One cannot contemplate Christianity without encountering, at
its heart, a structure that both fascinates and unsettles: the Eucharist, in
which bread and wine become, in one doctrinal view, the body and blood of a
human being, and in all views, a ritualized participation in death rendered
sacred. If one examines the rite with a detached scrutiny, one sees immediately
the formal resemblance to acts universally condemned: cannibalism, the
deliberate consumption of human flesh, the mingling of blood with desire and
sustenance. Even when the substance is symbolic, the ritual repeats the
essential form: ingestion of human matter, repeated across generations,
celebrated with joy and solemnity, taught to children as a source of divine
communion. The act is not incidental, nor ornamental; it is central,
constitutive. The mind recoils because it recognizes, beneath the layers of
symbol and theology, the uncanny shape of transgression rehearsed in the form
of devotion. And yet, in this recognition, there is a strange exhilaration: a
momentary sense that morality and horror are not merely opposites but entwined,
that the mind can inhabit both simultaneously without disintegration.
The crucifixion extends this meditation on the paradoxical
beauty of horror. A human life is offered as a means to redemption, and this
offering is elevated above the ordinary condemnation of human sacrifice,
enshrined in scripture, hymnody, and liturgy. The letters of early authorities
declare that without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness, that
salvation flows only through the veins of the one sacrificed. One may argue
that consent, or divinity, or cosmic necessity absolves this act, yet these
arguments do not alter the structure: a life is expended for the benefit of
others, the act of killing is central to salvation, and ritual remembrance
repeatedly enacts the logic of sacrifice. The ethical problem is unavoidable:
what is celebrated, repeated, and memorialized is an act that, outside its
theological frame, would be regarded as atrocity. And yet, here too is the
paradoxical optimism: by ritualizing the horror, by enveloping it in narrative,
song, and sacrament, the faithful convert the act of violence into an object of
contemplation, beauty, and even joy.
One may consider the function of ritual in this context.
Ritual is never inert; it educates, habituates, and habituates the imagination.
To participate in the Eucharist is to meditate on mortality, to taste the
paradox of nourishment in death, to rehearse the formal patterns of human
sacrifice while simultaneously affirming divine grace. In this sense, morality
and aesthetics are intertwined: the horror of cannibalism and the atrocity of
human sacrifice are abstracted into patterns of meaning, and these patterns are
themselves objects of fascination. The child who asks how many Eucharists it
would take to consume a whole Jesus articulates, innocently, a question
implicit in every act of ritual: the mind confronts the intimacy of life and
death, and wonders at the measure of participation, the degree to which one can
embrace the sacred through transgression imagined or symbolic.
One might object that consent and divinity render these
practices ethically distinct from ordinary acts of violence. Yet the mind,
trained to see horror sublimated into beauty, finds that these distinctions,
while perhaps sufficient to remove culpability, do not remove the uncanny
resonance of the act. Ritualized horror educates the conscience not by
forbidding, but by transforming. It teaches that the boundaries of what is
morally intolerable can be approached, circled, and rendered luminous, and that
the repetition of transgression, framed by narrative and awe, may itself be a
form of moral and aesthetic education. In other words, Christianity presents a
paradoxical landscape: horror is not erased but transfigured; what would
ordinarily repulse becomes, in the domain of faith, a source of contemplation,
intimacy, and even joy.
The metaphysical claim – divinity incarnate, death redemptive
– is inseparable from the ethical and aesthetic experience of the ritual. The
participant consumes not merely a body, but the narrative of life and death
made legible, distilled into a form that satisfies both intellect and
imagination. The crucifixion is not merely history, it is a model: suffering,
willingly embraced, ennobles; mortality, willingly consumed, redeems. One is
reminded that the human mind is capable of perceiving horror and beauty
simultaneously, that the ethical structure of ordinary life need not exhaust
the imagination, and that ritualized transgression can reveal, almost
ecstatically, the limits of moral understanding.
To judge the morality of such practices requires both care
and courage. If cannibalism and human sacrifice are immoral, then Christianity,
at least at the level of form and ritual, engages with them without hesitation.
Yet to stop at this judgment alone is to miss the full human experience of the
ritual: its capacity to illuminate, to transfigure, to render the unacceptable
sacred. The horror is undeniable, but the exhilaration of the intellect and
imagination, the strange delight in contemplating suffering and mortality made
meaningful, suggests a kind of optimism at the edge of terror. Christianity, in
this view, is not merely a repository of moral paradoxes, it is a laboratory
for the mind: a place in which horror and beauty, transgression and redemption,
are brought into intimate contact, and in which the human soul learns that the
boundaries of morality and aesthetic delight are not always coincident.
Thus the moral question remains: does repeated ritualization
of formally impermissible acts implicate participants in immorality, or does
the aesthetic and contemplative transformation absolve it? Analytically, the
moral caution cannot be dismissed; the horror is real and structured. Yet
simultaneously, one cannot ignore the ecstatic optimism in which horror is not
merely endured but comprehended, sanctified, and rendered luminous. The rituals
of Christianity teach that life, death, and the consumption of mortality itself
can be experienced as an object of understanding and even of joy, that the mind
may inhabit the sacred and the transgressive simultaneously, and that the act
of contemplation itself transforms what would otherwise horrify into a locus of
reflection, beauty, and subtle exultation.
