1.
Panis Angelicus
I was about eleven years old when I made my
First Communion in St. Joseph’s Church in Brattleboro Vermont. Unlike Napoleon, who claimed that his First
Communion was the happiest day of his life, for then he was brought nearest to
God, I hadn’t yet felt close to God except when instructed to be by my
teachers, who were nuns, as Napoleon’s may have been as well. What I remember of the day was the marvelous
white suit I had been provided, made from a cloth unknown to me then – it might
have been satin or silk or some lesser material infused with those (shantung?),
but it could have been seen, or sensed, to be a metaphor, or rather a metonymy, a thing that is “put for” another thing -- in this case, for the inner purity that I
acknowledged but really could only give the credit to the suit for. I had also
wished for another upgrade of my small self on that day: a hat. A real man’s hat, like my dad’s, a snap-brim
with a belt and a jaunty feather in it.
A hat that would raise my height a few inches, though the inches were no
part of me as me. Anyway, I didn’t get
the hat, though I was told that in another year, or two, I would be ready for
an actual, not notional, hat and all that it denoted in its full reality. (I never in fact received it. Maybe I stopped
wanting it.)
I don’t remember the actual
experience of First Communion. Based on
other remembered ritual behaviors of that time and place I can be fairly sure
that after gathering before the church steps we first-communicants in white
lined up by height in two columns, boys and girls, we entered the dim church
and went down the central aisle to be directed into the very front pews. The church filled with parents and
grandparents and older siblings who had gone through the process before us. No
doubt a choir sang us in, and it might have been the Panis angelicus they sang, which even now in Cesar Franck’s setting
can draw tears of nameless bliss.
Panis
angelicus (Latin for "Bread of Angels" or "Angelic
Bread") is a stanza in a poem written by Saint Thomas Aquinas, not for
First Communions but for the feast of Corpus Christi; it has been often set to
music by other authors. The apparently ordinary
bread and wine, through the power invested in the priests of the Church, is
transformed into the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ; it’s the bread and wine
given in the first instance by the Savior to the Apostles on the night they sat
together for the last time. In the terms of the rhetoric of typologies, that first
supper is an antetype: a beforehand,
a first type, that when repeated in a later time can give to the original the
power of a prophecy: the bread I took in
1952 was an endpoint that can be said to have been prophesied, though the
company that ate and drank in an upper room in Jerusalem (take this and eat, for this is my body) could not themselves know
it to be prophetic.
I am exploring a way to understand – which I hold even now, tentatively -- that the entirety of the Catholic Church, from its beginnings to now, is a system of metonyms and metaphors, beginning with God themself. The Communion bread, for a first instance, seems almost created (in its Catholic form) to be a metaphor. In Thomas’s Latin poem it seems that the angels, or some organized part of the angelic throng, actually partake of the divine food that they make, and share it with living humans attending at Mass. The bread in the human world is baked or cooked (how was it made, and of what? Perhaps I used to know) – but the bread of the angels can’t be a substance, can it? In Flemish painting of the 14th and 15th centuries, like the famed Flemish Portinari Alterpiece, angels are sometimes portrayed as robed ministers assisting at a Mass. They are surely metaphorical, or more exactly symbolic, because actually put before us. In such painted altarpieces are shown bound sheaves of wheat and grapes and grape-vines, further physical (painted) symbols of the Eucharist bread and wine. Did I, did we children of the 1950s, conceive the angels in the hymn as consuming the Deity just as we did? I’m sure I never thought of it, though I find the idea touching now.
2.
The existent and the real
Most
of us know about the use of metaphor and its companion, simile: they create
comparisons of things that are alike but different. Metaphoric extensions of
sentences or comparisons are the commonest way to enrich a text, if enrichment
is what’s sought for. Metaphors in poetry liken a primary subject to
a secondary subject: In the Communion metaphor, the primary subject is the
Host; the secondary subject is the asking or desiring soul of the Catholic
person. As primary subject, the Host is
almost invisible; it’s not food; it vanishes in the mouth. As a secondary subject bound by a primary, it
isn’t or almost isn’t a thing in itself but rather an event.
Metonymy
is less well-understood than metaphor and simile, but it’s actually more
powerful in assertion. Instead of words that describe by similarities, which is
what metaphors do, metonymies describe by actualities: things that draw the
attention or inform the spirit of a character, whether or not that character is
quite conscious of it. (Allegory is a
less flexible and more stable form.)
Here’s
a simple contrast -- a metaphor and a metonymy: “My love is like a red, red
rose, that’s newly sprung in June/ My love is like a melody, that’s sweetly
sung in tune.” (Robert Burns.) That’s a metaphor (or two): it
compares the feeling of love to something else that is in some way similar and
yet different. The beloved is only like a rose or as a rose;
there is no primary rose subject. But
“I’ll be with you in apple-blossom time / I’ll be with you to change your name
to mine” is a metonymy: the old song evokes a large thing — not a
notional unrelated thing but an orchard, a season — to stand for a moment in
personal time. The orchard and the apple blossoms are “put for” the feelings of
the lover.
3. The Bread and the Sheep
The
Christian box of metaphors, in their Catholic form particularly, is large. One
of the commonest and oldest is sheep: the constant attention to sheep in the
Hebrew bible, the shepherds, goats, flocks, lambs lost and sought for, descends
to the Christian mythology, providing new metaphors even down to later ages
without a substantial sheep investment.
In the economy of the Middle East
sheep and sheep production are universal, and in the Gospels Jesus is allied with sheep in several
places; but the sheep are all metaphors.
Jesus speaks of himself as a shepherd, but nowhere does he herd actual
sheep; the sheep fails as metaphor because in the life and acts of Jesus on
earth there are no actual sheep for the primary subject to point to, and so the
primary subject and the secondary subject are the same. Considered as metonyms,
it could be said that sheep are “put for” the dependent and beloved, straying
and returning, lost and found sheep that filled common life at the time and in
the teachings of Jesus; but because Jesus isn’t a sheepherder in fact, and the
lost sheep aren’t sheep, the metonym evaporates. In one well-known incident Jesus does feed
his followers with bread, and in
promises he evokes their heavenly Father as provider of food for people rather
than sheep. As he leaves his followers
to ascend to heaven, he orders them to “feed my sheep”-- who are the followers
themselves, in their growing numbers.
But
important as such stories are, the great allegories of Catholic belief and
faith are only a beginning. Every
material thing, or every thing denoted as material; everything understood as
existing in various times and places that in one way or another expresses some facet
of the actuality of the Catholic church and Catholic practice -- the Bishop’s
mitre, the Pope’s gloves, the robes and other apparel, the coronets and
headgear, the furniture of the church and of the Mass, the beads of the
rosaries, the crucifixes in all their forms, all chrisms and oils, and above or
derived from these, all prayers in all languages, spoken by priets or sung by
choristers –in the terms the Church has set for them, all these don’t exist. In Buddhist thought it would be understood
that such things perhaps exist, but they aren’t real: what alone is real is the
universal consciousness out of which we come and to which we will return. In
the Catholic context, they are metaphors, metonymies, analogies and
allegories. The thousand objects of
reverence, devotion, and daily use, necessary to faith, supports of the heart
and the soul, are effectually inert in their existing-but-imaginary unreality,
and yet are what create the Catholic Church and have kept it in existence from
the beginning up until the present, though the strength they lend to the future
may finally fail, or at least fall into a sort of archipelago of ghost islands
where the actuality of worshippers alone
seems to preserve all that once was seen
and felt to be real, the stacked matter that constitutes the Church. Stacked, because each part of it underlies
another pane, and an overlying part underlies a “higher” part “above”, and so on. As metaphors, these Catholic things are
weightless, though felt as heavy or solid by the believer; and yet the
heaviness may be lifted instantly without changing its nature, like the
Communion wafer, not a thing in itself.
4. Perichoresis
God
speaks from out of his sequestration in unknowability, but God being seen or
having been seen is much equivocated in the Bible accounts. Gideon, in Judges, assumes that seeing the
face of God means death; the parents of Samson think so too. God turns his face away from Moses and shows
his “back parts” only. In some legends
surrounding the early books of the Hebrew Bible, Isaiah is said to have been
killed by a king, Manasseh, for claiming to have seen God; what Isaiah is said
to have said is that “I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and
lifted up” – that’s in the Authorized Version’s translation. What he has seen
is a vast machinery of wheels within wheels that runs the God-established
universe in which or beyond which he dwells. God, speaking or seen or simply pervasive in
an imagined universe, who walks in the Garden of his own creation in the cool
of the day and calls to his creations to come from hiding, is unseen but known
to the only beings who could recognize his presence. If the round dance of serpent, Eve, Adam, , shame,
thorns and thistles, Cherubim with flaming sword, is an allegory of the common
life of humanity as it would be in the ages to come, then God and Godhead can
be understood as the generated or governing metonym that holds it together.
Christian
theology after the passing of Jesus included the entirety of the Hebrew Bible
and its extraordinary mythography, but its enthusiasts were onto something that could not be
contained in the hieratic structure of God and God’s servants and allies. If, as it came to be asserted, in the
beginning was the Word, and the word was with God, and the Word was God, then there was room in divinity for an being with
the Father. And what then was the
relation between them? Father plus Son
was not quite stable. Was the Son lesser? No, they were one and equal. But to
establish oneness and equality would mean the apprehension of a third entity,
one that would possess all the qualities of the other two and yet be
self-creating and independent. The theologian Alister McGrath writes that it
"allows the individuality of the persons to be maintained, while insisting
that each person shares in the life of the other two.” In other words, they dance: which is what the Greek perichoresis means. In and
out of one another, each an equivalent of the other two, swing your partner,
alone together in a way that leaves their worshippers to their own devices and
yet able to fatten on the endless divine interplay – as Virgil says, Spiritus intus alit, the Spirit nourishes within. Or as John Lennon
has it, I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together. To see
or imagine it in this way is to know, or to prove what is known to the believer:
that the entirety of this metaphoric, analogic, inexistent, metonymic construct
is what creates goodness, heartfeltness, wisdom, wonder, and joy in the
believer, as it did in all believers in former times and in all unbelievers and
believers now and to come.
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