Eucharistic Semiotics

ONE Eucharistic Semiotics The Body of Christ and the Play of Signs The anxiety, the desire to see, touch, and eat the body of God, to be that body and be nothing but that, forms the principle of Western (un)reason. That’s why the body, bodily, never happens, least of all when it’s named and convoked. For us, the body is always sacrificed: eucharist. —Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus What bread does one eat? What wine does one drink? —Wallace Stevens, “The American Sublime” The hallmark events in the life of Christ—from the Incarnation through the Eucharistic institution to the Passion and Resurrection—are the foun- dation of Christian creeds and doctrines. They shape ecclesiastical commu- nities as well as constitute the origin and terminus of liturgical worship. These same events also witness an incisive rupture in how signs, bodies, and their meanings are interpreted. When the Son of God takes human flesh, breaks bread and shares wine as his body and blood, and overcomes a bloody crucifixion by rising from the dead, he transforms the signs of the 19 © 2017 UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME 20 Shadow and Substance Old Law into new wonders. Such transformations, however astonishing in their uniqueness, generate confusion and controversy over the meaning of Christ’s body and its sacramental signs. The Eucharist produces many interpretive possibilities, all of them difficult. This chapter threads together from a range of theological writings a narrative about the semiotics of the Eucharist and its influence on the reli- gious culture, intellectual history, and dramatic production of late medieval and early modern England. While Eucharistic controversy dwells on the intricacies of metaphysics (form and essence, substance and accident, being and time), it also precipitates arguments about semiotic interpretation— particularly how the sacramental signs relate to the body of Christ and how their meanings were understood, revised, and contested at a time when one’s interpretation of the word and the flesh was a matter of life or death.1 For clergymen and churchgoers as well as dramatists and audiences, the sacrament of the altar seizes on the space between sign and referent; it casts into conflict the unstable meanings of a divine body one cannot see and the material signs by which it is made known. The great twentieth-century theo - logian Henri de Lubac captures this semiotic difficulty in his description of the Eucharist as “that indeterminate place . between shadow and truth, nearer the shadow because of the form of knowledge with which we are left—through a mirror and in enigmas—but how much nearer the truth because of its profound substance.”2 The Eucharistic Controversies show us that the sacrament of the altar means many different things to many different people. One person’s sign is another’s body; one’s shadow is another’s substance. In the Apologie of the Church of England (1562), John Jewel surveys these differences with re- markable economy and bracing clarity: There be some among them that say the body of Christ is present in the supper naturallye: again there be some even of their owne company also that deny it: that there be some that saye the body of Christ in the holy Communion is torne and ripped with the teeth: againe there be some that deny it: that there be some that write that the body of Christ in the sacrament hath quantitie and bygnesse, on the other syde ther be some that denye it: that there be some that saye, Christ did Consecrate by a cer- taine power of divinitie, some that by blessing, some by five specially prescribed wordes: some by repetting of the self same five wordes, some also © 2017 UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME Eucharistic Semiotics 21 that in those five wordes, by the pronoune demonstrative, Hoc, that is to say, This, thinke that the bread of wheate is pointed to. there be also some that say, that the accidentes of bread and wine may nourishe, some that say the substance retourneth againe. What nedeth any more? It were too long and over tedious to rehearse all, so uncertayne and so full of controversye is the whole platt of these mens religion and doctrine.3 Jewel recognizes that any attempt to impose a fixed meaning onto the Eu- charist is almost impossible. What is even more striking is that Jewel does not simply differentiate Catholic and reformed Eucharistic theologies but rather surveys the diverse theological and semiotic possibilities debated among Catholics themselves. For example, Jewel refers to the doctrine of transubstantiation, which holds that Christ is made “present in the Supper naturalye,” meaning that after the consecration the bread and wine become Christ’s Galilean body and blood at the level of substance.4 Moreover, such an ontological change is said to occur when the priest speaks “five specially prescribed wordes”—“Hoc est enim corpus meum”—and through God’s power confects Christ’s body and blood in the consecrated host and wine. Some accede to these terms, Jewel says, while others deny them. Jewel also raises the distinction between spiritual and carnal eating. Is Christ’s body “torne and ripped with the teeth,” or is it received as food for the soul? Fur- thermore, he speaks to linguistic issues, asking whether Christ speaks liter- ally or figuratively when he employs the “pronoune demonstrative” (this, or hoc) at the Last Supper. Does Christ use ordinary words, or does he insti- tute a new kind of language to establish a new sacramental covenant? The Eucharistic Controversies address such philosophical, theological, and linguistic questions from a wide range of perspectives. Though it is not my intention to rehearse a comprehensive history, I want to offer at least a brief survey, if only to illustrate how any study of the Eucharist demands a trans-Reformational approach.5 The remainder of this chapter will offer sev- eral close readings of the various texts that shape such debates. Historically, these arguments unfolded dialogically in texts that advanced different Eu- charistic positions. All too often, however, the textual intricacies of such dis- cussions are reduced to a series of exempla that round out a conventional narrative from early Christian writers to the rise of Scholasticism and then on to the English and Continental reformers of the sixteenth century. Taking a different approach, I will draw out of Eucharistic discourses—scriptural © 2017 UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME 22 Shadow and Substance writing and exegesis, sermons, polemics, and conciliar decrees—a working vocabulary for thinking about language, interpretation, and the body in drama. Considering these claims as part of ongoing controversies rather than as isolated examples of fixed theological positions enables us to appre- ciate how, despite significant differences in doctrine and practice, those who write about the Eucharist shape an ongoing semiotic debate about bodies and signs that conditions the landscape in which drama is written and performed in late medieval and early modern England. T E C: A B S Though disagreements over the Eucharist emerged in early Christianity, the first formal controversy is said to originate in the ninth century at the Abbey of Corbie in France, where Paschasius Radbertus (a defender of Catholic or- thodoxy) and Ratramnus (one of the first to question those orthodox positions) disagreed over the nature of Christ’s presence in the sacrament. The two monks offered divergent interpretations of Augustine, Ambrose, Ori- gen, John Chrysostom, and other patristic authorities.6 Similar controversies continued in the eleventh century, when Berengar of Tours said that the body of Christ received in the sacrament was not the same body born of the Virgin Mary and crucified on Calvary. He was forced to retract his position and confess before Popes Nicholas II and Gregory VII that what was received in the sacrament was indeed the Galilean body of Christ.7 The rise of Scholasticism in the twelfth century introduced a new ar- ticulation of orthodox Eucharistic theology based on particular applica- tions of Aristotelian metaphysics, especially in the writings of Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas’s doctrine of transubstantiation held that the sacramental signs of bread and wine become Christ’s body and blood at the level of substance. This position would come to define the orthodox doctrine of the Roman Church and, as the centuries wore on, would be sharply contrasted especially with the sacramentarian positions advanced by sixteenth-century Continental reformers including Andreas Karlstadt, Johannes Oeco lam pa - dius, and Ulrich Zwingli. These theologies of memorial symbolism suggest, at their most basic level, that the sacrament of the altar was a figure and memorial rather than a repetition of Christ’s original sacrifice. For Zwingli especially, the bread and wine represented Christ’s covenant but did not re- © 2017 UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME Eucharistic Semiotics 23 create his sacrifice or manifest his real presence in either ontological or mys- tical terms. Zwingli thus marked out considerable distance between the sacramental bread and wine and Christ’s Galilean body and blood. Zwingli, as Kimberly Johnson notes, “postulates the sign as crucial because it is the material object of encounter, because it must be confronted as the appre- hensible term of a hermeneutic act distinct from but assistive to its con- tent.”8 In the Marburg Colloquy of 1529, Martin Luther famously debated Zwingli on these points, holding fast to the version of real presence that he termed “consubstantiation,” as set against Zwingli’s arguments for sacramental commemoration and remembrance.9 Between the extremes of metaphysical conversion and memorial symbolism lie a number of spiritualist theologies in which the Eucharist was re- garded as both a holy sign and a manifestation of Christ’s real presence.

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