It’s taking me awfully long to trek through Taylor’s magnum opus, A Secular Age, but in my defense, I’ve had to read most pages twice.
The quote below is among the many that made it to my Kindle highlights page. His analysis of the mind’s absolute dominion over the modern person’s sense of what is and what matters sheds light on why Jesus wanted us to celebrate the Supper, “whenever we gather.”
… official Christianity has gone through what we can call an “excarnation”, a transfer out of embodied, “enfleshed” forms of religious life, to those which are more “in the head”. In this it follows in parallel with “Enlightenment”, and modern unbelieving culture in general. The issue here is not how many positive invocations of the body we hear; these abound in many forms of atheist materialism, as also in more Liberal Christianity. The issue is whether our relation to the highest—God for believers, generally morality for unbelieving Aufklärer (evidently “Enlightenment Philosophers” was too pedestrian)—is mediated in embodied form, as was plainly the case for parishioners “creeping to the Cross” on Good Friday in pre-Reformation England. Or looking to what moves us towards the highest, the issue is to what degree our highest desires, those which allow us to discern the highest, are embodied, as the pity captured in the New Testament verb ‘splangnizesthai’ plainly is. (Taylor, pg. 554).
If you’re wondering why I gave him a dig for “Aufklärer” and a pass on “splangnizethai” it’s because the former boarders on pretense and latter is useful for his purpose and mine. Plus, I studied Greek and not German, tbh. The Greek puts compassion and all religious feeling with it squarely in the gut, which is the root of the word. Christian thought and feeling are both visceral and cognitive at once. In fact, every other human feeling and thought is, even atheism, because we are material beings that think.
The puritanical materialist might argue that thinking and feeling are physiological, but that only begs the question. Breathing is physiological. The question is whether breathing and its metabolic partners like digestion and cardio-rhythms constitute life themselves. Materialists can say so, but that would be a categorically metaphysical position, ironically.
By Christ’s appointment and the Spirit’s uniting power, he is present spiritually in our hands, between our teeth, over our tongue, down our throat, and into our gut.
More important for our concern, to say that Christian or atheist thoughts and feelings are visceral is not to say they are anti or non-rational. It is only to say that physical beings are physically connected in mind and body to the world they inhabit. We are a single, albeit composite, thing— body and soul, mind, and heart.
The Sacraments affirm the solidarity of self and the “objective is” of the place and things we experience. The bread and wine do this by entering our body as independent physical realities that are also somehow spiritual. Then, by the physiological processes of the body and the sacramental processes of the Spirit, they become part of who we are as holistic persons. By Christ’s appointment and the Spirit’s uniting power, he is present spiritually in our hands, between our teeth, over our tongue, down our throat, and into our gut.
That is a fact regardless of what we believe the Sacrament signifies or delivers. Some might argue that the last phrase proves it’s all ultimately in our head, but in truth it argues the opposite. The point is not that we all perfectly agree or fully understand what we believe about the Eucharist. The point is that like our Savior and all that he did, the bread and wine are carnate, actual, physical, molecular, substantive things. We are given the Supper and Baptism to keep us from subsuming our religion (and the whole world of our experiences) into the pseudo-cosmos of our prideful little minds. Christianity cannot be excarnate any more than a loaf of bread can be.
