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.
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