At first glance, it seems like a cannibalistic gesture, even if it is addressed to God and not to a human being. Yet it is the quintessence of Roman Catholicism.
We are talking about ‘eating God,’ an act that is at the heart of the Roman Catholic understanding of the Eucharist. Can Roman Catholicism really be thought of as the religion of ‘eating God’? Exploring it is Matteo Al-Kalak, Professor of Modern History at the University of Modena-Reggio, in his latest book, Mangiare Dio. Una storia dell’eucarestia (Eating God. A History of the Eucharist).
The book is a history of the Eucharist from the Council of Trent (1545–1563) onwards in the Italian context, and focuses on how the Eucharist has been elevated to a primary identity-marker: practiced, taught, protected, abused, and used for various purposes, including extra-religious ones.
It is not surprising that, facing the challenges posed by the Protestant Reformation (in all its Eucharistic variants, from the German Lutheran version to the Calvinian-Zwinglian Swiss version), the Council of Trent emphasised the sacrificial character of the Mass and made the Eucharist the symbolic pivot of the Counter-Reformation. Al-Kalak’s book is a collection of micro-stories aimed at forming a mosaic that reflects the crucial importance of the Eucharist in the construction of the post-Tridentine Roman Catholic imagination and strongly Eucharistic emphasis.
The volume ends with an interesting ‘postscriptum’ in which Al-Kalak dwells on the ‘scandal’ of the Eucharist: ‘only the host is subject to the physiological mechanisms of the human being in such a radical way’ (p.191), yet it is believed to be a supernatural act filled with mystery. It combines rational language with sensory ones, opening up to the irrational (p.193). If it is true to say that ‘the Eucharist – in the regular mass, in Eucharistic adoration, in Eucharistic processions – and fidelity to the pope and to the hierarchy are the two most distinguished features of Roman Catholicism from the Council of Trent onwards’ (p.195), then a history of the Roman Catholic practice of ‘eating God’ allows us to enter into the depths of the Roman Catholic religion.
Beyond the fascinating stories told by the book, what is of some interest is its title, Eating God, and its appropriateness to describe the soul of Roman Catholicism. Already in the early centuries of the church, Christians were sometimes accused of cannibalism precisely in relation to the Lord’s Supper. From the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), and even more so from the Council of Trent, the church of Rome embraced ‘transubstantiation’, i.e. an understanding of the sacrament according to which, after the consecration of the bread and wine and the transformation of their nature into the body and blood of Christ, there is a sense in which the Roman Catholic Eucharist is a real ‘eating of God’. If the bread really becomes the flesh and blood of Jesus (the God-man), taking it in some way means ‘eating God’.Can it really go that far? Evidently yes, according to Rome. While the Reformation insisted on recovering the distinction between Creator and creature, the radical nature of sin and the sufficient mediation of the God-man Jesus Christ for the salvation of those who believe, the Roman Catholic Church instead veered on the analogy between Creator and creature and on the prolongation of Christ’s mediation in the hierarchical and sacramental church, to the point of considering the creature’s ‘eating God’ as possible, even necessary.
In the ‘eating God’ of the Eucharist, Roman Catholicism puts all its worldview at work: its view of reality as touched but not marred by sin, the extension of the incarnation in the church, the divinization of man, and the ‘already’ of salvation enjoyed in the fruition of the sacraments without waiting for the ‘not yet’ of the final banquet. If you think about it, as absurd as it appears, ‘eating God’ is a synthesis of Roman Catholicism.
