Anexos

Sacrifi ce is a central element of Catholic thought and life. Th e Roman Catholic Church is centred on the person of Jesus Christ, and his life—from Annunciation to Ascension and beyond—must pattern the nature of the com- munity which he founded. Indeed one way in which the Church understands its identity is as ‘body of Christ’. Th ough clearly not identical with Christ, the Church continues in some sense his life and ministry on earth. Th e events of Jesus’ paschal mystery—Last Supper, Cross, and Resurrection—are thus at the heart of the Church’s thought and practice. Th is centrality is focused on the sacrament which Catholics attend most frequently and which thus defi nes their identity: the Mass. Th is sacrament represents the events of the paschal mystery, centred on the Last Supper in which Jesus asked his followers to ‘do this in memory of me’. In obedience to his invitation at that foundational meal, the Church and her ministers, calling on the Holy Spirit, consecrate bread and wine, as their founder did, give thanks to the Father and unite themselves to Jesus’ self-off ering in proclaiming that ‘Th is is my Body’ and ‘Th is is my Blood’. By consuming his body and blood they become his body.

Th e Church has always interpreted the paschal mystery in sacrifi cial terms— whether in Scripture or in early theological texts—and consequently sacrifi ce has always been part of its understanding of the representation of that mystery in the Mass. Because the Church understands itself as founded by Christ, and therefore in some complicated sense continuous with Christ, the Church must proclaim Christ’s mission of salvation which scripture and tradition insist was substantially achieved by the events of the paschal mystery. Because sacrifi ce has been a central or governing, if not unique, mode for understanding those mysteries, sacrifi ce simply is central to Catholicism.

Nevertheless, anyone conversant with disputes over interpretation of the scrip- tures, church history, and ecumenical relations, or even petty liturgical squabbles, will know that this relatively straightforward, somewhat idealized, account  of

centrality is not the end of the story. Sacrifi ce is a riotously polyvalent term: the more scholars discuss it, the more mercurial it seems to get. It is certainly clear from this book that even our small circle of contributors is not using the term sacrifi ce in a straightforwardly univocal sense. Like the category ‘religion’, there is no one universally functional defi nition of sacrifi ce. I will operate with a basic heuristic spectrum between immolationist accounts of sacrifi ce, which involve the destruction of the ‘victim’, and oblationist accounts which emphasize the act of off ering the off erandum , whether of self or something else. Such an optic works both with the broader discussion of kinds of sacrifi ce in this book—for instance, Julia Meszaros’ use of sacrifi ce is more oblationist (Chapter 5), while the sacrifi ces described by David Brown, Laura Rival or Bettina Schmidt (Chapters 12, 11, and 13, respectively) tend much more to the immolationist end of the spectrum, with Johannes Zachhuber (Chapter 2) giving an account of the transition from one end to the other—as well as with the particular story of Catholicism.

In what follows I will show that what appears to hold true in general of this volume as a whole, namely, that there is no one defi nition of sacrifi ce—it is an inherently aporetic or lacunic reality—and that it is therefore a polyvalent concept with many senses, holds true in particular of its appearance in the Catholic tradition: it is this aporetic yet polyvalent confi guration which I term paradoxical. And yet one consequence of such aporia and concomitant plural- ity is confl ict between some more polarizing and exclusive ideas of sacrifi ce. It is my contention that a paradoxical plurality held sway in the Church until the Reformations, both Protestant and the Catholic responses, when sacrifi ce became a polarizing concept. In more recent Catholic thought, the main inter- est of this article, a return to paradoxical plurality can be perceived with a very wide range of accounts of sacrifi ce available in the twentieth and twenty- fi rst centuries. Th ere will be a practical and contemporary sting in the tale, however: contemporary Catholicism faces the resurgence of a polarizing con- ception of sacrifi ce. Pope Benedict XVI is emblematic here both by strongly accenting the paradoxical sense of sacrifi ce, setting it on a more capacious canvas, while having to deal with the practical diffi culties attendant on the resurgence of a polarizing understanding as a function of his Petrine ministry of unity.

Modern Catholic understandings of sacrifi ce were heavily infl uenced by a constellation of three thinkers at the beginning of the twentieth cen- tury: Maurice de la Taille SJ (1872–1933), Anscar Vonier OSB (1875–1938), and Odo Casel OSB (1886–1948). 1 _{De la Taille’s main work, Mysterium} Fidei , proposed a thorough reworking of the theology of sacrifi ce prevalent in Catholicism since the Reformation debates. Following those debates the Catholic theologians, insisting that the Eucharist was indeed a sacrifi ce in

1 _{Arguably a fourth member of this constellation is Eugène Masure, but space precludes treat-}

some predefi ned kind of way, had then to fi nd where the sacrifi ce was located. Some found it in the transformation of the elements into Christ (what more lowly existence could be imagined than to be insensate in a wafer?), others in the immolation of the consecrated elements in the mouth and stomach of the celebrant. 2 _{In opposition to these immolation-hunting views de la Taille}

reframed the discussion by emphasizing the element of oblation, of off ering, as central to the Church’s sacrifi ce. Th is allowed him to integrate his under- standing of soteriology, sacrifi ce, eucharist, grace, desire, and prayer. 3 _Most

signifi cantly de la Taille insists on the unity of supper and cross as together comprising the one sacrifi ce of Christ’s Passion. Th e supper-oblation is exter- nal sign of Christ’s interior devotion in tendering his loving gift of himself to God, and this then is central in reframing our own desire from worldly to divine terms. In emphasizing the will in this way de la Taille appears strik- ingly modern. Th is key insight, linking the internal disposition, or posture, of Christ (and therefore ideally his followers) with the external outworking of that on the Cross and beyond, recurs in subsequent Catholic theology, right up to the contemporary author James Alison, as we will see.

Despite de la Taille’s apparent modernity, his work was highly controversial and was soon relatively forgotten. Vonier’s theology of the Eucharist, by con- trast, has arguably had a greater impact and was a tacit criticism of de la Taille. Th e key insight of Vonier, relying apparently on Aquinas, is made in the area of the ‘link’ between Calvary and the Mass by arguing that the Mass is the sac- rament of the sacrifi ce of Christ, a ‘sacrament-sacrifi ce’. 4 _{Vonier, like Th omas}

Aquinas, can be described as a semiotic theologian: the sacrament of the Mass re-presents the reality of Calvary under the category of sign, transposed, as it were. Th is approach makes the prior category of sacrament central in seeking to shed some light on the link between the Passion and the Mass. All sacra- ments proceed by using earthly signs to denote what they contain. Th e signs of the Eucharist denote the sacrifi ce of Calvary which they thus re-present. Th e historical passion of Calvary however is not thereby repeated but made pre- sent in the sacramental realm or order. 5 _{Vonier’s championing of the category}

of sign prefi gures the work of Power and Chauvet.

Th is early constellation is completed by Odo Casel’s remarkable Mysterientheologie or Mysterienlehre . 6 _{Central was the biblical and patristic}

2 _{Th e fullest catalogue of these now extraordinary ideas is Lepin, L’idée du sacrifi ce de la messe .}

A summary of some of the views can be found in Daly, ‘Robert Bellarmine and Post-Tridentine Eucharistic Th eology’.

3 _{See Matthiesen, Sacrifi ce as Gift .}

4 _{Vonier, A Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist , 89 and passim .}

5 _{For a criticism of Vonier’s reading of Aquinas, see Kilmartin, ‘Th e Catholic Tradition’,}

407–413.

idea of mysterion which for Casel had three main referents: God in his combi- nation of hidden mystery and outgoing economy of salvation, Christ in the full sweep of his incarnation, life, ministry, death, and Resurrection, the revelation of the invisible Father. Finally for Casel, mystery is the term for sacramental action which makes present past deeds of redemption. In each sense of mys- tery, we see a paradoxical combination of revelation and hiddenness which requires faith for reception. Th e apostles and early Christians passed on the mysterion of Christ in the mysteries of the sacraments, ta mysteria . For Casel the God who revealed himself in Christ continues to act through Christ aft er his Resurrection and glorifi cation in the liturgy of the Church. Casel wished to emphasize the real presence of those saving mysteries in the liturgical myster- ies, not just as intentional re-presentation or as a (mere) communication of grace. Where ‘sign’ arguably downplays realism, Caselian ‘mystery’ does not. Th is presence of the economy of salvation through and in the liturgical mys- teries calls on the Christian to identify with the life of Christ by reliving it in the liturgical mysteries. It can be argued that Casel’s thought has subsequently infl uenced offi cial Church documents substantially, both in the Catechism and the documents of Vatican II. Signifi cantly, Joseph Ratzinger endorsed his the- ology of mystery as ‘perhaps the most fruitful theological idea of our century.’ 7

It is worth pausing here to note that, through their various emphases on oblation, sacrament, sign, and mystery, this early constellation of Catholic theologians eff ectively moved theological discourse about sacrifi ce away from the crudely transactional, mechanistic, and ultimately idolatrous accounts which framed the Reformation disputes onto altogether more promising, because more unifying, territory. Th us twentieth-century theology has wit- nessed a remarkable rapprochement between Catholic theologians and theologians from other ecclesial communities on this topic. 8 _{So it has been}

possible, for example, in the twentieth century for Reformed theologians to assert the sacrifi cial nature of the Eucharist and our participation in it in no uncertain terms. Th us, Jean-Jacques von Allmen could say that understood as anamnesis , the Eucharist ‘is much more than a mnemonic ceremony; it is a re-enactment of the event which the celebration commemorates’ and that this ‘compromises neither the uniqueness nor the suffi ciency of the death of Christ . . . it avoids a doctrine of the Eucharist which sees in the Supper a rep- etition of Calvary . . . but . . . does not downgrade the celebration of the Supper into a mere memorial meal.’ 9 _{To exclude sacrifi ce from one’s understanding of}

the Lord’s Supper is to ‘deal a blow at the intention of Jesus when he made it a sacrament of his sacrifi ce’ in which Jesus asks his disciples ‘through their own sacrifi ce to share in his sacrifi ce . . . Th e Supper becomes in a way the channel

7 _{Ratzinger, Die sakramentale Begründung , 3.}

8 _{See, for instance, Tillard, ‘Sacrifi cial Terminology and the Eucharist’.}

of the sacrifi ce of Christians [cf. Rom. 12:1, Eph. 5:2], the sacrament of their sacrifi ce as it is the sacrament of the sacrifi ce of Christ.’ 10 _{Similar statements of}

broad areas of agreement can be found in works of theologians of other eccle- sial communities too, for instance the Methodists and Anglicans. 11 _{We are at}

a remarkable and exciting ecumenical moment in the history of sacramental and Eucharistic theology. 12

What of more recent Catholic theology—what does it have to say about sac- rifi ce? While these theologies of sacrifi ce in the fi rst half of the twentieth cen- tury accept sacrifi ce and contribute various ways of thinking about the unity of Christ’s Passion and the Mass, towards the end of the twentieth century and on into the twenty-fi rst century the picture, while still very plural, is tending to become polarized, once again. A  tour d’horizon will bear this out. 13

David Power, pushing well beyond Vonier, draws attention to the meta- phorical nature of the language of sacrifi ce hoping to press beyond a reductive (because not literal) or banally transactional (because literal) view of sacrifi ce by arguing that sacrifi ce as metaphor contains an excess of meaning which can be applied to the Christian community, Christ’s death, and the Eucharistic celebration, without the implication of a literal off ering of a gift to God. By ‘metaphor’ Power means to draw attention to the conjoining of both identity and diff erence, and as iconic its ‘value lies in the fact that the diff erence shows in the affi rmation of identity.’ 14 _{Vis à vis the wider, ‘history-of-religions’ cat-}

egory of sacrifi ce, Christian sacrifi ce, for this Catholic author, sits in tensile relation: enough similarity for a connection but at the same time a greater sub- verting dissimilarity: an analogy in other words. Where does this lead Power?

Power situates the Eucharist fi rmly within thanksgiving and praise. In the Eucharist we do not add an off ering to Christ’s off ering but our act is meta- phorically called a sacrifi ce. Further, the self-off ering of the Church is also metaphorically called a sacrifi ce, so that the faithful unite themselves existen- tially with the love and obedience of Christ. Th is entails for Power the star- tling conclusion that the literal off ering of bread and wine are not necessary to the Eucharist but, when added, ‘draw out’ the meaning of the Eucharist in certain directions. In terms of Christ’s death the metaphor of sacrifi ce draws out Christ’s obedience, and the obsolescence of ritual sacrifi ce following Christ’s death, as a metaphor of the expiation of sin, is a metaphor for God’s love found in Christ.

10 _{Allmen, Th e Lord’s Supper , 91–92.}

11 _{On convergence between Methodists and Catholics on sacrifi ce see the very thorough work}

of Stephen Bentley Sours: ‘Eucharist and Anthropology’ (unpublished thesis). On the fruits of offi cial dialogues between Anglicans and Roman Catholics on these points, see Franklin, ‘ARC- USA: Five Affi rmations’.

12 _{See now Hunsinger, Th e Eucharist and Ecumenism , especially parts 1 and 2.}

13 _{Analogous surveys can be found in Journet, Th e Mass , and Schenk, ‘Opfer und Opferkritik’.}

Th ere is much here which resonates with the offi cial teaching of the Church, but the account can be questioned in some ways. Power does not, at least on this account, situate sacrifi ce suffi ciently within a Trinitarian context. Such a context would show that for real metaphor to work, literal and metaphorical cannot be played off against each other as a zero-sum game. Doing so must put one on a path to the regrettable evacuation of metaphor, feeding off a noxious disdain for the real.

While Power favours metaphor, Jean-Louis Chauvet champions ‘symbol’. Strongly marked by his interaction with Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics Chauvet wants to relocate the sacramental discourse outside the metaphysical, and therefore ontotheological, ‘ball park’. We should replace scholastic categories of instrumental causality, with a new methodology based ‘upon [sacraments] as symbolic fi gures allowing us entrance into, and empowerment to live out, the (arch-) sacramentality which is the very essence of Christian existence.’ 15 _For

Chauvet the mistake of the metaphysical tradition is to think that our use of the verb ‘to be’ actually links language and the real, whereas the mismatch between these two must be foregrounded. A  failure in this regard has led to a view of causality in sacramental theology which is ‘always tied to the idea of production or augmentation’, 16 _{or in the terms I used above, transactional. Chauvet seems}

to think that all sacramental theology, until his symbolic proposal, has laboured under a far too creaturely, ontotheological, because essentially univocal, under- standing of the operation of grace and the sacraments.

For Chauvet it is Th omas Aquinas who falls most prey to the ontotheo- logical captivity—though he admits his presentation of Aquinas is more of a caricature and that is surely right; following the work of Denys Turner and Jean-Luc Marion, it can hardly be said that Th omas is an ontotheologian but rather seriously apophatic and analogical. 17 _{Despite the fact that the allegation}

of ontotheology may not stick to Th omas this does not discount the insights of Chauvet’s own ‘symbolic’ approach. How then does he see sacrifi ce?

For Chauvet sacrifi ce in the symbolic perspective should be seen as ‘anti- sacrifi ce’ (and Eucharistic presence, oddly, as ‘ad-esse’). By this term he wishes to escape both horns of the dilemma between either ‘sacrifi ce or non-sacrifi ce’ in Eucharistic theology. 18 _{He then reinterprets the language of the Eucharistic}

Prayers in terms of symbolic gift exchange. He emphasizes the obsolescence of the whole Jewish cultic system: ‘Christians have no other Temple than the glo- rifi ed body of Jesus, no other altar than his cross, no other priest and sacrifi ce

15 _{Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament , 2.}

16 _{Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament , 7.}

17 _{For a critique and correction of Chauvet’s liturgical theology via Lonergan’s understanding}

of intention, see Mudd, ‘Eucharist and Critical Metaphysics’ (unpublished dissertation). More positively, see Ambrose, Th e Th eology of Louis-Marie Chauvet .

18 _{Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament , 307. Th is trichotomy is picked up and usefully developed}

than his very person: Christ is their only possible liturgy.’ 19 _{Th is ‘trumping’ of}

the Jewish cultic system by the Christian order means that sacrifi ce must oper- ate in a totally new way. Chauvet centres on the todah , thanksgiving, or off er- ing as the appropriate context to formulate this new ‘anti-sacrifi cial’ approach (though todah off erings were part of the Jewish sacrifi cial complex). Sacrifi ce should be existential rather than ritual and modelled on Christ’s sacrifi ce as kenosis understood as ‘the consent to his condition as Son-in-humanity and as Brother of humanity.’ 20 _{Th e Son’s selfl ess giving is the reversal of Adam’s proud,}

grasping, ontotheological, sin. Th e Son off ers us an example of ‘de-mastery’, of ‘letting-be’. 21 _{Th e Son’s fi lial trust in the Father is his sacrifi ce of (his divine) self.}

Th is enables Chauvet to include elements of expiation within his overall con- ception of sacrifi ce as sacrifi ce of thanksgiving, in clear resonance with James Alison’s Girardian proposal. Th e whole sacrifi cial order is to be approached with this fi lial attitude of trust, as contrasted with the ontotheological, com-