AN ARGUMENT FOR THE RECOVERY OF OCULAR RECEPTION DERAILED OR WHY DIGITAL PHANTASMS CANNOT CONFECT THE EUCHARIST (II)
Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash modified by Victor Gan.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is the second half of a two-part series You can read the first part of this post here.
PART II
In the first part of this article, I abandoned the (already slightly absurd) idea that recovering a theology of ocular reception (the medieval practice of receiving the Eucharist via visual extramission) would be a good way of receiving the Eucharist via live-streaming in these strange times; as opposed to practices such as virtual or tele-communion and drive-through communion which are either being practiced or debated even now. I suggested that unaddressed questions of access and mediation complicate all of these practices, and that these practices were indicative of how those issues of access and mediation have been inadequately addressed in parish life, having a deleterious effect on both sacramentology and ecclesiology.
We then talked about what access to the sacraments means from a perspective of giftedness rather than a sense of right, expectation, or entitlement. We located the community of the church as the given context within which the gift is fully received (the gift, given for you, plural, can only be received from within that plurality). We wondered whether it was possible to receive the gift of Eucharist if the community was not able to gather, and we talked about a theology of the priesthood which was predicated on the priest’s participation in the mediatory work of Christ, enabling them to serve both in persona Christi (and an instrument of Presence) as well as in persona ecclesiae (and a sign of the community), even in the absence of the rest of the community, the church being a mystery and not a math problem.
It was acknowledged that understanding the priest as having a mediating role with respect to Christ’s one and perfect sacrifice on the cross might be unpopular, and that the preferred understanding (in many parts of the Episcopal church, at any rate) is that a priest should manage the sacramental life of the community and not mediate it in any meaningful way, mediation being, apparently on principle, a bad thing for priests to do. We left Part I saying that our aversion to mediation and our hunger for the immediate does not, however, mean we’re mediation-free, nor does it guarantee that all forms of mediation are the same, or that they mediate the same things in the same ways.
ON MEDIATION
Because our on-principle aversion to mediation is complicated by our immersion in a culture saturated by media and the mediation of the real which has attenuated our ability to distinguish between a feeling of immediacy occasioned by the swift gratification of desire, and the actual immediacy of a truly present reality. Our suspicion of mediation is subordinated to our desire for gratification, for a feeling of immediate access. That we feel we’re participating in something becomes more important than the reality in which we may or may not be participating.
This is not a screed against feelings. In fact, feelings are important and can be helpful in the discernment of what is or isn’t true or real; and feelings are not and cannot be exclusively (or even predominantly) determinative of what actually is or isn’t true or real. The critique here is not of feelings, but of how desire, conditioned by consumerist/capitalist privilege, can distort our feelings and render them unhelpful.
It’s on account of that distortion that tele-communion or virtual communion is both so attractive to many and so damaging to a coherent sacramentology, and subsequently damaging to a coherent ecclesiology. The practice involves a priest live-streaming the consecration of the elements to faithful folks who’ve tuned in with a plate of bread and a cup of wine which they then consume as Eucharist. Our desire for access to the sacrament is managed and met by an event that feels so much like presence (in part because our desire for presence may be so keen), that the fact of the event’s technological mediation is elided in favor of affirming the feeling. The virtual feels real, so it must be.
Curiously and worryingly, the whole experience of tele-communion is predicated on understanding technological mediation as a democratized (and therefore acceptable) form of sacerdotal mediation, collapsing the real differences between the two—i.e., that the latter is an incarnationally inflected, embodied ministry of transformation, of presence-making-present, of realizing the Real by which we’re realized; while the latter is de-incarnationally inflected, a de-realizing of what is really present to render it more accessible as information to be consumed, processed or absorbed.
And here’s where a consideration of ocular reception actually becomes helpful. Assuming ocular reception was completely reasonable: what, in fact, are people receiving when they gaze at a collection of pixels that looks like a host? The image of the Precious Body on a computer screen is completely immaterial—there is no substance to it that has not been de-realized into 0s and 1s, into mere information. There is no presence to it. It is a ghost, an absence, a void. That it looks like something recognizable does not mitigate its illusoriness.
This is not to say that images are unimportant or not useful. Saying that an image of a thing is not the thing imaged does not mean that the image cannot still serve as a doorway to some real spiritual apprehension of the absent thing.
So while a digital image of a consecrated host is impossible to receive in any way real way, it may prompt us to make an act of spiritual communion, which is lovely and edifying and, best of all: real. But the image can only ever be a prompt to seek the Presence elsewhere than in itself, because in itself there is no there there. Ceci n’est pas l’Eucharistie.
Similarly, an image of a priest cannot confect the Eucharist in the same way that a phantom or an echo or a movie or a photograph cannot confect the Eucharist. Nor can the digitized voice of the priest have any spiritual efficacy when speaking the canon of the Mass: it is a simulacrum of the priest’s voice; the words are not spoken, but reproduced. If you were to record the Mass on an LP in 1960 and play it in your home in 2020, your breadbox would not suddenly become a tabernacle regardless of whether or not you (or even the priest saying Mass) wanted it to. If we learned anything from Plato in high school, it ought to have been that while shadows are real, they’re not actually people.
Some might argue that I’m limiting grace here—why can’t the Spirit use technology to accomplish the Spirit’s work? Of course the Spirit can do whatever the Spirit wants to do! But we don’t get to tell the Spirit what the Spirit wants to do—it bloweth where it listeth, not where we list it. Our desires do not constitute a mandate for the sovereign God of the Universe to behave in any particular way. That we desire a thing to be so with respect to how the sacrament is confected is immaterial compared to what God in Christ and through Christ’s Church has told us with respect to how the sacrament is confected—the real bread is really held by a real priest, the real words of the real Christ really spoken, the Real Presence really gifted and received, a real promise of grace really fulfilled by grace, all within the context of a real Gospel really proclaimed. Reality here is key—and reality and virtuality are simply not the same. When we speak of a virtual presence, I’ve no doubt we’re speaking about something (and perhaps even something edifying—but the context of a virtual presence will always be a real absence. The chief virtue of that absence may be to create in us a yearning for the Presence, and direct us to seek it where it may really be found.
Further, that the sacraments are just not particularly amenable to virtualization via technological communication is constitutive of an implicit critique of technology within the economy of the Church: because if we’re to insist that technological mediation should assist us to access the sacraments, then who has access to the technology will determine who has access to the sacraments—technology inherently privileges both wealth and secular power—and will always, if only on those grounds, misrepresent the sacraments. The wealthy and powerful will always be able either to afford or seize the technology needed to access the sacrament, and the narrative surrounding the purchase or the seizure will always be one of greater democratization of-, freedom for-, or access to the holy, even as the poor and the powerless remain disenfranchised. Happily, though, the sacraments resist this collusion with privilege as they resist communication via technological means. They insist only on essential things: presence, the human body, the human voice, human touch, the real materiality of common things made uncommon by grace.
None of this is an argument for limiting Jesus; it’s an argument for being limited by the wisdom of Jesus’ Body, the Church, regarding how presence works with respect to the sacrament as a localized instance of the Presence. As such, it’s also an argument that greater pastoral attention be paid to just what the Church is and what belonging to it means: it’s not a collectivity of individuals, not an amalgamation of spiritual consumers who are owed sacramental access at any cost (even at the cost of the integrity of the sacraments themselves) as a perk of membership. The Church is a Living Body into which the individual dies and is raised as something new in community, with saints past, present, and to come, the local being a sign (and not a countersign) of the catholic/universal, the earthly embodying and communicating the heavenly. Access to the divine is not available to us on our own terms and subject to our desires, but is a gift given to and for us on God’s own sovereign and gratuitously gracious terms. This requires from us a certain fundamental humility, both with respect to God and also with respect to the Mystery of the Church; it assumes a real death of self.
In the end, you can have the church in which you get to do and to have whatever you want whenever or however you want it…but the price you’ll pay for it is that it will only ever be just yours.
