third scenario—​that which would come to be the position of Chalcedonian Christianity—​the prototype structure of the category god is significantly altered so that Jesus-​as-​God comes to take a place within the center of the category. Here (Figure 5.8) the blend is taken as strongly tectonic, so that “Jesus is God” is unquestionably true in the proper sense.

JESUS as GOD blend: now also a central instance of GOD

God the Father: still a central instance of GOD

GOD

Figure 5.8.  jesus is god: recentering of category

Yet there is an intriguing difference here from the category structure in the third scenario explored for jesus is the messiah. In this case, the previously

IDENTITY: BRIDGING THE DIVIDE  151 existing prototypical concept for god has not been replaced or displaced to the periphery. God the Father remains central to Christians’ understanding of god even as Jesus-​as-​God takes a central place alongside God the Father. For Christians God can no longer be understood without reference to Jesus, and yet it is also true that God the Father remains a central and prototypical member of the Godhead. It is not, then, necessary to a tectonic shift that a previous prototype be replaced outright. In some cases, the blended space may become a new central instance alongside previous prototypes rather than instead of them. This process by which Jesus is incorporated into the prototype structure without displacing the previously prototypical sense of God accounts for the fact that “Jesus is God” does not display the same bidirectionality Masson notes in “Jesus is the Messiah.” For trinitarian Christians, “Jesus is God” is true proprie, and yet it is inadequate to say “God is Jesus” without further qualification, because Jesus is not the only prototypical member of the concept god. Over time, of course, the same tectonic shift took place with regard to the Holy Spirit, so that for trinitarian Christians the concept god is actually a radial network with three equal central members (Figure 5.9). It remains the case that the Father is identified as the source or fount of the Godhead, from whom the other two persons are begotten and proceed, respectively—​a theological claim about the immanent Trinity that corresponds to the order of revelation of the economic Trinity.21 In cognitive terms, even as there are now three equally central members of the concept god, it remains true that the First Person of the Trinity was the original prototype and served as the source domain for the tectonic blends by which the other two members were incorporated into the concept.

God the Father Jesus (God the Son)

God the Holy Spirit

GOD

Figure 5.9.  god: category with three central instances

152  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence Yet Figure 5.9 still does not tell the whole story. As it stands, it could simply depict a polytheistic category of god with three central members, very similar to the Greco-​Roman category of god with twelve central members (and a large number of peripheral members such as minor gods and demigods). Christian theology, however, while insisting that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all God, adds the assertion inherited from Judaism that there is only one God, the God of Israel. This means that, for Christians, god is not simply a superordinate category into which these three members fit. Rather, at the center of the category god are not only the three persons (ὑποστάσεις) of the Trinity but also the one being (οὐσία) of God. While God’s οὐσία is unknowable, the concept of the οὐσία can be described cognitively as an underspecified schema, or generic space, abstracted over what is common to all three persons. Trinitarian theology as it developed over the first four centuries is in fact a remarkably sophisticated example of radial extension and polysemy. It asserts that the relation between each ὑπόστασις and God’s οὐσία is not one of category membership but one of identity. Meanwhile, paradoxically, it also asserts that these identity relations do not exist among the various ὑποστάσεις: while the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are each to be identified with the central οὐσία, they cannot be identified with one another. The result is challenging for formal logic but poses no difficulty to the human capacity for cognitive mapping (Figure 5.10).22 Father Identity

(no identity)

(no identity)

GOD Identity

Identity

Son

Holy Spirit

(no identity)

Figure 5.10.  god: Identity relations

The traditional image of the scutum Trinitatis, or “shield of the Trinity,” diagrams this radial category structure admirably, succinctly expressing the Christian claim that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are all distinct from one another, yet all truly God in the proper sense (Figure 5.11).23

IDENTITY: BRIDGING THE DIVIDE  153

Figure 5.11.  Scutum Trinitatis

5.3  The Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor as a tectonic shift We are now in a position to return to eucharistic theology by considering the Synoptic/​Pauline blend: this loaf is jesus’s body and this wine is jesus’s blood. It is convenient to treat the two halves separately, beginning with the first half: this loaf is jesus’s body. It is quite possible, of course, to understand this as a simple, first-​order conceptual metaphor, so that jesus’s body properly indicates only Jesus’s historical body and the Loaf-​as-​Body blend remains outside the category (Figure 5.12).

Prototypical body of Jesus (his historical body) THIS LOAF as JESUS’S BODY blend

JESUS’S BODY

Figure 5.12.  this loaf is jesus’s body: metaphoric extension

154  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence A second possibility might be the entrenchment of this blend to form a radial extension of the category jesus’s body, but a very peripheral one. Here it could properly be said “This loaf is Jesus’s body,” since the loaf would now be seen as a true member of the category, but only in a very secondary and derivative sense (Figure 5.13).

Prototypical body of Jesus (his historical body) THIS LOAF as JESUS’S BODY blend

JESUS’S BODY

Figure 5.13.  this loaf is jesus’s body: metaphoric extension with category expansion

The acceptance of the Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor as fully, properly true by way of a tectonic shift creates a different outcome indeed. Here the loaf-​ as-​body blend is accepted into the center of the category body of jesus christ in a way that significantly alters its prototype structure (Figure 5.14). In other words, if this loaf is jesus’s body is accepted as a tectonic equivalence, this creates a profound reconfiguration of the believer’s understanding of what exactly the body of Jesus can be. What emerges is a category structure closely analogous to that of the doctrine of the Trinity. The original sense of “body of Christ”—​Jesus’s historic, risen, and glorified physical body—​is by no means displaced but remains very much a central member of the category. However, now another sense—​Christ’s eucharistic body—​takes its place alongside it as not only a full but also a central member, such that (for those who accept this tectonic shift) Christians can no longer understand the concept of Christ’s body without reference to it. Like jesus is the messiah and jesus is god, this is a radical claim indeed, one that can only be made in good faith on the basis of the contention that this metaphor constitutes a revealed truth—​the discovery, so to speak, of something God had in mind all along.

IDENTITY: BRIDGING THE DIVIDE  155

THIS LOAF as JESUS’S BODY blend: now also a central instance of JESUS’S BODY

Jesus’ historical body: still a central instance of JESUS’S BODY

JESUS’S BODY

Figure 5.14.  this loaf is jesus’s body: recentering of category

Yet this does not fully describe the core structure of body of jesus christ. There is yet another central sense—​one that derives from another scriptural metaphor, this one grounded in several of the Pauline epistles: the church is the body of christ. While a full study of this metaphor is outside the scope of this project, its prominence in the New Testament is unquestionable, and I take it too to be true in the tectonic, proper sense. It too is essential to any adequate account of the concept body of jesus christ. Just as with the concept of god, then, Christians are invited into a wider, more complex understanding of body of christ, one with three (or at least three) interrelated senses as well as an underspecified schematic central sense of which each of these is an instantiation (Figure 5.15). Historic body Identity

(no identity)

(no identity)

JESUS’S BODY Identity

Identity

Eucharistic body

Ecclesial body

(no identity)

Figure 5.15.  jesus’s body: Identity relations

156  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence This radial network for body of christ is a cognitive model for a classic theological idea: that of the threefold body of Christ. In the words of the twelfth-​century abbot William of Saint-​Thierry, Whenever the intelligent reader finds in a book anything about the flesh or body of the divine Jesus, he may apply this threefold definition of his flesh or body. . . . He must think in one way of that flesh or body which hung on the Cross and is sacrificed on the altar, in another way of his flesh or body which is abiding life to the person who receives it in Communion, and in yet another way of that flesh or body which is the Church. . . . Not that we would depict Christ as having three bodies, like Geryon in the fable, since the Apostle testifies that the body of Christ is one. But the mind or heart makes the distinction with a certain relation to faith, though the reality maintains the undivided truth in its simplicity.24

Christians’ own bodies are members of the ecclesial body of Christ, fed by the eucharistic body of Christ, and look forward to sharing in the resurrection of the glorified body of Christ—​who himself feeds them with his eucharistic body, and who is the head of his ecclesial body. Not one of these senses is identical with any of the others—​yet each can truly, properly be said to be the body of Christ, just as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not identical with one another yet can each truly, properly be said to be God. Meanwhile, much as God the Father continues to occupy a place of cognitive priority as the source within the coequal Godhead, the historic, risen, and glorified body of Christ continues to occupy such a place within the polysemous network body of christ, having been the original prototype and source domain for the other senses.25 The second half of the blend, this wine is jesus’s blood, can be understood in a similar way. Like body of christ, blood of christ becomes a polysemous radial network. Jesus’s historic blood shed on the cross and his eucharistic blood offered week by week to the faithful are both essential central members of the concept blood of christ, and each can truly, properly be said to be the blood of Christ (Figure 5.16). Here there is no third metaphor akin to the church is christ’s body, and so the radial network remains somewhat simpler, with only two main senses. Combining the two halves of the metaphor leads to the diagram in Figure 5.17, in which a central mental space with two elements, “body of Christ” and “blood of Christ,” represents the central underspecified sense of each. A mental space for the historical Jesus (now risen and glorified) has two corresponding elements, as does a mental space for the eucharist. A third,

IDENTITY: BRIDGING THE DIVIDE  157 Historic blood Identity (no identity)

JESUS’S BLOOD Identity Eucharistic blood

Figure 5.16.  jesus’s blood: Identity relations

ecclesial, mental space has only a “body of Christ” element. Each of these elements in the three main spaces is connected by a mapping to its counterpart in the central space. Historic

Body of Christ Blood of Christ

(no Identity) (no Identity)

Identity Identity

(no Identity)

Body of Christ Identity Identity Body of Christ Blood of Christ

Eucharistic

Blood of Christ (central sense, underspecified)

Identity

Body of Christ

(no Identity) Ecclesial

Figure 5.17.  jesus’s body and blood: Identity relations

The historic body of Christ, the ecclesial body of Christ, and the eucharistic body of Christ each are the Body of Christ. The historic blood of Christ and the eucharistic blood of Christ each are the blood of Christ. None of these senses are identical with one another. And yet there is only one body and blood of Christ. These assertions are paradoxical, but not nonsensical—​ as a cognitive understanding of polysemy can help further illustrate.

158  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence

5.4  Polysemy: identity and distinction in tension What is the relationship among the various senses of “body of Christ”? If it is accepted that the eucharistic bread may properly be called the body of Christ, and that the church may be as well, does that mean that there are several different bodies of Christ? The question has been raised many times, with varying answers. In the fourth century, Ambrose seems clearly to state that the eucharistic body of Christ is the same as the historic body of Christ: “This body which we make is that which was born of a virgin.”26 His contemporary John Chrysostom writes, similarly if more vividly, “When you see it set out, say to yourself, . . . ‘This is that same body that was bloodied and pierced by a spear, from which the fountains of blood and water flowed to save the whole world.’ ”27 Jerome, on the other hand, seems to distinguish between the two: “The blood and flesh of Christ are understood in a twofold manner. They are understood either as spiritual and divine, of which he himself said, ‘My flesh is truly food, and my blood is truly drink,’ . . . or as the flesh and blood which was crucified and which was poured out by the spear of the soldier.”28 In the ninth century, Paschasius Radbertus clearly identifies the two, while Ratramnus distinguishes them: the former writes of the sacrament, “This certainly is no other flesh than that which was born of Mary and suffered on the cross and rose from the tomb,”29 while the latter writes, “The difference is great which distinguishes the body in which Christ suffered and the blood which He shed from His side when hanging on the cross from this body which is daily celebrated by the faithful in the mystery of the passion of Christ and the blood which is taken by the mouth of the faithful.”30 At the turn of the tenth century, the abbot Heriger of Lobbes sought to hold together Paschasius’s and Ratramnus’s views by making a distinction between “natural” and “special” references to Christ’s body. Summarizing Heriger’s approach, Gary Macy writes, “Since the body of the Lord remains one despite these two ways of speaking of the Lord, they are not in opposition. To distinguish, then, between the Lord’s body born of Mary and the Lord’s body present in the Eucharist, as Augustine did, is only to distinguish modes of presence of the one body of the Lord, and not to deny that the body present on the altar is the same as that born of Mary.”31 For Heriger both identity and distinction were appropriate. A century and a half later, however, Berengar of Tours insisted that the historical and eucharistic bodies of

IDENTITY: BRIDGING THE DIVIDE  159 Christ were two separate things, only to be forced in 1059 to sign a recantation asserting their identity in strongly realistic terms.32 Yet Berengar’s adversary Lanfranc sought to hold together identity and distinction in a way reminiscent of Heriger: “It can be truly said that we receive that very body which was taken from the Virgin, and yet that it is not the same:—​the same indeed so far as concerns the essence and peculiarity and power of the real nature, but not the same as regards the species of bread and the species of wine and the other things mentioned above.”33 The controversies of the Reformation led to a hardening of positions. Roman Catholic and Lutheran statements from this period tend to affirm that Christ’s eucharistic body is identical with his historic body in a way that minimizes any distinction between them. For example, Luther argues that “it is not the spiritual body of Christ which is present, but his natural body,” which “was born physically of Mary, just as all other men have bodies.”34 The Catechism of Trent, for its part, goes so far as to insist that the sacrament contains “the true body of Christ, and whatever pertains to the nature of a true body, such as bones and nerves.”35 On the other hand, Reformed writers follow Ratramnus and Berengar in being unwilling to identify the eucharistic bread with Christ’s historic body. Unlike those earlier theologians, however, they are unwilling to entertain the idea that Christ has more than one body, seeing this as a denial of Christ’s true humanity. The Reformed response, then, is to identify Christ’s historic, risen, and glorified body as the only proper referent for the phrase “body of Christ” while treating the eucharistic sense of the phrase as figurative and thus not properly true. Calvin, while insisting that a figurative interpretation does not make the words “an empty phantom,” writes that the phrase “is taken grammatically to denote a metonymy, lest any one should suppose that the bread is called ‘the body of Christ’ as absolutely (ita simpliciter) as Christ himself is called ‘the son of God.’ ”36 This remark of Calvin’s illustrates the core assumption at the heart of the Reformation impasse. Both he and his opponents take for granted that Christ is called the son of God “absolutely,” that is, not figuratively, and disagree over whether the eucharistic bread can be called Christ’s body in the same way. In contrast, a cognitive understanding of figurative language allows me to argue that both statements, “Christ is the son of God” and “the bread is the body of Christ,” are figurative; that this does not detract from their ability to be properly true; and that they do indeed function in precisely the same way—​ through tectonic shifts.

160  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence For Ratramnus and Berengar, “body of Christ” was homonymous: it had multiple, essentially separate meanings. For all the Reformation disputants, “body of Christ” was monosemous: it had only a single meaning identified with the original prototypical sense, Christ’s historic body. Luther and Trent identified this with the eucharistic body of Christ without qualification; the Reformed theologians treated the two as distinct in such a way that the eucharistic bread could no longer be called “body of Christ” proprie. I propose instead that “body of Christ” is perfectly polysemous. It occupies the precise middle of the spectrum between monosemy and homonymy. It cannot be definitively pinned down as having one general sense or multiple separate senses. Rather, its various senses, while conceptually distinguishable from one another, are inextricably intertwined. Polysemy offers an answer to the question that vexed the reformers: how can one thing truly be said to be another? In other words, how can there be a real predication of two concepts that does not collapse the distinction between them? For Zwingli the answer was to restrict real predication to monosemy—​but this came at the cost of the ability to claim paradoxical theological truths like the hypostatic union as genuinely true. Luther’s instinct was to insist on polysemy—​but his theory foundered for lack of a realistic constraint on the multiplication of new meanings, tending toward homonymy, so that he had to return to a monosemous understanding of “body of Christ.” Embodied realism provides both the bridge across Zwingli’s gap between concepts and the constraint to Luther’s unfettered proliferation of senses. Understanding “body of Christ” and “blood of Christ” as truly polysemous honors the paradoxical tension between identity and distinction. There is clear precedent for this understanding of the eucharist in the theology of the Trinity. There is only one God, and each of the three persons is fully God, yet the three persons are not identical to one another. Similarly, there is only one body of Christ, and each of its multiple senses is fully the body of Christ, yet they are not identical to one another. This is no mere sophistry but, rather, the acceptance of a paradox that lies beyond classical categories and objectivist views of language—​but not beyond the mystery of God. This simple proposal turns out to have far-​reaching consequences. For one, it allows a resolution to such speculative questions, popular in medieval discussions, as whether the body of Christ is swallowed and digested, goes down into the stomach of a mouse, is moved from place to place during the distribution of communion, and so on: both yes and no are true.37 Questions

IDENTITY: BRIDGING THE DIVIDE  161 such as these—​which may seem trivial to many Christians today but sparked intense and sophisticated discussion among scholastic theologians—​can in fact be seen as variants of the linguistic tests for monosemy and homonymy encountered earlier.38 Yes, the eucharistic bread goes down into the stomach of a mouse, and the eucharistic bread is the body of Christ. And yet the historic body of Christ is also the body of Christ, and the historic, glorified body of Christ certainly does not go down into the stomach of a mouse. Does the body of Christ go down into the stomach of a mouse? Both yes and no are true. Similarly, the (eucharistic) body of Christ is moved from place to place during the liturgy. The (historic) body of Christ is not moved from place to place. Is the body of Christ moved from place to place? Both yes and no are true. More importantly for today’s ecumenical situation, treating “body of Christ” and “blood of Christ” as polysemous can allow a resolution to the divisive test cases of the manducatio oralis and manducatio impiorum, which function in much the same way. Do believers receive the body of Christ by the mouth? Yes, they receive the (eucharistic) body by the mouth. No, they do not receive the (historic or ecclesial) body by the mouth. Do unbelievers receive the body of Christ? Yes, unbelievers receive the (eucharistic) body of Christ. No, they do not receive the (historic or ecclesial) body of Christ. Because “body of Christ” is polysemous, no definitive yes or no answer to such questions is possible; rather, both yes and no can be valid responses, and which seems most appropriate will inevitably depend on context and on which sense or senses are being most strongly evoked in the minds of readers and hearers at a given time. Cognitively speaking, this is not unusual. It is the ordinary way polysemy works. As David Tuggy points out in the study mentioned in Chapter 2, applying a coat of exterior paint to a house, putting a fresco on a fresh plaster wall, and producing a landscape in oil on canvas are all full examples of the underspecified central meaning of “painting.”39 In one way these are all the same activity; in another they are quite different. Various linguistic tests will produce various levels of zeugma. There is no one right answer to whether they are the same or not: there is a permanent tension between identity and difference. Just so, there is a permanent paradoxical relationship among the various senses of “body of Christ”: each is identical to the central, underspecified sense yet not identical to the others. The Eastern Orthodox liturgies of St. Basil and St. John Chrysostom express this paradox well when the priest, after breaking the consecrated bread, proclaims, “The Lamb of

162  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence God is broken and distributed; broken but not divided, always eaten and never consumed.”40 The tension between identity and difference is recognized in different ways by different Christian traditions. Historically, each tradition has consistently seen itself as standing at the ideal point between two extremes (Figure 5.18). On the one hand is the belief that the eucharistic elements are a signum nudum, an empty sign with no relationship to what they signify. On the other is Capernaism, the idea that the eucharistic elements are so to be identified with Christ’s historic flesh and blood as to constitute a cannibalistic feast. Zwingli

Calvin

Luther

Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox

signum nudum

Capernaism

Figure 5.18.  A spectrum from signum nudum to Capernaism

At any point along the spectrum, it is easy to think of any group farther to one’s left of endorsing the signum nudum and any group farther to one’s right of endorsing Capernaism. Much of the history of eucharistic polemic has been the story of one group accusing another of one of these extreme positions, only to be accused of its opposite. Yet there is a hidden ecumenical consensus here in the very fact that the spectrum exists. No church actually understands itself to teach Capernaism. Nor does any church involved in serious ecumenical dialogue today understand itself to teach the signum nudum. Even as they disagree on what particular formulas most adequately express it, the various traditions agree that there is a tension between “is” and “is not,” between unconstrained predication and monosemy. As Calvin put it, It is not a bare figure (une figure nue), but joined to its reality and substance. . . . The sacraments of the Lord ought not and cannot at all be separated from their reality and substance. To distinguish them so that they be not confused is not only good and reasonable but wholly necessary. But to divide them so as to set them up the one without the other is absurd.41

It was Calvin’s legitimate concern for distinguishing among the multiple senses of “body of Christ” that kept him from calling the eucharistic bread “body of Christ” in the proper sense. Yet, in asserting a real predication between its target and source, the Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor does not collapse

IDENTITY: BRIDGING THE DIVIDE  163 the distinction between them. Rather, it holds them together in paradoxical union. The safeguarding of the distinction between the eucharistic body and the historical, risen, glorified body of Jesus does not demand the rejection of the affirmation that the eucharistic body is the body of Jesus. An ecumenical theology of eucharistic presence informed by an embodied realist understanding of language and truth can assert, simply and honestly, that the affirmation The eucharistic bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ is true. In cognitive terms, it is true by means of a metaphoric extension leading to a tectonic shift resulting in a polysemous radial network. From the standpoint of faith, it is true because the same God who gave us this metaphor is faithful and makes it true again at each eucharist, and again, and again.

5.5  Conclusions “This is my body” and “This is my blood” can be figurative and true at the same time. They are figurative in that their meanings arise by way of a blend, the Synoptic/​Pauline, that makes use of metaphor as well as metonymy. And they are true—​properly true—​because “body of Christ” and “blood of Christ” are the true and proper names for what the eucharistic bread and wine really are. This is what Masson describes as a tectonic shift, and it results in a polysemous radial network (analogous to that of the Trinity) by which it can truly be said that there is only one body and one blood of Christ and yet that the multiple senses of each are distinct from one another. Identity and distinction, monosemy and homonymy, are held together in permanent paradox. The eucharistic reality cannot be fully described. Our language for it is not exhaustive but reflects our embodied minds with their capacity for metaphor, metonymy, and blending. It is to us as embodied beings that God is self-​ revealed, in ways that are appropriate, apt, and salvific for us. For those who accept them—​and scripture and tradition provide ample reasons for Christians to do so—​“This is my body” and “This is my blood” are metaphors to live by.

Notes 1. Gilles Fauconnier, Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 152. 2. Gilles Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 166.

164  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence 3. Gilles Fauconnier, “Conceptual Blending and Analogy,” in The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science, ed. Dedre Gentner, Keith J. Holyoak, and Boicho N. Kokinov (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 280; see James Clerk Maxwell, The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, ed. P. M. Harman, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 320, 337ff. 4. Data from MarketWatch, http://​www.marketwatch.com/​investing/​index/​djia/​historical; accessed February 19, 2021. 5. Robert Masson, Without Metaphor, No Saving God: Theology After Cognitive Linguistics (Leuven: Peeters, 2014), 59, 67–​72. 6. Masson, 66. Masson adopts the term “tectonic” from the work of Mary Gerhart and Allan Melvin Russell: see Mary Gerhart and Allan Melvin Russell, Metaphoric Process: The Creation of Scientific and Religious Understanding (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1984); Mary Gerhart and Allan Melvin Russell, New Maps for Old: Explorations in Science and Religion (New York: Continuum, 2001). 7. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1.13.3. In Chapter 4 we already saw the term proprie used in this sense by Calvin, Zwingli, and Wyclif. 8. Masson, Without Metaphor, No Saving God, 52–​54, 132–​36, 196–​207. 9. Masson, 67. 10. Masson, 198. 11. Masson, 297. 12. Masson, 90–​92. 13. Masson, 133. On speech act theory, see J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962); John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). 14. “An enquiry into the relative weights of the ultimate particles of bodies is a subject, as far as I know, entirely new: I have lately been prosecuting this enquiry with remarkable success.” John Dalton, “On the Absorption of Gases by Water and Other Liquids,” in Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, second series, vol. 1 (Manchester/​London: S. Russell for R. Bickerstaff, 1805), 286. 15. John Dalton, “All bodies of sensible magnitude, whether liquid or solid, are constituted of a vast number of extremely small particles, or atoms of matter,” in A New System of Chemical Philosophy, vol. 1 (Manchester/​London: S. Russell for R. Bickerstaff, 1808), 141. 16. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 131. 17. See the discussion of reception in Masson, Without Metaphor, No Saving God, 68–​72, 113–​14. 18. On these verbal hedges, see George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 122–​25. 19. Zech. 9:9. 20. In earlier versions of this work, including my dissertation, I did imagine these scenarios as sequential stages. I am grateful to Robert Masson (personal correspondence)

IDENTITY: BRIDGING THE DIVIDE  165 for comments that have pointed me toward a more flexible and dynamic perspective. What inadequacies remain in this proposal are, of course, wholly my own. 21. Here I summarize the relations among the persons as described in the original version of the Niceno-​Constantinopolitan Creed, still used in the Eastern churches. The West, of course, eventually came to add the filioque, the assertion that the Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son. 22. For a more detailed study of various metaphors and metonymies that contribute to trinitarian theology as further developed in the Nicene Creed and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, see Antonio Barcelona, “The Metaphorical and Metonymic Understanding of the Trinitarian Dogma,” International Journal of English Studies 3, no. 1 (January 14, 2009): 1–​28. 23. Public domain image reprinted from Sarah Cazneau Woodward, Embroidery for Church Guilds (New York: James Pott & Co., 1896); http://​anglicanhistory.org/​ vestments/​woodward1896/​plates.html (accessed February 19, 2021). 24. On the Sacrament of the Altar 12, in PL 180:361–​ 62; ET Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, trans. Lancelot C. Sheppard and Elizabeth Englund (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 388. 25. It might be argued that Christ’s historic, risen, and glorified bodies should be distinguished as separate senses. The theological tradition treats them as distinct, yet also as numerically identical with one another in a way the historic, ecclesial, and eucharistic bodies are not. We might also propose additional senses, such as the body of Christ encountered in the neighbor in need (Matt. 25:31–​46). The point is not that there must be precisely three senses but, rather, that the concept is a polysemous radial network. 26. On the Mysteries 9.53, in Des sacrements; Des mystères; L’Explication du symbole, ed. Bernard Botte, 2nd ed., Sources chrétiennes 25bis (Paris: Cerf, 1961), 186–​88; ET Darwell Stone, A History of the Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), 1:80. 27. Homily on 1 Corinthians 24, in PG 61:203; ET mine. 28. Commentary on Ephesians 1.7, in PL 26:451A; ET Ronald E. Heine, The Commentaries of Origen and Jerome on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 91–​92. 29. On the Body and Blood of the Lord 1.51–​2, in De corpore et sanguine Domini; cum appendice Epistola ad Fredugardum, ed. Beda Paulus, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 16 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1969), 15; ET Stone, History, 1:218. 30. On the Body and Blood of the Lord 69, in De corpore et sanguine Domini: texte original et notice bibliographique, ed. J. N. Bakhuizen van den Brink (Amsterdam: North-​ Holland Publishing Company, 1974), 60; ET Stone, History, 1:231. At almost the same time, one of Florus’s accusations against Amalar of Metz was that his allegorical method of interpreting the fraction inappropriately divided Christ into three bodies; his three, however, were the historic body of Christ, the church militant, and the church expectant. See Gary Macy, The Theologies of the Eucharist in the Early Scholastic Period: A Study of the Salvific Function of the Sacrament According

166  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence to the Theologians, c. 1080–​c. 1220 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 22; Gary Macy, The Banquet’s Wisdom: A Short History of the Theologies of the Lord’s Supper, 2nd ed. (Maryville, TN: OSL Publications, 2005), 85; Stone, History, 1:212–​13. 31. Macy, Theologies of the Eucharist in the Early Scholastic Period, 34. 32. Gary Macy, “Theology of the Eucharist in the High Middle Ages,” in A Companion to the Eucharist in the Middle Ages, ed. Ian Levy, Gary Macy, and Kristen Van Ausdall (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 371–​72. 33. On the Body and Blood of the Lord 18, in PL 90:430; ET Stone, History, 1:249. On Lanfranc’s approach, see also Nathan Mitchell, Cult and Controversy: The Worship of the Eucharist Outside Mass (New York: Pueblo, 1982), 150. 34. Von Anbeten des Sakraments, in WA 11:438, 437; ET The Adoration of the Sacrament, in LW 36:284, 283. For Luther Christ’s “spiritual body” is the church. 35. Catechism of the Council of Trent 2.4.33, in Catechismus ex decreto Concilii Tridentini: ad parochos (Ratisbon: G. J. Manz, 1905), 175; ET mine. 36. Optima ineundae concordiae ratio, in CO 9:520; ET The Best Method of Obtaining Concord, in Tracts and Treatises on the Doctrine and Worship of the Church, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1958), 327. 37. For an analysis of the difference in approaches between Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas on such questions, see Yves de Montcheuil, “La raison de la permanence du Christ sous les espèces eucharistiques d’apres Saint Bonaventure et Saint Thomas,” in Mélanges théologiques, 3rd ed. (Paris: Aubier, 1951), 71–​82. 38. See “Polysemy” in Section 2.4, 42–45. 39. David Tuggy, “Ambiguity, Polysemy, and Vagueness,” in Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings, ed. Dirk Geeraerts (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006), 169–​72. Again see “Polysemy” in Section 2.4, 42–45. 40. The Divine Liturgy of Our Father Among the Saints Basil the Great (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1988), 40; George L. Papadeas, ed., The Divine Liturgy of Saint John the Chrysostom (New York/​Athens: G. Tsivetiotis & Co., 1968), 36. 41. Petit Traicté de la Saincte Cene, in CO 5:439; ET Short Treatise on the Lord’s Supper, in John Calvin, Theological Treatises, trans. J. K. S. Reid, Library of Christian Classics 22 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), 147–​48.

6 Representation The eucharistic bread and wine are the symbols (or signs, figures, antitypes, etc.) of the body and blood of Christ.

Unlike identity, but like the spatial motifs that will be explored in subsequent chapters, representation is a secondary motif that developed over time as a commentary on the Synoptic/​Pauline blend. The burden of this chapter is to argue that it should be part of the ecumenical repertoire for eucharistic presence. This might be expected to be an easy case to make, since unlike some of the other motifs, representation is not particularly contentious today. There is a broad consensus among theologians of many traditions not only that the early church, as William Crockett puts it, considered a symbol “to participate in the reality that it represented and to mediate that reality to those who participated in the symbol” but also that recovering such an understanding of symbols is desirable and important.1 Yet this has not always been so. Both Eastern and Western Christianity, in different ways, have been strongly influenced by the idea that a sign or symbol cannot be what it represents—​an idea Alexander Schmemann calls “a progressive ‘dissolution’ of the symbol.”2 In the East, iconoclasts’ contention that the consecrated eucharistic elements were the only legitimate figures of Christ led to the eventually victorious iconophiles’ denial that they were figures at all—​a claim that would remain characteristic of Eastern Orthodox eucharistic theology. As John of Damascus puts it, “The bread and the wine are not a figure of the body and blood of Christ (God forbid) but the body of the Lord itself that is filled with Godhead, since the Lord himself said, ‘This is my’—​not ‘figure of the body’ but—​‘body,’ and not ‘figure of the blood’ but ‘blood.’ ”3 In the West, the idea that a sacrament is a sign was a cornerstone of scholastic theology and was still accepted by all parties at the time of the Reformation.4 However, while Roman Catholic and Lutheran traditions Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence. Stephen R. Shaver, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197580806.003.0006

168  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence continued to assert that the elements were both sign and reality, the Reformed tradition was influenced by Zwingli’s argument that “the sign and the thing signified cannot be one and the same. Therefore the sacrament of the body of Christ cannot be the body itself.”5 As we have seen, Calvin sought to mitigate Zwingli’s extreme position by insisting that God gave the reality together with the sign, and therefore that the name of the reality could be legitimately (albeit figuratively) applied to the sign. However, he stopped short of claiming that representation and identity, in the sense of proper predication, could actually coexist. In the centuries following, the influence of Enlightenment rationalism produced a tendency to separate sign from reality not only among the Reformed but also in the Roman Catholic and Lutheran traditions.6 The past century has seen what John McKenna calls “a rehabilitation of the notion of symbol in current theology.”7 Twentieth-​century Roman Catholic theologians from Odo Casel through Karl Rahner and Edward Schillebeeckx to Aidan Kavanagh, David Power, Louis-​Marie Chauvet, and Susan Ross have made the concept of the symbol integral to their work on the eucharist, as have Protestants such as Gordon Lathrop, Don Saliers, and Hans Boersma.8 While some Eastern Orthodox theologians remain wary of the language of symbol, the work of other recent Orthodox writers like Schmemann and Thomas Hopko suggests that there are strong grounds for reclaiming it in that tradition as well.9 Affirming the motif of representation as part of the ecumenical repertoire, then, is not particularly controversial. Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry itself refers twice to the elements as “the signs of bread and wine.”10 What I want to do in this chapter is not to retread the work of these scholars but simply to situate the concept of symbol in a new context, that of cognitive linguistics, and specifically of blending theory. Doing so can be helpful in placing the focus less on what symbols are, from a philosophical or ontological point of view, than on how they work on us—​that is, on the cognitive processes by which material objects interact with our embodied minds. This focus on materiality accords well with both an embodied-​realist account of cognition and a Christian understanding of sacramentality. By drawing on Fauconnier and Turner’s work on blending and vital relations, I will show that “The bread is the symbol of Christ’s body” is not, as Oecolampadius argued, a literal rendition of “The bread is Christ’s body”; rather, it is a prompt for a different and more complex integration network. This network sets up mappings between “this bread” and “Christ’s body” that are nondeterministic and can be characterized by multiple vital relations,

Representation  169 including both that of Identity and that of Representation. Rather than being mutually exclusive, the two relations can coexist—​together with others such as Change—​in the same mapping. This allows me to offer a further refinement of the polysemy network from Chapter 5 that reflects both Identity and Representation relations among the various senses of “body of Christ” and “blood of Christ.”

6.1  Symbols as material anchors Representation is the second earliest attested motif of eucharistic presence in the Christian tradition: only identity is older. As early as the third century, Tertullian describes the bread of the Last Supper as the figura (“shape,” “figure”) of the body of Christ.11 In the fourth century, Ambrose cites an early form of the Roman Canon using the same phrase.12 Other fourth-​century texts show variations in terminology. A Mozarabic prayer from the Liber ordinum refers to the church’s offering as the imago et similitudo (“image and likeness”) of Christ’s body and blood.13 Cyril (or John) of Jerusalem uses both τύπος (“stamp,” “pattern”) and ἀντίτυπος (“copy”); Gregory of Nazianzus and the eucharistic prayer in book 7 of the Apostolic Constitutions also use ἀντίτυπος.14 The anaphora of Sarapion uses ὁμοίωμα (“likeness”),15 and Eusebius of Caesarea uses σύμβολον (“token,” “seal”) as well as εἰκών (“image”).16 Slightly later, Augustine of Hippo uses not only figura but also signum and sacramentum.17 Several of these expressions draw from the semantic domain of visual resemblance: figura, imago, τύπος/​ἀντίτυπος, εἰκών. Others, such as similitudo and ὁμοίωμα, convey an idea of likeness or resemblance without implying that this likeness is strictly image-based. Still others, such as σύμβολον, signum, and sacramentum, do not imply any necessary likeness but simply a token relationship (a σύμβολον, for example, was originally an object broken in half, with one of the halves kept by each party to a contract, while a sacramentum was an object given as collateral to a pledge). In cognitive linguistics terminology, the first group of terms suggests a relationship based on image metaphor; the second, on conceptual metaphor in general; the third, on metonymy. Over the past two centuries many philosophers and theologians have proposed various organizational schemes for defining and distinguishing among signs, symbols, icons, indices, and so on.18 At various times during

170  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence his career, for example, Charles Sanders Peirce proposed three, ten, twenty-​ eight, and sixty-​six different types of sign.19 One advantage of Fauconnier and Turner’s theory of mental spaces is that it avoids the need for complicated taxonomies of this kind. Instead, it can account for all these as variations of a single process: the creation of a mapping between two different entities, one of which is a material object. This mapping can be based on metaphor, metonymy, double-​scope blending, or a megablend that includes several of these operations at once. What is significant is that one element of the blend is a physical entity existing in the material world—​what Fauconnier and Turner (drawing on the work of anthropologist Edwin Hutchins) call a “material anchor.”20 In some cases a material anchor may contribute a considerable degree of its physical structure to the content of a blend. A clock or wristwatch, for example, is a symbol of time. Not only is it a physical artifact that can help its users keep track of the passage of time; it also encourages them to think of time as a cyclical reality divisible into equal units. These units can take on a very real conceptual status. “The train arrived promptly at four o’clock” is both a genuine truth claim and one that only has meaning within such a blend.21 At the other extreme, a material anchor may be linked to its blend only by an arbitrary, conventional metonymy. For example, the word “cat” is a symbol of a certain kind of animal. It is a material anchor, composed (if spoken) of vibrations in air or (if written) of marks on a surface. Neither the sound pattern kæt nor the letter shapes C-​A-​T have any particular metaphoric resemblance to the concept of an animal with which they are blended, but the conventions of the English language create a metonymic relationship between the word and its concept. In most cases, as with most cognitive phenomena, the degree of participation in a blend on the part of a material object is a spectrum rather than all-​or-​nothing. A partially onomatopoeic word like “sizzle,” for example, is related to its meaning not only by conventional metonymy but also by a kind of auditory image metaphor in which the sounds of the word echo the sounds it represents.22 A picture or statue of the Grim Reaper, as we saw in Chapter 3, is related to the concept of death by a complex megablend integrating several metaphors and metonymies into a single scene. It is this dynamic, combinatorial quality of multiple-​scope blending that makes precise taxonomies of sign and symbol difficult to sustain. Blends first created on the basis of, say, metaphor may go on to generate metonymic or other mappings as well. Certainly historic Christian authors make no attempt

Representation  171 at terminological precision: those who use imago or εἰκών, for example, do not necessarily intend to emphasize image-​metaphoric characteristics of the elements over and above the rest of the complex and dynamic blend evoked by the Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor. However, “symbol,” “sign,” figura, ἀντίτυπος, and all the rest of these terms have two things in common. The first is a common syntactic pattern: “The eucharistic bread is the _​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​of the body of Christ” and “The eucharistic wine is the _​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​of the blood of Christ.” The second is that all these terms conventionally prompt a reader or hearer to set up a mapping between the elements and the body and blood of Christ characterized by the vital relation of Representation. In discussing these two common features, I will use “symbol” to stand in for the whole array of such terms.

6.2  The Y2 construction: a more complex integration network In Chapter 3 we encountered the XYZ construction, which has been studied at length by Fauconnier and Turner as well as other linguists. As noted there, “This bread is the body of Christ” is already an XYZ construction that prompts for a conceptual blend: in this case, a simplex blend in which Christ is mapped into the frame structure (person) prompted for by the word “body.”23 This fairly straightforward mapping then sets up the more elaborate single-​scope blend at the heart of the identity motif. In contrast, the representation motif relies on a more complicated syntax. In the phrase “This bread is the symbol of the body of Christ,” we encounter one XYZ construction nested inside another. This is what Fauconnier and Turner have dubbed a Yn construction, with n standing for the number of iterations (in this case, two).24 Yn constructions are not at all uncommon. They feature frequently in ordinary conversation: for example, the statement “My friend is the chair of the Department of Economics” includes a Y2 construction. They do, however, add cognitive complexity to a sentence, and there is an upper limit as to how many can be easily processed. Y3 constructions seem to be the most complicated examples found in ordinary conversation (“the husband of the chair of the Department of Economics”). Beyond that, listeners or readers tend to lose track of the increasingly unwieldy integration networks being constructed.25

172  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence As we saw in Chapter 4, Oecolampadius’s preferred variant of the trope interpretation of the Synoptic/​Pauline blend treated it as a metonymy, which he took to mean that “This bread is the symbol of the body of Christ” was the literal equivalent of “This bread is the body of Christ.”26 From the point of view of blending theory, however, it is clear that the two sentences are far from equivalent. “This bread is the symbol of the body of Christ” is a prompt for a more complicated integration network, one that adds another layer of blending over and above the original XYZ network to form a Y2 network. This is a megablend that can be diagrammed as shown in Figure 6.1.27 Input Space: This bread and Christ Input Space: REPRESENTING frame

Input Space: PERSON frame

This bread Christ

Symbol

Body

Thing Symbolized

Blended Space 1

Person

The Bread as Symbol

Body

Thing Symbolized

Blended Space 2

Christ as Person This Bread as Symbol Body as Thing Symbolized

Blended Space 3

Christ as Person

Figure 6.1.  “This bread is the symbol of the body of Christ”

The first blend, shown on the left side of the diagram, is prompted by the XYZ phrase “this bread is the symbol of the body.” Words such as “symbol,” “sign,” “image,” and so on all activate a representing frame, with two roles we might call Symbol and Thing Symbolized.28 Importantly, this representing

Representation  173 frame explicitly specifies that the relationship between the entities in these two roles is characterized by the vital relation of Representation. In Blended Space 1, then, X (“this bread”) is mapped into the Symbol role of this frame. The second blend, shown on the right side, is prompted by the phrase “the body of Christ.” It activates a person frame and maps Christ into the Person role (Blended Space 2). Finally, Blended Spaces 1 and 2 in turn form the inputs for a second round of blending. Now the Body element from Blended Space 2 is mapped into the Thing Symbolized role in Blended Space 1. The final blended space at the bottom of the diagram, Blended Space 3, is structured by both representing and person frames, with “body” occupying a role in each frame. It is illustrative to compare this megablend with the original Synoptic/​ Pauline blend prompted by “This bread is the body of Christ.” As shown in Chapter 3, that phrase prompts for a simplex blend that creates a clash between the Bread element and the Body role, resulting in the subsequent generation of a single-​scope blend in which “this bread” and “my body” are compressed into Uniqueness.29 In contrast, the Y2 blend evoked by “This bread is the symbol of the body of Christ” sets up two simplex blends, but neither of these simplex blends creates any clashes. In both Blend 1 and Blend 2, a fairly familiar frame is activated, and the elements being mapped into its roles are natural fits for them. Both the Symbol role and the Thing Symbolized role in the representing frame can be taken by any object, so there is no clash in mapping the eucharistic bread into the former in Blend 1 or Christ’s body into the latter in Blend 3. In other words, the array of mental spaces that this Y2 blend evokes is more complex than that evoked by the Synoptic/​Pauline blend, but the mappings involved are more straightforward, so that they remain simplex blends rather than become metaphorical (single-​scope). The end result is a blended space in which “this bread” is explicitly given a Representation relationship to “the body of Christ.” Cognitively speaking, then, “This bread is the body of Christ” and “This bread is the symbol of the body of Christ” are very different sentences. They are processed differently. The second is not an equivalent to the first. The first sentence asserts a relationship of Uniqueness in the blend without stipulating precisely how that relationship is to be unpacked back into the input spaces, meaning that a listener may understand it as Identity, Representation, or both. The second never blends “this bread” directly with “the body of Christ” but instead explicitly sets up a Representation relationship between them.

174  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence

6.3  Representation and Identity in coexistence In Chapter 3 I introduced Fauconnier and Turner’s concept of vital relations: standard, frequently recurring relationships that characterize mappings. Among the most commonly occurring vital relations are Uniqueness, Identity, Representation, Change, Cause–​Effect, Part–​Whole, Time, Space, Analogy, and Disanalogy.30 It is important to distinguish between Uniqueness and Identity. Uniqueness is simply the vital relation of a single entity to itself, while Identity can only exist as a relation between two distinct entities.31 For example, if I say, “I’ve lost ten pounds since college,” I am setting up a network of two distinct mental spaces: one for the current time and another for the time when I was in college. Each of these spaces contains an entity identified as me, and these two entities are linked by Identity—​I understand myself to be the same person now as I was then. Yet there are also many differences between the “me” of today and the “me” of my college years, not only in weight but also in age, habits, life experience, and so on. As Fauconnier and Turner write, “Identity connectors always involve interesting differences.”32 When a blend is created, it is common for the vital relations characterizing mappings between different input spaces (outer-​space relations) to be compressed into tighter relations within the blended space (inner-​space relations). For example, in the blend prompted by “Jesus is the Messiah,” an Identity mapping between Jesus (in one input space) and the Messiah (in the other) is compressed into Uniqueness: there is only one entity in the blended space who is both Jesus and the Messiah. But Identity is not the only vital relation that can be compressed into Uniqueness: in fact, any vital relation can be. Recall these examples from Chapter 3: (1) a. “Ben-​Gurion was the Washington of Israel.” (Analogy compressed into Uniqueness) b. “Here is Queen Elizabeth” (said of a painting). (Representation compressed into Uniqueness) As we see here, a Uniqueness relation in the blend can be the product of any one or more of several different vital relations between the input spaces. This fact is at the heart of historic divisions over whether the eucharistic bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ, the symbols of the body and blood of Christ, or both. The phrase “This is my body” prompts for a

Representation  175 blend in which the relation between the eucharistic bread and the body of Christ is compressed into Uniqueness. The question, then, is whether this assertion of Uniqueness in the blended space should be decompressed to reflect an Identity relation or a Representation relation between these two counterpart elements in their input spaces. The answer is indeterminate—​for the Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor can be taken either way. This illuminates Oecolampadius’s insistence that the word “body” can be taken to mean “sign of my body” and Zwingli’s insistence that “is” can be taken to mean “signifies.” These Reformers are operating at the level of language, assuming that language reflects reality directly and that figurative language is a matter of word substitution. A cognitive way of describing their legitimate insight, however, is that the word “is” prompts for a relation of Uniqueness in the blended space, which can be unpacked to yield an inference of either Identity or Representation in the input spaces, depending on context—​or, perhaps, of both. Representation is a legitimate possibility for the reconstructed relationship between these two input spaces. The question is whether it is appropriate to collapse the range of possibilities for interpreting the Synoptic/​ Pauline metaphor to that single option. I have already argued at length that it is not: that “This is my body” can and should be understood as a statement of real predication—​that is to say, of Identity—​based on a tectonic shift. The issue, then, is whether Identity and Representation rule one another out or whether they can coexist, and here the answer is clear. It is in fact very common for a single mapping to be characterized by multiple vital relations at once. Vital relations are not mutually exclusive, and their coexistence within a single mapping is more the norm than the exception. The mapping between me and my college self, for example, is one not only of Identity but also of Change: the past “me” has become the current “me.” It also includes the vital relations of Space and Time, since the current “me” lives in a different state than the old “me” and about twenty years separate us. The Representation relation, too, can be included in such multiply related mappings. If I say, “John Malkovich plays himself in that movie,” I am prompting my hearer to construct both Identity and Representation relations between an entity called John Malkovich in one mental space (the real world) and an entity called John Malkovich in another mental space (the world of the movie). The real-​world actor both represents and is (Identity, which always includes some degree of distinction) the John Malkovich of the movie. Conversely, the John Malkovich of the movie is the same person as the one

176  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence in the real world and is also a fictional representation of him. Cognitively speaking, then, there is no inherent reason why Identity and Representation relations cannot coexist in the same mapping. From the perspective of mental spaces theory, Zwingli’s flat denial that a sign cannot be the thing it signifies is simply untrue. It does contain a kernel of truth, however, since Identity is not the same thing as Uniqueness. Because an Identity mapping can only exist between two distinct entities, we might say that an entity cannot be the sign of itself and also be itself without distinction. But it can be the sign of another entity that is distinguishable from, yet also stands in an Identity relationship with, the original entity. Thus, the representation and identity motifs can coexist: the eucharistic elements can legitimately be said to represent the body and blood of Christ and to be the body and blood of Christ. Fauconnier and Turner’s theory of mental spaces cannot, of course, prove that the two motifs of representation and identity are both apt. But it can show that there is no logical contradiction in thinking them so. Given the fact that representation does not rule out identity, and given the ancient and extensive use of both identity and representation motifs in the historical repertoire, I believe an ecumenical theology of eucharistic presence can and must assert both that the eucharistic bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ and that the eucharistic bread and wine are the symbols (or signs, figures, antitypes, etc.) of the body and blood of Christ. In holding together the identity and representation motifs, such a theology would fulfill Hunsinger’s call to his own Reformed tradition to “retain their traditional view that the eucharistic sign is indeed a sign, but . . . stretch to adopt the position that the sign, without ceasing to be a sign, also becomes primarily—​in the Word and by the Spirit—​the reality that is signified.”33

6.4  Revisiting the polysemy networks from Chapter 5 Thinking in terms of both vital relations, Identity and Representation, also permits a more nuanced understanding of the relationships among the various senses of “body of Christ” and “blood of Christ” explored in Chapter 5.34 As I argued there, these terms are polysemous. They are radial networks in which each sense can truly be said to be a full member of the category without being identical with the other senses. They occupy the ambiguous territory between monosemy and homosemy, so that it can be legitimate both to say

Representation  177 that there is only one meaning of “body of Christ” and to say that there are many. Thus, the eucharistic body of Christ is conceptually distinct from the ecclesial body of Christ and the historic body of Christ, yet all three can truly be said to be the body of Christ—​of which, in a paradox analogous to that of Trinitarian theology, there is nonetheless only one. Drawing upon Fauconnier and Turner’s theory of mental spaces, mappings, and vital relations, we can now treat each sense as an individual mental space and characterize the relationships among the various “body of Christ” and “blood of Christ” entities populating those spaces as Identity, Representation, or both. In Figure 6.2, solid lines stand for Identity relations and dotted lines for Representation relations. The eucharistic body of Christ is linked to the central, underspecified sense of “body of Christ” by both, as are the ecclesial and historic body of Christ. Each can be said both to be the body of Christ and to be a symbol of the body of Christ. Meanwhile, the eucharistic body of Christ is not linked by Identity to the ecclesial or historic bodies of Christ—​but it is linked to them by Representation. The eucharistic body of Christ, the ecclesial body of Christ, and the historic body of Christ are all symbols of one another. All this is true also for the blood of Christ, except that there is no specific entity for “blood of Christ” in the ecclesial space as there are in the eucharistic, central, and historic spaces. Historic Body of Christ Blood of Christ

Body of Christ Blood of Christ

Body of Christ Blood of Christ

Eucharistic

(central sense, underspecified)

Body of Christ

Ecclesial

Figure 6.2.  jesus’s body and blood: Identity and Representation relations

178  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence Is this, then, meant as a decisive diagram of the nature of Jesus Christ’s body and blood? Certainly not. It is a risky business to draw diagrams where God is concerned. The whole thrust of this book is to argue that theological words should be understood not as objective mirrors of reality but as tools meant to provoke creative blends in hearers’ and readers’ minds: blends that will be apt to reality as it is lived in God’s world by human-​bodied beings. The same is true of a diagram. This is not a diagram of the objective nature of Christ’s body and blood but a diagram of an array of mental spaces by means of which human beings might appropriately think about Christ’s body and blood—​an array, I argue, that is grounded in scripture, faithful to the breadth of Christian tradition, and apt for Christians to love, worship, and follow Jesus with.

6.5  Conclusions The motif of representation is a venerable one, dating back even farther in the Christian tradition than those of change, containment, and the conduit. Like those motifs, representation is not derived directly from scripture; rather, it is a way of interpreting the Synoptic/​Pauline blend that highlights the fact that it is a blend and the material quality of the elements that serve as anchors for it. It affirms the relationship between those elements and the body and blood of Christ while holding them in clear distinction from one another. An exclusive dependence on representation at the expense of other motifs can tend to exaggerate that distinction, moving toward the signum nudum end of the spectrum. In reaction against this possibility, Christians in some traditions have rejected the representation motif altogether. But neither of these extremes is necessary. Identity and Representation are not mutually exclusive. They are different, but potentially complementary, ways of interpreting the relationship between res and sacramentum by decompressing the Uniqueness that holds between them in the blend.

Notes 1. William R. Crockett, Eucharist, Symbol of Transformation (New York: Pueblo, 1989), 236. 2. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy, 2nd ed. (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973), 140.

Representation  179 3. Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith 86 (4.13), in La foi orthodoxe 45–​100, ed. B. Kotter, trans. P. Ledrux and G.-​M. de Durand, Sources chrétiennes 540 (Paris: Cerf, 2011), 212; ET Darwell Stone, A History of the Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), 1:146. 4. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 3.60.1, for a classic formulation. 5. Eine klare Unterrichtung vom Nachtmahl Christi (1526), in Z 4:794; ET On the Lord’s Supper, in Huldrych Zwingli and Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli and Bullinger, trans. G. W. Bromiley, Library of Christian Classics 24 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953), 188. 6. John McKenna writes that post-​Reformation Roman Catholicism, in its emphasis on causality and transformation, tended “to look outside the symbol for a way of establishing the reality of the Eucharist”: Become What You Receive: A Systematic Study of the Eucharist (Chicago: Hillenbrand Books, 2012), 180. On the Lutheran side, theology and practice tended to be pushed in the opposite direction, moving in many places at least temporarily closer to Calvinist or Zwinglian views of the elements. See Frank C. Senn, Christian Liturgy: Catholic and Evangelical (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1997), 528–​48; Paul H. Jones, Christ’s Eucharistic Presence: A History of the Doctrine, American University Studies 157 (New York: P. Lang, 1994), 172; Stone, History, 2:634–​39. 7. McKenna, Become What You Receive, 16. 8. Odo Casel, The Mystery of Christian Worship (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1962); Karl Rahner, “The Theology of the Symbol,” in Theological Investigations, trans. Kevin Smyth, vol. 4 (Baltimore, MD: Helicon Press, 1966), 221–​52; Karl Rahner, “What Is a Sacrament?,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 14 (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), 135–​48; Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God, trans. Paul Barrett, Mark Schoof, and Lawrence Bright (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963); Edward Schillebeeckx, “Transubstantiation, Transfinalization, Transignification,” in Living Bread, Saving Cup: Readings on the Eucharist, ed. R. Kevin Seasoltz (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1982), 175–​89; Aidan Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology (New York: Pueblo, 1984); David Power, Unsearchable Riches: The Symbolic Nature of Liturgy (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1994); Louis-​Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1993); Susan Ross, Extravagant Affections: A Feminist Sacramental Theology (New York: Continuum, 1998); Gordon W. Lathrop, Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993); Don E. Saliers, Worship as Theology: Foretaste of Glory Divine (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1994); Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010). 9. Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 135–​51; Thomas Hopko, The Orthodox Faith, vol. 2 (Syosset, NY: Orthodox Church in America, 1972), 35–​37. John Meyendorff is reluctant: Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes, 2nd ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1979), 201–​6. 10. Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, Faith and Order Paper 111 (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1982), Eucharist II.B.13.Comm.

180  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence 11. Against Marcion 4.40, in Tertullian, Contre Marcion: Tome IV (Livre IV), ed. Claudio Moreschini, trans. René Braun, Sources Chrétiennes 456 (Paris: Cerf, 2001), 498. For commentary on Tertullian’s use of the term, see Victor Saxer, “Figura corporis et sanguinis Domini: une formule eucharistique des premiers siècles chez Tertullien, Hippolyte et Ambroise,” Rivista di archeologia cristiana 47 (1971): 65–​89; Enrico Mazza, The Celebration of the Eucharist: The Origin of the Rite and the Development of Its Interpretation (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), 118–​21. 12. On the Sacraments 4.21, in Ambrose of Milan, Des sacrements; Des mystères; L’Explication du symbole, ed. Bernard Botte, 2nd ed., Sources chrétiennes 25 bis (Paris: Cerf, 1961), 114; see also Enrico Mazza, The Origins of the Eucharistic Prayer (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995), 248. 13. Mazza, The Origins of the Eucharistic Prayer, 248. 14. Cyril, Mystagogical Catecheses 4.3, 5.20, in Catéchèses Mystagogiques, ed. Auguste Piédagnel, reprint of 2nd ed., Sources Chrétiennes, 126 bis (Paris: Cerf, 2004), 136, 170. Gregory of Nazianzus, Orations 8.18, in Discours 6–​12, ed. Marie-​Ange Calvet-​ Sebasti, Sources chrétiennes 405 (Paris: Cerf, 1995), 286. Apostolic Constitutions 7.25.4, in Marcel Metzger, ed., Les Constitutions Apostoliques, Sources Chrétiennes 336 (Paris: Cerf, 1987), 54. 15. Maxwell E. Johnson, The Prayers of Sarapion of Thmuis: A Literary, Liturgical and Theological Analysis, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 249 (Rome: Pontificio Istituto Orientale, 1995), 48. Some of these sources might be interpreted as referring to the elements prior to consecration: for example, Sarapion’s two uses of ὁμοίωμα occur before the epiclesis, while figura in Ambrose’s version of the Roman Canon comes before the institution narrative. However, such interpretations presume a later understanding in which a particular moment in the eucharistic prayer (whether epiclesis or institution) is consecratory—​an understanding that cannot be attributed to these early prayers in their own time. Meanwhile, other sources such as Cyril and Gregory of Nazianzus clearly refer to consecrated elements. 16. Eusebius, σύμβολον: Ecclesiastical History 10.3.3, in Eusebius of Caesarea, Histoire ecclésiastique: Livres VIII–​X; et les martyrs en Palestine, ed. Gustave Bardy, Sources chrétiennes 55 (Paris: Cerf, 1958), 80; Proof of the Gospel 1.10, in PG 22:89D. Eusebius, both σύμβολον and εἰκών: Proof of the Gospel 8.1, in PG 22:593D, 596A. Elsewhere Eusebius speaks deprecatingly of the sacrifices of the first covenant as “symbols and icons, but ones which do not contain the truth itself ” (σύμβολα καὶ εἰκόνας, ἀλλ᾿ οὐκ αὐτὴν ἀλήθειαν περιέχοντα); Proof of the Gospel 1.10, in PG 22:88C. An occurrence of σύμβολον that would be even earlier than Tertullian’s figura if accepted as referring to eucharistic wine is Clement of Alexandria’s remark in the Paedagogos (c. 198) that scripture calls wine “the μυστικὸν . . . σύμβολον of holy blood”: 2.2, in Clementis Alexandrini Paedagogus, ed. M. Markovich, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 61 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 85. In context, however, this seems more an allegorical reference to wine in general (cf. Gen. 49:11). 17. Figura: Expositions of the Psalms 3.1, in Enarrationes in Psalmos I–​L, ed. Eligius Dekkers and Johannes Fraipont, Corpus Christianorum 38 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1956), 8. Signum: Against Adimantus, in PL 42:144. Sacramentum: Letter 98.9, in Epistulae

Representation  181 LVI–​C, ed. Klaus-​D. Daur, Corpus Christianorum 31A (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2005), 233. See also Augustine’s definition of a sacramentum as a signum that has to do with divine things: Letter 138.7, in Epistulae CI–​CXXXIX, ed. Klaus-​D. Daur, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 31B (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009), 278. 18. E.g., Charles S. Peirce, “Signs,” in Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic, ed. James Hoopes (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 239–​40; Rahner, “The Theology of the Symbol”; Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 53–​78; Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 111–​28. 19. Priscila Farias and João Queiroz, “On Diagrams for Peirce’s 10, 28, and 66 Classes of Signs,” Semiotica 147 (November 2003): 165–​84. 20. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 195; see Edwin Hutchins, “Material Anchors for Conceptual Blends,” Journal of Pragmatics 37, no. 10 (October 1, 2005): 1555–​77. Here I am following Fauconnier and Turner’s more expansive understanding of “material anchors,” which includes more arbitrary symbols such as written letters and spoken sounds, rather than Hutchins’s more restrictive one. Hutchins prefers to reserve the term for objects whose physical structure is integral to the content of the blend, but he acknowledges that “a word can be seen as a material anchor for a conceptual blend” even if this is “the weakest type of material anchor” (1572). 21. Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 195–​98. In societies without mechanical clocks, other physical entities, such as the shadow of a sundial or the sun itself moving across successive portions of the sky, have been part of similar blends. 22. For “image” metaphor as including sound, smell, and kinesthetic sensations, see George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 444–​46. Even a seemingly arbitrary sound–​meaning pairing can become entrenched to such an extent as to take on iconic qualities. For example, as Benjamin Bergen points out, the English sound gl is disproportionately associated with the semantic domains of light and vision (“glisten,” “glimmer,” “gleam,” “glitter,” “glow,” etc.): “The Psychological Reality of Phonaesthemes,” Language 80, no. 2 (2004): 290–​311. 23. See Section 3.1, “Nonmetaphorical and metaphorical blends,” 70–71. 24. Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 149–​54. 25. Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 151. 26. See Section 4.2, 112–13. 27. See the similar diagrams for “Ann is the boss of the daughter of Max” and “Prayer is the echo of the darkness of the soul” in Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 155, 157. 28. The name of this frame is taken from FrameNet (https://​framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/​, accessed February 20, 2021). For clarity, I have adapted the names of the roles; FrameNet calls them Entity and Phenomenon, respectively. 29. See Section 3.1, “Nonmetaphorical and metaphorical blends,” 70–71. 30. On vital relations, see Section 3.1, “Vital relations,” 73–76, and Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 92–​102. Note that I have followed Fauconnier and Turner’s

182  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence convention of capitalizing the names of vital relations. The motifs I call “identity” and “representation” are based on mappings characterized by the two vital relations that share their names. I use initial capitals when referring narrowly to the vital relation and lower case when referring to the overall motif. 31. See Gilles Fauconnier, Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 154–​55. 32. Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 95. 33. George Hunsinger, The Eucharist and Ecumenism: Let Us Keep the Feast (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 92. 34. See Sections 5.3 and 5.4, 153–63.

7 Change The eucharistic bread and wine are changed into (or become) the body and blood of Christ. The eucharistic bread and wine are bread and wine, but not ordinary bread and wine.

Human beings exist in space. We take up space, navigate our way through space, and interact with other objects in space. We live, move, and have our being in a three-​dimensional environment. The hippocampus, a brain structure we share with other mammals, appears to provide us with an innate capacity to make mental maps of this environment.1 Without such a sense of spatial relations it would be impossible to orient ourselves to even the simplest actions in the world. Because space is such a basic component of human experience, spatial metaphors are pervasive in thought and language. Many primary metaphors draw from spatial concepts in the source domain: intimacy is closeness, similarity is closeness, states are locations, categories are bounded regions, change is motion, and so on. As we have seen, almost every culture uses spatial metaphors to understand time.2 Given the importance of spatial imagery to human thinking, it is no surprise that the language of spatial relations is pervasive in eucharistic theology. Bread and wine may be said to be changed into Christ’s body and blood, drawing upon the primary metaphor change is motion. Or Christ’s body and blood may be said to be in the bread and wine, or under them, using language of containment. Alternately, Christ may be envisioned not as on the altar but as far away, in heaven, separated from believers by a vast distance that can nonetheless be bridged by the Holy Spirit. In these three very different pictures, there is one common element: believers, in receiving

Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence. Stephen R. Shaver, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197580806.003.0007

184  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence communion, are put in direct contact with Jesus Christ and receive the life of his body and blood into themselves. These three spatial motifs of change, containment, and conduit are important secondary motifs of eucharistic presence in the ecumenical repertoire. Unlike identity, but like representation, they are not drawn directly from scripture; rather, they have emerged out of the experience and reflection of generations of Christians celebrating the eucharistic feast. Nor can these spatial motifs be said to be true proprie. They are not “literally” true in the narrow sense in which cognitive linguistics understands that word, since they are self-​evidently not verifiable by direct sensory experience; nor would any Christian theologians argue that they are. Nor are they true by means of a tectonic shift in which old words acquire new primary meanings, as is identity. They remain at the level of first-​order figurative language. Yet this does not make them “merely figurative.” Rather, they prompt for rich, productive blends whose entailments have real-​world consequences. Sometimes these entailments are compatible; sometimes they clash. All of them are irreducible to translation or explanation. They stand alongside one another as different, yet potentially complementary, ways of speaking about the mystery of Christ’s presence in the holy meal. Treating spatial metaphors as complementary rather than contradictory may go far toward resolving Reformation-​era disputes in which differences in spatial imagery have often played a significant role. James F. White has pointed out that the various parties to the Reformation all tended to think of the eucharist as a “spatial” mystery rather than a “time mystery,” focusing on the localization of Christ’s presence rather than on the anamnesis of past saving events and the eschatological consummation to come.3 While White is surely right that a twentieth-​century shift toward emphasizing time over space in the eucharist has helped to ease ecumenical tensions and reveal common ground, this does not make spatial imagery unimportant or outmoded. Given the foundational role of image schemas in human thinking, spatial metaphors are likely always to play a major role in the ways Christians understand the eucharistic encounter with Jesus Christ.4 Rather than seek to deemphasize them, then, I wish to examine them appreciatively for what they have to offer. Understood as part of a shared repertoire rather than as mutually exclusive, these three motifs highlight a rich variety of aspects of the eucharistic mystery. The first of these is the change motif. Change is a basic area of human experience—​and one understood largely by means of primary metaphors.

Change  185 Probably the single most important of these is one we first encountered in Chapter 2: change is motion. Consider how English speakers tend to speak of change: (1) a. The traffic light changed from red to green. b. I’m changing the time of our meeting from 2:00 to 3:00. c. The caterpillar changed into a beautiful butterfly.

Spatial prepositions like from, to, and into reveal the primary metaphor at work. In light of the common primary metaphors time is space and states are locations, change over time is readily conceptualized as a movement through space from one location or bounded region to another. Not only spatial prepositions but also verbs of motion are often used to describe change: (2) a. He’s gone from struggling to being the best student in the class. b. A wicked sorcerer turned me into a frog. c. The news that she had won the Oscar sent her into ecstasy.

Other primary metaphors for change also exist. Given that making artifacts out of raw materials is an important activity in every human society, it is not surprising that another important metaphor is changing is being made: (3) a. His hard work made him the best student in the class. b. The news that she had won the Oscar made her ecstatic.

For English speakers these two metaphors can actually combine, so that verbs of making can be used together with directional prepositions: (4) a. You’ve made me into a better person. b. Coach fashioned me into a real ballplayer. c. Basic training made a soldier out of me.

These metaphors are so prevalent in ordinary language as to be almost unavoidable. To be sure, there are ways to speak of change without using such metaphors. We can say “The traffic light was red, then it was green” or “He was struggling earlier, but now he’s the best student in the class.” Yet avoiding

186  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence such metaphors for more than a sentence or two at a time takes conscious effort and results in a dramatic impoverishment of one’s repertoire for talking—​ and thinking—​about change. The very word “change,” in English, demands the use of directional prepositions like “from” and “to” if the initial and final states involved are to be specified without awkward circumlocutions (“I’m changing the time of our meeting so that, instead of 2:00, we will now meet at 3:00”). English does have one word for change that does not demand such prepositions: “become,” as in “The caterpillar became a beautiful butterfly.” Even here, though, the root “come” betrays the influence of change is motion in its etymological origins. The Latin and Greek languages in which so much of Christian eucharistic theology has developed have their own ways of invoking primary metaphors for change. Both have close equivalents to the English “become,” which similarly do not demand prepositions but which rely, at least in their origins, on primary metaphors: the Latin fio (changing is being made) and the Greek γίνομαι (changing is being born, a metaphor not seen in English). Change imagery is extremely prominent in Christian theologies of eucharistic presence. Indeed, one of the most basic corollaries of the motif of identity is the idea that the bread and wine of the eucharist undergo a change of some kind. If it is accepted that, when they are placed on the holy table, the elements are ordinary bread and wine, and that, later, they are no longer ordinary bread and wine but the body and blood of Christ, then it is a natural implication that some sort of change has taken place.5 It is not surprising, then, that language of conversion and change became prominent in Christian discourse on the eucharist by about the fourth century, arising first in the Greek-​speaking East with theologians like Cyril of Jerusalem and John Chrysostom and slightly later in the Latin-​speaking West with Ambrose of Milan.6 The change motif remains central to Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox understandings of the eucharist today. It has historically been more difficult, though not altogether impossible, for Lutheran and Reformed theologians to endorse. Much of these theologians’ reluctance has stemmed from a desire to maintain the affirmation that the eucharistic bread and wine are indeed still bread and wine—​an affirmation with which Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox theologians, in turn, have had more difficulty. In this chapter I propose that both affirmations belong in the ecumenical repertoire, and that theological resources from within each of these traditions exist that may help facilitate their acceptance.

Change  187

7.1  Development and variations of the change motif From about the fourth century onward, many ancient Christian authors use the language of change with regard to the eucharistic elements. Sometimes this language uses the Greek or Latin equivalents of the English word “become”: (5) a. “The bread and the wine of the Eucharist before the invocation of the holy and adorable Trinity were simple bread and wine, but when the invocation has taken place the bread becomes (γίνεται) the body of Christ and the wine the blood of Christ.” (Cyril of Jerusalem)7 b. “Let your holy word come upon this bread in order that the bread may become (γένηται) body of the Word, and upon this cup in order that the cup may become (γένηται) blood of truth.” (Anaphora of Sarapion of Thmuis)8 c. “It isn’t every loaf of bread, you see, but the one receiving Christ’s blessing, that becomes (fit) the body of Christ.” (Augustine of Hippo)9 d. “Be pleased, O God, we pray, to bless, acknowledge, and approve this offering . . . so that it may become for us (ut fiat nobis) the Body and Blood of your most beloved son, our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Roman Canon)10

Because fio/​fieri is also the passive form of the verb facio/​facere (“make”), and because English shares the metaphor changing is being made with Latin, each of these Latin examples could also be translated using “be made” instead of “become.” In contrast, since English lacks changing is being born, translating the Greek examples of γίνομαι as “be born” would not be helpful; to a speaker of ancient Greek, however, the verbs are the same. In addition to fio and γίνομαι, changing is being made appears in Latin texts through verbs like formo (“make, form”) and in Greek texts through ποιέω (“make, do”): (6) a. “Make (ποίησον) this bread the precious body of Christ . . . and that which is in this cup the precious blood of Christ.” (Anaphora of John Chrysostom)11 b. “The conformation (conformatio) of the sacrament, that the oblation which is offered to God . . . may be conformed (conformetur) to the body and blood of Christ.” (Isidore of Seville)12

188  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence c. “Since it is customary for people to eat bread and drink water and wine, he has linked with them his Godhead, and has made (πεποίηκεν) them his body and blood.” (John of Damascus)13

However, the most important primary metaphor for change in both Latin and Greek writings on the eucharist is change is motion. Ordinary words for change in both languages are commonly used with directional prepositions like “from” (de or ex with the ablative case, ἐκ with the genitive) and “into” (in with accusative, εἰς with accusative). In the following sentences, Ambrose combines change is motion with changing is being made in a manner very similar to English examples like “You’ve made me into a better person”: (7) a. “This bread is bread before the sacramental words; when the consecration has taken place, from being bread it becomes (de pane fit) the flesh of Christ.” b. “You have learned that from bread the body of Christ comes to be (quod ex pane corpus fiat Christi), and that wine and water are placed in the cup but become blood (fit sanguis) by the consecration of the heavenly word.”14

Many words used for eucharistic change in Greek and Latin are based on verbs of motion, such as muto (“move”), verto (“turn”), βάλλω (“throw”), and ἵστημι (“set up”). These and other verbs are often combined with the directional prefixes trans-​ and μετά, both of which mean something like “beyond.” The result is a veritable cornucopia of change is motion expressions: (8) a. μεταβάλλω: “We beseech the merciful God to send the Holy Ghost upon the oblations that he may make the bread the body of Christ and the wine the blood of Christ; for whatever the Holy Ghost has touched is surely consecrated and changed (μεταβέβληται).” (Cyril of Jerusalem)15 b.  μεταποιέω, μεταστοιχείω: “The bread which is consecrated by the word of God is transmade (μεταποιεῖσθαι) into the body of God the Word. . . . He transelements (μεταστοιχειῶσας) the nature of the visible things to that immortal thing by virtue of the consecration.” (Gregory of Nyssa)16

Change  189 c.  μεθίστημι: “That we may not be stupefied by seeing flesh and blood lying on the holy Tables of the churches, God, condescending to our infirmities, sends the power of life into the gifts that are set forth and transfers (μεθίστησιν) them into the efficacy of His own flesh.” (Cyril of Alexandria)17 d.  muto: “If the word of Elijah had such power as to bring down fire from heaven, shall not the word of Christ have power to change the nature (ut species mutet) of the elements? . . . Shall not the word of Christ, which was able to make out of nothing that which was not, be able to change (mutare) things which already are into what they were not?” (Ambrose of Milan)18 e.  converto: “I told you of the word of Christ, which works so as to be able to change and convert (mutare et convertere) the appointed forms of nature.” (Ambrose)19 f.  transfiguro: “As often as we receive the signs, which by the mystery of the holy prayer are transfigured (transfigurantur) into flesh and blood, we proclaim the Lord’s death.” (Ambrose)20 g.  transeo: “Although [the bread and wine] are visible, nevertheless, sanctified through the Holy Spirit, they pass over (transeunt) into the sacrament of the divine body.” (Isidore of Seville)21 h.  transformo: “May there descend, O Lord, the fulness of thy power, Godhead, goodness, might, blessing, and glory upon this bread and upon this cup, that there may be to us a valid eucharist in the transformation (transformatione) of the body and blood of the Lord.” (from a Gallican eucharistic prayer)22 i.  transfusio, transfero: “Pour the Spirit of sanctification upon these creatures laid on Thine altar, that by the transfusion (transfusione) of the heavenly and invisible Sacrament this bread may be changed (mutatur) into the flesh, and the cup transferred (translatus) into the blood.” (from a Gallican eucharistic prayer)23

Language of change and conversion remained central in both West and East into the Middle Ages, becoming more conventionalized over time. In the West, the ninth-​century commentator Amalar of Metz writes that the nature of bread and wine is “turned” (verti) into the nature of Christ’s body and blood.24 At about the same time Paschasius Radbertus writes that the substance of bread and wine is “effectively and inwardly changed” (commutatur) into Christ’s body and blood.25 His fellow monk at Corbie,

190  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence Ratramnus, while insisting that the faithful do not eat Christ’s flesh in a corporeal way, can still write of “that bread which by the ministry of the priest is made (conficitur) the body of Christ” and of “bread and wine, turned (conversa) into the substance of [Christ’s] body and blood.”26 Later, in the eleventh century, Berengar’s adversary Lanfranc of Canterbury uses both mutari/​commutari27 and converti/​conversio,28 along with transferri,29 transire,30 and simply fieri,31 and Berengar’s second recantation of 1079 asserts that the bread and wine are “substantially converted” (substantialiter converti).32 By the thirteenth century conversio had become something of a technical term, such that in about 1201 or 1202 Peter of Capua could use it as an overarching category within which three different theories of eucharistic change might all be located: Concerning the conversion (conversione) there is a threefold opinion. Some say that there is no change (mutatio) here, but the substance of bread and the substance of wine remaining, at the recitation of the words the flesh and blood of Christ begin to be under the same species. . . . Thus wherever something about a conversion (conversio) is read, it ought to be understood thus: that where first was only bread and wine, the flesh and blood of Christ also begin to be. Others say that the substance of bread and wine are completely annihilated and the same species remaining, the flesh and blood of Christ alone begin to be here and in a similar way they explain that conversion (conversio). We say, and the commentators assert, that the substance of bread itself is converted (convertitur) into the true flesh of Christ which was born of the Virgin, and the substance of wine itself into the true blood, and with the prior species remaining, the flesh and blood of Christ begin to be here. Nor is it an article of faith to believe that conversion (conversio) takes place this way or that but only to believe that the body of Christ is on the altar at the recitation of those words.33

Not long afterward, in 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council gave official sanction to the use of a relatively new trans-​ word: transubstantio, which seems first to have been coined in the eleventh century.34 The Council did not define the term’s meaning, and through the fifteenth century it could still be used to describe either the second or the third of the alternatives Peter of Capua had described.35

Change  191 If muto and converto were the most prominent forms of change is motion language in the West, μεταβάλλω came to be the most important term for the Greek-​speaking East. The eighth-​century theologian John of Damascus, the eleventh-​century Bulgarian archbishop Theophylact, the thirteenth-​century patriarch Germanus II, and the fourteenth-​century metropolitan Nicholas Cabasilas all use it.36 Over time the increasing popularity of the word transubstantio/​transubstantiatio in the West had an influence in the East as well, giving rise to the parallel term μετουσίωσις. The 1672 Confession of Dositheus describes the elements as being “changed (μεταβάλλεσθαι), transubstantiated (μετουσιοῦσθαι), transmade (μεταποιεῖσθαι), and reordered (μεταρρυθμίζεσθαι).”37 While using the terminology of “substance” (ουσία) and “accident” (συμβεβηκός), which had become standard in the West, it goes on to insist that “by the word Transubstantiation (μετουσίωσις) the manner in which the bread and wine are transmade (μεταποιοῦνται) into the body and blood of the Lord is not explained; for this is altogether incomprehensible and is impossible except for God Himself; and attempts at explanation bring Christians to folly and error. But the word denotes that the bread and the wine after the consecration are changed (μεταβάλλεται) into the body and blood of the Lord not figuratively or by way of image or by superabundant grace or by the communication or presence of the Deity alone of the Only Begotten.”38

7.2  Lutheran and Reformed responses to the change motif While the language of eucharistic conversion has remained essential for both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches up to the present, the traditions of the Reformation have been more cautious about its use, largely in reaction against the fully developed Latin doctrine of transubstantiation and out of concern for safeguarding the insistence that the consecrated elements are still truly bread and wine. In the Babylonian Captivity, Martin Luther attacked the doctrine of transubstantiation using Christ’s incarnation as an analogy: In order for the divine nature to dwell in him bodily, it is not necessary for the human nature to be transubstantiated and the divine nature contained under the accidents of the divine nature. . . . In like manner, it is not necessary in the sacrament that the bread and wine be transubstantiated and that

192  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence Christ be contained under their accidents in order that the real body and real blood may be present. But both remain there at the same time, and it is truly said: “This bread is my body; this wine is my blood,” and vice versa.39

The 1577 Solid Declaration of the Formula of Concord (authorized Latin translation 1584) seems to reject the concept of change entirely when it insists on “the sacramental union of the unchanged (unverwandelten /​ non mutatae) essence of the bread and of the body of Christ.”40 This strong emphasis on the simple identification of the elements of bread and wine with Christ’s body and blood, avoiding language that would suggest any kind of change in substance, would remain particularly characteristic of the Lutheran tradition. While theologians of the Reformed traditions have shared some of this reticence, some have been more willing to accept the legitimacy of at least some change language provided the assertion that the elements remain bread and wine is maintained. John Calvin demonstrates this perspective: I admit that some of the old writers used the term “conversion” (conversion /​ conversion) sometimes, not because they intended to wipe out the substance in the outward sign, but to teach that the bread dedicated to the mystery is far different from common bread, and is now something else. . . . For because they say that in consecration a secret conversion takes place, so that there is now something other than bread and wine, as I have just observed, they do not mean by this that the elements have been annihilated, but rather that they now have to be considered of a different class from common foods intended solely to feed the stomach, since in them is set forth the spiritual food and drink of the soul. This we do not deny. . . . If they mean that it is made (fieri /​est fait) something which it was not before, I agree.41

The English reformer Nicholas Ridley, testifying to his faith before his execution, was similarly willing to use the language of change and of “mutation”: In the sacrament is a certain change in that that bread, which was before common bread, is now made a lively presentation of Christ’s body, and not only a figure but effectually representeth his body; that even as the mortal body was nourished by that visible bread, so is the internal soul fed with the heavenly food of Christ’s body, which the eyes of faith see, as the bodily eyes see only bread. Such a sacramental mutation I grant to be in the bread and

Change  193 wine, which truly is no small change, but such a change as no mortal man can make, but only the omnipotency of Christ’s word.42

A century later, John Cosin would even go as far as to write that “no Protestant altogether denies the conversion or change (conversionem . . . sive transmutationem) of the bread into the body of Christ, and similarly of the wine into His blood. For they know and acknowledge that in the Eucharist by virtue of the words and blessing of Christ the bread is wholly changed (immutatum) in condition and use and office; that is, of ordinary and common, it becomes our mystical and sacramental food.”43 Even in the Lutheran tradition there are hints that the idea of change can be acceptable as long as the elements are acknowledged still to be bread and wine. In the Defense of the Augsburg Confession, Philip Melanchthon endorses Eastern language of change to buttress his arguments for the real presence: We have ascertained that not only the Roman Church affirms the bodily presence of Christ, but the Greek Church also both now believes, and formerly believed, the same. For the canon of the Mass among them testifies to this, in which the priest clearly prays that the bread may be changed and become the very body of Christ (ut mutato pane ipsum corpus Christi fiat). And Vulgarius [i.e., Theophylact of Bulgaria], who seems to us to be not a silly writer, says distinctly that bread is not a mere figure, but is truly changed into flesh (in carnem mutari).44

Largely on the basis of this quote from Melanchthon, recent Lutheran ecumenical discussions have been willing to endorse the concept of change, to the extent that the Lutheran-​Roman Catholic Joint Commission’s 1970 agreed statement The Eucharist says: The ecumenical discussion has shown that these two positions must no longer be regarded as opposed in a way that leads to separation. The Lutheran tradition agrees with the Catholic tradition that the consecrated elements do not simply remain bread and wine but by the power of the creative Word are bestowed as the body and blood of Christ. In this sense it also could occasionally speak, as does the Greek tradition, of a “change.” [Here a footnote refers to the passage from Melanchthon’s Defense.] The concept of transsubstantiation [sic] for its part is intended as a confession

194  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence and preservation of the mystery character of the Eucharistic presence; it is not intended as an explanation of how this change occurs.45

Perhaps the Reformation traditions might see a precedent in the words of Ratramnus, with his willingness to speak of change while insisting both on the continuing reality of the bread and wine and on their identification as the body and blood of Christ: How is that called the body of Christ, in which no change (permutatio) is perceived to have been made? . . . If then no change has taken place (nihil est hic permutatum), it is not different from what it was before. Yet it is something different, since the bread has been made the body, and the wine the blood, of Christ. . . . Since they confess that they are the body and blood of Christ, and that this could not be except by a change (commutatione) being made for the better, and since this change (commutatio) is made not corporally but spiritually, it must be said that it has been made by way of figure (figurate), since under the veil of bodily bread and bodily wine the spiritual body and spiritual blood exist. Not that two things different from one another exist, namely body and spirit, but the one and the same thing is in one respect the nature (species) of bread and wine, and in another respect the body and blood of Christ.46

7.3  The eucharistic gifts as bread and wine Are the consecrated elements of the eucharist still bread and wine? The change motif, in itself, does not require a specific answer to this question. It is true that some changes take away a previous identity: the beautiful butterfly, for example, is no longer a caterpillar. But there are also changes that retain it: I am still myself even after Coach has fashioned me into a ballplayer. Certain strands of Christian eucharistic theology have suggested that the consecrated elements are no longer bread and wine. The twelfth-​century bishop Odo of Cambrai, for example, could write of the consecrated elements, “Now it is flesh, it is no longer bread” and “It is perceived by the senses to be wine; and it is not.”47 Western reformers would see this tendency as a threat to the sign-​character of the eucharist. As Calvin put it, “The nature of the sacrament requires that the material bread remain as visible sign of the body.”48 To be sure, no Christian tradition argues that the eucharistic

Change  195 elements are illusory rather than materially real. The question is, rather, whether they are bread and wine in the proper sense. Certainly both scripture and many ancient authors refer to them as bread and wine. Paul writes, “Whenever you eat this loaf (ἄρτος) and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord, until he comes. So whoever eats the loaf and drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will be liable for the body and the blood of the Lord. Examine yourself, and thus eat from the loaf and drink from the cup.”49 Justin Martyr refers to “the eucharistized bread and wine and water,” which “is called among us ‘eucharist’ ” and which “is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.”50 Irenaeus asks rhetorically how heretics who do not believe Christ to be the Word of God can believe that “the bread over which the thanks have been given is the body of their Lord and the cup is his blood.”51 By the fourth century, however, Cyril of Jerusalem—​a major figure in the increasing prominence of the change motif—​is able to assert that the consecrated gifts are no longer, strictly speaking, bread and wine: “The seeming (φαινόμενος) bread is not bread, even though it is sensible to the taste, but the body of Christ, and the seeming (φαινόμενος) wine is not wine, even though the taste will have it so, but the blood of Christ.”52 Many writers over the centuries have been able to use the motif of change without denying the ongoing identification of the gifts as bread and wine. In one passage the fifth-​century writer Theodoret of Cyrrhus holds together the motifs of change, identity, and representation while still affirming that the elements retain their own nature as bread and wine: Even after the consecration the mystic symbols are not deprived of their own nature; they remain in their previous substance [and] figure and form; they are visible and tangible as they were before. But they are regarded as what they are become (ἐγένετο), and believed so to be, and are worshipped as being (ὄντα) those things which they are believed to be. Compare then the image (εἰκόνα) with the archetype (τῷ ἀρχετύπῳ), and you will see the likeness (ὁμοιότητα), for the type (τὸν τύπον) must be like the reality (τῇ ἀληθείᾳ).53

In the Latin-​speaking West, Theodoret’s near-​contemporary Pope Gelasius can make a very similar statement: The substance or nature of the bread and wine does not cease to exist (non desinit substantia vel natura panis et vini). And certainly the image and

196  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence likeness (imago et similitudo) of the body and blood of Christ are celebrated in the action of the mysteries. . . . Just as they pass over into this, namely, into the divine substance by the working of the Holy Spirit, yet remaining in the peculiarity of their nature; so they demonstrate, by remaining in the proper sense (proprie) those things which they are, that the principal mystery itself, whose efficacy and power they truly represent to us, remains the one Christ, integral and true.54

But Cyril’s suggestion that the change in the gifts meant they were no longer bread and wine would recur over time. The Canons of Pseudo-​ Athanasius, an Egyptian document from perhaps the sixth century, write that “the bread and wine, before they are raised upon the altar, are bread and wine, yet, after that they are raised upon the altar, are no more bread and wine but the life-​giving body of God and blood.”55 In the West, Paschasius Radbertus would write in the ninth century that “although the figure of bread and wine is there, after the consecration we must believe that there is nothing at all other than the flesh and blood of Christ.”56 In formalizing a definition of the doctrine of transubstantiation, the Council of Trent would speak of “that wonderful and singular change of the whole substance of the bread into the body and the whole substance of the wine into the blood, the appearances only (dumtaxat speciebus) of bread and wine remaining.”57 This suggests a certain ambiguity: can the species properly be called bread and wine, or are they merely appearances cloaking the reality of body and blood? The Catechism of Trent does not completely commit itself but seems to treat the use of the terms “bread” and “wine” as what it would consider figurative: “It is not surprising if after the consecration it is also called bread; for the Eucharist has customarily been called by this name, both because it has the appearance (speciem habeat) of bread, and because it still retains the natural quality of feeding and nourishing the body which is proper to bread.”58 Shortly afterward, the early Jesuit Alfonso Salmerón is less cautious, writing flatly that “it is bread no longer (panis amplius non sit)” and explaining Paul’s use of the term “bread” on the grounds that “it is customary in Scripture that, when things are changed, their former names are preserved (mutatis rebus, nomina pristina illarum asseruari).”59 In the East, the 1672 Confession of Dositheus adopts terminology similar to that of Trent: “After the consecration of the bread and the wine the

Change  197 substance (οὐσία) of the bread and the wine no longer remains, but there is the body itself and the blood of the Lord in the species and form (εἴδει καὶ τύπῳ) of bread and wine; that is to say, under the accidents of the bread.”60 In 1838 the Russian Orthodox Church accepted this confession but altered the text to remove the terminology of substance and accident, asserting instead more categorically that “the very bread and wine (самый хлеб и вино) no longer remain.”61 As we have seen, this denial was strongly unacceptable to the traditions of the Reformation. For John Calvin it constituted a rejection of both the plain language of scripture and the sign value of the eucharist: “The truth is sufficiently evident to refute the absurdity. I leave alone the numberless passages from both the Scriptures and the ancient Fathers where the sacrament is called bread. I only say that the nature of the sacrament requires that the material bread remain as visible sign of the body.”62 Similarly, the Church of England’s Articles of Religion claim that the Roman doctrine “overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament.”63 For his part, Martin Luther argued that “it is real bread and real wine, in which Christ’s real flesh and real blood are present in no other way and to no less a degree than the others assert them to be by their accidents.”64 I have argued at great length that the Reformed tradition should move past its historic reluctance to assert that the eucharistic elements are, properly, the body and blood of Christ, and that the tectonic process and a cognitive account of polysemy offer a realistic path for this affirmation. I consider it equally necessary for those strands of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions that have been reluctant to assert that the elements are, properly speaking, bread and wine to move past this reluctance as well. This need not, however, mean abandoning these churches’ commitment to a strong theology of eucharistic change, nor even, in the case of Rome, to the particular combination of change and containment models known as transubstantiation. As Theodoret and Gelasius show, these motifs can stand alongside one another. It simply means forgoing flat denials like those of Salmerón and the Russian adaptation of Dositheus and affirming, rather, that the elements may be called bread and wine in the proper sense. One precedent for this affirmation, in Rome’s case, lies in the Roman Canon itself, which refers to the bread after the institution narrative (typically treated as consecratory in the Western tradition) as “the holy bread of eternal life” (panem sanctum vitae aeternae).

198  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence In the Latin tradition there have been two major ways of justifying the application of the names “bread” and “wine” to the consecrated gifts. Thomas Aquinas neatly outlines these two possibilities here: After the consecration there are two ways in which we can speak of “bread” in this sacrament. First, the species hold onto the name of the original substance, as Gregory explains in an Easter sermon. Second, the body of Christ itself can become bread; it is the mystical bread that comes down from heaven. Therefore, when Ambrose says that this bread does not become part of our body, he is taking “bread” in the second sense and his meaning is that the body of Christ is not changed into our body but that it refreshes our soul. He is not talking about bread in the first sense.65

The first argument, which we saw earlier in the Catechism of Trent, is based on the idea that the species have a genuine, ongoing reality to which the name of the original substance can be applied. The second, interestingly, takes advantage of the metaphoric chaining in which the output of the Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor is fed into the Johannine metaphor (as explored in Chapter 3). In the megablend, the eucharistic elements that are the body and blood of Christ can subsequently be identified as the Johannine “food indeed,” “drink indeed,” “bread of life,” and so on. As Paschasius Radbertus puts it, the consecrated bread “is the flesh of Christ and real flesh, and yet is rightly called the living Bread which came down from heaven, flesh indeed by grace but bread by effect, because, as this earthly bread supplies temporal life, so that heavenly Bread affords eternal and heavenly life.”66 For ecumenical purposes, the simple affirmation that the eucharistic bread and wine are bread and wine should suffice to safeguard the legitimate Reformed concern for the plain language of scripture and the sign value of the sacrament. Whether this is justified on the basis that the species are in fact properly bread and wine, on the basis of the double metaphor chain by which the sacrament is heavenly bread and drink indeed, or on some other basis can be left up to the faithful and creative work of theologians within these traditions; it seems to me that these avenues at least present reasonable possibilities. This may be made easier still in light of the fact that all parties agree that the eucharistic bread and wine are not ordinary bread and wine—​an affirmation made consistently across traditions despite great differences in other respects:

Change  199 9. a. “We do not receive these things as common (κοινόν) bread or common drink. But . . . the food which has been eucharistized through a word of prayer which comes from him is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.” (Justin Martyr)67 b. “The bread of the earth, receiving the invocation of God, is no longer common (communis) bread but Eucharist, made up of two things, an earthly and a heavenly.” (Irenaeus of Lyons)68 c. “The bread . . . is up to a certain point common (κοινός) bread; but when the mystery has consecrated it, it both is called and becomes the body of Christ.” (Gregory of Nyssa)69 d. “The Sacrament is bread and wine, but not mere (schlecht, simpliciter) bread or wine, such as are ordinarily served at the table, but bread and wine comprehended in, and connected with, the word of God.” (Martin Luther)70 e. “As to the material, the drink and food are nothing other than wine and bread; but as to the use, it is no common (gemein) bread, but a bread of the Supper and of thanksgiving for the death of Christ. . . . the material of the bread is the same as all bread, but the use and the dignity of the Supper give it such a nobility that it is not like other bread.” (Huldrych Zwingli)71 f. “We do not strip the ordinance of Christ of its reality, nor give the name of simple (simplicem) bread to that which has been sanctified for a peculiar use.” (John Calvin)72 g. “It was natural bread, but now no common bread, for it is separated to another use. Because of the use it may be called bread of life.” (Thomas Cranmer)73 h. “This bread and wine, being set apart, and consecrated to this holy use by God’s appointment, are not now common bread and wine, but sacramentally the body and blood of Christ.” (English Puritan Richard Baxter)74

7.4  Conclusions The language of change and conversion has been a major part of the Christian repertoire for speaking of eucharistic presence since at least the fourth century. It is central in Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, and it is at least minimally acceptable in Reformed and Lutheran traditions as long

200  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence as the elements are also still affirmed to be bread and wine. What has not always been clearly acknowledged is that this language of change is necessarily metaphorical—​not because it is not true, but because, as cognitive linguistics has shown, an enormous proportion of all human vocabulary about change is metaphorical. In order to conceptualize change, we rely extensively on primary metaphors like changing is being made, changing is being born, and, most prominent of all, change is motion. Our most “literal” words for change, such as “become,” fio, and γίνομαι, are derived from these metaphors, and ordinary statements about change are full of verbs of motion and directional prefixes and prepositions. With this in mind, then, it should be possible today for a cognitively informed ecumenical theology of eucharistic presence to make this affirmation: The eucharistic bread and wine are changed into (or become) the body and blood of Christ. Meanwhile, an important corollary to the change motif is the affirmation of the ongoing reality of the elements of bread and wine. This is insisted upon by the Lutheran and Reformed traditions, and while it has been difficult at times for the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, theological resources exist that may allow these traditions also to affirm that The eucharistic bread and wine are bread and wine—​provided it is also agreed that they are not ordinary bread and wine.

Notes 1. Vyvyan Evans, “The Perceptual Basis of Spatial Representation,” in Language, Cognition and Space: The State of the Art and New Directions, ed. Vyvyan Evans and Paul A. Chilton, Advances in Cognitive Linguistics (London: Equinox, 2010), 40. 2. See Section 2.1, “Metaphors and cross-​cultural variation,” 29–30. 3. James F. White, “Where the Reformation Was Wrong on Worship,” The Christian Century 99, no. 33 (October 27, 1982): 1075; cf. Introduction to Christian Worship, 3rd ed. (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2000), 255–​57. 4. Moreover, even focusing on the anamnetic and eschatological dimensions of the eucharist is likely to rely heavily on spatial imagery, given its prominent role in our thinking about time. 5. I prescind here from the question of precisely when this change might take place, which has traditionally been answered differently by Eastern and Western theologians. A consensus in my own Anglican tradition today holds that “the whole eucharistic prayer should be seen as consecratory”: Principle 6, from the Principles and Recommendations of the fifth International Anglican Liturgical Conference (held at Dublin in 1995), in David Holeton, ed., Our Thanks and Praise: The Eucharist in Anglicanism Today (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1998), 262.

Change  201 6. See William R. Crockett, Eucharist, Symbol of Transformation (New York: Pueblo, 1989), 96–​98; Paul H. Jones, Christ’s Eucharistic Presence: A History of the Doctrine, American University Studies 157 (New York: P. Lang, 1994), 50–​51; Edward J. Kilmartin, The Eucharist in the West: History and Theology, ed. Robert J. Daly (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1998), 14–​23. 7. Catechetical Lectures 19.7, in PG 33:1072; ET Darwell Stone, A History of the Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), 1:67. 8. Maxwell E. Johnson, The Prayers of Sarapion of Thmuis: A Literary, Liturgical and Theological Analysis, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 249 (Rome: Pontificio Istituto Orientale, 1995), 48, ET 49. 9. Sermon 234.2, in PL 38:1116; ET Augustine, Sermons (230–​272B) on the Liturgical Seasons, ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Edmund Hill, vol. 3.7, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 1993), 37. 10. Missale Romanum, 3rd typical ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2008), Ordo Missae 88; ET The Roman Missal, 3rd typical ed. (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2011), The Order of Mass 88. 11. Anton Hänggi et al., eds., Prex eucharistica: textus e variis liturgiis antiquioribus selecti, 3rd ed., vol. 1, Spicilegium Friburgense 12 (Freiburg, Switzerland: Universitätsverlag Freiburg Schweiz, 1998), 226; ET R. C. D. Jasper and G. J. Cuming, eds., Prayers of the Eucharist: Early and Reformed, 3rd ed. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990), 133. 12. On Ecclesiastical Offices 1.15.3, in De Ecclesiasticis Officiis, ed. Christopher M. Lawson, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 113 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1989), 17; ET Isidore of Seville: De Ecclesiasticis Officiis, trans. Thomas L. Knoebel, Ancient Christian Writers 61 (New York: Newman Press, 2008), 40. I have altered Knoebel’s “confirmation” to “conformation” to reflect the Latin more closely and to avoid confusion with the rite of confirmation. 13. Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith 86 (4.13), in La foi orthodoxe 45–​100, ed. B. Kotter, trans. P. Ledrux and G.-​M. de Durand, Sources chrétiennes 540 (Paris: Cerf, 2011), 210; ET Stone, History, 1:146, with Stone’s “men” emended to “people.” 14. On the Sacraments 4.14, 19, in Des sacrements; Des mystères; L’Explication du symbole, ed. Bernard Botte, 2nd ed., Sources chrétiennes 25bis (Paris: Cerf, 1961), 108, 112; ET Stone, History, 1:81. 15. Catechetical Lectures 23.7, in PG 33:1113–​16; ET Stone, History, 1:71. Cyril uses ποιήσῃ for “make.” 16. Catechetical Oration 37, in The Catechetical Oration of Gregory of Nyssa, ed. J. H. Srawley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 149, 152; ET Stone, History, 1:72–​73. 17. Commentary on Luke 22.17–​22, in Joseph Reuss, ed., Lukas-​Kommentare aus der griechischen Kirche, Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur 130 (Berlin: Akademie-​Verlag, 1984), 210; ET Stone, History, 1:105. 18. On the Mysteries 9.52, in Ambrose of Milan, Des sacrements; Des mystères; L’Explication du symbole, 186; ET Ambrose of Milan, St. Ambrose: Select Works and Letters, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, trans. H. De Romestin, Nicene and

202  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence Post-​Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church: Second Series 10 (New York: The Christian Literature Company, 1896), 324. 19. On the Sacraments 6.3, in Ambrose of Milan, Des sacrements; Des mystères; L’Explication du symbole, 138; ET mine. 20. On the Faith 4.10.124, in Ambrose of Milan, Sancti Ambrosii Opera Pars Octava: De Fide [Ad Gratianum Augustum], ed. Otto Faller, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 78 (Vienna: Hoelder-​Pichler-​Tempsky, 1962), 201; ET mine. 21. On Ecclesiastical Offices 1.18.4, in De Ecclesiasticis Officiis, 20; ET Isidore of Seville, Isidore of Seville, 42. 22. Mass 4, Collectio, in PL 138:871; ET Stone, History, 1:206. 23. Mass 3, Post-​secreta, in PL 138:869; ET Stone, 1:206. I have altered Stone’s “transformation” and “transformed” to “transfusion” and “transferred,” respectively, to reflect the Latin more closely. 24. On the Liturgy 3.24, in Amalar of Metz, On the Liturgy, ed. Eric Knibbs, vol. 2, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 36 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 168. 25. Paschasius Radbertus, On the Body and Blood of the Lord 8, in De corpore et sanguine Domini; cum appendice Epistola ad Fredugardum, ed. Beda Paulus, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 16 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1969), 42; ET Stone, History, 1:221. 26. Ratramnus, On the Body and Blood of the Lord 9, 30, in De corpore et sanguine Domini: texte original et notice bibliographique, ed. J. N. Bakhuizen van den Brink (Amsterdam: North-​Holland Publishing Company, 1974), 45, 51; ET mine. 27. Lanfranc, On the Body and Blood of the Lord 7, 8, in PL 150:417B, 419A. These and the Lanfranc references that follow are drawn from the list in Lanfranc of Canterbury, On the Body and Blood of the Lord, trans. Mark G. Vaillancourt, The Fathers of the Church: Mediaeval Continuation 10 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 7. 28. Lanfranc, On the Body and Blood of the Lord 4, 9, in PL 150:414B, 420A. 29. Lanfranc, On the Body and Blood of the Lord 6, in PL 150:416A. 30. Lanfranc, On the Body and Blood of the Lord 10, in PL 150:420C. 31. Lanfranc, On the Body and Blood of the Lord 20, in PL 150:438A. 32. Heinrich Denzinger, Peter Hünermann, and Helmut Hoping, eds., Enchiridion Symbolorum Definitionum et Declarationum de Rebus Fidei et Morum, 40th ed. (Freiburg: Herder, 2005), 700. 33. Summa vetustissimae veterum, in Gary Macy, Treasures from the Storeroom: Medieval Religion and the Eucharist (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), 107; ET 83–​84. I have altered the translation to use “conversion” wherever conversio is used. 34. See Joseph Goering, “The Invention of Transubstantiation,” Traditio 46 (1991): 147–​70. 35. See Macy, Treasures from the Storeroom, 84–​85. 36. John of Damascus: Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith 86 (4.13), in La foi orthodoxe 45–​100, 210. Theophylact: Commentary on Mark 14:22–​ 25, in PG 123:649; Commentary on John 6:48–​51, in PG 123:1308. See Stone’s compilation of Theophylact’s terms in History, 157. Germanus II: Mystic Contemplation, in PG

Change  203 98:440. Cabasilas: Commentary on the Divine Liturgy 1.1, 49.16, in Explication de la divine liturgie, trans. Sevrien Salaville, 2nd ed., Sources chrétiennes, 4 bis (Paris: Cerf, 1967), 56, 280. 37. Article 17, in Ernest Julius Kimmel, ed., Monumenta fidei ecclesiae orientalis (Jena: F. Mauke, 1850), 457; ET Stone, History, 1:181. 38. Article 17, in Kimmel, Monumenta fidei ecclesiae orientalis, 461–​62; ET Stone, History, 1:182. 39. De captivitate Babylonica, in WA 6:511–​12; ET Babylonian Captivity, in LW 36:35. 40. 7.35, in Friedrich Bente and W. H. T. Dau, eds., Concordia triglotta: Die symbolischen Bücher der Evangelisch-​lutherischen Kirche /​Triglot Concordia: The Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1921), 982–​85. 41. Institutes 4.17.14, in CO 2:1012–​13, 4:994–​95; ET Battles 2:1375. 42. Stone, History, 2:193; see also Hugh Latimer’s similar statement, Stone, 2:198. 43. Historia Transubstantionis Papalis 4.1, in The Works of the Right Reverend Father in God John Cosin, vol. 4, Library of Anglo-​Catholic Theology 37 (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1851), 46; ET Stone, History, 2:324. 44. Article 10, in Bente and Dau, Concordia triglotta, 246–​47. Note that Justus Jonas’s German translation in the right column of p. 246 omits this language of change. See Hermann Sasse, This Is My Body: Luther’s Contention for the Real Presence in the Sacrament of the Altar (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1959), 169n78. 45. Lutheran/​ Roman Catholic Joint Commission, “The Eucharist,” http://​www. prounione.urbe.it/​dia-​int/​l-​rc/​doc/​e_​l-​rc_​eucharist.html. See also the 1968 statement of the Lutheran-​Catholic Dialogue in the United States, “The Eucharist,” at https://​w ww.usccb.org/​committees/​ecumenical-​interreligious-​affairs/​eucharist, and the same group’s 2015 document “Declaration on the Way: Church, Ministry, and Eucharist,” athttps://​download.elca.org/​ELCA%20Resource%20Repository/​ Declaration_​on_​the_​Way.pdf. All these accessed February 21, 2021. 46. On the Body and Blood of the Lord 12, 13, 16, in Ratramnus, De corpore et sanguine Domini, 45–​47; ET Stone, History, 1:228–​29. I have altered Stone’s “confess that they are the body and blood of God,” based on PL 121:134B, to “confess that they are the body and blood of Christ,” in keeping with Bakhuizen van den Brink’s more recent critical edition. 47. Exposition on the Canon of the Mass, in PL 160:1061D, 1063C; ET Stone, History, 1:263–​64. 48. Petit Traicté de la Saincte Cene, in CO 5:451; ET Short Treatise on the Lord’s Supper, in John Calvin, Theological Treatises, trans. J. K. S. Reid, Library of Christian Classics 22 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), 158. 49. 1 Cor. 11:26–​27, ET mine; see also 10:16–​17. 50. First Apology 65–​66, in Denis Minns and Paul Parvis, eds., Justin, Philosopher and Martyr: Apologies, Oxford Early Christian Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 254–​56; ET 255–​257. 51. Against Heresies 4.18.4, in Irenaeus of Lyon, Contre les hérésies: Livre IV, Tome II, ed. Adelin Rousseau, vol. 2, Sources chrétiennes 100 (Paris: Cerf, 1965), 608; ET mine.

204  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence 52. Mystagogical Catecheses 4.9, in Cyrille de Jérusalem, Catéchèses Mystagogiques, ed. Auguste Piédagnel, reprint of 2nd ed., Sources Chrétiennes, 126 bis (Paris: Cerf, 2004), 144; ET Stone, History, 1:103. 53. Eranistes Dialogue 2, in Theodoret of Cyrus, Eranistes, ed. Gérard H. Ettlinger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 152; ET Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, eds., Nicene and Post-​Nicene Fathers: Second Series, vol. 3 (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1892), 200–​201. 54. Tractate 3: On the Two Natures of Christ, Against Eutyches and Nestorius 14, in Andreas Thiel, Epistolae Romanorum pontificum genuinae et quae ad eos scriptae sunt a S. Hilaro usque ad Pelagium II (Brunsberg: Eduard Peter, 1868), 541–​42; ET Kilmartin, Eucharist in the West, 41–​42. 55. Arabic Canon 7, in The Canons of Athanasius of Alexandria: The Arabic and Coptic Versions, ed. W. E. Crum and Wilhelm Riedel (London: Williams and Norgate, 1904), 14–​15. The Arabic translation is probably from the eleventh century, and so it is possible that this passage is from a later version than the original. 56. On the Body and Blood of the Lord 1, in De corpore et sanguine Domini; cum appendice Epistola ad Fredugardum, 14–​15; ET mine. 57. Council of Trent, Session 13, October 11, 1551, Canones de sanctissimo Eucharistiae sacramento, Canons on the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist, Canon 2, in H. J. Schroeder, ed., Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (St. Louis, MO: B. Herder, 1950), 356; ET 79. 58. Catechism of the Council of Trent 2.4.40, in Catechismus ex decreto Concilii Tridentini: ad parochos (Ratisbon: G. J. Manz, 1905), 178; ET mine. 59. Commentarii in Evangelicam historiam, et in Acta Apostolorum, vol. 1 (Cologne: Antonium Hierat. and Joan. Gymni, 1602), 206; ET Stone, History, 2:359–​60. 60. Article 17, in Kimmel, Monumenta fidei ecclesiae orientalis, 457; ET Stone, History, 1:181. 61. See Athelstan Riley, ed., Birkbeck and the Russian Church (London: SPCK, 1917), 355; Stone, History, 1:185. 62. Petit Traicté de la Saincte Cene, in CO 5:450–​51; ET Short Treatise on the Holy Supper, in Theological Treatises, 158. 63. Article 28, in Brian Cummings, ed., The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 681. 64. De captivitate Babylonica, in WA 6:508; ET Babylonian Captivity, in LW 36:29. Elsewhere Luther writes, “The gospel calls the sacrament bread. It says that the bread is the body of Christ. We shall stand by that. We are sufficiently certain, contrary to all the dreams of the sophists, that what the gospel calls bread is bread.” Von Anbeten des Sakraments, in WA 11:441; ET On the Adoration, LW 36:288. 65. Summa Theologiae 3a.77.6, in Blackfriars 58:150; ET 151. 66. On the Body and Blood of the Lord 16, in De corpore et sanguine Domini; cum appendice Epistola ad Fredugardum, 96–​97; ET Stone, History, 1:219–​20. 67. First Apology 66.2, in Minns and Parvis, Apologies, 256; ET 257. 68. Against Heresies 4.18.5, in Contre les hérésies: Livre IV, Tome II, 2:610–​12; ET Stone, History, 1:35.

Change  205 69. Sermon on the Baptism of Christ, in PG 46:581C; ET Stone, History, 1:68. 70. Large Catechism 5.8, in Bente and Dau, Concordia triglotta, 754–​55. 71. Sermon at Bern, January 19, 1528, in Z 6.1:481; ET mine. 72. Ultima admonitio ad Westphalum, in CO 9:244; ET Last Admonition to Joachim Westphal, in Tracts and Treatises on the Doctrine and Worship of the Church, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1958), 485. 73. From a December 1548 debate in the House of Lords; quoted in Stone, History, 2:134. 74. The Reformation of the Liturgy (1661), in Jasper and Cuming, Prayers of the Eucharist, 274.

8 Containment The body and blood of Christ are in (or under) the eucharistic bread and wine.

Containers are everywhere. We store things in boxes, drink from cups, and carry things around in bags. We live in containers called buildings that shield our bodies from the elements. Our bodies themselves are containers, with bone and muscle on the inside, skin on the outside, and breath, food, drink, and waste moving in and out. Very early in life we learn how containers function: experimental evidence shows that three-​month-​olds are already aware both “that containers must have an opening if something is to go inside and that if the container moves so does what is inside it.”1 And metaphorical containers are pervasive in language and thought. For example, one of the eucharistic prayers in the Episcopal Church’s prayer book proclaims, “In [Jesus], you have brought us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.”2 Here we see Jesus portrayed as a container, a kind of vessel or vehicle inside which God’s people are contained. We also see three sets of paired regions (error and truth, sin and righteousness, death and life) that are themselves containers. As Jesus moves out of each negative region and into its positive counterpart, the people within him are safely conveyed there as well. George Lakoff and Rafael Núñez have offered a basic definition of this image schema: “The Container schema has three parts: an Interior, a Boundary, and an Exterior. This structure forms a gestalt, in the sense that the parts make no sense without the whole. There is no Interior without a Boundary and an Exterior, no Exterior without a Boundary and an Interior, and no Boundary without sides, in this case an Inside and Outside.”3 This gestalt structure has two entailments that are of particular interest for theologies of eucharistic presence: transitivity and concealment. Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence. Stephen R. Shaver, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197580806.003.0008

Containment  207 Transitivity occurs whenever one container is placed inside another: if A is in B, and B is in C, then by default A must be in C. As Mark Johnson puts it, “Consider what follows if your car keys are in your hand and you then place your hand in your pocket. Via the transitive logic of containment, the car keys end up in your pocket.”4 This is not a matter of abstract reasoning or formal logic: as Lakoff and Núnez put it, “We don’t have to perform deductive operations to draw these conclusions. They are self-​evident simply from the images.”5 Cognitive linguists suggest that this basic sensorimotor experience underlies the property of transitivity in formal logic, such as in set theory.6 Concealment is the simple fact that a container, unless it is made of a transparent material, hides its contents from sight. Infants learn as early as two and a half to three months that objects disappear from view when put into containers and reappear when taken out.7 This requires a sense of object permanence—​the understanding that an object can continue to exist even when it is not seen.8 Both transitivity and concealment have featured prominently in Christian discourse about the eucharist, which has often made use of container language such as “in” and “under” to describe the relationship between the elements of bread and wine and Christ’s body and blood. If Jesus’s body and blood—​or, metonymically, simply Jesus himself—​are present “in” the elements, then by the first entailment, transitivity, anyone who eats and drinks the elements is receiving the presence of Jesus into his or her own body. If A (Jesus’s presence) is in B (the elements), and B (the elements) is in C (the believer), then the presence of Jesus in the believer is assured. A postcommunion prayer from the Gothic Missal expresses this vividly: “May your body, Lord, which we have received and your cup which we have drunk remain in our inmost parts (hereat in uisceribus nostris). Grant, Almighty God, that no stain may remain where pure and holy sacraments have entered (intrauerunt).”9 The second entailment, concealment, suggests that believers should not be surprised by the fact that the presence of Jesus cannot be sensed. By the logic of the container schema, the visible and tangible elements serve as a sort of covering that hides their contents from view. We see this idea clearly expressed by Ratramnus: That cannot be called a mystery in which there is nothing hidden, nothing removed from the bodily senses, nothing concealed under any veil (velamine). But that bread which by the ministry of the priest is made

208  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence the body of Christ, shows one thing outwardly (exterius) to the human senses, and proclaims another thing inwardly (interius) to the minds of the faithful. . . . Likewise the wine, which by the consecration of the priest is made the Sacrament of the blood of Christ, shows one thing on the surface (superficietenus) and contains (continet) another thing within.10

Like the motifs of representation, change, and conduit, the containment motif is not drawn directly from scripture. Rather, it has arisen from centuries of Christian reflection on eucharistic faith and practice. The entailments of transitivity and concealment offer attractive ways to express how believers, in receiving the eucharistic bread and wine, are receiving Christ’s body and blood, although that body and blood cannot be sensed. To be sure, certain Christian traditions have had significant objections to the containment motif, typically arising from concerns either about its overliteralization or about a potential incompatibility between it and the identity motif. Because a multiply metaphorical approach to eucharistic presence can help assuage these concerns, I propose that the affirmation The body and blood of Christ are in (or under) the eucharistic bread and wine deserves its place in the ecumenical repertoire.

8.1  Development and variations of the containment motif There are brief glimpses of container imagery in Christian texts as early as the fourth century. In one place Ambrose of Milan writes, “Christ is in this sacrament (in illo sacramento Christus est), because it is the body of Christ.”11 Cyril of Jerusalem (or perhaps his successor John) employs the entailment of transitivity when he tells his neophytes, “In the figure (τύπῳ) of bread is given to thee the body, and in the figure of wine is given to thee the blood, in order that by partaking of the body and blood of Christ thou mayest become of one body and of one blood with Him (σύσσωμος και σύναιμος αὐτοῦ). For so also do we become Christbearers (χριστοφόροι), since his body and blood are distributed throughout our members.”12 Ephrem of Edessa, a Syrian contemporary of Ambrose and Cyril, includes some striking container imagery in his hymnody: “Dwell in bread /​and in those who eat it. In hidden and revealed [form] /​let your church see You as [does] the one who bore You.”13 Here we clearly see an emphasis on both transitivity (“Dwell in bread /​and in those who eat it”) and concealment (“hidden and revealed”). Similar emphases can be found elsewhere

Containment  209 in Ephrem’s hymns: “In your bread is hidden the Spirit which cannot be eaten. /​In your wine dwells the fire that cannot be drunk. /​Spirit in your bread, fire in your wine: /​It is a distinct wonder that our lips have received! . . . /​The fire of compassion has come down and dwelt within the bread. . . . /​Your fire, O our Lord, we have eaten in your offering.”14 The Latin-​speaking West would eventually come to make heavy use of containment language. Ratramnus’s language of “inward” and “outward” is echoed at the end of the tenth century by the English abbot Aelfric and the French theologian Gerbert of Aurillac (later Pope Sylvester II), and shortly afterward by Gerbert’s pupil Fulbert of Chartres.15 In the twelfth century Peter Lombard, the tremendously influential Master of the Sentences, used the word “contain” (continere) to distinguish between the res that is united to the sacramentum and the res tantum, which is only signified: “The res that is contained (contenta) and signified is the flesh of Christ which he took from the Virgin, and the blood which he shed for us. And the res that is signified and not contained (non contenta) is the unity of the Church.”16 Continere would become something of a standard term in medieval Western theology: for example, the Fourth Lateran Council used it in declaring that Christ’s “body and blood are truly contained (continentur) in the sacrament of the altar under the forms (sub speciebus) of bread and wine.”17 The Council’s statement seems to be a fairly early example of the use of the preposition sub (“under”) together with the term species, which is perhaps best translated as “appearance” (compare specio, “look at”).18 From an image-​ schematic point of view, “under” has similar connotations to “in,” with slight differences. It still implies a container, but one that is inverted so as to cover its contents.19 The use of “under,” then, can imply the same two entailments as “in” (transitivity and concealment) but tends to emphasize the latter more strongly. We can already see this emphasis on “concealment under” in Ratramnus’s quote, with its reference to a veil. Elsewhere Ratramnus also writes that “under the veil (sub velamento) of corporeal bread and corporeal wine the spiritual body and spiritual blood of Christ exist.”20 Similarly, Thomas Aquinas’s famous hymn Adoro te devote says to Christ, “Under these figures you truly lie hidden” (sub his figuris vere latitas). The combination of continere, in, and sub would be officially enshrined for post-​Reformation Roman Catholicism by the Council of Trent: After the consecration of bread and wine, our Lord Jesus Christ, true God and true man, is truly, really and substantially contained (contineri) in

210  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence (in) the august sacrament of the holy Eucharist under the appearance (sub specie) of those sensible things.21

8.2  Post-​Reformation responses to the containment motif While Martin Luther criticized the doctrine of transubstantiation, his understanding of the real presence retained the Western tradition of heavy reliance on container imagery. For Luther it was not the “accidents” of bread and wine but real bread and real wine that formed the container in which Christ was to be found: “Why could not Christ include his body in the substance of the bread (corpus suum intra substantiam panis continere) just as well as in the accidents? In red-​hot iron, for instance, the two substances, fire and iron, are so mingled that every part is both iron and fire. Why is it not even more possible that the body of Christ be contained in every part of the substance of the bread?”22 Luther’s Large Catechism includes the following question and response: Now, what is the Sacrament of the Altar? Answer: It is the real body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ in and under (in et sub /​ in und unter) the bread and wine.23

Huldrych Zwingli criticized Luther and his followers’ use of container imagery, accusing them of contradicting themselves by claiming sometimes that the bread was Christ’s body and at other times that Christ’s body was in or under the bread.24 For Zwingli, though, the problem with Luther’s container language went beyond inconsistency. It implied a local presence of Christ that Zwingli found not only crude and demeaning to Christ’s glory but also incompatible with the fact that Christ’s human body had ascended into heaven and could not be present in more than one place. Zwingli therefore challenged Luther: “We know that you would show him in the bread, but Scripture does not support you. Prove, therefore, by unequivocal passages of Scripture that he is in the bread, as we do that he is in heaven. . . . Christ, by virtue of his humanity, sits at the right hand of the Father, circumscribed just as angels and people are circumscribed.”25 The conflict between Luther’s ubiquity and Zwingli’s local presence in heaven was a real one. Still, as early as the Babylonian Captivity, Luther

Containment  211 had already suggested that he understood container language as a secondary and illustrative way of expanding on identity language, which was fundamental.26 In response to Zwingli’s criticism, Luther made this principle explicit: If they wish to press us so closely . . . then we are ready and willing to retract the expression and say purely and simply, “This is my body,” as the words stand. Let them do likewise, and agree on the text. Although no Christian will constrain us that in all our sermons and discourses, whenever we are speaking about the Supper, we must be limited to saying, “This is my body,” provided that in the administration of the Supper we let the text remain as it is and in its place. On other occasions and in other expressions there will surely be no objection to our saying, “Under the bread,” or, “in the bread is Christ’s body,” or, “Christ’s body is truly in the Supper,” else we should not be permitted to speak about our faith at all.27

As Lutheran-​Swiss dialogues continued, it became clear that container language remained a sticking point. Martin Bucer’s 1530 Nine Propositions Concerning the Holy Eucharist explicitly rejected not only language like contineri and in but also, pointedly, Luther’s image of iron and fire: “We deny that the body of Christ is locally in the bread (localiter esse in pane), as if one were to imagine that the body is so contained (contineri) in the bread as wine is in a cup or as flame is in glowing iron.”28 Bucer was happy to use container language with regard to the Supper as an overall event (“We affirm that the body of Christ is really in the supper (in coena), and that Christ actually present feeds us with his real body and his real blood”)29 but ruled out its use in connection with the elements of bread and wine themselves. Subsequent Reformed writers would maintain this position. For John Calvin container imagery for the elements was an insult to Christ’s omnipotence and glory because it made the elements of bread and wine a sort of prison, putting divine freedom under human control: “We must, to shut out all carnal fancies, raise our hearts on high to heaven, not thinking that our Lord Jesus Christ is so abased as to be enclosed under any corruptible elements (enclos soubz quelques elemens corruptibles).”30 A suspicion of container language has remained characteristic of the Reformed tradition of eucharistic theology. The influential twentieth-​ century theologian Thomas F. Torrance criticized it in terms reminiscent of

212  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence Calvin’s, arguing that “the adoption of Aristotle’s container view of space” contributed to an “objectivization” of the sacrament:31 This was a concept of space, involving the interdependence and inseparability of the container and what it contains, which was essentially quantitative and volumetric, and as such, not only inevitably gave rise to concepts of a static and rigid character, but forced upon the Roman Church highly artificial explanations as to how the body and blood of Christ are really present through the bread and wine which are circumscribed in their place on the altar or in the mouth without being confined to them, while they are contained in the whole host and each part of the host and in a thousand hosts at the same time.32

Cognitively speaking, it is difficult to imagine how human beings might conceptualize space without relying on the container schema. However, Torrance’s concerns about container imagery seem to be connected chiefly with its overliteralization. From the point of view of a multiply metaphorical theology of eucharistic presence, perhaps it might be possible for Reformed Christians to accept the use of container language as one metaphor in the ecumenical repertoire. This may be made easier by noting that even among Reformed writers there are small hints here and there of its use. Writing toward the end of his life, in his irenic 1561 treatise The Best Method of Obtaining Concord, Calvin himself is willing (with great caution) to accept the use of the word “under.” While maintaining his rejection of ubiquity, he writes, “This being agreed, it will be legitimate to admit forms of speech, by whose ambiguity some are perplexed: that the body of Christ is given us under the bread or with the bread (sub pane vel cum pane), because it is not a substantial union of corruptible food with the flesh of Christ that is denoted, but sacramental conjunction.”33 Thirty-​six years later, Richard Hooker—​while making his own preference for a basically receptionist understanding clear—​is able in a flight of rhetorical eloquence to proclaim, “This bread hath in it more than the substance which our eyes behold.”34 His slightly later compatriot Lancelot Andrewes, in a Christmas sermon, uses container imagery in likening the eucharistic elements to the manger (or “cratch”) of Christ: “Christ in the Sacrament is not altogether unlike Christ in the cratch. To the cratch we may well liken the husk or outward symbols of it. Outwardly it seems little worth but it is rich of contents, as was the crib this day with Christ in it. For what are they,

Containment  213 but infirma et egena elementa, “weak and poor elements” of themselves? yet in them find we Christ.”35 While these two English theologians both contributed to the development of a distinctively Anglican self-​understanding, each still understood himself to be situated firmly within the Reformed tradition, yet was able to use containment language of the elements at least in poetic or illustrative ways. Modern free-​church writers whose overall theology of eucharistic presence is generally memorialist are also occasionally willing—​particularly in nonpolemical contexts—​to speak of Christ’s presence “in” the eucharistic elements. The twenty-​first-​century Pentecostal theologian Daniel Tomberlin has written that “the Spirit makes Christ really present in the bread and cup” and that, given their high understanding of God’s direct miraculous intervention in the material world, “it seems logical that Pentecostals would be willing to affirm the presence of Christ and the Spirit in the bread and cup of the holy meal.”36 His fellow Pentecostal Chris E. W. Green writes of “the presence of the risen Jesus who the Spirit makes in that moment bodily present for them, with, in, and through the thereby-​transfigured bread and wine.”37 In using container language of the elements while referring to both Jesus and the Spirit, these two Pentecostal theologians are strikingly reminiscent of the fourth-​century Syrian imagery of Ephrem. Ecumenical acceptance of container language may also be helped by noting that writers in both the Roman Catholic and Lutheran traditions have historically nuanced their use of it in ways that emphasize its metaphoric, nonliteral (or perhaps more-​than-​literal) quality. Aquinas, whose work went on long after his death to become the dominant paradigm within post-​Tridentine Roman Catholicism, devotes an entire article of the Summa Theologiae to the question of whether the body of Christ “is in this sacrament as in a place (sicut in loco)” and answers it negatively.38 He rejects the idea of its being contained definitive (i.e., in a way that puts limits on the location of its activity) or circumscriptive (i.e., in a way that surrounds it with another material), or of its being present localiter (locally).39 For Aquinas, while container language is apt to describe Christ’s presence in the elements, that containment is also different from any ordinary physical kind of containment. Writing nearly seven centuries later as a popularizer of this tradition, the Roman Catholic bishop John Cuthbert Hedley puts it this way: “Our Lord’s body is not touched, or circumscribed, or bounded by the species. Its parts have no point of contact in any point with the Host. . . . The species do not contain it as a stone is contained

214  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence by the clay in which is embedded, or a man’s body by its surroundings—​ but in a way quite special to the Holy Eucharist, viz., as substance with no dimensive relation.”40 Martin Luther, who is usually critical of scholastic theology, refers approvingly to the scholastic distinction among ways of being present definitive, circumscriptive, and repletive in building up his own argument for the ubiquity of Christ’s human presence.41 However, his preference remains to avoid technical language in favor of vivid examples drawn from everyday life. In his 1527 pamphlet That These Words of Christ, “This is my Body,” etc., Still Stand Firm Against the Fanatics, Luther rejects an overliteral interpretation of container imagery: “We . . . are not so foolish as to believe that Christ’s body is in the bread in a crude visible manner, like bread in a basket or wine in a cup. . . . God has more ways by which to have one object in another than this crude mode which they set forth, as wine is in a cask, bread in a box, or money in a pocket.”42 He then puts forth a varied array of examples that are clearly and richly metaphorical: Levi was said by the author of Hebrews to be in Abraham’s loins; the things people see are said to be in their eyes; a reflection is said to be in a mirror; a tree, in its seed; God, in our hearts. “Who will doubt, then, that God has many more modes which he does not tell us about, where one thing is in another, or two things are present at the same time in one place?”43 The Eastern Orthodox tradition has made less use of container language than have the Roman Catholic and Lutheran traditions, tending to rely instead on motifs of identity and conversion. Early in the twentieth century, the Greek theologian Constantine Dyobouniotes criticized his contemporary Chrestos Androutsos for having been too strongly influenced by the Western terminology of transubstantiation. Androutsos had defined the eucharist as “that divinely instituted sacrament in which Jesus Christ is present actually and really under the forms of bread and wine,”44 to which Dyobouniotes rejoined: “[Our Lord] said: ‘Take, eat, this is my body,’ not ‘under this is my body.’ . . . The Eastern Church does not recognize that the substance of the bread and wine is changed into the Body and Blood of Christ while the accidents remain, under which the Body and Blood of Christ exist, but simply says that the bread and wine are changed into the Body and Blood of Christ by the descent of the Holy Spirit.”45 On the other hand, “under the form” does appear in both the 1643 Catechism of Peter Mogila (ὑποκάτω εἰς τὴν θεωρίαν) and the 1823 Longer Catechism of Philaret of Moscow (под видом).46

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8.3  Transubstantiation: a special combination of change and containment Up to this point, I have intentionally avoided giving much specific attention to the doctrine of transubstantiation. This is because doing justice to this most characteristic Roman Catholic model of eucharistic presence requires taking both motifs of change and containment into account. Now, having explored both in some detail, we are in a position to delve into the way the concept of transubstantiation brings these motifs together. The word “transubstantiation” did not originally refer to a single formalized doctrine but could be used to encompass a fairly wide variety of models of eucharistic change.47 Shortly before the Fourth Lateran Council officially used the term “transubstantiation” for the first time, Peter of Capua considered three possible models at least potentially orthodox: one, in which the “substance” (substantia) of bread and that of wine remained along with those of Christ’s body and blood; a second, in which the substances of bread and wine went out of existence and were replaced by those of Christ’s body and blood; and a third, in which the substances of bread and wine were converted into those of Christ’s body and blood.48 In order to avoid the anachronistic use of terminology that would later acquire more specialized meanings, Gary Macy has suggested the names “coexistence,” “substitution,” and “transmutation” for these three models, respectively.49 The first would be deemed unacceptable by most theologians by about the fourteenth century; the second and third would each find adherents up through the time of the Council of Trent, and Trent itself would avoid taking sides between them, although the increasingly normative status accorded to Thomas Aquinas would eventually make the third the de facto standard for Roman Catholic catechesis. What is noteworthy for our purposes here is the fact that Peter relies on the terminology of substantia to describe all three of these potential models. While the use of substantia in Western eucharistic theology was certainly furthered by the twelfth-​century spread of Aristotelian philosophical terminology, it can already be seen in the eleventh-​century writings of Lanfranc of Canterbury and Guitmund of Aversa as well as in the second (1079) recantation extracted from their nemesis Berengar.50 The word has a rich and complex history in Roman philosophy; it is often, but not always, used to translate the Greek οὐσία (“being, essence”).51 Unlike οὐσία, however, which is a form of the verb “be,” substantia is originally derived from substo, “stand under”—​an etymology that hints at the embodied metaphor at work.

216  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence From the point of view of cognitive linguistics, the concept of substantia can be seen as an example of what Lakoff and Johnson call the “Folk Theory of Essences.”52 This is a common way of modeling the universe, particularly predominant in Greek philosophy and its descendants, in which each thing that exists is understood to “have” a basic nature or essence. This essence is a metaphorical reification (ideas are objects) of the fundamental category to which a thing is considered to belong. Typically this essence or nature is imagined as being located “inside” the thing in question, invoking a container image schema and drawing upon another primary metaphor: essential is central. As Eve Sweetser writes, this metaphor is directly linked to basic realities of human embodiment: As Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999) and Johnson (1987) have argued, our bodies are inherently containers and are experienced as such. Not only do we eat and drink, urinate and excrete (filling and emptying our digestive tract), but when cut we bleed, emptying out an even more essential liquid. Further, our essential and vulnerable internal organs (brain, heart, lungs, etc.) are contained and protected by skin and flesh, and also by containers of bone: the skull, the rib-​cage and the pelvis. The fingers and toes are unprotected, and although important are not essential to the continuing life of the whole body; nails and hair are at the far bodily periphery, and inessential to life. We thus experience our bodies both as containers of essential bodily fluids and internal organs, and as constituting a gradual cline from most central to most peripheral parts. . . . As our internal organs and other essential body parts are generally central to our physical self, we have a basis for a metaphor essential is central.53

Sweetser goes on to note the importance of these container and center-​ periphery schemas to common understandings of human identity. We speak of our “inner” selves, our “core” values, our “deeply held” principles. We can act one way “on the outside” while feeling another way “deep down inside”; we can “let someone in on” our thoughts or “wall them out.”54 The idea of the self is, in fact, an example of the Folk Theory of Essences applied to the human person: each person “has” a self, the most important, unchanging aspect of that person’s identity, which is often imagined as contained inside the person (“who I really am inside”).55 The concept of transubstantiation as it developed in Western eucharistic theology can be understood as bringing together the Folk Theory of Essences

Containment  217 with the primary metaphors essential is central and change is motion. By means of the Folk Theory of Essences, a substance is something an object can “have”; the object is a container, and the substance is inside, at the center (essential is central). Since the substance is inside, it cannot be seen or otherwise perceived, but the object does have more changeable, less essential qualities (species) that reside on the outside. Before the eucharistic elements are consecrated, then, they “have” the substances of bread and wine within the species of bread and wine (Figure 8.1). External Qualities of Bread

Bread

External Qualities of Wine

Wine

Figure 8.1.  Substance inside species

The differences among Peter of Capua’s three models lie in precisely what kind of change is imagined as taking place with respect to these image schemas. In coexistence (or, as it would later be called, consubstantiation), the substances of Christ’s body and blood are added, respectively, to those of bread and wine. Here the metaphor change is motion can be applied to Christ’s body and blood—​for example, they might be said to “arrive” or to “come into” the bread and wine—​but not to the substances of bread and wine, which remain where they are, as in Figure 8.2. In substitution (or, as it would later be called, annihilation), the image-​ schematic picture is quite different. Here change is motion applies to both the substances of bread and wine and those of Christ’s body and blood. The former “go away,” “pass out” of existence, or are “annihilated” (ad nihil, “to nothing”), while the latter again “arrive,” as in Figure 8.3.

218  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence Before Consecration

At Consecration

After Consecration

External Qualities of Bread

External Qualities of Bread

External Qualities of Bread

Bread

Bread

Body of Christ Bread

Body of Christ

External Qualities of Wine Blood of Christ

External Qualities of Wine

External Qualities of Wine

Wine

Wine

Wine Blood of Christ

Figure 8.2. Coexistence

Before Consecration

At Consecration

After Consecration

External Qualities of Bread

External Qualities of Bread

External Qualities of Bread

Body of Christ Bread

Bread

External Qualities of Wine

Body of Christ

External Qualities of Wine

External Qualities of Wine

Wine

Blood of Christ

Blood of Christ Wine

Figure 8.3. Substitution

Finally, in the model Macy calls transmutation, which would eventually become the standard description of transubstantiation, change is motion again applies to both the substances of bread and wine and to those of Christ’s body and blood. Only in this third model, however, can the former be said to change “into” the latter. Meanwhile, the latter can be said to come “from” the

Containment  219 former, as in Ambrose’s sentence “From being bread it becomes the flesh of Christ” (Figure 8.4).56 Before Consecration External Qualities of Bread

Bread

External Qualities of Wine

Wine

At Consecration External Qualities of Bread

Bread

Body of Christ

External Qualities of Wine

Wine

Blood of Christ

After Consecration External Qualities of Bread

Body of Christ

External Qualities of Wine

Blood of Christ

Figure 8.4. Transmutation

In both the second and third models the end result is the same: the “interior” substance, essence, or true identity of what is present on the altar after consecration is the body and blood of Christ, while the “exterior” qualities or species are those of bread and wine. It is worth noting that many Reformed critiques of transubstantiation have equated it with annihilation. John Calvin describes transubstantiation as the belief “that a conversion of the bread into the body takes place; not that the body is properly made from the bread, but because Christ, to hide himself under the figure, annihilates its substance (substantiam in nihilum redigit /​ aneantit la substance).”57 Similarly, John Cosin writes, “The papists hold it an article of faith that in the Eucharist the substance of bread and wine is annihilated (panis et vini substantia annihilatur), and that the body and blood of Christ takes its place.”58 While it is true that the substitution model preferred by thinkers like Duns Scotus was never formally rejected, Roman Catholic thinking since the Reformation has tended toward the transmutation model preferred by Aquinas, and so it might perhaps be possible to argue that what the Reformers condemn is not altogether identical to what the Roman Catholic Church teaches. From a cognitive standpoint, the question of whether transubstantiation is “literal” simply does not arise. Literality exists on a spectrum, not as a binary

220  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence either/​or property, and the only statements that can really be said to be almost completely literal are those that describe things directly amenable to sensorimotor experience. The ideas at work in the concept of transubstantiation are not literal in this sense, nor should acknowledging this be problematic from a Roman Catholic point of view. No ancient, medieval, or modern theologian has ever seriously argued that there is physical motion happening when one substance changes “into” another or that the substance of Christ’s body “under” the species of bread can be uncovered by digging into the surface of a host. Transubstantiation is an elegant metaphor of eucharistic presence in many ways. It rests on a construction of reality, the Folk Theory of Essences, that is widely shared in societies affected by ancient Greek thought and is likely at least intelligible in a variety of other cultural settings given the human universality of container experiences of the self. By way of the change motif, it strongly affirms the identification of the consecrated gifts with the body and blood of Christ; by way of the containment motif with its entailment of concealment, it explicitly accounts for the clash in the Synoptic/​Pauline blend between the sensory attributes of the elements and those of Christ’s body and blood. As Macy puts it, this model “is about as neat and clean a way of understanding how the risen Lord can be present in the Eucharist as is possible using Aristotelian categories.”59 On the other hand, history has shown that it has been highly controversial when it has been seen as a literal explanation of the eucharistic change. As many Roman Catholic theologians have pointed out since the mid-​ twentieth century, the Council of Trent did not formally state that transubstantiation was the only permissible way of describing the eucharistic change; rather, it commended it as “most apt” (aptissime).60 This idea of aptness is consonant with an embodied-​realist account of language. If it is agreed that theology—​like human reasoning about other important aspects of life—​makes use of figurative language grounded in embodied experience, that no single metaphor can exhaustively define the eucharistic mystery, and that multiple metaphors that are incompatible when literalized can nevertheless simultaneously be true, then perhaps Christians of those churches in both East and West that have not enshrined transubstantiation to a place of preeminence, as the Roman communion has, might nonetheless be willing to accept it as one model among others.

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8.4  Conclusions All in all, the motif of containment has been an important part of the ecumenical repertoire. The container schema’s entailment of transitivity has facilitated believers’ reflection on the communion with Jesus and with one another that they enact by taking Jesus within themselves, while its entailment of concealment has provided a useful way of identifying Jesus’s body and blood as present “in” the elements despite their imperceptibility. Eastern Orthodox Christians may be able to accept its use as long as it is accompanied by an affirmation of both identity and conversion. Reformed Christians will likely have the most difficulty endorsing it. In an ecumenical theology of eucharistic presence, however, they need not be asked to make it a major part of their own discourse or piety but simply to tolerate its use by fellow Christians as one metaphor, apt in its own ways, among others. This may be easier in light of a more conscious awareness of the ways Reformed eucharistic theology itself relies on spatial metaphors, as will be explored in Chapter 9.

Notes 1. Jean M. Mandler and Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas, “On Defining Image Schemas,” Language and Cognition 6, no. 4 (December 2014): 516; referring to Susan J. Hespos and Renée Baillargeon, “Reasoning About Containment Events in Very Young Infants,” Cognition 78, no. 3 (March 1, 2001): 207–​45. 2. The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church: Together with the Psalter or Psalms of David: According to the Use of the Episcopal Church (New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1979), 368. 3. George Lakoff and Rafael E. Núñez, Where Mathematics Comes from: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 30–​31. Lakoff and Núñez’s use of initial capital letters (Container) rather than small capitals (container) reflects variation of formalism within the field rather than any technical difference. 4. Mark Johnson, “The Philosophical Significance of Image Schemas,” in From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics, ed. Beate Hampe and Joseph E. Grady (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2005), 22. 5. Lakoff and Núñez, Where Mathematics Comes From, 31. 6. Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 39–​40. 7. Mandler and Cánovas, “On Defining Image Schemas,” 215; Andréa Aguiar and Renée Baillargeon, “Developments in Young Infants’ Reasoning About Occluded Objects,” Cognitive Psychology 45, no. 2 (September 2002): 267–​336.

222  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence 8. Jean Piaget’s experiments in the 1950s led him to conclude that object permanence did not develop until eight months of age. However, more recent work suggests that infants have some degree of object permanence at two to three months and perhaps from birth. See Aguiar and Baillargeon, “Developments in Young Infants’ Reasoning About Occluded Objects.” 9. Missale Gothicum 76.519, in Els Rose, ed., Missale Gothicum: e codice Vaticano Reginensi latino 317 editum, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 159D (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2005), 538; ET mine. A colloquial translation of hereat in uisceribus nostris might be “stick to our ribs”! 10. On the Body and Blood of the Lord 9, 10, in PL 121:131; ET Darwell Stone, A History of the Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), 1:227. 11. On the Mysteries 9.58, in Ambrose of Milan, Des sacrements; Des mystères; L’Explication du symbole, ed. Bernard Botte, 2nd ed., Sources chrétiennes 25bis (Paris: Cerf, 1961), 190; ET mine. 12. Mystagogical Catecheses 4.3, in Catéchèses Mystagogiques, ed. Auguste Piédagnel, reprint of 2nd ed., Sources Chrétiennes, 126 bis (Paris: Cerf, 2004), 136; ET Stone, History, 1:103. On authorship, see Maxwell E. Johnson, The Rites of Christian Initiation: Their Evolution and Interpretation, 2nd rev. and expanded ed. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2007), 121. 13. Hymns on the Nativity 16.4, in Des heiligen Ephraem des Syrers: Hymnen de Nativitate (Epiphania), ed. Edmund Beck, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 186 (Louvain: Secrétariat du Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, 1959), 84; ET Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns, trans. Kathleen E. McVey (New York: Paulist Press, 1989), 149. 14. Hymns on Faith 10.8, 12, in Des heiligen Ephraem des Syrers: Hymnen de Fide, ed. Edmund Beck, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 154 (Louvain: L. Durbecq, 1955), 50–​51; ET Hymns on Faith, trans. Jeffrey T. Wickes, The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 130 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015), 122–​23. 15. Aelfric: “The bread and the wine which are hallowed through the priest’s Mass appear one thing without to people’s understanding, and another thing inwardly to believing minds. Without they seem to be bread and wine both in aspect and in taste; and after their hallowing they be truly Christ’s body and His blood through spiritual mystery.” Sermo de sacrificio in die Pascae, Catholic Homilies 2.15, in Aelfric’s Catholic Homilies: The Second Series: Text, ed. Malcolm Godden (London: Oxford University Press, 1979), 153; ET Stone, History, 1:237. Gerbert: “There is a figure, since the bread and the wine are outwardly seen; but also a reality, since the body and blood of Christ are believed in reality to be within.” On the Body and Blood of the Lord 4, in PL 139:182C; ET Stone, 1:236. Fulbert: “Through the gift of consecration the true majesty is poured out, and that which appeared outwardly as the substance of bread and wine now becomes within the body and blood of Christ.” Epistle 5, in PL 141:202C; ET Stone, 1:243. 16. Sentences 4.8.7.1, in Peter Lombard, Magistri Petri Lombardi Parisiensis episcopi Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, 3rd ed., vol. 2, Spicilegium Bonaventurianum 5

Containment  223 (Grottaferrata, Italy: Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1981), 284; ET mine. 17. H. J. Schroeder, ed., Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils, Text, Translation, and Commentary (St. Louis, MO: B. Herder, 1937), 560; ET 238. 18. Cate Gunn has suggested that the thirteenth century may have seen a shift in terminology from in specie to sub specie as Aristotelian philosophical categories became standard and species became a technical term for the “accidents” of bread and wine. Cate Gunn, “In Specie, Sub Specie: A Significant Difference?,” November 2014, https://​www.academia.edu/​9213489/​In_​Specie_​Sub_​Specie_​A_​Significant_​ Difference, accessed February 23, 2021. 19. Todd Oakley writes that experimental evidence supports the existence of this distinction at the image-​schematic level for modern speakers of English and Danish. I believe the same can be assumed for in and sub in medieval Latin, a distant cousin but one that shares a European cultural context with those two Germanic languages. Oakley notes that there are languages such as Zapotec that make no such distinction between “in” and “under.” Todd Oakley, “Image Schemas,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, ed. Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 226–​27; Oakley cites the experimental work of Chris Sinha and Kristine Jensen de López, “Language, Culture, and the Embodiment of Spatial Cognition,” Cognitive Linguistics 11, no. 1/​2 (2000): 17–​41. 20. On the Body and Blood of the Lord 16, in Ratramnus, De corpore et sanguine Domini: texte original et notice bibliographique, ed. J. N. Bakhuizen van den Brink (Amsterdam: North-​Holland Publishing Company, 1974), 47; ET mine. 21. Council of Trent, Session 13, October 11, 1551, Decretum de sanctissimo Eucharistiae sacramento, Decree Concerning the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist, chap. 1, in H. J. Schroeder, ed., Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (St. Louis, MO: B. Herder, 1950), 350; ET 73. 22. De captivitate Babylonica, in WA 6:510; ET Babylonian Captivity, in LW 36:32. 23. Large Catechism 5.8, in Friedrich Bente and W. H. T. Dau, eds., Concordia triglotta: Die symbolischen Bücher der Evangelisch-​lutherischen Kirche /​Triglot Concordia: The Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1921), 754–​55. A third preposition, “with,” would also become a common element of Lutheran catechetical language; “with” does not necessarily evoke a container schema but is compatible with it. For the three prepositions used together, see Luther’s Vom Abendmahl Christi, Bekenntnis, in WA 26:447, ET Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, in LW 37:306; and the Thorough Declaration of the Formula of Concord 7.35, 38, in Bente and Dau, Concordia Triglotta, 982–​85. 24. Ad Theobaldi Billicani et Urbani Rhegii epistolas responsio, in Z 4:901. 25. Amica exegesis, in Z 5:696–​97; ET Friendly Exegesis, in Huldrych Zwingli: Writings, trans. H. Wayne Pipkin, vol. 2 (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1984), 333. 26. De captivitate Babylonica, in WA 6:511; ET Babylonian Captivity, LW 36:34. 27. Vom Abendmahl Christi, Bekenntnis, in WA 26:265; ET Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, in LW 37:166. See also Daß diese wort, in WA 23:145; ET That These Words, in LW 37:65.

224  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence 28. Propositiones Novem de Sacra Eucharistia, Proposition 2, in Martin Bucer, Scripta Anglicana Fere Omnia, ed. Conrad Hubert (Basel: Pietro Perna, 1577), 611; ET Stone, History, 2:44. 29. Propositiones Novem de Sacra Eucharistia, Proposition 3, in Bucer, Scripta Anglicana, 611; ET Stone, History, 2:44. 30. Petit Traicté de la Saincte Cene, in CO 5:460; ET Short Treatise on the Holy Supper, in Theological Treatises, trans. J. K. S. Reid, Library of Christian Classics 22 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), 166. 31. Thomas F. Torrance, “The Paschal Mystery of Christ and the Eucharist,” Liturgical Review 6, no. 1 (May 1976): 9. 32. Thomas F. Torrance, “The Paschal Mystery of Christ and the Eucharist,” in Theology in Reconciliation: Essays Towards Evangelical and Catholic Unity in East and West, American ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976), 125. 33. Optima ineundae concordiae ratio, in CO 9:520; ET The Best Method of Obtaining Concord, in John Calvin, Tracts and Treatises on the Doctrine and Worship of the Church, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1958), 327–​28. 34. On the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity 5.67.12, in Richard Hooker, The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, ed. W. Speed Hill, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), 343. 35. Sermons of the Nativity 12, in The Works of Lancelot Andrewes, vol. 1 (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 213. 36. Daniel Tomberlin, Pentecostal Sacraments: Encountering God at the Altar (Cleveland, TN: Center for Pentecostal Leadership and Care, Pentecostal Theological Seminary, 2015), 175. 37. Chris E. W. Green, Toward a Pentecostal Theology of the Lord’s Supper: Foretasting the Kingdom (Cleveland, TN: CPT Press, 2012), 282. 38. Summa Theologiae 3a.76.5, in Blackfriars 58:106; ET mine. 39. Summa Theologiae 3a.76.5, in Blackfriars 58:106–​10. 40. John Cuthbert Hedley, The Holy Eucharist (London: Longmans, 1914), 53–​54. 41. Vom Abendmahl Christi, Bekenntnis (1528), in WA 326–​29; ET Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, in LW 37:215–​16. 42. Daß diese wort, in WA 23:144–​47; ET That These Words, in LW 37:65. Here Luther is drawing back from a previous statement that “as wheat fills the sack, so he fills all things,” for which he had been mocked by his Reformed opponents. See LW 37:65n108. 43. Daß diese wort, in WA 23:144–​47; ET That These Words, in LW 37:65–​66. 44. Chrēstos Androutsos, Dogmatikē tēs Orthodoxou Anatolikēs Ekklēsias [Δογματικη της Ορθοδοξου Ανατολικης Εκκλησιας], 2nd ed. (Athens: Astēr, 1956), 344; quoted in Frank Gavin, Some Aspects of Contemporary Greek Orthodox Thought (New York: American Review of Eastern Orthodoxy, 1962), 330. See 330–​36 for the summary of the debate. 45. Constantine Dyobouniotes, Ē Dogmatikē tou k. Chrēstou Androutsou krinomenē [Η Δογματικη του κ. Χρηστου Ανδρουτσου κρινομενη] (Athens, 1907), 58, 144; quoted in Gavin, Some Aspects of Contemporary Greek Orthodox Thought, 331.

Containment  225 46. Peter Mogila, Question 106, in Orthodoxos Omologia Tēs Katholikēs Kai Apostolokēs Ekklēsias Tēs Anatolikēs [Ορθοδοξος Ομολογια Της Καθολικης Και Αποστολοκης Εκκλησιας Της Ανατολικης] (Bratislava: Io. Iacob. Korn., 1751), 173–​74. Philaret, “On the Communion,” Article 312, in Pravoslavnyĭ Katekhizis [Православный Катехизис] (Moscow: Direkt-​Media, 2014), 70. 47. See Gary Macy, Treasures from the Storeroom: Medieval Religion and the Eucharist (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), 81–​120. 48. See Section 7.1, 190. 49. Macy, Treasures from the Storeroom, 83. 50. On Lanfranc and Guitmund, see Edward J. Kilmartin, The Eucharist in the West: History and Theology, ed. Robert J. Daly (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1998), 144. For Berengar’s second oath, see Heinrich Denzinger, Peter Hünermann, and Helmut Hoping, eds., Enchiridion Symbolorum Definitionum et Declarationum de Rebus Fidei et Morum, 40th ed. (Freiburg: Herder, 2005), 700. 51. See Rafael Winkler, “Ousia, Substance, Essence: On the Roman Understanding of Being,” Phronimon 14, no. 1 (June 20, 2013): 101–​17. 52. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 363. 53. Eve Sweetser, “‘The Suburbs of Your Good Pleasure’: Cognition, Culture and the Bases of Metaphoric Structure,” in Shakespeare Studies Today, ed. Graham Bradshaw, Tom Bishop, and Mark Turner, Shakespeare International Yearbook 4 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 27–​28. 54. Sweetser, 29–​30. 55. See George Lakoff, “Sorry, I’m Not Myself Today: The Metaphor System for Conceptualizing the Self,” in Spaces, Worlds, and Grammar, ed. Gilles Fauconnier and Eve Sweetser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 91–​123. 56. On the Sacraments 4.14; see Section 7.1, 188. It is worth mentioning that, while Ambrose uses both de pane and ex pane, Aquinas distinguishes between the two prepositions, arguing that only the latter is strictly correct although the former may be used in a broader sense. See Summa Theologiae 3a.75.8. 57. Institutes 4.17.14, in CO2:1012, 4:994; ET Battles 2:1374. 58. Historia Transubstantionis Papalis 4.1, in The Works of the Right Reverend Father in God John Cosin, vol. 4, Library of Anglo-​Catholic Theology 37 (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1851), 46; ET Stone, History, 2:324. 59. Gary Macy, The Banquet’s Wisdom: A Short History of the Theologies of the Lord’s Supper, 2nd ed. (Maryville, TN: OSL Publications, 2005), 136. 60. Council of Trent, Session 13, October 11, 1551, Canones de sanctissimo Eucharistiae sacramento, Canons on the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist, Canon 2, in Schroeder, Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 356; ET 79. Louis-​Marie Chauvet writes that “the adoption of this adverb by the Council of Trent in its dogmatic enunciations means at least two things. First, the term ‘transubstantiation’ is relevant in the measure in which it expresses the integrality of the change or conversion of substance which is effected in the Eucharist. . . . Second, that transubstantiation is

226  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence a term employed by the Church ‘in the most appropriate way’ means it is not an absolute and thus it is theoretically possible to express the specificity of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist in a different manner.” Louis-​Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1993), 383.

9 Conduit The body and blood of Christ are received through (or by means of) the eucharistic bread and wine.

An ancient feature common to both Western and Eastern eucharistic liturgies is the dialogue that traditionally begins the eucharistic prayer, known by its Latin name as the Sursum corda. “Let us lift up our hearts!” says the presiding minister to the people, according to the Greek wording (Ἄνω σχῶμεν τὰς καρδίας)—​or, in the terser Latin, simply “Hearts upward!”—​to which they respond, “We have them with the Lord.” The idea that the Lord is “upward,” that God’s domain is located somewhere above the realm of human beings, is deeply rooted in both Jewish and Christian tradition. In scripture, the Hebrew word ‫ש ַ מיִם‬ ָ ׁ and the Greek word οὐρανός are routinely used for both the sky and the domain of God. This reflects a basic and cross-​culturally common primary metaphor: good is up. In Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson offer an extensive overview of the experiential groundings for various subcases of this metaphor.1 The fact that humans are bipedal creatures who walk upright when we are awake and healthy but lie down when we are asleep, ill, or dead gives rise to metaphors like happy is up/​sad is down (“My spirits rose”; “I sank into a depression”), conscious is up/​unconscious is down (“Wake up”; “I fell asleep”), and healthy is up/​sick is down (“She’s in tip-​top shape”; “The patient is declining”). The fact that being physically on top of an opponent offers an advantage in a struggle gives rise to having control is up/​being subject to control is down (“I’m on top of the situation”; “You’re under my control”). The fact that a pile of objects or the level of a fluid gets higher as more is added gives rise to more is up/​less is down (“He’s a high-​energy person”; “My income fell this year”). While these metaphors have somewhat different experiential bases, they are coherent with one another: all are

Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence. Stephen R. Shaver, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197580806.003.0009

228  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence grounded fundamentally in the experience of a body subject to the pull of our planet’s gravity. It is not surprising, then, that god’s domain is up forms an important part of the Judeo-​Christian symbol system, since God is the ultimate source of goodness, virtue, wisdom, and power. To be sure, when literalized, god’s domain is up is as lacking as any other metaphor. God is not physically located in outer space, and indeed outside a given planet’s gravitational field the concept of up has no meaning. Moreover, as many recent theologians have pointed out, too exclusive a reliance on up imagery can lead to the neglect of other valuable images for God as down: the ground of being, the still small voice, the lowly servant.2 Still, the pervasiveness of good is up in everyday human thinking means that vertical language is likely always to form an important component of Christian discourse about God. Christians believe that after the resurrection Jesus ascended into heaven—​ an event about which scripture explicitly uses vertical imagery. If, then, the eucharist is to be in a real sense an encounter with Jesus, there is a basic image-​schematic problem to be solved: How can Jesus, who is above, be with us who are here below? Christian traditions have found different ways of answering this. Sometimes Jesus is portrayed as descending from heaven to meet his faithful people at the eucharistic table. Sometimes the people are portrayed as being lifted up to Jesus in heaven. Sometimes both these images are used alongside one another. However, there is a third possibility—​one that emerges prominently in the eucharistic theology of Calvin. Perhaps there can be a sort of conduit, a connector bridging the gap between earth and heaven, through which Jesus’s body and blood can be received. Cognitively speaking, this conduit is a source-​path-​goal image schema. For Calvin and his successors, the Holy Spirit is frequently depicted as forming the path along which the energies, the life, or simply the body and blood of Christ can travel from a source in heaven to a goal in the faithful believer. This imagery does not necessarily involve the physical elements of bread and wine. Indeed, the majority of Reformed writers do not picture the elements themselves as part of the conduit. Rather, Christ’s life is portrayed as flowing directly into the believer’s heart, mind, or spirit by faith. For this reason, the conduit motif can seem to lend itself more readily to Johannine spiritual communion than to Synoptic/​Pauline sacramental communion. However, there are occasional exceptions in which Reformed writers are able to speak of the eucharistic elements as “instruments,” and to use prepositions

Conduit  229 such as per in Latin or par in French that carry a sense of directional motion, suggesting that the elements themselves might serve as a sort of conduit “by” or “through” which the body and blood of Christ might be received. This possibility is reinforced by the fact that, while Reformed writers speak only rarely of receiving the body and blood of Christ through the elements, they display no reticence whatsoever about the idea of seeing the body and blood of Christ through the elements. This visual imagery of the conduit has striking, and perhaps unexpected, commonalities with the visual piety of the eucharist that developed in the medieval West and remains important in much Roman Catholic spirituality today. Where the previous two chapters sought to describe motifs well attested in various Christian traditions, this chapter seeks to sketch a few possibilities for a motif more hinted at in historic Reformed sources than developed by them. I hope theologians and practitioners whose eucharistic theology looks to these sources for inspiration will build upon these possibilities to the extent they find them helpful.

9.1  Verticality and the emergence of the conduit motif Vertical imagery is used extensively in ancient Christian eucharistic texts. The Roman Canon asks God to “command that these gifts be borne by the hands of your holy Angel to your altar on high,” while numerous Eastern prayers speak of the Holy Spirit (and sometimes Christ) “descending” upon the bread and wine.3 In the middle ages, however, Western theologians were more cautious about the imagery of ascent and descent. The tenth-​century bishop Ratherius of Verona warns, “You ask, perhaps unseasonably, that the vanity of human curiosity may have place, whence and by what agency [Christ’s flesh] has come, and if it is brought down (delata) from above, and if the bread is invisibly taken up (sublatus), or if the bread itself is changed into flesh.”4 In a similar vein, Pope Innocent III (d. 1216) writes, “If it be asked whether Christ locally descends from heaven or ascends into heaven (descendat de coelo, vel ascendat in coelum), when He conveys or withdraws His bodily presence, or otherwise begins or ceases to be under the species of the Sacrament, I reply that we ought not to be curious in such matters. . . . I do not know how Christ approaches, I am ignorant also how He departs, He knows who is ignorant of nothing.”5

230  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence It was in large part to avoid the problem of Christ’s having to descend out of heaven that scholastic theologians came to regard the conversion of the elements into Christ’s body and blood as a necessity. As Aquinas puts it, It is clear that the body of Christ does not begin to exist in this sacrament by being brought in locally. First, because it would thereby cease to be in heaven, since anything that is locally moved begins to be somewhere only by leaving where it was. Second, every bodily thing that is moved from place to place must pass through all the intermediate places, and there is no question of that in the present case. Third, it is impossible that the one movement of a bodily thing that is being locally moved should end up at the same time in different places; now the body of Christ in this sacrament begins simultaneously to be in different places [i.e., in masses celebrated in different locations]. For these reasons it remains that there is no other way in which the body of Christ can begin to be in this sacrament except through the substance of the bread being changed into it.6

Latin eucharistic theology, then, found the believer’s physical connection with Jesus by the conversion of the bread and wine into his body and blood. Here on the altar, Christ’s eucharistic body could be both adored and received, even while his natural body simultaneously remained in heaven. While Martin Luther would move away from language of conversion, he maintained the conviction that Christ was present on the altar. However, the idea that Christ’s body and blood could be in more than one place at once was anathema to the Swiss Reformers, who insisted that Jesus’s body is located in heaven, at the right hand of God the Father, to which he ascended and from which he will return again. In his divinity, they agreed, Jesus Christ is present everywhere throughout the universe; however, in his humanity he, like any other human, can only be in one place at a time—​and that place is heaven. In Zwingli’s words, “The human side of Christ . . . is so circumscribed or situated that it must be in one place only.”7 Like Zwingli, Calvin rejects Luther’s idea of ubiquity and affirms the local presence of Christ’s body only in heaven. His language about heaven is marked by a striking degree of vertical imagery. For example, his liturgy for the Lord’s Supper exhorts believers, Let us raise our hearts and minds on high (eslevons noz espritz et noz coeurs en hault), where Jesus Christ is, in the glory of his Father, and from whence we look for him at our redemption. Let us not be bemused by

Conduit  231 these earthly and corruptible elements which we see with the eye, and touch with the hand, in order to seek him there, as if he were enclosed (encloz) in the bread or wine. Our souls will only then be disposed to be nourished and vivified by his substance, when they are thus raised above all earthly things, and carried as high as heaven (eslevees, par dessus toutes choses terrestres, pour attaindre iusque au Ciel), to enter the kingdom of God where he dwells.8

Calvin rejected the language of containment and the idea of the manducatio oralis. At the same time, he insisted that in partaking of communion the faithful truly fed on Christ’s body and blood in a way stronger than Zwingli’s mental remembering. To support this insistence, he developed a remarkable and distinctive repertoire of spatial imagery emphasizing the vertical distance between the believer on earth and Jesus in heaven—​a distance that can nonetheless be crossed by the power of the Holy Spirit: Even though it seems unbelievable that Christ’s flesh, separated from us by such great distance, penetrates to us, so that it becomes our food, let us remember how far the secret power of the Holy Spirit towers above all our senses, and how foolish it is to wish to measure his immeasurableness by our measure. What, then, our mind does not comprehend, let faith conceive: that the Spirit truly unites things separated in space.9

Calvin’s use of vertical imagery is pervasive. In one frequent image, it is the believer who is lifted up to feed on Christ: Greatly mistaken are those who conceive no presence of flesh in the Supper unless it lies in the bread. For thus they leave nothing to the secret working of the Spirit, which unites Christ himself to us. To them Christ does not seem present unless he comes down to us (ad nos descendat /​ descend à nous). As though, if he should lift us to himself (ad se nos evehat /​ en nous elevant à soy), we should not just as much enjoy his presence!10

Yet at other times Calvin does speak of Christ (or, often, his “virtue” or “energy”) descending to feed the believer: Christ, though remaining in heaven as to the locality of his body, yet descends to us (ad nos descendere) by the secret agency of his Spirit, so as to unite us with him and make us partakers of his life.11

232  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence At times Calvin is even able to use both these images in the same passage: Christ then is absent from us in respect of his body, but dwelling in us by his spirit he raises us to heaven to himself (in coelum ad se nos attollit), transfusing into us the vivifying vigor of his flesh. . . . He infuses life into us from his flesh, in no other way than by descending into us by his energy (ad nos sua virtute descendit), while, in respect of his body, he still continues in heaven.12

These twin metaphors of the believer ascending and Christ’s energy descending are what George Lakoff has called a “dual.” That is, they form a pair of spatial metaphors that invoke opposite directions of movement but are both subcases of a more generalized mapping in which two objects are in motion relative to one another.13 The third image Calvin frequently uses is that of the Holy Spirit spanning the gap between earth and heaven. In this variant, although the believer remains on earth and Christ remains in heaven, the Spirit forms not only a bridge but actually a sort of conduit through which Christ’s life flows from Christ’s body into the believer: “No extent of space (locorum distantia) interferes with the boundless energy of the Spirit, which pours (transfundit) life into us from the flesh of Christ.”14 Here we have a source-​ path-​goal image schema with heaven as the source and the believer as the goal. It is intriguing to compare Calvin’s conduit imagery with the “conduit metaphor” identified by Michael Reddy, commonly used among English speakers today, in which interpersonal communication of ideas is conceptualized as the sending and receiving of objects along a conduit from one person to another. This gives rise to common expressions like “I’m not getting through to you” or “Put it into different words so I can get what you’re trying to say.”15 In a very similar way, Calvin’s eucharistic conduit image maps interpersonal communication onto a source-​path-​goal schema. Here, however, what is being communicated is not discrete ideas in packets but Christ’s own “life,” or “energy,” imagined as a kind of fluid that can be poured from Christ’s body into that of the believer.16 In keeping with the rejection of the manducatio oralis, Reformed writers most frequently portray the conduit as a direct connection between Christ in heaven and the believer’s mind or soul, bypassing not only the mouth but

Conduit  233 any direct link with the elements themselves. At times they speak of faith as a kind of mouth of the soul, as here in the Belgic Confession: As really as we receive and hold the sacrament in our hands, and even drink it with our mouths . . . so really do we by faith, which is the hand and mouth of our soul, receive the real body and the real blood of Christ our only Savior in our souls.17

But the Confession goes on to make it clear that it is the Spirit, not the elements received by mouth, that forms the conduit between Christ’s true body and the believer: We do not err when we say that what is eaten is the identical and natural body of Christ, and what is drunk is his real blood. But the manner in which (la manière par laquelle; the Latin version has “the instrument or medium by which,” instrumentum seu medium quo) we eat and drink is not the mouth but the Spirit through faith.18

Still, there are occasional exceptions. In the Short Treatise, Calvin is willing to say that the bread and wine are called Christ’s body and blood because “they are as instruments by which (ce sont comme instrumens par lesquelz) our Lord Jesus Christ distributes them to us.”19 A century later the Geneva scholar Francis Turretin can write that “The external thing is the moral instrument by and with which (instrumentum morale, per quod et cum quo) God wishes to be efficacious and to communicate really the internal thing to the believer.”20 Both Calvin’s par (in French) and Turretin’s per (in Latin) are rendered in the translations above as “by.” However, they might well also be translated as “through.” Like the English “through,” the prepositions par and per convey a sense of directional motion along a path. In cases like these, a reader might envision an image schema in which the elements are placed along the length of the conduit rather than being bypassed by it. A schema like this would make a qualitative distinction between sacramental communion (taking place “through” the elements, so to speak) and spiritual communion (which bypasses them). Such a distinction would be helpful for ecumenical convergence. It is important not to minimize the difference between the Reformed model, which envisions the transmission of Christ’s body and blood into the

234  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence believer without oral consumption and across a great distance, and those of the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Lutheran traditions, which all envision the reception of Jesus’s body and blood directly into the believer’s body by oral ingestion. These different image schemas cannot simply be harmonized, as if ecumenical agreement required the common acceptance of a single correct model. Rather, in a multiply metaphorical theology of eucharistic presence, they stand alongside one another—​just as multiple and unharmonizable metaphors stand alongside one another in our language about time, stock markets, ideas, and other realities not amenable to direct sensorimotor experience. My goal in making the image schemas underlying Reformed eucharistic theology explicit is not to merge them with those of other traditions but simply to show that all these traditions rely heavily on spatial metaphors. This is true no less of Thomas Aquinas’s assertion that Christ “truly [lies] hidden under these figures (sub his figuris vere latitas)” than of Calvin’s assertion that “Christ is truly joined to us (nobiscum Christus vere in unum coalescat /​ Iesus Christ s’unisse vrayement à nous)” and that “the Spirit truly unites (vere unire /​unit vrayement) things that are divided in place.”21 All these statements use the word vere, “truly.” None of them can be said to be literal in the basic, sensorimotor sense. An ecumenical consensus on eucharistic presence need not reject either the more localized images of Christ as present in the elements via conversion or containment or the more distant images of Christ as connected to his people by a spiritual conduit.

9.2  Visual conduit language Before leaving the Reformed imagery of the conduit behind, an additional feature needs to be explored. It is remarkable how much Calvin, and his fellow Reformed writers, rely on the language of vision. More striking still is the fact that they use this language specifically in connection with the elements of bread and wine. In other words, although they only very rarely suggest that Christ’s body and blood might be eaten or drunk through the bread and wine, they routinely describe them as shown or exhibited through them. For example, Calvin writes that “the sacred mystery of the Supper consists in two things: physical signs, which, thrust before our eyes, represent to us, according to our feeble capacity, things invisible; and spiritual truth, which

Conduit  235 is at the same time represented and displayed (figuratur et exhibetur /​ figurée et pareillement exhibée) through (per /​ par) the symbols themselves.”22 Calvin goes on to state that the eucharistic bread and wine “have to be considered of a different class from common foods intended solely to feed the stomach, since in them is set forth (in iis . . . exhibeatur) the spiritual food of the soul.”23 Bryan Spinks has pointed out that Calvin uses the verb exhiberi seventeen times in book 17 of the Institutes, and indeed this became a standard term for Reformed eucharistic theology in general.24 Martin Bucer writes that “the very body and blood of Christ are presented (exhiberi) by the symbols of the Eucharist,”25 and Philip Melanchthon’s 1540 revision of the Augsburg Confession (an attempt to facilitate reunion with the Reformed, signed by Calvin among others) replaces the statement that “the body and blood of Christ are truly present, and are distributed to those who eat” with one that “with the bread and wine the body and blood of Christ are really exhibited (exhibeantur) to those who eat.”26 The First Helvetic Confession of 1536 uses extensive visual language of exhibition, representation, and light in connection with the elements: Not that the body and blood of the Lord are naturally united to the bread and wine, but that the bread and wine are ordained by the Lord to be symbols by which the real communication of his body and blood may be presented (exhibeatur) by the Lord himself. . . . [The holy symbols] are holy and venerable things as being instituted and used by the high priest Christ, exhibiting (exhibentes) in their own way, as we have said, the things signified, affording testimony to that which is been done, representing difficult realities, and bringing the most clear light to those mysteries (clarissimam mysteriis istis lucem offerentes) by a certain wonderful analogy to the things that are signified.27

All this language of “exhibition” is reminiscent to some extent of many ancient Eastern eucharistic texts that use verbs like φαίνω (“appear”) and δείκνυμι (“show”). The anaphora in book 8 of the Apostolic Constitutions, for example, asks that the Holy Spirit may “manifest” (ἀποφήνῃ) the bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ, while the Byzantine anaphora of St. Basil uses “show” (ἀναδεῖξαι).28 Paul Bradshaw and Maxwell Johnson describe these texts as displaying “an ‘epiphany’ understanding of eucharistic

236  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence consecration, in which the Spirit is invoked on the gifts in order that the presence of Christ may be revealed in them.”29 Calvin, who at times wrote approvingly of Eastern churches, might have welcomed this comparison. But what Calvin would undoubtedly have abhorred—​and what I will suggest nonetheless—​is that there is also an unexpected but considerable degree of consonance between this Reformed way of describing the elements as “exhibiting” the body and blood of Christ and the highly visual piety that developed in the medieval West around the practice of ocular communion.

9.3  Reformed and Roman Catholic visual piety: an unexpected convergence Calvin and his Reformed colleagues, of course, detested the practice of visual adoration. Calvin explicitly called it idolatry, and in a famous passage Thomas Cranmer bitingly satirized the visual devotion he sought to eliminate: What made the people to run from their seats to the altar, and from altar to altar, and from sacring (as they called it) to sacring, peeping, tooting and gazing at that thing which the priest held up in his hands, if they thought not to honor that thing, which they saw? What moved the priests to lift up the sacrament so high over their heads? or the people to cry to the priest, Hold up, hold up: and one man to say to another, Stoop down before or to say: This day have I seen my maker. And, I cannot be quiet, except I see my maker once a day? What was the cause of all these, and that as well the priest as the people so devoutly did knock and kneel at every sight of the sacrament, but that they worshiped that visible thing, which they saw with their eyes, and took it for very God?30

Yet both the medieval (and later Roman Catholic) practice of ocular communion and the Reformed description of the elements as “exhibiting” Christ’s body and blood rely heavily on a source-​path-​goal schema associated not with the mouth but with the eyes—​what is commonly thought of as the “gaze.” As Lakoff has pointed out, the idea of a gaze is a metaphorical one relying on fictive motion along an imagined path from the eyes to the

Conduit  237 object being seen.31 It is this fictive motion that accounts for the directional language in sentences like these: (1) a. She glanced at her watch. b. I couldn’t see the movie because someone’s hat was in the way. c.  From Grizzly Peak on a clear day you can see all the way to the Farallones.32

In fact, as Lakoff and Johnson show, the gaze is often conceived of as a kind of metaphorical limb. This creates a more general metaphor, seeing is touching, as in the following examples Lakoff and Johnson offer: (2) a. I can’t take my eyes off her. b. He sits with his eyes glued to the TV. c. Her eyes picked out every detail of the pattern. d. Their eyes met. e. She never moves her eyes from his face. f. She ran her eyes over everything in the room. g. He wants everything within reach of his eyes.33

This conceptual metaphor of seeing is touching was the basis for a widespread understanding of vision in the classical and medieval world. As Margaret Miles describes it, vision was understood “as occurring when a quasi-​physical ray is projected from the eye of the viewer to touch its object. An impression of the object, in turn, travels back along the visual ray to be imprinted on the soul and preserved in the memory.”34 For medieval Christians with this understanding, ocular communion was a genuine way of enjoying physical, tactile communion with Jesus. The source-​path-​goal schema in ocular communion runs from the believer’s eye directly to the consecrated elements, which are Jesus’s body and blood and thus (by conceptual metonymy) are Jesus. Since seeing is touching, seeing Jesus is touching Jesus. As Ann Astell writes, “To see the Host was to touch it. One could eat it, touch it, taste it, with one’s eyes. Gazing upon the Host in adoration meant a real physical contact with it, a touch, as light rays emanating from the Host beamed into the eye of the adorer; and vice versa, as rays from the beholder’s eye extended themselves in a line of vision to the Host.”35

238  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence The schema evoked by the Reformed language of “exhibition” is different in a crucial way. It runs from the believer’s eye not to but through the consecrated elements, placing them not at the goal but along the path as a sort of window through which Jesus can be seen. Still, it shares an important feature with that of ocular communion in that its goal is understood to be the true body and blood of Jesus, which are seen and thus metaphorically touched. For this motif, just as much as for the change and containment motifs, the overall purpose is to place believers metaphorically—​and truly—​ in connection with Jesus.

9.4  Conclusions The conduit motif is something of a distinctively Reformed contribution to the ecumenical repertoire of eucharistic presence—​even as it is more hinted at than explicitly endorsed by historical Reformed authorities. Vertical imagery is certainly central in the eucharistic theology of Calvin and others in the Swiss Reformed tradition, as is the idea that the Holy Spirit bridges the vertical gap between Christ and believers by forming a kind of conduit. In many—​indeed most—​Reformed writings, this conduit can best be imagined as a means of spiritual, Johannine communion. Yet for Reformed Christians who believe that sacramental communion is indeed qualitatively distinct from spiritual communion, there are hints in this tradition that the bread and wine can on occasion be conceptualized as part of the path of the conduit—​as “instruments” by which, or through which, the body and blood of Christ can be received. Intriguingly, while historic Reformed writers are only occasionally comfortable with placing the elements along the path when speaking of eucharistic reception, they are clearly more than willing to do so when using language of sight. This may point to a tenuous but real possibility of ecumenical convergence with regard to eucharistic adoration, as will be explored further in Chapter 10. Meanwhile, in an age less contentious than previous centuries, perhaps some sacramentally and ecumenically minded Reformed theologians might boldly and playfully experiment with building on their tradition’s occasional hints that the elements are instruments by which Christ is eaten, and its ready assertion that they are symbols through which Christ is seen, to explore whether it might after all be consonant with their tradition to

Conduit  239 assert that the body and blood of Christ are received through (or by means of) the eucharistic bread and wine.36 The past three chapters have explored three motifs for eucharistic presence that all rely, in different ways, on spatial imagery—​a basic component of human language and thought. Through twenty centuries of eucharistic faith and practice, the Christian churches have developed a varied repertoire of ways of speaking spatially about their encounter with the risen Christ in the sacred meal. Three motifs have figured most prominently in this repertoire: change (understood via various primary metaphors, particularly change is motion); containment (the container schema); and the conduit (a source-​path-​goal schema). The first two of these can occur independently, as with the Eastern emphasis on change and relative lack of container imagery and the Lutheran emphasis on containment and relative lack of change imagery. Or they can be combined, as in the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, which relies on an internal change of “substance” within the species as external container. All these variants imply that Christ’s body and blood are received into the believer by oral reception. On the other hand, the conduit model preferred by the Reformed tradition generally avoids the manducatio oralis in favor of a direct, “inward” transmission into the believer’s soul. It often pictures the elements as bypassed by the conduit but at times privileges them more highly by making them a part of it. All these different models have one important feature in common: each asserts that in the eucharistic meal, Christians are put in direct contact with Jesus Christ. Metaphorically—​and truly—​they see him, touch him, and feed on his body and blood, receiving his very life into themselves. None of them can be said to be literal. Yet all can nonetheless be acknowledged as true: ​as apt descriptions of the church’s real eucharistic encounter with Jesus Christ, which can be described in multiple ways, yet never exhaustively defined.

Notes 1. Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 14–​21. Several of the examples in this paragraph are taken from Lakoff and Johnson. 2. Parker Palmer, for example, writes, “I had to be forced underground before I could understand that the way to God is not up but down.” Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-​Bass, 2000), 69.

240  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence 3. See, e.g., Apostolic Constitutions 8.12.39, in Metzger, Les Constitutions Apostoliques, 198–​200; Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, Epiclesis, in Hänggi et al., Prex eucharistica, 1:226; Anaphora of St. John, Son of Thunder, 100, in Marcos Daoud, trans., The Liturgy of the Ethiopian Church (London: Kegan Paul, 2005), 100. Cf., in two Gallican masses from Reichenau: “May there descend (discendat), O Lord, the fullness of Thy power . . . upon (super) this bread and upon this cup”; “Bless this sacrifice . . . and pour upon it the dew (rore perfundas) of the Holy Spirit.” Mass 4, Collectio, and Mass 5, Post-​secreta, in PL138:871A, 873B; ET Darwell Stone, A History of the Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), 1:206. 4. Letter 1.4, in PL 138:647A; ET Stone, History, 1:240. 5. On the Holy Mystery of the Altar, in PL 127:867–​68; ET Stone, 1:311. 6. Summa Theologiae 3a.75.2, in Blackfriars 58:60–​62; ET 61–​63. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (London: Blackfriars, 1964), 60–​62; ET 61–​63. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 60–​62; ET 61–​63. 7. Amica exegesis, in Z 697; ET Friendly Exegesis, in Huldrych Zwingli: Writings, trans. H. Wayne Pipkin, vol. 2 (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1984), 333. 8. La Forme des Prières et Chantz ecclésiastiques (1542), in Irmgard Pahl, ed., Coena Domini, vol. 1, Spicilegium Friburgense 29 (Freiburg, Switzerland: Universitätsverlag Freiburg Schweiz, 1983), 360; ET Jasper and Cuming, Prayers of the Eucharist, 318. 9. Institutes 4.17.10, in CO 2:1009, 4:986; ET Battles 2:1370. 10. Institutes 4.17.31, in CO 2:1032, 4:1027; ET Battles 2:1403. 11. Secunda defensio piae et orthodoxae de sacramentis fidei contra Ioachimi Westphali calumnias, in CO 9:48; ET Second Defence of the Faith Concerning the Sacraments in Answer to Joachim Westphal, in Tracts and Treatises on the Doctrine and Worship of the Church, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1958), 249. 12. Defensio sanae et orthodoxae doctrinae de sacramentis, in CO 9:33; ET Mutual Consent in regard to the Sacraments, in Tracts and Treatises, 240. Cf. in a letter to Bullinger, Dec. 27, 1963: “Christ comes down to us (descendere) not only by means of external symbols but also by the secret workings of his Spirit, so that we through faith may rise up (conscendamus) to him.” In CO:19:603; ET Max Thurian, “The Real Presence,” in Christianity Divided: Protestant and Roman Catholic Theological Issues, ed. Daniel J. Callahan, Heiko A. Oberman, and Daniel J. O’Hanlon (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1961), 214. 13. The Moving Observer (“We’ve almost reached spring break”) and Moving Events (“Spring break is almost here”) metaphors explored in Chapter 2 (Section 2.1, “Conceptual metaphor: an asymmetric mapping between two frames,” 29–30) constitute a dual. See George Lakoff, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor,” in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 218; George Lakoff, “Reflections on Metaphor and Grammar,” in Essays in Semantics and Pragmatics: In Honor of Charles J. Fillmore, ed. Masayoshi Shibatani and Sandra A. Thompson (Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1995), 138–​39. 14. Secunda defensio contra Westphalum, in CO 9:48; ET Second Defence in Answer to Westphal, in Tracts and Treatises, 249.

Conduit  241 15. Michael J. Reddy, “The Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language About Language,” in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 164–​201; see also Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 10–​13; Joseph E. Grady, “The ‘Conduit Metaphor’ Revisited: A Reassessment of Metaphors for Communication,” in Discourse and Cognition: Bridging the Gap (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 205–​18. 16. My awareness of the relevance of the conduit schema for Calvin’s eucharistic theology was sparked by Paul Jones’s remark that for Calvin the Spirit is like “an instrumental category or conduit that bridges the infinite gap between Christ and the communicant”: Paul H. Jones, Christ’s Eucharistic Presence: A History of the Doctrine, American University Studies 157 (New York: P. Lang, 1994), 145. 17. Philip Schaff, ed., The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 3 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1882), 429; ET Stone, History, 2:57. 18. Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, 3:429; ET Stone, History, 2:57. 19. Petit Traicté de la Saincte Cene, in CO 5:439; ET Short Treatise on the Lord’s Supper, in John Calvin, Theological Treatises, trans. J. K. S. Reid, Library of Christian Classics 22 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), 147. 20. Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology 19.22.13, in Institutio theologiae elencticae (Edinburgh: John D. Lowe, 1847), 371; ET Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, ed. James T. Dennison, trans. George Musgrave Giger, vol. 3 (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 1997), 434. 21. Aquinas, from the hymn Adoro te devote; Calvin, Institutes 4.17.10, in CO 2:1009, 4:986, ET mine. 22. Institutes 4.17.11, in CO 2:1010, 4:987; ET Battles, 2:1370–​71. 23. Institutes 4.17.14, in CO 2:1012–​13; ET Battles, 2:1375. The French version at 4:994 here paraphrases, giving “here we have (là nous avons) the spiritual drink and food to nourish our souls.” 24. Bryan D. Spinks, Do This in Remembrance of Me: The Eucharist from the Early Church to the Present Day (London: SCM Press, 2013), 289. 25. Propositiones Novem de Sacra Eucharistia, Proposition 4, in Martin Bucer, Scripta Anglicana Fere Omnia, ed. Conrad Hubert (Basel: Pietro Perna, 1577), 611; ET Stone, History, 2:44. 26. Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, 3:13; ET Stone, History, 2:27–​28. 27. Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, 3:225–​26; ET Stone, History, 2:49–​50. 28. Apostolic Constitutions 8.12.39, in Metzger, Les Constitutions Apostoliques, 198–​200; Liturgy of St. Basil, Epiclesis, in Hänggi et al., Prex eucharistica, 1:236. 29. Paul F. Bradshaw and Maxwell E. Johnson, The Eucharistic Liturgies: Their Evolution and Interpretation (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012), 122. 30. Calvin, Institutes 4.17.36; Thomas Cranmer, A Defence of the True and Catholike Doctrine of the Sacrament of the Body and Bloud of Our Sauiour Christ (London: Reynold Wolfe, 1550), 101; spelling modernized. 31. Lakoff, “Reflections on Metaphor and Grammar.” 32. Examples mine.

242  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence 33. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 50; examples theirs. 34. Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity and Secular Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 96. 35. Eating Beauty: The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 3. 36. Presbyterian theologian Martha Moore-​Keish occasionally uses “through” with regard to the elements in Do This in Remembrance of Me: A Ritual Approach to Reformed Eucharistic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), e.g., at 25 (“the Spirit’s gracious work in and through these material signs”) and 59 (“the gift of God’s grace offered through the bread and wine”). In both these places Moore-​Keish is using her own words to describe the perspective of earlier Reformed writers (Calvin at 25, Calvin and John Williamson Nevin at 59), suggesting that she considers “through” language consonant with the historic Reformed tradition.

10 Bringing the Repertoire Together In the second letter to Timothy, Paul (or a disciple writing in Paul’s name) writes, “Warn them before God not to quarrel over words, which does no good but only ruins the hearers” (2:14). This admonition seems at first glance to suggest that words are a secondary matter not worth causing strife over. The idea is a tempting one: why fight over trivialities? In today’s colloquial parlance, “arguing over semantics” connotes unnecessary nitpicking. If I have my definitions of words and you have yours, who’s to say which is right—​and why should we worry about it? Such a relativistic approach is not the aim of this project. A multiply metaphorical theology is not a free-​for-​all: words matter, and they can be true or untrue. Good words prompt their hearers and readers to generate mental simulations that are apt to the task of living embodied human lives. Sometimes these simulations are straightforward and basic level: “Here’s an apple.” “This is my cat.” “Sit here.” Sometimes they draw upon basic sensorimotor experience to convey metaphoric truth: “We’ve built a beautiful life together.” “We’ve grown closer and closer over the years.” Sometimes they evoke elaborate blends indeed: “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.”1 A closer look at this passage from 2 Timothy makes it apparent that the scriptural author does not in fact see words as unimportant. While he writes dismissively of “profane babblings” (βεβήλους κενοφωνίας), he urges Timothy to work hard at “rightly dividing (ὀρθοτομοῦντα) the word of truth.”2 This image of “dividing” is an evocative one: it hints at the way words can serve to carve up our experience of the world into categories. The word of truth, Paul seems to be suggesting, is God’s, yet it is up to Timothy to take his own share in expressing that Word through words of his own, and to do so “rightly.” Theology, we might say, is the task of rightly dividing the word of truth, finding our own words that faithfully—​though never exhaustively—​ convey the mystery of God’s self-​revelation. Christians over the centuries have developed many ways of using words to attempt to speak truth about the presence of Jesus Christ in the eucharist, Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence. Stephen R. Shaver, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197580806.003.0010

244  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence and about the relationship of that presence to the bread and wine that are blessed and shared. One of those ways, the motif of identity, is scriptural and therefore deserves, I believe, to be privileged as central. Four others—​ representation, change, containment, and conduit—​ have long-​ standing precedent in various families of the Christian tradition, and each of them has entailments that highlight particular aspects of the motif of identity. In this concluding chapter I will gather these motifs and their respective affirmations together into what might form the basis of a shared ecumenical agreement, summarizing what each can add to the common repertoire when they are understood as complementary rather than contradictory. I will also explore some practical implications that arise from their differing entailments, particularly regarding reservation and adoration, and propose a bounded diversity of practice grounded in mutual charity.

10.1  Affirmations in common: the ecumenical repertoire of metaphors Here again is the list of affirmations that I first proposed in Chapter 1 and that have now been explored at length. For each, I will review its major cognitive underpinnings (blends, conceptual metaphors, image schemas) and the distinctive entailments it contributes to the common repertoire. Table 10.1 gives an overview of each of these in summarized form.

1.  The eucharistic bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ This statement affirms what, as a shorthand, I have called the identity motif. It rests on the Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor (actually a blend incorporating both metaphoric and metonymic components): this loaf is jesus’s body and this wine is jesus’s blood. It is the fundamental metaphor of eucharistic presence with regard to the elements, and it provides the basis for a sacramental communion understood as qualitatively distinct from the spiritual communion that believers can enjoy at all times and everywhere. That spiritual communion is itself scripturally grounded, via the Johannine metaphor: jesus’s flesh and blood are heavenly, life-​giving bread and drink.

Bringing the Repertoire Together  245 Table 10.1.  Motifs, affirmations, their underlying cognitive phenomena, and their entailments Motif

Affirmations

Underlying Cognitive Entailments Phenomena

identity

The eucharistic bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ.

The Synoptic/​Pauline blend: this loaf and wine are JESUS’S BODY AND BLOOD.

representation The eucharistic bread and wine are the symbols (or signs, figures, antitypes, etc.) of the body and blood of Christ.

Y2 construction; Representation vital relation, which can coexist with Identity vital relation.

The eucharistic bread and wine are changed into (or become) the body and blood of Christ. and The eucharistic bread and wine are bread and wine, but not ordinary bread and wine. The body and blood of Christ are in (or under) the eucharistic bread and wine.

change is motion, states are locations; change is being made; change is being born.

change

containment

container image schema.

Can be affirmed as properly true via a tectonic shift; “body of Christ” and “blood of Christ” are perfectly polysemous. Manducatio impiorum and oralis can be both affirmed and denied. Complements identity by emphasizing inherent distinction; allows a rich network of relationships among senses of “body of Christ” and “blood of Christ.” Can threaten identity if representation and identity are understood as mutually exclusive. Before-​and-​after quality: the elements are not the body and blood of Christ before consecration but are afterward. Can raise question of whether or not they are still bread and wine.

Transitivity (A in B and B in C means A in C); concealment (cannot see what is inside). Transubstantiation is a special case of change combined with containment. Can raise question of imprisonment. (continued)

246  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence Table 10.1. Continued Motif

Affirmations

Underlying Cognitive Entailments Phenomena

conduit

The body and source-​path-​goal blood of Christ are image schema; good received through is up. (or by means of) the eucharistic bread and wine.

Distinction between historic body of Christ (in heaven) and eucharistic body of Christ (here); highlights role of Holy Spirit. Can raise question of whether elements are bypassed and thus sacramental communion not qualitatively distinct.

As the Reformed tradition has rightly insisted, the Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor is an example of figurative language. As the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Lutheran traditions have rightly insisted, it can be understood as properly true. The eucharistic bread and wine are, simply and truly, the body and blood of Christ; this both is, and is not, the same body and blood of Christ that were born of Mary, hung on the cross, rose, and ascended into glory. Similarly, the eucharistic body of Christ both is, and is not, the same body of Christ that subsists in all the members of the church. The historic, eucharistic, and ecclesial senses of these words exist in a state of ongoing polysemy, distinguishable yet inseparable, much as do the three senses of “God” whom Christians know and adore. This polysemy also allows a resolution to the contested test cases of the manducatio oralis and manducatio impiorum, since it can be truly said both that Christians do, and do not, eat the body and blood of Christ by mouth, and that unbelievers do, and do not, receive the body and blood of Christ.

2.  The eucharistic bread and wine are the symbols (or signs, figures, antitypes, etc.) of the body and blood of Christ The representation motif—​the oldest in the repertoire other than identity itself—​is, like the change, containment, and conduit motifs, best understood as a commentary or elaboration on identity. Unlike those three spatially oriented motifs, representation focuses specifically on the nature of the Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor as a blend. It highlights the tension

Bringing the Repertoire Together  247 between identity and distinction inherent in any metaphoric blend and tends to emphasize distinction—​ although, contrary to long-​ standing misunderstandings in both West and East, a relationship of representation does not rule out a simultaneous relationship of identity. When understood as literal, the representation motif can easily be taken to be a translation or more precise equivalent for the identity motif—​what the Synoptic/​ Pauline metaphor “really means.” Such an understanding risks discarding the scriptural language “This is my body” in favor of the nonscriptural “This is the symbol of my body.” Moreover, the latter is not in fact a more precise translation of the former: it is (1) a prompt for a more complicated (Y2) integration network, which (2) ends up specifying a vital relation of Representation between the elements and Christ’s body and blood. In contrast, the original metaphor allows for any combination of various vital relations including Identity, Representation, and Change. When understood as part of the common repertoire, the representation motif makes a rich contribution. It helps elucidate the rich ambiguity of the relationships among the various senses of “body of Christ”: each of the specific senses (historic, eucharistic, ecclesial) is a sign of the others, while also being both a sign of and identical with (though not indistinguishable from) the central underspecified sense. Put more simply, representation complements identity by placing sameness and distinction in a rich and holy tension.

3.  The eucharistic bread and wine are changed into (or become) the body and blood of Christ This affirmation, which corresponds to the motif of change, takes account of the passage of time in the eucharistic liturgy. At one point in time, the elements are ordinary bread and wine; later, they are the body and blood of Christ. To speak of this reality, Christians since at least the fourth century have employed primary metaphors of change. By far the most prominent of these is change is motion, but others like changing is being made and changing is being born have been used as well. In formulating this affirmation, I have preferred the phrase “are changed into” over “become” because the former, by using the preposition into, makes its metaphorical character more obvious. Both formulations, however, are appropriate. (While “become” still derives etymologically from change is motion, many English speakers will not be aware of this. Fio in Latin and γίνομαι in Greek are more obviously related to their respective primary metaphors.)

248  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence The most important entailment of the change motif, and its most distinctive contribution to the repertoire, is its before-​and-​after quality. To say that a change has taken place in the elements is to acknowledge that what once were ordinary bread and wine are now no longer so—​an affirmation, as we have seen, that all traditions can make. A potential difficulty of this motif when it is taken as literal is that it can lead to denying that the elements are still bread and wine at all. This denial is unacceptable to certain traditions, particularly the Lutheran and Reformed.

4.  The eucharistic bread and wine are bread and wine, but not ordinary bread and wine This affirmation does not come from a separate motif of its own. Rather, it is simply an acknowledgment that both scripture and long-​standing tradition clearly refer to the elements as bread and wine, just as they refer to them as the body and blood of Christ. Understanding this former reference in terms of what George Hunsinger calls “real predication” is as nonnegotiable for Lutheran and Reformed traditions as understanding the latter in terms of real predication is for Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions.3 If the churches of the Reformation are asked to affirm real predication in one direction, it is only fair to ask the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches to affirm it in the other. How, precisely, this is to be explained in terms of the internal doctrinal categories of each tradition can be left up to the churches themselves: one potential avenue might be simply to assert that the material reality of the species is such as to justify this proper predication, while another might be to rely on chaining together the Johannine and Synoptic/​Pauline metaphors (this is my body is heavenly life-​giving bread). In any case, no church is being asked to abandon its commitment to the change motif. This affirmation may also be made easier by noting that all parties agree that the elements are far from ordinary.

5.  The body and blood of Christ are in (or under) the eucharistic bread and wine This affirmation, based on the containment motif, has two main entailments. The first is transitivity: if Christ’s body and blood are in the bread and wine, then those who receive the bread and wine into themselves are also receiving

Bringing the Repertoire Together  249 Christ’s body and blood. The second is concealment: as opaque containers, the bread and wine can be sensed, while the body and blood of Christ cannot. Containment seems to have figured prominently in the Syrian tradition as early as the fourth century; it became important in the Latin-​speaking West by the end of the first millennium. The preposition “in,” like the Latin in, tends to emphasize both transitivity and concealment, while “under,” like sub, puts a somewhat stronger emphasis on concealment. The entailment of transitivity is a strong affirmation of the identity motif and of the manducatio oralis. This in itself has been problematic for the Reformed tradition. Another difficulty has been that, when literalized, the container schema can suggest that Christ is a prisoner trapped within the elements and so is physically moved around when the elements are moved, hurt when the bread is broken, and so on—​an idea that has been offensive to the Reformed emphasis on God’s sovereignty and freedom. However, if the Reformed churches can affirm the identity motif and can accept the manducatio oralis as one way of articulating the polysemous quality of “body of Christ” and “blood of Christ” (while also continuing to affirm its opposite), the transitivity entailment might become unobjectionable. Meanwhile, holding other elements of the repertoire alongside the containment motif helps to lessen the danger of a literalistic understanding of imprisonment. The Roman Catholic tradition has historically made heavy use of the doctrine of transubstantiation, calling it “most apt” (aptissime) and relying in formal documents on terminology of substantia and species.4 Cognitively speaking, transubstantiation is a combination of the change and containment motifs, in which the “innermost” (essential is central) substance changes while the sensible, “external” species remain. Understood as a blend, transubstantiation can be seen as an elegant and creative model that takes explicit account of the clash in the Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor between the sensible properties of Christ’s body and those of bread. When held alongside the other motifs rather than literalized or treated as exclusive, it may be more acceptable to those traditions that have typically condemned it.

6.  The body and blood of Christ are received through (or by means of) the eucharistic bread and wine This affirmation stems from the conduit motif, which relies on the idea that Jesus Christ is located upward, in heaven—​a concept based on cross-​culturally

250  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence common primary metaphors like good is up. The Reformed tradition shares this idea of verticality with other Christian traditions. However, where those traditions have often envisioned the Spirit as descending on the elements or the elements as being lifted up to heaven, Reformed theologians have preferred to portray the Spirit as a conduit or bridge, a source-​path-​goal image schema, spanning the distance between earth and heaven. This image has helped safeguard the Reformed priority of insisting on the unity of Christ’s body and its identity with his historic body, which remains locally in heaven, while still allowing believers to be placed in metaphorical physical contact with Jesus as his energies flow into them through the conduit. Those Reformed theologians who have tended to deny or downplay any qualitative difference between sacramental and spiritual communion have generally avoided portraying the physical elements of bread and wine as part of this conduit, emphasizing instead that Christ’s body and blood are received by the believer directly (perhaps through the “mouth of faith”). However, Reformed writers like Calvin who did see sacramental communion as to some extent qualitatively distinct were on rare occasions willing to speak of the elements as “instruments” and to use prepositions such as par (in Latin) or per (in French) that can convey an image-​schematic sense of directional motion “through” them. This occasional willingness becomes much more common when the language used is not that of feeding but, rather, that of seeing. The Swiss Reformers often describe the body and blood of Christ as “exhibited” or “seen” in the elements, suggesting a source-​path-​goal schema in which the elements are situated along the path and serve as a sort of window through which Christ (though still located in heaven) can truly be seen. This creates an unexpected convergence, if not one the Reformers themselves would have welcomed, with the medieval tradition of ocular communion, which will have implications for the discussion of adoration in Section 10.3. The conduit schema makes several unique contributions to the common ecumenical repertoire. Its emphasis on verticality takes advantage of a deeply ingrained and cross-​culturally shared primary metaphor, good is up. Its insistence that Christ in his humanity is located in heaven emphasizes the legitimate distinction between the historic/​risen/​glorified body of Christ and the eucharistic body of Christ—​a distinction that is as much a part of the polysemous character of “body of Christ” as is their identification. It also highlights the role of the Holy Spirit in the eucharistic celebration in a way none of the other motifs do specifically—​a role often underemphasized elsewhere in the

Bringing the Repertoire Together  251 Western traditions, whose common ancestry in the Roman rite has historically lacked an explicit epiclesis. Like the other motifs, the conduit schema has certain weaknesses when understood as literal or exclusive. If the elements are not spoken of as positioned along the conduit, this schema risks eliminating the distinction between sacramental and spiritual communion. If used without awareness of its metaphorical character, it risks implying that heaven is a geographic place in the sky. When held together with the identity, change, containment, and representation motifs, however, the conduit motif highlights important aspects of the eucharistic mystery that can be accepted by all traditions while remaining particularly distinctive elements of Reformed piety.

10.2  Embodied entailments: the duration of Christ’s presence Agreement on words is not the sum total of ecumenical reconciliation. Over the past five centuries, differences in practice with regard to the eucharistic elements have been at least as divisive as differences in doctrinal formulations. These differences in practice are hardly arbitrary. Rather, they arise as corollaries of the differing entailments of various metaphors of eucharistic presence. One major historic area of controversy has had to do with the appropriate disposal of any consecrated elements that remain after the eucharistic celebration. Should they be consumed immediately, reserved for the sick, sent home with the faithful for home communion during the week, or simply treated as ordinary bread and wine? The question is really one of the duration of Christ’s presence: assuming that, as I have argued, the motif of identity is to be accepted, how long are the elements to be understood as the body and blood of Christ? The various answers to this question are strongly linked to the relative prominence of various motifs in different Christian traditions. In particular, those traditions such as Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy that have placed a strong emphasis on change have tended to understand Christ’s presence as more permanent than those such as Lutheranism and the Reformed tradition for whom change has been less prominent. This makes good cognitive sense based on the embodied entailments of the respective image schemas involved. What is put into a container can generally

252  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence also be taken out.5 A conduit can be disconnected or blocked. But our physical experiences of change are more complicated. Some changes are reversible: for example, water can freeze into ice and then melt back into liquid water. However, many other changes in everyday experience are not. When batter is baked into a cake, a stone sculpted into a statue, or a glass shattered into smithereens, there is no straightforward way to undo the transformation that has taken place. Human beings ourselves are subject to irreversible changes as we are born, grow from children into adolescents and from adolescents into adults, and eventually die. It is no surprise, then, that churches emphasizing the motif of change have often treated that change as at least potentially a permanent one. Whether or not this was the case was in fact a topic of discussion among theologians of the medieval West. In the eleventh century, Witmund of Aversa argued for irreversibility: Nor may one think that after being changed it returns to what it was before or is changed again into something else. . . . The whole of the bread and the whole of the wine of the altar of the Lord are so substantially changed by the consecration of God into the flesh and blood of Christ that afterwards henceforth for ever they are nothing else at all than the flesh and blood of our Saviour and Lord God Jesus Christ.6

On the other hand, a roughly contemporaneous treatise attributed to Peter Damian suggests that a reverse conversion can take place if the sacrament is burned or eaten by an animal: “As the substance is miraculously converted into the Lord’s body and the body begins to be in the sacrament, so after a kind of way there is a miraculous return (quodammodo miraculose revertitur), when that ceases to be there.”7 The thirteenth century saw a similar difference of opinion between Thomas Aquinas, who endorsed irreversibility, and Bonaventure, who believed in reversibility.8 In practice, however, these medieval theologians agreed on most points. Those who believed in the possibility that the body and blood of Christ might be converted back into bread and wine envisioned this only in circumstances involving the destruction or desecration of the elements. Those who understood the eucharistic conversion as irreversible, for their part, still acknowledged that Christ’s presence would cease if the species were destroyed; the difference lay in the fact that they believed that this would be a simple withdrawal of that presence rather than a conversion of his body and blood back

Bringing the Repertoire Together  253 into the substances of bread and wine.9 None questioned the ongoing duration of Christ’s presence under normal circumstances or the legitimacy of reserving the sacrament. Martin Luther took a different stance. In 1522 he still permitted “the practice of reserving the sacrament for the sick in pyxes” but encouraged believers instead to “realize that the elements of the sacrament at the time of death are not essential. Since the words of the sacrament are present, on which its power entirely depends, it is enough that a person should receive the elements while he is healthy, and not despise them when he is dying.”10 For Luther the reception of the sacrament apart from the proclamation of the words of institution risked superstition: ten years later he would coauthor an opinion that read in part, Concerning the reserving of the sacrament in the ciborium, we think that even though it might still be the custom to reserve the sacrament and lock it up, this custom ought to be abolished; for sacrament and Word ought to be together. . . . This sacrament has been instituted for the purpose of being used and not for the purpose of making a special worship of God with [one] piece of the sacrament apart from the usage of the sacrament and the Word.11

This emphasis that the sacrament is “for the purpose of being used” has meant that Lutheran tradition has at times been willing to entertain the possibility that the elements are Christ’s body and blood during the administration of communion but cease to be so thereafter. Luther himself seems never to have pronounced decisively on this question, although he did condemn the practice of returning consecrated bread to the sacristy to be consecrated again later, ordering that remaining consecrated elements should instead be consumed or burned.12 The Reformed tradition, for its part, has tended to assume that the special role of the eucharistic elements lasts only for the duration of the communion rite. This is true despite the fact that many Reformed theologians have been willing to speak of a change in the elements and to assert that after consecration they are no longer ordinary bread and wine. In general, Reformed practice has agreed with Martin Bucer that “they are sacraments only when they are in use.”13 Bucer would be influential in the 1552 revision of the English Book of Common Prayer, which not only repealed its 1549 predecessor’s limited provision for reservation but also stipulated that, after

254  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence communion, the priest might have any leftover bread or wine “to his own use.”14 A common Reformed perspective on the disposal of consecrated elements is summarized by the Presbyterian Church of Wales in its response to Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry: “ ‘Consecration’ signifies the setting apart of the elements for the purpose of communication, with the result that the method of disposal is an irrelevance.”15 From an ecumenical standpoint, the most practical way forward would seem to be for members of various traditions to honor one another’s scruples even when they do not share them. Mark Stamm has described such an experience within the context of a seminary chapel where Roman Catholic and United Methodist students share the same sacristy: Since [a conversation with Roman Catholic students], we have first soaked our soiled purificators before cleaning them further, and we believe it is an important ecumenical discipline. It is not theologically necessary that United Methodists and other Protestants soak purificators, but keeping the practice seems to increase our devotion to the sacraments and the sacramental life, as does all reverent handling of communion elements. Moreover, handling the purificators with greater care is an ecumenical gesture of love and respect, one that allows us to avoid wounding another’s conscience. As such, it follows in the spirit of John Wesley’s admonition to do no harm, and thus is a laudable practice.16

From the standpoint of multiply metaphorical theology, this can be understood as the practice of respecting multiple entailments. If, as I have argued, the motif of change is a legitimate member of the common repertoire of metaphors of eucharistic presence, then its entailments should be taken seriously. Reverently consuming leftover elements does no violence to the entailments of the containment or conduit motifs, and it safeguards those of the change motif when, as in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, that change is understood as a permanent one.17 The question of reservation depends on the question of duration but does not necessarily follow from it. In other words, reserving the consecrated elements is meaningless if they are no longer considered to be the body and blood of Christ, but a church might believe in principle that consecrated elements are consecrated once and for all while not in fact permitting reservation. Such a position seems close to that of Luther. Certainly, no ecumenically serious party would argue that reserving the sacrament should be

Bringing the Repertoire Together  255 required of any church. The question, rather, is whether churches that do not practice reservation can nonetheless tolerate it among others. As Hunsinger writes, the goal of this kind of ecumenical work is “if not to resolve the remaining differences, at least to lessen them to the point where they would not be church-​dividing.”18 Here the concern on the part of Lutherans and Reformed for the proper “use” of the sacrament is important. Both Lutheran and Reformed critiques of reservation tend to focus on its practice for the purpose of adoration rather than for communion itself. The Lutheran Johannes Brenz, for example, wrote, “It is clear that the bread which is carried about and reserved for adoration is not reserved for the sick but is at last consumed by those who consecrate it.”19 Fortunately, the past century has seen a decisive ecumenical convergence on the affirmation that the primary purpose of reservation is communion. While today’s Roman Catholic Church still affirms the legitimacy of adoration, it shares Brenz’s judgment that reservation for adoration alone is inappropriate. As a 1973 decree from the Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship puts it, “The principal reason for reserving the sacrament after Mass is to unite, through sacramental communion, the faithful unable to participate in the Mass, especially the sick and the aged, with Christ and the offering of his sacrifice.”20 Certainly, reservation for later communion has long-​standing precedent. Justin Martyr writes in the second century that the consecrated elements are sent by deacons to those absent from the celebration, while Tertullian and Cyprian provide ample third-​century evidence for believers’ reservation of the sacrament at home for their own weekday communions.21 Such practices might be considered to fall within a somewhat broadened definition of the Lutheran and Reformed concept of the “use” of the sacrament. Given this ample support in early Christian practice, and given a general consensus that reservation is for the purpose of extending the administration of communion to those unable to be present at a particular celebration of the eucharist, perhaps those churches that do not choose to practice it themselves might nonetheless be able to accept its use by others.

10.3  Embodied entailments: adoration The issue of eucharistic adoration is often treated together with that of reservation, and certainly the adoration of the reserved elements has had a

256  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence prominent place in the Roman Catholic tradition in particular.22 However, adoration does not depend on reservation. As Robert Taft writes, “It is not worship of Christ in the Eucharist that distinguishes the West; it is that worship apart from the eucharistic liturgy and Holy Communion.”23 Both Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, along with some Anglicans and Lutherans, practice adoration during the eucharistic rite itself. Such adoration may take the form of outward physical displays (such as bowing, genuflecting, kneeling, or prostration) or of prayer directly to Christ in the elements (as in the prayer of Philoxenus seen in Chapter 3).24 In any case, it is understood as an act of the kind of worship called λατρεία by the Second Council of Nicaea, and reserved for God alone, in contrast to the veneration (προσκύνησις) accorded to icons and images. The devotion to the reserved sacrament outside the liturgy exemplified in such practices as the Holy Hour and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament is idiosyncratic to the Roman tradition (although some Anglicans and Lutherans have borrowed these practices over the past two centuries). It has often been criticized as lending itself easily to an unbalanced piety of gazing instead of eating. Nathan Mitchell writes that in the Middle Ages, by and large, “eating and drinking the Eucharist gave way to ocular communion with the sacred host; direct participation in the prayer and song of worship was replaced by gazing at the consecrated elements.”25 However, the convergences described earlier with regard to reservation have resulted in strong affirmations on the part of today’s Roman Catholic Church that such extraliturgical devotions are “a secondary end.”26 As Lambert Beauduin put it, “The eucharist is adored because it is reserved, not reserved in order to be adored.”27 Ecumenical theology takes traditions at their best, in their own self-​understanding, and so here I wish to focus not on the distinctive Roman Catholic custom of adoration outside mass but on the deeper question of whether any adoration of the consecrated elements is ecumenically viable. The question is not “Should the elements be adored?” but, rather, “Is ecumenical reconciliation possible among churches that give different answers to that question?” Calvin and the Swiss Reformers were clear in condemning adoration as idolatry. The 1549 Consensus Tigurinus, which Calvin, Bullinger, and William Farel composed as a means of unity among the various Swiss churches, asserts: If it is not lawful to affix Christ in our imagination to the bread and the wine, much less is it lawful to worship (adorare) him in the bread. For

Bringing the Repertoire Together  257 although the bread is held forth to us as a symbol and pledge of the communion which we have with Christ, yet as it is a sign and not the thing itself (signum est, non res ipsa), and has not the thing either included in it or fixed to it (inclusam aut affixam), those who turn their minds towards it, with the view of worshiping Christ, make an idol of it.28

The rationale for rejection here rests on the assumption that “it is a sign and not the thing itself.” In contrast, of course, I have argued that the eucharistic bread and wine can be understood by Reformed and other Christians as both signs and the things themselves. Still, this does not necessarily mean that adoration is called for. Luther, who did believe that the bread was both the sign of Christ’s body and Christ’s body itself, could accept differences of practice on this question: One should not condemn people or accuse them of heresy if they do not adore the sacrament, for there is no command to that effect and it is not for that purpose that Christ is present. Just as we read that the apostles did not adore the sacrament since they were sitting and eating at table. On the other hand, one should not condemn and accuse of heresy people who do adore the sacrament. For although Christ has not commanded it, neither has he forbidden it, but often accepted it [i.e., when people prostrated themselves before him in his earthly ministry]. Free, free it must be, according as one is disposed in his heart and has opportunity.29

I propose that an ecumenical, multiply metaphorical theology of eucharistic presence can also accept such differences on the grounds that they reflect different entailments of various metaphors. Here identity, change, and containment would all tend to support adoration, while the conduit and representation motifs on their own give no grounds for it. The acknowledgment that these multiple metaphors are complementary rather than mutually exclusive might be enough by itself to suggest toleration. However, I would also like to suggest a way in which Christians for whom the conduit image is primary and who do not themselves practice adoration might be able to understand its use among others in a charitable light. In Chapter 9 I noted the preponderance of visual imagery in Reformed descriptions of the eucharist and the willingness of Reformed theologians to use “in” and “through” language of the elements with regard to seeing Jesus’s body and blood despite their greater reticence with regard to eating and

258  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence drinking them. This tradition of visual imagery evokes a source-​path-​goal schema in which the believer’s gaze passes through the elements to reach Jesus Christ. The elements are portrayed, in effect, as windows on Jesus’s body and blood: in Calvin’s words, “In them is presented to us (in iis nobis exhibeatur) the spiritual food of the soul.”30 Nathan Mitchell has pointed out the importance of visual language in both scripture and later Christian theological expression: From earliest times, vision has been a common metaphor for the Christian experience of world-​transcending realities. From the Easter appearance stories in the Synoptics to the Johannine invitation to “come and see” (John 1.39), to the seer’s Lord’s Day vision on the isle of Patmos, to Augustine’s illumination at Ostia, to St. Benedict’s perception of the whole world in a ray of light, seeing has been identified with grace and mystical intuition. Even in a systematic theology such as Aquinas’s, the ultimate condition of humanity in the presence of God is described as visio beatifica, the beatific vision.31

Mitchell goes on to suggest that the experience of gazing at a focal point is a basic element of devotion, grounded in the early childhood experience of the mutual gaze between infant and parent, and that it remains important as a component of a more complex adult spirituality: “The need for seeing and being seen, for gazing and being gazed upon, for a numinous visual symbol of ‘sanctioned centrality,’ lasts throughout life. But mature adult development in faith as in the rest of human life demands that we integrate this legitimate need for security, familiarity and mutuality into generative modes of symbolic expression and ritual behavior.”32 Mitchell’s suggestion that visual experience is a major element of spirituality is supported by experimental evidence indicating that the brain’s visual system, as Lakoff and Núñez write, “is not restricted to vision. It is also the locus of mental imagery.”33 The visual cortex and other components of the visual system are used in conjunction with the motor system for conceptualizing image schemas, not only by sighted people but also by people who have been blind since birth. “One should not think of the visual system as operating purely on visual input. Thus, it makes neurological sense that structures in the visual system can be used for conceptual purposes, even by the congenitally blind. . . . Image schemas are kinesthetic, going beyond mere seeing alone.”34 The visual system of the brain plays a critical role in facilitating the

Bringing the Repertoire Together  259 ability to imagine the image schemas that form the building blocks of many complex concepts.35 An Eastern Orthodox theology of icons is a source-​path-​goal schema very similar to the Reformed schema of the elements: the icon serves as a window “through” which προσκύνησις rendered to an icon of Christ passes, to become true λατρεία rendered to Christ himself.36 While the Reformed tradition has often been resistant to the use of icons, Reformed theologians have been more than willing to describe the eucharistic elements themselves as visual signs. With this in mind, perhaps Reformed Christians whose theological orientation is open to it might be willing to think of their fellow Christians’ practice of adoration as functioning in a manner analogous to the veneration of icons in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. On this account, a Roman Catholic fellow believer would be rendering προσκύνησις to the eucharistic elements but through them would be rendering λατρεία to Christ. Meanwhile, that Roman Catholic might understand herself to be rendering λατρεία to the elements that are Christ (but meanwhile only προσκύνησις to the species). Despite their differences in spatial imagery, both could agree that Christians adore Jesus Christ with the worship of λατρεία and that such λατρεία is not to be given to any created thing. Today it is universally agreed, among traditions that practice eucharistic adoration or treat it as an adiaphoron, that such adoration is categorically secondary and that the primary purpose of the eucharistic elements is to serve as food and drink for the people of God. Given such agreement on the primary purpose, perhaps Christians of traditions that do not practice adoration could be willing to tolerate its practice by others by understanding it as a manifestation of a visual piety known also to the Reformed tradition although expressed quite differently. In the change and containment models, this adoration is expressed directly to the elements; in the conduit model it can be understood as expressed to Christ through the elements; however, in both it belongs properly only to Jesus Christ. These image-​schematic differences can be complementary rather than result in mutual condemnation.

10.4  Conclusions The theme of unity in diversity is close to the heart of the eucharistic mystery. The eucharistic prayer over the bread in the Didache emphasizes the fact that what once were countless separate grains of wheat have been gathered

260  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence and baked into one loaf for the common meal: “Just as this broken bread was scattered upon the hills and was gathered together and became one, so may your church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into your kingdom.”37 Paul’s words to the Corinthians emphasize the fact that this one loaf is itself then broken into fragments and shared among the many who are gathered: “Because it is one loaf, we many are one body: for we all share from the one loaf.”38 Both images in their own ways point to the truth that the church is one body composed of many members. Each member is unique, and without each the whole would be diminished. Yet no one member is the whole of the church; each needs the others in order to be the Body of Christ together. Metaphors are a bit like that. To approach any truth of sufficient complexity, we embodied human beings need more than one metaphor. At its best, multiply metaphorical thinking gives us access to truths we would never be able to encounter otherwise. Each metaphor is unique and irreplaceable, yet none is the whole truth, and each needs to be complemented and counterbalanced by others. It is fitting, then, that the eucharist, the sacrament of unity in diversity, should itself give rise to a multiplicity of metaphors by which Christians have learned to approach the mysterious presence of Jesus Christ. In this book I have argued that, in light of the findings of cognitive linguistics, there cannot be said to be a clear division between literal and figurative language. Rather, the two are ends of a continuum from language describing experiences amenable to direct sensorimotor interaction to language evoking complex blends. Because eucharistic theology deals with realities not accessible to basic-​level sensory experience, it inherently makes use of figurative language. Making use of multiple metaphors is the normal way human beings conceptualize complex experience, and entailments that would conflict if understood as literal are often instead ways of highlighting different aspects of reality. Thus, the motifs developed by various Christian traditions over the centuries for talking about the relationship between the eucharistic elements and Jesus Christ’s body and blood are best understood as multiple metaphors (or, strictly speaking, multiple blends with metaphoric and other components) of eucharistic presence. The central metaphor of eucharistic presence with regard to the elements is the Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor, this loaf and wine are jesus’s body and blood, which is the scriptural warrant for sacramental communion. The Johannine metaphor, jesus’s flesh and blood are heavenly life-​giving bread and drink, gives rise to the concept of spiritual

Bringing the Repertoire Together  261 communion. All Christians agree in believing in spiritual communion, and those Christian traditions that have emphasized it have much to teach those that have emphasized sacramental communion. But since the Johannine metaphor does not intrinsically require physical elements, a theology of the elements themselves needs to be based on the Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor—​ although the Johannine metaphor can under certain circumstances be combined with the Synoptic/​Pauline one. The Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor can be understood by Christians as being true in the proper sense by means of a tectonic shift by which believers are invited into a broader understanding of what “body of Christ” and “blood of Christ” really mean. This broader understanding creates polysemous radial networks in which the historic, eucharistic, and ecclesial senses of “body of Christ” and the historic and eucharistic senses of “blood of Christ” coexist in a complex relationship, with each standing in a relation of Representation to the others and in relations of both Identity and Representation to a central, underspecified sense. These radial networks allow long-​standing test cases like the manducatio oralis and manducatio impiorum to be resolved, since both affirmative and negative answers are legitimate for each. Several other motifs were developed throughout Christian history and serve as elaborations on the identity motif. The oldest of these is that of representation, which (contrary to assumptions made at times in both East and West) can coexist with identity. Three others are grounded in basic spatial image schemas: change, containment, and the conduit. While these three have different entailments that would sometimes be incompatible if literalized, they share the common feature of putting believers directly in contact with Jesus Christ. The doctrine of transubstantiation, central to Roman Catholic understandings of eucharistic presence, can be understood as a particular combination of the change and containment motifs. Finally, while mutual charity recommends the reverent consumption of consecrated elements, a multiply metaphorical theology of the elements can allow for a diversity of practice with regard to the customs of reservation and adoration. It is Christ himself who is the source of our unity. I pray that this project will have contributed in its own small way to the increasing visible manifestation of that unity, which exists not for our own sake alone but for the life of all creation. A cognitive approach to theology legitimates a move away from single verbal formulations designed to express a single, finely tuned, precise truth. Yet it in no way implies a move toward an unmoored relativism. Instead, it embraces the multiplicity of figurative language as a gift of

262  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence God: one by which finite, embodied creatures like us can share in God’s own creative power of naming and come to know a God whose self-​revelation is faithful and true. May God hasten the day when we may all gather as one around the common table to share in the body and blood of Christ. And at length, when sacraments have ceased, may we feast forever at the banquet to come.

Notes 1. From the Nicene Creed in Episcopal Church, The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church: Together with the Psalter or Psalms of David: According to the Use of the Episcopal Church (New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1979), 358. 2. 2 Tim. 2:15. 3. For “real predication,” see again George Hunsinger, The Eucharist and Ecumenism: Let Us Keep the Feast (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 60. 4. Council of Trent, Session 13, October 11, 1551, Canones de sanctissimo Eucharistiae sacramento, Canons on the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist, Canon 2, in H. J. Schroeder, ed., Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (St. Louis, MO: B. Herder, 1950), 356; ET 79. 5. I once heard a pastor explain her willingness to discard consecrated elements by saying, “If Jesus can get in there, I trust him to be able to get out!” 6. On the Reality of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist, in PL 149:1494D; ET Darwell Stone, A History of the Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), 1:254. 7. An Exposition of the Canon of the Mass, in PL 145:882D; ET Stone, 1:261. 8. Aquinas: Summa Theologiae 3a.77.5; Bonaventure: Commentary on the Sentences 4.d13.a2.q1.ad3. See Yves de Montcheuil, “La raison de la permanence du Christ sous les espèces eucharistiques d’apres Saint Bonaventure et Saint Thomas,” in Mélanges théologiques, 3rd ed. (Paris: Aubier, 1951), 71–​82. 9. E.g. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 3a.77.4. 10. Von beider Gestalt des Sakraments zu nehmen (1522), in WA 10.2:32; ET Receiving Both Kinds in the Sacrament, in LW 36:257. 11. Luther, Jonas, Bugenhagen und Melanchthon an die markgräflich brandenburgischen Statthalter und Räte und den Rat zu Nürnberg (August 1, 1532), No. 1949, in WA Br 6:341; ET To the Regents and Councilors of the Magistrate of Brandenburg-​Ansbach and to the Council of the City of Nürnberg, in LW 50:66. 12. Consumption is the ordinary course Luther recommends: Luther an Simon Wolferinus in Eisleben (July 20, 1543), No. 3894, in WA Br 10:348. However, he approves a decision to burn a group of mixed consecrated and unconsecrated hosts after a minister had irreverently mingled them: Luther an Nikolaus von Amsdorf in Zeitz (January 11, 1546), No. 4186, in WA Br 11:259.

Bringing the Repertoire Together  263 13. Propositiones Novem de Sacra Eucharistia, Proposition 6, in Martin Bucer, Scripta Anglicana Fere Omnia, ed. Conrad Hubert (Basel: Pietro Perna, 1577), 611; ET Stone, History, 2:45. 14. Brian Cummings, ed., The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 140; spelling modernized. The 1549 book had allowed the sacrament to be reserved only for the purpose of bringing it to the sick directly after a celebration of the eucharist: see Cummings, 81. 15. Max Thurian, ed., Churches Respond to BEM, vol. 2, Faith and Order, Paper 132 (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1986), 171. The response continues in a spirit of charity, acknowledging nonetheless that “there is nothing to commend unseemly methods of disposal. Reformed Christians would be horrified if pages of a discarded pulpit Bible were used to wrap up fish and chips! And yet we are often totally indifferent to the way in which the eucharistic elements are disposed of. We also acknowledge that our laxity at this point can cause great offence to Christians of other traditions and our practice in this regard requires re-​examination.” 16. Mark Wesley Stamm, “‘What Are We Doing?’ Thoughts About a Seminary Chapel Program in an Ecumenical Setting,” Worship 84, no. 2 (March 1, 2010): 130–​31. 17. Other methods of disposal such as burning the elements or returning them to the earth may be understood by those who practice them as the equivalent of reverent consumption. Both Luther and pseudo-​Peter Damian permit burning at least in some situations: see Hermann Sasse, This Is My Body: Luther’s Contention for the Real Presence in the Sacrament of the Altar (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1959), 174n102; PL 145:882, ET Stone, History, 1:260–​61. My own experience suggests that pouring leftover consecrated wine into the earth, while not rubrically permitted, seems to be common among Episcopalians (cf. Book of Common Prayer [1979], 408–​9). Still, such methods may give offense to others even when reverently intended. In the absence of a widespread ecumenical consensus on acceptable alternate methods of disposal, consumption seems the most appropriate choice. 18. Hunsinger, The Eucharist and Ecumenism, 85. 19. Heinrich Heppe, Die Bekenntnisschriften der altprotestantischen Kirche Deutschlands (Cassel: Theodor Fischer, 1855), 520; ET Stone, History, 2:34. 20. In The Rites of the Catholic Church, study ed., vol. 1 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990), 637. 21. Justin, First Apology 65.5, in Denis Minns and Paul Parvis, eds., Justin, Philosopher and Martyr: Apologies, Oxford Early Christian Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 255; ET 256. Tertullian, To His Wife 2.5, in PL 1:1295–96. Cyprian, On the Lapsed 26, in PL 4:486–87. 22. This adoration of the reserved sacrament did not emerge until well into the second millennium, but it became a major component of piety for many in the medieval West and in post-​Tridentine Roman Catholicism. See Nathan Mitchell, Cult and Controversy: The Worship of the Eucharist Outside Mass (New York: Pueblo, 1982), 163–​98. 23. Robert F. Taft, “‘Communion’ from the Tabernacle: A Liturgico-​ Theological Oxymoron,” Worship 88, no. 1 (January 1, 2014): 13; emphasis original. 24. For Philoxenus’ prayer, see Section 3.2, 77–78. Cf. this medieval Western prayer, meant to be offered at the moment of elevation: “I honor you with all my might /​In form of bread as I you see, /​Lord that in your lady bright, /​In Mary Man became for me.”

264  Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence Miri Rubin, “Popular Attitudes to the Eucharist,” in A Companion to the Eucharist in the Middle Ages, ed. Ian Levy, Gary Macy, and Kristen Van Ausdall (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 464. 25. Mitchell, Cult and Controversy, 119. 26. Lutheran-​Catholic Dialogue in the United States, “The Eucharist,” 1968, http://​www. usccb.org/​b eliefs-​and-​teachings/​ecumenical-​and-​interreligious/​ecumenical/​lutheran/​eucharist.cfm; accessed February 26, 2021. 27. Lambert Beauduin, Melanges Liturgiques: Recueillis Parmi Les Oeuvres de Dom Lambert Beauduin (Louvain: Centre Liturgiques, 1954), 265, quoted in Lutheran-​ Catholic Dialogue in the United States, “The Eucharist,” http://​www.usccb.org/​ beliefs-​and-​teachings/​ecumenical-​and-​interreligious/​ecumenical/​lutheran/​eucharist.cfm, n29. 28. Consensio mutua in re sacramentaria ministrorum Tigurinae ecclesiae et D. Ioannis Calvini 26, in CO 7:744; ET Mutual Consent, in John Calvin, Tracts and Treatises on the Doctrine and Worship of the Church, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1958), 220. 29. Von Anbeten des Sakraments, in WA 11:448; ET The Adoration of the Sacrament, in LW 36:295. Luther’s ambiguous position with regard to adoration can be seen in the fact that he is able to affirm in 1528 that “whoever sees the bread sees Christ’s body” (Vom Abendmahl Christi, Bekenntnis, in WA 26:442; ET Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, in LW 37:300) but a year later at Marburg to agree with Oecolampadius that “it is childish if a person, on seeing the bread, says: ‘I have seen the Lord’ ” (Hedio’s account, in WA 30.3:142; ET LW 38:34). 30. Institutes 4.17.14, in CO 2:1013; ET Stone, History, 2:52. 31. Mitchell, Cult and Controversy, 375–​76. Note that while some of the examples Mitchell describes are instances of the conceptual metaphor knowing is seeing, others describe experiences in which spiritual revelation is conflated with literal seeing. 32. Mitchell, 389. 33. Where Mathematics Comes from: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 33–​34. 34. Lakoff and Núñez, 34. 35. The fact that the visual cortex is involved in spatial thinking of all kinds suggests that the source-​path-​goal piety implied by the language of “exhibition” is not exclusive to sighted people. This in no way lessens the importance of avoiding an uncritical reliance on visual language in liturgy, since when knowing is seeing is not counterbalanced by other metaphors it creates an offensive stereotype of blindness as error and sin. See Gail Ramshaw, Liturgical Language: Keeping It Metaphoric, Making It Inclusive (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996), 32–​34. 36. See Jaroslav Pelikan, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600–​1700), The Christian Tradition 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 117–​33. 37. Didache 9:4. 38. 1 Cor. 10:17.

Recommended Readings in Cognitive Linguistics Introductions to the field Dancygier, Barbara, and Eve Sweetser. Figurative Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. An excellent overview of the complex and dynamic interplay among metaphor, metonymy, blending, and other forms of figurative language. Includes attention to gesture, literary and poetic analysis, and other topics that have become important in the field over the past decade or two. Kövecses, Zoltán. Language, Mind, and Culture: A Practical Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. A good complement to Dancygier and Sweetser’s volume, this book reads more like an introductory textbook, including study questions and exercises to be worked. For visually oriented thinkers, Kövecses also includes more diagrams. Bergen, Benjamin K. Louder than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning. New York: Basic Books, 2012. An entertaining and readable volume on the embodied mind thesis, aimed at nonspecialists while still drawing from the scholarly literature.

Overview volumes Geeraerts, Dirk, and Hubert Cuyckens, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Dąbrowska, Ewa, and Dagmar Divjak, eds. Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2015. Two good survey volumes composed of short topical articles written by experts. Geeraerts and Cuyckens’ is more accessible to nonspecialists; Dąbrowska and Divjak’s is a more technical snapshot of the state of research as of 2015.

Cognitive linguistics, theology, and religion Masson, Robert. Without Metaphor, No Saving God: Theology After Cognitive Linguistics. Leuven: Peeters, 2014. Sanders, John. Theology in the Flesh: How Embodiment and Culture Shape the Way We Think About Truth, Morality, and God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016.

266  Recommended Readings in Cognitive Linguistics Masson and Sanders are the first two systematic theologians to offer book-​length engagements with cognitive linguistics. Sanders writes an introduction to the field for theologians and makes an argument for the embodied quality of theological language in general. Masson attempts to break new interdisciplinary conceptual ground by developing the idea of a “tectonic shift.” Howe, Bonnie, and Joel B. Green, eds. Cognitive Linguistic Explorations in Biblical Studies. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. This edited volume brings together essays by scholars working at the intersection of cognitive linguistics and biblical studies. A number of the authors were involved in creating the Cognitive Linguistics in Biblical Interpretation section of the Society of Biblical Literature. Several have also produced books using cognitive linguistics to address specific topics in exegesis.

Historically significant readings in cognitive linguistics Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. The seminal work in conceptual metaphor theory, Metaphors We Live By has had a cross-​disciplinary impact. A 2003 edition includes an afterword with some updates on the development of the field through that time. Johnson, Mark. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Langacker, Ronald W. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987. Lakoff, George. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Three books from 1987 have made a major impact on the field: Johnson’s for the theory of embodied mind, Langacker’s for a radical shift away from the formalist approach to grammar, and Lakoff ’s for radial categorization and prototype theory. Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Lakoff, George, and Rafael E. Núñez. Where Mathematics Comes from: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being. New York: Basic Books, 2000. In these three books Lakoff and his collaborators apply insights derived from cognitive linguistics to literary analysis, philosophy, and mathematics, respectively. Philosophy in the Flesh is particularly relevant to religious and theological discussions. Grady, Joseph E. “Foundations of Meaning: Primary Metaphors and Primary Scenes.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1997. The basic work on primary metaphors. Fauconnier, Gilles. Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Recommended Readings in Cognitive Linguistics   267 Fauconnier, Gilles. Mappings in Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Fauconnier’s initial work on mental spaces remains useful on its own but also provided the basis for his collaboration with Turner, in which they developed conceptual blending theory. Mental Spaces and Mappings in Thought and Language are more technical; The Way We Think is written to be accessible to nonspecialists but broke important ground nonetheless. Geeraerts, Dirk, ed. Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006. A selection of seminal articles that appeared in journals between 1982 and 2000, with a helpful introduction and epilogue by Geeraerts providing a historical and theoretical overview of the field.

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Index accidents. See species additive method, 6–​10 adoration, 13, 58–​59, 87, 236–​38, 244, 250, 255–​59, 261 affection is warmth metaphor, 23–​28, 38 alloeosis. See Christology Amalar of Metz, 189 Ambrose of Milan, 109, 158, 169, 186, 188–​89, 198, 208, 219 Amondawa language, 30 Analogy (vital relation), 73–​76, 174 See also vital relations Andrewes, Lancelot, 212–​13 Androutsos, Chrestos, 214 Anglican tradition, 15–​16, 107, 200n5, 212–​13, 256 annihilation. See substitution model Anselm of Laon, 96 antitype. See symbol Apostolic Constitutions, 169, 235, 240n3 aptness, 10, 22, 49, 51, 90, 220 Aquinas. See Thomas Aquinas Arcadi, James M., 107 Aristotle, 212, 215, 220 Arius and Arianism, 149–​150 Astell, Ann, 237 asymmetry, 27–​28, 64, 77–​80, 142 atom concept, 141–​42 Augustine of Hippo, 89, 97, 109, 158, 169, 187, 258 Aune, Michael, 9, 15 “aunt” as monosemous, 43–​44 Aymara language, 30   Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, 2, 9, 168, 254 basic-​level categories, 38–​39, 49, 68, 76, 121, 260 Basil of Caesarea, 161, 235 Belgic Confession, 233 Ben-​Gurion, David, 68–​70, 73–​75, 174

Berengar of Tours, 89, 109, 158–​60, 190 Bergen, Benjamin, 24–​25, 181n22 blended space, 61–​71, 89–​90, 140–​51, 172–​75 blending. See conceptual blending blickets, 142 Boersma, Hans, 5, 10, 20n37, 50, 168 Bonaventure, 166n39, 252 Boroditsky, Lera, 29 Bradshaw, Paul F., 235–​36 bread roll example, 117–​18, 121 Brenz, Johannes, 255 Brown, David, 9 Brümmer, Vincent, 10 Bucer, Martin, 107, 211, 235, 253 Bullinger, Heinrich, 107, 127–​29, 256   Cajetan, 97 Calvin, John on adoration, 236, 256–​57 and change motif, 192, 194, 197, 199, 219 and conduit motif, 228, 230–​36, 238, 250, 258 and containment motif, 211–​12 figurative understanding of words of institution, 3, 107, 129–​30, 159, 162 and representation motif, 1, 130, 168, 194 on sacramental and spiritual communion, 1, 15, 128–​31, 162, 250 Canons of Hippolytus, 109 Capernaism, 86, 162 Capon, Robert Farrar, 8–​9 Casel, Odo, 168 catachresis, 112, 134n30 categories and categorization, 38–​39, 42–​49, 119, 142–​57 See also radial extension “chained” metaphors, 93–​96, 198, 248 change is motion metaphor, 26, 32, 35, 47, 71, 144, 183–​91, 200, 217–​20, 239, 245, 247

284 Index change motif, 1, 12–13, 183–200, 215–20, 239, 244–45, 247–49, 251–54, 257, 259, 261 Change (vital relation), 73, 174–​75 See also vital relations changing is being born metaphor, 186–​87, 200, 245, 247 changing is being made metaphor, 185–​88, 200, 245, 247 Chauvet, Louis-​Marie, 5, 168, 225n60 Chez Panisse, 61–​62 christ is a vine metaphor, 113, 119, 131, 139–​40 Christology, 114–​16, 148–​53, 159–​60 Chrysostom. See John Chrysostom the church is the body of christ metaphor. See ecclesial body of Christ Cicero. See rhetoric, classical clash, in blend, 65, 85, 92, 142, 145, 148–​49, 173, 184, 220, 249 coexistence model, 215–​18 communicatio idiomatum. See Christology compression, 73–​76, 173–​75 computers are people metaphor, 80 concealment, 206–​9, 220–​21, 245, 249 conceptual blending, 11, 22, 52, 60–​76, 89–​90, 100n10, 143, 168–​73 as dynamic rather than deterministic, 65, 85–​89, 143–​49, 168, 170–​71 (see also motivation) See also blended space; double-​scope blending; generic space; input spaces; mental spaces; multiple-​scope blending; simplex blending; single-​scope blending conceptual metaphor theory. See under metaphor conduit motif, 13, 106, 227–​39, 246, 249–​52, 257–​59 consubstantiation. See coexistence model container schema, 30–​37, 63, 82, 86, 206–​221, 239, 245, 248–​49, 251–​52 containment motif, 13, 106, 183–​84, 206–​ 221, 231, 239, 245, 248–​49, 251–​52 copula construction, 81, 103n45 Council of Trent. See Trent, Council of count noun, 90, 93–​94 Cranmer, Thomas, 15, 58, 199, 236 critical realism, 49–​51

Crockett, William, 19n35, 115, 167 cucumber example, 117–​18 Cyprian of Carthage, 255 Cyril of Alexandria, 189 Cyril of Jerusalem, 109, 169, 186–​88, 195–​96, 208 Cyrus (Persian king), 146   Dalton, John, 141–​42 Dancygier, Barbara, 25, 27, 35, 36, 38, 60, 80 “dead” metaphors, 6, 37–​38 desktop blend, 76, 89 Didache, 8, 259 directional metaphor. See asymmetry directional prepositions. See prepositions disposal of elements. See duration of Christ’s presence Dix, Gregory, 8 Donne, John, 16 Dositheus, Confession of, 191, 196–​97 double-​scope blending, 101n22, 142, 170 dual, 232 dualism, 5, 21 Duns Scotus, John, 219 duration of Christ’s presence, 251–​55 Dyobouniotes, Constantine, 214   Eastern Orthodox tradition and adoration, 256 and change motif, 1, 12, 186, 191–​97, 199–​200, 239, 248, 251, 254 and conduit motif, 234–​36, 259 and containment motif, 214, 221, 239 and ecumenical dialogue, 14–​15, 99 and identity motif, 58–​59, 107, 122, 139, 161, 246 and representation motif, 167–​68 vertical imagery in, 227, 229 See also icons (Eastern Orthodox) ecclesial body of Christ, 155–​63, 176–​78 edge case, 46, 56n72, 143, 146 Elizabeth I, 16 Elizabeth II (“Here is Queen Elizabeth”), 74–​76, 174 embodied realism, 21–​25, 47–​52, 108, 160 See also critical realism embodied simulation, 22, 24–​25, 38–​39, 47, 51, 73, 243

Index  285 entailments, 7, 13, 36–​37, 52, 88, 143, 184, 206–​209, 220–​21, 244–​262 entrenchment, 26, 28, 43–​44, 61, 76, 108, 146, 154, 181n22 Ephrem of Edessa, 208–​9, 213 epiclesis, 15, 180n15, 240n3, 251 epistemology. See embodied realism essence. See Folk Theory of Essences essential is central metaphor, 216–​17, 249 Evans, Vyvyan, 61 Event Structure metaphor, 35 exhibition language, 234–​38 extension. See radial extension   Fabius. See rhetoric, classical Fauconnier, Gilles, 41, 44, 61, 67, 72–​74, 87, 138, 142, 168, 170–​71, 174, 176–​77 figurative language capable of truth claims, 3–​4, 12, 22, 47–​51, 76, 107, 139, 170 continuum of literal and figurative, 38–​39, 219–​220, 260 literal equivalents for, 5, 40, 108, 112–​19, 122, 131, 143, 168, 172, 175 See also conceptual blending; metaphor; metonymy; tropes figure. See symbol float, 65, 67, 89, 92, 101n15, 140, 143 Folk Theory of Essences, 215–​220 Fourth Lateran Council, 190, 209, 215 fuzzy categories, 46 See also edge case   gaze, 77–​79, 236–​37, 258 Gelasius, 196–​97 generic space, 62–​73, 84, 92, 97, 101n13, 152 Gerrish, Brian, 127–​28 god is a rock metaphor, 119–​21, 131, 139–​41, 143–​44, 145, 149 god’s domain is up metaphor. See good is up good is up metaphor, 227–​28, 246, 250 See also happy is up; more is up Gothic Missal, 207 Grady, Joseph, 26–​28 Green, Chris E. W., 20n37, 213

Green, Melanie, 61 Gregory of Nazianzus, 169 Gregory of Nyssa, 188, 199 Grim Reaper, 71–​73, 170   happy is up metaphor, 26, 28, 227 See also good is up; more is up Hedley, John Cuthbert, 213–​14 Heriger of Lobbes, 158–​59 Hippolytus, Canons of, 109 historic body of Christ, 153–​163 Hoen, Cornelius, 111–​12 Holy Spirit, 2, 15, 151–​56, 183, 189, 196, 214, 228–​36, 238, 246, 250–​51 See also epiclesis homonymy, 42–​45, 122, 160–​61, 163 See also monosemy; polysemy Hooker, Richard, 212 Hugh of St. Victor, 89 Hughes, Graham, 5 Hunsinger, George, 20n37, 106–​8, 122, 130–​31, 139, 141, 176 Hussite movement, 111 hypostatic union. See Christology   iconicity, 169–​71, 181n22 icons (computer). See desktop blend icons (Eastern Orthodox), 109, 167, 256, 259 ideas are objects metaphor, 7, 216, 232 identity motif, 11–​12, 58, 106–​11, 122, 139, 153–​63, 176, 186, 195, 244–​46, 261 Identity (vital relation), 73–​76, 152–​53, 155–​57, 167–​78, 181n30, 245, 261 See also vital relations image metaphor, 38, 43, 87, 103n50, 118–​19, 169–​70, 181 image schemas, 30–​35, 47–​51, 184, 216–​219, 228, 232–​34, 244–​46, 251–​52, 258–​59 role in blending, 72, 81, 84, 92–​93 See also container schema; source–​ path–​goal schema incarnation. See Christology; sacramentality input spaces, 61–​76, 83–​85, 87–​89, 173–​75 See also conceptual blending; generic space; source frame; target frame institution narrative. See words of institution

286 Index instruments, eucharistic elements as, 128, 228, 233, 238, 250 intimacy is closeness metaphor, 26, 28, 35, 86, 183 Irenaeus of Lyons, 15, 109, 195, 199   Jerome, 158 jesus is god metaphor, 148–​52, 154 jesus is the messiah metaphor, 139–​41, 144–​48, 150–​51, 174 jesus’s flesh and blood are heavenly life–​giving bread and drink metaphor. See Johannine metaphor Johannine metaphor, 77–​79, 90–​93 “chained” with Synoptic/​Pauline, 93–​96, 198, 248 and spiritual communion, 11, 60, 96–​99, 112, 124–​29, 228, 238, 244, 260–​61 John Chrysostom, 158, 161, 186, 187 John of Damascus, 167, 188, 191 Johnson, Mark, 6–​7, 28, 32–​33, 39, 41, 48–​50, 60, 207, 216, 227, 237 Johnson, Maxwell E., 5, 235 Justin Martyr, 108, 195, 199   Karlstadt, Andreas, 103n46, 115 Koenig, Sarah, 59 Kövecses, Zoltán, 26, 29, 36–​37, 41   Lakoff, George, 6–​7, 24, 27, 30, 34, 39, 41, 45, 48–​50, 60, 206, 216, 227, 232, 236–​37, 258 landmark and trajector, 30–​31 Lanfranc of Canterbury, 109, 159, 190, 215 Last Supper. See Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor; words of institution Lateran Council. See Fourth Lateran Council Lathrop, Gordon, 5, 8, 51, 168 Leibniz, Gottfried, 9 literal language. See figurative language liturgical and sacramental theology, 4–​6, 8–​10, 17n10 Lollard movement, 111 Lombard, Peter. See Peter Lombard the lord is my shepherd metaphor, 131, 139–​40 love is a journey metaphor. See a love relationship is a shared journey metaphor

a love relationship is a shared journey metaphor, 33–​36, 62–​64 Luther, Martin on adoration and reservation, 253–​54, 257 attempts at reconciliation with Swiss, 1, 107 on Capernaism, 86 and change motif, 191–​92, 197, 199, 230 and containment motif, 210–​211, 214 equation of historic and eucharistic body of Christ, 159–​60 literal understanding of words of institution, 3, 108–​110, 115–​24, 130, 139–​40 on sacramental and spiritual communion, 97, 122–​24 theory of new word meanings, 118–​22 and ubiquity of Christ’s body, 131, 210–​14, 230 Lutheran tradition and adoration and reservation, 251–​57 and change motif, 186, 191–​94, 199–​200, 239, 248 and containment motif, 13, 211, 213–​14, 239 and ecumenical dialogue, 1, 14, 99, 139 and identity motif, 1, 58–​59, 107–​8, 130, 139, 246 and representation motif, 167–​68   Macy, Gary, 158, 215–​20 Malkovich, John, 175–​76 manducatio impiorum, 99, 111, 122, 161, 245–​46, 261 manducatio oralis, 99, 122, 128–​29, 161, 231–​32, 239, 245–​46, 249, 261 Marburg Colloquy, 1, 3, 122, 264n29 mass noun, 90–​94 Masson, Robert, 3–​4, 13, 50, 139–​43, 147, 151, 163 material anchors, 76, 169–​71, 178 McKenna, John, 168, 179n6 megablend. See multiple-​scope blending and megablends Melanchthon, Philip, 107, 193, 235 memorialism, 1, 15, 127, 136n82, 213 mental spaces, 61–​76, 89, 156–​57, 170–​78

Index  287 metaphor conceptual metaphor theory, 11, 22–​39, 64, 77, 81, 140–​43, 169 as means of generating new senses (see polysemy; radial categorization) as shorthand for figurative thinking in general, 10–​11, 19n32, 60, 244, 260 as substitution of words (see figurative language: literal equivalents for) See also asymmetry; “dead” metaphors; primary metaphors; single-​scope blending; source frame; target frame; tectonic equivalence; and names of individual conceptual metaphors metonymy, 11, 22, 40–​42, 43, 49, 107, 118 and blending theory, 52, 60, 72, 108, 163 interpretation of words of institution, 112, 130, 159, 172 and symbols, 169–​70 in Synoptic/​Pauline blend, 82, 84–​88, 163, 237 Miles, Margaret, 237 monosemy, 42–​45, 121, 160–​63, 176–​77 morality is cleanliness metaphor, 23–​24, 28, 38 more is up metaphor, 25, 76, 138, 227 See also good is up metaphor; happy is up metaphor motifs, 9, 11–​14, 60, 106, 185, 239, 244–​261 See also names of individual motifs motivation, 28–​30, 43, 88, 97 mouse, 43–​44, 160–​61 Moving Events and Moving Observer metaphors, 29–​30, 33, 240n13 multiple-​scope blending and megablends, 71–​73, 76, 87–​88, 93–​95, 170, 172–​ 73, 198 multiply metaphorical theology, 4, 7–​10, 51, 60, 208, 212, 220, 234, 243–​61   Nestorianism. See Christology Núñez, Rafael, 206–​7, 258   objectivism and referentialism, 22, 24, 47–​52, 160, 178 ocular communion, 87, 236–​38, 250, 256

Oecolampadius, 3, 112–​13, 115, 119–​20, 122, 130, 168, 172, 175, 264n29 Origen, 109   “paint” as polysemous, 44–​45, 161 parallelism, 127–​28 Part for Part metonymy, 40 Part for Whole metonymy, 40–​41, 84 Paschasius Radbertus, 109, 158, 189, 196, 198 passion narrative frame, 82, 86–​88, 94 path schema. See source–​path–​ goal schema Peirce, Charles Sanders, 170 Pentecostal tradition, 1, 15, 20n37, 59, 99, 213 people are computers metaphor, 80 Peter Damian, 252, 263n17 Peter Lombard, 89, 209 Peter of Capua, 190, 215, 217 Philoxenus of Mabbug, 77–​80, 84, 86, 256 Piaget, Jean, 25, 222n8 Plutarch. See rhetoric, classical polysemy, 42–​45, 48, 76, 121–​22 as result of tectonic equivalence, 148, 152, 156–​63, 176–​78, 245–​46, 249–​50, 261 Power, David, 5, 168 predication habitual predication (Wyclif), 110–​11 literal predication (Zwingli and Luther), 114–​22 real predication (Hunsinger), 106–​8, 122, 130–​131, 139, 141, 160, 162, 168, 175, 248 prepositions, 185–​86, 188, 200, 228–​29, 233, 247, 250 primary metaphors, 25–​28, 33–​35, 38, 47, 50–​51, 77, 183–​86, 200 See also affection is warmth; change is motion; essential is central; good is up; happy is up; intimacy is closeness; morality is cleanliness; more is up; states are locations proprie, 3, 111, 125–​26, 130, 140–​151, 160, 184, 196 prototypicality, 45–​47, 65–​66, 121–​22, 142–​57 Quintilian. See rhetoric, classical

288 Index Radbertus. See Paschasius Radbertus radial extension, 43, 45–​46, 76, 119–​121, 142–​57, 163, 176–​78, 261 Ramscar, Michael, 29 Ramshaw, Gail, 5, 57n93 Ratramnus, 109, 158–​60, 190, 194, 207–​9 real predication (Hunsinger). See under predication Reddy, Michael, 232 referentialism. See objectivism and referentialism Reformed tradition, 1, 12–​15, 20n37 and adoration and reservation, 251–​59 and change motif, 186, 192–​93, 197–​200, 248, 251 and conduit motif, 228–​239, 249–​51 and containment motif, 211–​13, 219, 221, 249 and identity motif, 58, 107–​8, 122–​31, 139, 159–​60, 176, 246 and representation motif, 168, 176 and visual piety, 234–​39, 250 representation motif, 12, 107, 109, 167–​78, 184, 195, 245–​47, 257, 261 Representation (vital relation), 73–​76, 169, 171–​78, 245, 247, 261 See also vital relations res and sacramentum, 88–​90, 96–​100, 123–​31, 169, 178, 209 reservation of the sacrament, 13, 58–​59, 87, 251–​56, 261 restaurant frame, 27, 40–​41, 61–​62 rhetoric, classical, 107, 111–​14, 118, 130–​31, 133n28, 134n30 Roman Canon, 169, 187, 197, 229 Roman Catholic tradition, 1, 14–​15 and adoration and reservation, 255–​59 and change motif, 12–​13, 186, 191, 193–​94, 197–​200, 215–​20, 239, 248–​49, 251, 254, 261 and containment motif, 13, 209, 213–​20, 239, 249, 261 and identity motif, 58–​59, 107–​8, 122–​25, 130–​31, 139, 159, 162, 234, 246 and representation motif, 167–​68 and visual piety, 229, 236–​38

sacramental communion, 11, 60, 96–​100, 115, 122–​31, 228, 233, 238, 244–​46, 250–​51 sacramentality, 5–​6, 13, 15–​16, 22, 50–​51, 167–​68, 197–​98 sacramental realism. See embodied realism sacramental theology. See liturgical and sacramental theology sacramental union, 1, 107, 192 sacramentum and res, 88–​90, 96–​100, 123–​31, 169, 178, 209 Salmerón, Alfonso, 196–​97 Sanders, John, 13, 23, 47–​48, 50 schema. See generic space; image schema Schmemann, Alexander, 167–​68 scutum Trinitatis, 152–​53 seeing is touching metaphor, 237 semi-​Arianism, 149–​50 sign. See symbol signum nudum, 162, 178 simplex blending, 67, 69–​71, 101n22, 171, 173 simulation. See embodied simulation single-​scope blending, 64–​65, 83, 87, 140, 142–​43, 145, 149, 171, 173 source frame, 27, 34–​38, 62–​67, 71, 77, 84–​86, 92–​95, 140–​43, 147–​48 source-​path-​goal schema, 30, 33–​35, 62–​64, 228, 232–​39, 246, 250, 258–​59 species, 196–​98, 209–​10, 213–​14, 217–​220, 239, 248–​49, 252, 259 speech act, 141 spiritual communion, 11, 60, 96–​100, 112, 115, 122–​31, 228, 233, 238, 244–​46, 250–​51 Stamm, Mark, 254 states are locations metaphor, 26, 32, 34–​35, 63, 71, 183, 185, 245 stock market, 4, 76, 138, 234 substantia. See Folk Theory of Essences substitution model, 190, 192, 215, 217–​219 substitution of figurative for literal language. See figurative language: literal equivalents for Sursum corda, 227

Index  289 Sweetser, Eve, 25, 27, 35, 36, 38, 60, 80, 104n57, 216 symbolic instrumentalism, 128 symbolic memorialism, 127 symbolic parallelism, 127–​28 synecdoche, 116 Synoptic/​Pauline metaphor, 11–​12, 77–​79, 81–​90, 108, 139, 153–​63, 167, 171–​75, 178, 220, 260–​61 “chained” together with Johannine, 93–​96, 198, 248 and sacramental communion, 96–​99, 123–​31, 228, 244–​49, 260–​61 See also words of institution   target frame, 27, 35–​36, 62–​67, 71, 77, 83, 92–​95, 140–​43 tectonic equivalence, 139–​43, 146–​59, 163, 175, 184, 197, 245, 261 tectonic shift. See tectonic equivalence Tertullian, 109, 169, 255 Theodoret of Cyrrhus, 195, 197 Theophylact of Bulgaria, 191, 193 this butcher is a surgeon metaphor, 77–​78, 89 this loaf and wine are jesus’ body and blood metaphor. See Synoptic/​ Pauline metaphor this surgeon is a butcher metaphor, 64–​67, 77, 89 Thomas Aquinas, 164n7, 179n4, 198, 209, 213, 215, 219, 225n56, 230, 245, 252, 258 thought is a journey metaphor, 7 threefold body of Christ, 155–​57, 176–​78 time, spatial metaphors for, 29–​30, 33, 183, 185 Tomberlin, Daniel, 213 Torrance, Thomas F., 211–​12 trajector and landmark, 30–​31 transitivity, 206–​9, 221, 245, 248–​49 transmutation model, 215, 218–​19 transubstantiation, 1, 13, 106, 191–​94, 196–​97, 210, 214–​220, 239, 245, 249, 261 Trent, Council of, 3, 130, 159–​60, 196, 198, 209–​10, 215, 220 Trinitarian theology, 151–​54, 160, 163, 177

tropes, 3, 40, 111–​14, 116–​21, 130, 172 See also figurative language Tuggy, David, 44–​45, 161 Tunstall, Cuthbert, 130–​31 Turner, Mark, 61, 67, 72–​74, 87, 142, 168, 170–​71, 174, 176–​77 Turretin, Francis, 233 type. See symbol   ubiquity, 131, 210–​14, 230 Uniqueness (vital relation), 73–​76, 173–​76, 178 See also vital relations   verticality, 4, 138, 227–​34, 238, 249–​50 See also good is up; happy is up; more is up visual piety, 229, 234–​39, 257–​59 vital relations, 73–​76, 168–​69, 171, 173–​77, 245, 247 See also names of individual vital relations “virus” as polysemous, 44   Washington, George, 68–​70, 73–​75, 174 watermelon example, 117–​18 “We Love the Church Life!,” 79–​80, 93 White, James F., 184 Whole for Part metonymy, 40, 103n48 William of Saint-​Thierry, 156 Witmund of Aversa, 252 words of institution as basis for Synoptic/​Pauline blend, 11, 81–​83, 87, 97 as both figurative and true, 12, 106, 163 divide between literal and figurative interpretations, 3, 107–​8, 110–​22, 130–​31, 140, 168, 175, 247 role in eucharistic celebration, 197, 200n5, 253 Wyclif, John, 110–​111   XYZ construction, 67–​71, 171–​73   Yn construction, 171–​73, 245, 247   zeugma, 44–​45, 161

290 Index Zwingli, Huldrych and change motif, 199 and containment motif, 210–​11 figurative understanding of words of institution, 3, 107–​8, 111–​22, 131, 139, 140, 160

on the location of Christ’s body, 230 and memorialism, 1, 14–​15, 122, 162, 231 and representation motif, 1, 112, 168, 175–​76 on sacramental and spiritual communion, 122, 124–​30