AN ARGUMENT FOR THE RECOVERY OF OCULAR RECEPTION DERAILED OR WHY DIGITAL PHANTASMS CANNOT CONFECT THE EUCHARIST (I)

Johann Zahn’s Oculus Artificialis

Editor’s Note: This article is the first half of a two-part series. The second part will be released tomorrow (May 9). 

PART I 

This essay began its humble life as an attempt to uncover a theology of ocular reception that could fund a practice of livestreaming the Eucharist in these strange times by affirming that the faithful do indeed receive the fullness of the sacrament by looking on it.  I was prepared to dive into extramission theory (the medieval theory of vision that a thing is seen when the eyes produce rays that apprehend a thing and fetch it back into the soul in a way analogous to how the hand passes a morsel of food to the mouth); and I was going to spend a not inconsiderable amount of time unpacking the idea of heaven as the beatific vision and what it might mean to really and substantially participate in the eschaton when we see Jesus really and substantially present in the Eucharist.   

The somewhat cheeky hope in all this was that in arguing for the recovery of a largely deprecated Eucharistic practice that nonetheless had behind it a legitimate theological rootedness (as well as no small weight of tradition, however dodgily premised on an outmoded understanding of vision), it would call into question some rather newer practices surrounding Eucharist that can claim neither a clear theological rootedness nor the authority of tradition: specifically virtual or tele-communion and drive-through communion.  I’d hoped to demonstrate that the basis of the newer practices wasn’t actually a question of theology at all, but a question of privilege and of access, a question of what it means to perceive a thing as being-for-me because I desire it or am accustomed to having it.   

It turns out, however, that the question of access gives way to a question of mediation, and the implications for ocular reception are just as complicated as those for tele-communion.  Consequently, those questions are far more pressing than shoring up a medieval mode of Eucharistic reception to troll the practice of novel forms of “Eucharist,” in part because they reveal what’s really at stake here: occurrences of things like tele-communion and drive-through communion are symptomatic of the fact that these questions of access and mediation have been inadequately addressed in parish life.  Consequently, and perhaps unexpectedly, the threads connecting sacramental theology, sacramental practice, and the character of our ecclesiology have significantly unraveled as they’ve become entangled in an unruly skein of social, cultural, political, and (yes) generational expectations regarding what is or ought to be available or accessible to us.   

ACCESS TO THE SACRAMENTS 
I’ll begin by being blunt: no one has a right to the Eucharist.  No one.  No one can legitimately demand that Our Lord’s Sacramental Body and Blood be available to them at any time either in general or in particular.  Our desire for the sacrament does not mean it ought to be available to us.   

Grace is not a commodity and does not respond to commodification.  Our approach to the Eucharist cannot be indistinguishable from our approach to a Big Mac at a drive-through window at McDonald’s.  Granted, the Kingdom suffers violence and the violent take it by force…but if giftedness is a defining feature of grace, how can we receive it if we insist on seizing it?  (Saint Paul has an answer: we receive it as condemnation.) 

Grace is no one’s to take, but ours to receive.  Which is challenging on account of a socio-cultural inability to understand what it means to receive a gift, and not just any gift: a gift of which we are completely undeserving, which we could not possibly reciprocate or repay, and for which we could not know to desire or how to rightly ask in the first place.  Moreover, it is a gift both given in and constitutive of real community in a real way; a gift given for you, plural (pro vobis), not for you, singular (pro te), and that cannot be rightly received outside the context of the plurality or contrary to the plurality which the gift itself constructs (on these grounds, communion-without-baptism is untenable, and a lack of robust catechesis around baptism regrettable).  Such a gift can only be for me because it’s first for us, and I can only receive it at all if I stand in and with the community to which it’s been given.  The question is not, then, ought not the Body of Christ be available to me, but ought not I be available to the Body in the way the Body (the Church) has been instructed and constructed to both give and receive it? 

If the community cannot gather, does that mean that Eucharist cannot be received?  That depends on one’s theology regarding the priesthood, given which, it is possible to imagine the Eucharist being offered for a real community (another sense of pro vobis) even if that community cannot be physically present, and received by the community in the person of the priest, even if no one else in the community is able to receive.  This possibility is due, in part, to the liminal stance of the priest who serves both in persona Christi with respect to the community, and in persona ecclesiae with respect to Christ, the community’s Head.  Which is to say, in part, and perhaps unpopularly or uncomfortably, that the priest is indeed a mediator, one who stands in-between realities, whose job is principally one of reconciliation…save that they are not the author of that reconciliation but its messenger and its minister, and the work of mediation in which they participate is a function of the priesthood being a particular instantiation of the Eternal Priesthood of Christ (in which all believers share) and specifically oriented, in a unique way, by and toward the sacrifice of Christ on the cross: the eternal, full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction made once by Christ of Christ to the Father for the redemption of the world.  There is no priest if there is no sacrifice, even if the sacrifice the priest offers is not one the priest has the power to actually make apart from grace and apart from having been ordained by grace to make it.   

By virtue of acting in persona ecclesiae, the priest stands in for the community on whose behalf the sacrifice has been made, even when the community is physically absent, and this in part because numbers (to paraphrase Richard Hooker) do not and cannot constitute the community’s reality.  The church does not suddenly come into being once a quorum of bodies is present in a room.  Rather, the church is a mystical reality in which a community participates (whether together or apart) by virtue of its having been baptized into the life, death and resurrection of Jesus who remains sacramentally present to the community, the priest being an instrument of that Presence and a sign of that Community.  It should be said that a priest celebrating alone for and on behalf of the community is not ideal and that medieval chantry Masses were rightly condemned for their abuses; and while the situation of the solitary celebrant may strain the priest’s role as sign of the community, it does not obviate or destroy it, particularly given that the Church Triumphant, though unseen, is present in its numberless hosts.   

We’re conditioned, however, to distrust mediation and to seek immediate and unfettered access to all we desire in whatever way we happen to desire it.  The Reformation critique of the priesthood has, sadly, become little more than a half-remembered argument against mediation on principle (coupled with a not unrelated aversion to hierarchy).  Consequently, the mediatory office of the priest has been re-imagined as a managerial office: it’s a priest’s job to manage the sacraments, to dispense them well, on demand or on schedule. 

That doesn’t mean that our access to the things we desire is actually unmediated the more they’re merely managed, nor does it mean that all forms of mediation are equivalent or are even capable of mediating the same things in the same ways.  In the second installment of this article, we’ll look more closely at this question of mediation.