One cannot approach Christianity – whether as a theologian
bent over vellum, a secular scholar rummaging through the synoptic debris of
antiquity, or a curious wanderer drifting through cathedrals as one drifts
through half-remembered dreams – without brushing up against an interior
structure whose very strangeness effulges beneath the encrustations of
centuries. At its pulsating center lies a rite so audacious, so troublingly
intimate, that only the numbing power of repetition has made it seem serene.
The Eucharist – this delicate yet formidable ceremony wherein bread and wine
become, by the stipulative metaphysics of the Church, the flesh and blood of a
crucified man – is the gravitational core of Christian devotion. It is here, in
this strange transaction of bodies, that Christianity reveals a form so
difficult to confront directly that generations of worshippers have learned to
glance at it sidelong, as one looks at the sun reflected in water.
For if one strips away the devotional haze, the gilded
chalices, the sweet fumes of myrrh, and the theological scaffolding constructed
by councils and catechisms, one finds unmistakably the structure of a practice
universally condemned among societies both ancient and modern: cannibalism,
though of a ritualized, sanctified, metaphysically transfigured kind. The
frightful clarity of this recognition does not fade under scrutiny; indeed, it
intensifies. Even in doctrinal traditions that reject the literal metamorphosis
of substance – for example, the Reformed symbolic reading, or the Lutheran
consubstantial middle path – the essential ceremonial gesture remains
unaltered. One consumes the body of a man. One drinks his blood. One
participates in a structured reenactment of anthropophagic intimacy, repeated
weekly or daily, taught to children, enshrined in liturgical calendars, and
understood as the central avenue to salvation.
The early Church Fathers did not shy from the implications of
this ritual, and their enemies – Roman pagans, Hellenistic skeptics – accused
Christians of precisely what the ritual appeared to be. Minucius Felix records
the Roman charge that Christians feast upon infant flesh; Tertullian, with
characteristic heat, denies it by invoking the Eucharist as proof of
misinterpretation rather than innocence. Yet even he cannot efface the
genealogical resemblance. Ignatius of Antioch wrote yearningly of “the flesh of
our Lord Jesus Christ,” using language so literal that later theologians
labored to soften its bite. Augustine, in Tractates on John, affirms
that “we eat this flesh, we drink this blood,” and although he gestures toward
the sacramental sign, he also defends the practice’s positive necessity.
Aquinas, with his serene scholastic assurance, devotes the entirety of Summa
Theologica III.73–83 to arguing that the Eucharist contains Christ “truly,
really, and substantially” – a phrasing that cannot but strengthen the
anthropophagic resonance.
Even the Apostle Paul, whose ambivalent eloquence oscillates
between tenderness and terror, speaks of eating and drinking “the body” and
“the blood” (1 Corinthians 10–11) in terms that admit no easy metaphorical
escape. One is compelled to acknowledge, however reluctantly, that Christianity
encodes its core salvific act within the frame of consumption – indeed,
ingestion – of a human being. That later catechisms and defenders have sought
to theologize the implications into a more palatable register does not erase
the form; it only drapes it in interpretive lace.
And what is striking – what astonishes even the jaded scholar
who has handled too many brittle patristic texts – is how Christianity not only
preserves this structure but elevates it to a sacramental pinnacle. In
Levitical law, the consumption of blood is forbidden with a strictness so
absolute it borders on obsession. The early Israelites seem almost haunted by
the thought of ingesting life itself; blood is cordoned off, set aside for God
alone, its consumption a kind of theft from the divine economy. Yet in
Christianity this prohibition is not merely relaxed but theatrically inverted.
What was forbidden as pollution becomes commanded as communion. The
transformation is so profound that one can almost feel the tremor of
intellectual vertigo rippling through the long corridor of theological history.
The crucifixion, the narrative apex of the Christian story,
only intensifies the paradox. A man’s death – agonizing, public, anatomically
precise – occupies the center of the faith, not as a tragic necessity
reluctantly endured but as the luminous fulcrum of redemption itself. The
shedding of blood is, in Hebrews 9:22, declared indispensable: “without the
shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” The ethical implications of this
are staggering. Human sacrifice, among anthropologists from Frazer to Girard,
is understood as a mechanism of social cohesion, catharsis, or scapegoating,
but always shaded with an aura of primordial dread. Yet Christianity enshrines
a single instance of human sacrifice and proclaims it not merely permissible
but salvific. Consent may wash the act clean of its juridical impurities;
divinity may add a metaphysical sheen; but the structural truth remains:
salvation proceeds through a killing, and forgiveness is made potable only by
blood.
This ritual remembrance – the Eucharist as a perpetual
re-enactment of the crucifixion – constitutes a theological dare to the moral
imagination. Christianity performs what anthropologists call “the domestication
of the violent sacred,” a practice in which the horror of sacrifice is not
abolished but meticulously re-scripted into a form of communal nourishment.
Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, notes with a
certain austere amazement that the sacred often emerges precisely where the
forbidden has been ritually choreographed, where transgression is not
eliminated but transformed into a symbolic feast. Christianity exemplifies this
with uncanny elegance. The Eucharist is not a repudiation of cannibalism but a
sublimation of it; the crucifixion is not the negation of human sacrifice but
its aesthetic and metaphysical perfection.
One begins to perceive that Christianity’s central rites form
a double helix of horror and holiness, each strand coiling about the other in
such intricate embrace that extraction becomes impossible. To tear the horror
away would be to mutilate the holiness; to excise the holiness would leave only
the raw sinew of horror. The genius – or perhaps the audacity – of the
tradition lies in its ability to persuade entire civilizations that to consume
a man is the most intimate path to loving him, that to reenact his sacrificial
death is the deepest expression of gratitude, and that the ritualized
repetition of this death in liturgy is not merely permissible but indispensable
to moral and spiritual life.
But to see this clearly, one must understand ritual not as a
passive commemoration but as an active pedagogy. Ritual educates the senses,
the nerves, the moral reflexes. One need only consider how the Eucharistic
liturgies of the early Church were conducted – by candlelight, with whispered
Latin and Greek phrases like hoc est enim corpus meum and τοῦτό ἐστι τὸ σῶμά μου
murmured into the flickering dark – to recognize that the participant is not
merely receiving doctrine but being reshaped by it at a sensual level. Ritual
habituates; ritual insinuates. As Catherine Bell argues, ritual actions
“produce agents” by drawing them into embodied patterns of meaning-making. One
learns to taste the divine in the form of another’s body; one learns to locate
redemption in the memory of blood.
The child who innocently wonders how many Eucharists would be
required to consume “a whole Jesus” speaks inadvertently from within a
tradition that has long veiled the arithmetic of its own symbolism. That child
– pure in intention, inquisitive by nature – unwittingly articulates the
precise tension a more sophisticated theology labors to embroider over: the
sacrament’s form is anthropophagic even when its metaphysics denies the literal
fact. And it is this form, not the metaphysics, that is irreducible. Whether
Christ is present “truly, really, and substantially” (Aquinas), or symbolically
yet spiritually (Calvin), or in a mode beyond substance altogether (various
mystical theologians), the action itself – taking, eating, drinking – is
anthropophagic. The mouth repeats what the mind cannot bear to articulate
plainly.
The crucifixion, too, resists domestication. It is, in the
rawest anthropological terms, a ritual killing. The Gospel narratives, despite
their theological embroidery, do not soften the anatomical brutality: the nails
splitting flesh, the suffocating posture suspending the diaphragm, the spear
piercing the thoracic cavity to release a mixture of blood and pericardial
fluid. Medical historians, such as Frederick Zugibe and William Edwards, have
analyzed crucifixion not as mythic emblem but as forensic event: a slow
asphyxiation punctuated by cardiovascular collapse. And Christianity insists
that this act – this precise method of execution – is not accidental, not
incidental, but cosmically chosen. Here is the disquieting truth: redemption
proceeds anatomically.
The participant in the Eucharist does not merely remember
this death; they ingest it. They make the crucifixion enter their bloodstream
by sacramental proxy. This is not symbolic in the way a national flag
symbolizes a country; it is symbolic in the ancient sense, from the Greek symbolon:
two halves of a broken token that authenticate one another when joined. The
believer’s act of ingestion is the fitting of one broken half to another, the
rejoining of body to body in a gesture that collapses the distance between
historical event and ritual reenactment.
One finds echoes of this structure across ancient
Mediterranean religions, where theophagy – eating the god – was not unknown.
The cult of Dionysus, as reconstructed from Euripides and later Orphic
fragments, flirted with the consumption of the divine body in ritual frenzy.
The worship of Attis and Cybele involved bloodletting that blurred the line
between sacrifice and union. Even the Mithraic cult’s sacred banquet,
reconstructed from reliefs and inscriptions, appears to have dramatized the
consumption of divine vitality. Yet Christianity does something subtler and
more enduring: it replaces the frenzy with solemnity, the rapture with
reverence, the ecstatic violence with communal tenderness. Christianity
performs cannibalism in its Sunday best.
The theological justifications for this are manifold, and
each bears the unmistakable signature of intellectual labor expended to tame a
dangerous idea. Athanasius argues in On the Incarnation that Christ
became flesh so that flesh might be divinized; Irenaeus, in Against Heresies,
claims that the faithful must eat the body of Christ precisely because
salvation is material, not ethereal. “Our bodies,” he writes, “receiving the
Eucharist, are no longer corruptible.” One begins to notice that Christianity’s
metaphysics of salvation depend upon a literal exchange of substances: Christ
takes on human flesh; humans take in Christ’s flesh. The process is circular,
nutritive, reciprocal.
Yet even as these theological structures crystallize, their
anthropological substratum remains unaltered. The ritual is an act of
transgressive consumption. It is cannibalism – if not in substance, then in
structure; if not in fact, then in form. And the ethical question rises with
the calm persistence of a bubble in an undisturbed chalice: does the
transfiguration of an act render it morally innocent, or does the form retain its
troubling gravity regardless of the metaphysical embellishment?
Theologians often attempt to argue that consent alters the
moral status of the act. Christ, being divine, wills his own death, and thus
the crucifixion is not murder but offering. Yet consent does not erase the
structure; it merely reframes it. A willing victim is still a victim; a chosen
sacrifice is still a sacrifice. Moreover, the ritual repetition of this event
by millions who did not participate in the original consent raises further
complexities. Anthropological studies of sacrifice – from Hubert and Mauss to
Girard – suggest that the consent of the sacrificial victim, while morally
relevant, does not neutralize the act’s symbolic implications. The community
still consumes what was killed. The body still becomes food for the collective
imagination.
One might suppose that the spiritualization of the Eucharist
in Protestant traditions removes the cannibalistic implication. But even the
most symbolic interpretations retain the same choreography: the taking, the
breaking, the eating, the drinking. These gestures do not lose their
anthropological resonance by sheer force of theological abstraction. A symbol
can retain the structure of the act it signifies. The act does not flee its own
shadow.
Here one begins to sense the paradoxical optimism that pulses
beneath Christianity’s ritual core. The religion is not ashamed of its
transgressive architecture; it revels in it – or, more accurately, it renders
the transgression luminous, turns the horror into a prism through which beauty
refracts. The cross, a device of torture refined by Roman engineers to produce
maximal suffering with minimal expenditure, becomes an emblem worn between
lovers’ breasts. The chalice, whose contents evoke blood, is lifted with tender
hands by children who cannot yet distinguish symbol from substance.
Christianity teaches – quietly but insistently – that horror
can be transfigured. Indeed, it suggests that the most profound moral and
metaphysical truths require horror as their medium. This is a daring
proposition. It implies that beauty and terror are not merely neighbors but
cohabitants, that redemption cannot be extracted from suffering without
diminishing both, and that the ritualized contemplation of death is a school
for the soul.
To judge Christianity by ordinary moral categories is
therefore both necessary and insufficient. Necessary, because the form of
ritualized cannibalism cannot be excused simply by tradition. Insufficient,
because the ritual itself is an attempt to teach the mind that moral boundaries
are not exhausted by instinctive aversions. As Wittgenstein observed about
ritual and magic, some human practices cannot be understood by translating them
into ethical algorithms; they function as attempts to reorder the very landscape
of what can be meant.
Thus one arrives at a conclusion both unsettling and
strangely consoling: Christianity is, in its ritual core, an anthropophagic
religion sublimated into tenderness. It consumes its god, and invites its
adherents to consume him, not in frenzy but in awe. Its central narrative is a
human sacrifice elevated into cosmic necessity. Its signature gesture is the
ingestion of another’s body. And yet, through these transgressive structures,
it teaches millions how to contemplate mortality without despair, how to face
suffering without futility, and how to find, in the very act of consuming
death, a strange and radiant joy.
The question of morality remains open – perhaps necessarily
so. But the phenomenon itself is undeniable. Christianity, through a long and
subtle alchemy, has transformed cannibalism into communion, sacrifice into
salvation, horror into beauty. It has made the unthinkable not only thinkable
but lovable, and in doing so has revealed something profound about the human
condition: that we hunger not only for bread, but for meaning; not only for
life, but for life made luminous through ritual; not only for sustenance, but
for a taste of the infinite – even when the infinite arrives in the troubling
form of flesh and blood.
If cannibalism is the consumption of another’s body, then
Christianity has made cannibalism sacred. If sacrifice is the offering of a
life for the many, then Christianity has made sacrifice redemptive. And if
horror is the recognition of boundaries transgressed, then Christianity has
turned horror into a corridor leading, if not to certainty, then at least to
wonder.
