In the academic world, 20 years is pretty good shelf life for a book.

Not many of us can

hold out the same hope for our works, and it is a tribute to our honoree that he had the instinct for

a topic that would remain provocative for so long a time. In 1998, the year of publication for

Torture and Eucharist, stamps were 32 cents, the search engine Google was incorporated, Tara

Lipinski took the gold in the winter Olympics, and Bill Clinton denied he had sexual relations

with that woman. This sounds like ancient history for the younger members of our audience, but

I can turn to my same Internet source and find stories which indicate fewer changes in areas

where we might have hoped for them. India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons, UNICEF

reported 250 million child laborers worldwide, Osama bin Laden published the fatwa declaring

jihad “against all Jews and Crusaders,” and Bill Clinton ordered a series of airstrikes against

Iraq. J.R.R. Tolkien soberly wrote, “I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so I do not

expect history to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ - though it contains … some samples or

glimpses of final victory.”1 1998 was also, of course, the year of the arrest of Pinochet in Britain,

but we can hardly expect that torture has ceased on the world stage.

When it was revealed to Abba Anthony (then age 90) that there was a man who had

already lived the life of heaven on earth for 113 years, he set out to find him. Jerome records the

meeting of Anthony and hermit Paul. Their day ended with a contest of humility, of course.

“Having returned thanks to the Lord, they sat down together on the brink of the glassy spring. At

this point a dispute arose as to who should break the bread, and nearly the whole day until

eventide was spent in the discussion.” But before that spiritual quarrel, Paul met him with a holy

kiss and the first words he spoke were: "Behold the man whom you have sought with so much

toil, his limbs decayed with age, his grey hairs unkempt. You see before you a man who before

long will be dust. But love endures all things. Tell me therefore, I pray you, how fares the human
race? Are new homes springing up in the ancient cities? What government directs the world? Are

there still some remaining for the demons to carry away by their delusions?”

How goes it in the world? After Babylon falls to Persia, which falls to Greece, which falls

to Rome, does that last in line still govern the world? After the Jin dynasty, followed by the Yuan

dynasty, succeeded by the Ming dynasty, does the Qing dynasty survive beyond 1912? How does

the Byzantine Empire fare after 1453? How does the house of Romanov fare after 1917? What

government now directs the world, Paul wants to know. But he is not asking in the spirit of

Politico or The New York Times, because he is already living the life of heaven. In his hermitage

he lives on five dried figs a day from a palm tree, and half a loaf of bread delivered to him by a

raven – a regular prophetic diet such as Elijah ate (1 Kings 17). The bread was his viaticum: a

provision of something necessary for his journey.

Every one of our Eucharists should be understood as a viaticum, not just the last one we

receive, because every one of them is necessary for our journey through this world. The world is

a pathway, and should not be given any more status than that, says Gregory the Great in his

Moralia on Job. “Our present life is the road by which we journey on to our home; and we are

harassed here by frequent disturbances, in the secret judgment of God, expressly that we may not

love our road instead of our home.” 2 While different governments take their turn directing the

world, the Eucharist opens our soul on the side of heaven, and can do so because what is to

come, already is. The time at the altar is of more consequence than all our other time spent on the

pathway, and in the balance scale Cavanaugh has placed the Eucharist in one tray for us to see

the eternal outweigh the temporal.

We usually connect the Eucharist with the past: Jerusalem, all branches, the upper room,

Golgotha, the cross are all components feeding into the Paschal mystery that Eucharist celebrates
with anamnetic force. Gregory Dix famously defined anamnesis as “as re-presenting before God

an event in the past, so that it becomes here and now operative by its effects.”3 Though separated

by a span of two millennia, what was present on Calvary is present on the altar. Though

separated by the tomb, the one Who was present on Calvary is still present on the altar. So that

“his priesthood and might not come to an end with his death,” says the Council of Trent (session

22) and so that “he might leave to his beloved spouse the Church a visible sacrifice … Whereby

that bloody sacrifice once to be accomplished on the cross might be re-presented … [he] offered

up to God the father his own body and blood under the form of bread and wine.” The past has

been made present by its effects, and fittingly so.

But the Eucharist makes present a reality at the other end of the spectrum, as well, and

fittingly so. I am not defining this spectrum as one stretching between past and future, because

that would simply be two points on the same horizontal line snaking its way along what Tolkien

called the long defeat. That would simply be waiting for a respite, a reprieve, a temporary pause

in our death sentence. I am contrasting instead a historical act and the eschaton. In addition to

connecting the Eucharist to the establishment of the Paschal mystery, we ought at every

celebration find the connection to the final accomplishment of the Paschal mystery. “Our Lord

Jesus Christ comes to us to be, as it were, the germ of our future resurrection,” says Fr. Francis

Libermann, and “our Divine Savior, having pity on us, comes and makes us participate in the

purity and glory of His adorable body. … He gives a share in the sanctity, the glory, the

incorruptibility, and immortality of his own body.”4 The eschatological ingredient of Eucharist,

however, involves apocalyptic judgment. Apo, meaning “off, away” plus kalyptein, meaning “to

cover, conceal.” The apocalypse will be the stripping of masks.

probably puzzle us. In a Sermon titled “Our God Is a Consuming Fire” he writes of the divine

government under which hermit Paul was living.

We have received a kingdom that cannot be moved – whose nature is immovable: let us

have grace to serve the Consuming Fire, our God, with divine fear; not with the fear that

cringes and craves, but with a bowing down of all thoughts, all the lights, all loves before

him who is the life of them all, and will have them all pure. … He will shake heaven and

earth, that only the unshakable may remain; he is a consuming fire … He will have

purity. It is not that the fire will burn us if we do not worship thus; but that the fire will

burn us until we worship thus; … When evil, which alone is consumable, shall have

passed away in his fire from the dwellers in the immovable kingdom, the nature of man

shall look the nature of God in the face, and his fear shall then be pure; for an eternal, that

is holy fear, must spring from a knowledge of the nature, not from a sense of the power.5

The eschaton is ripening history until it arrives at this judgment seat. Our vocation in the face of

death to live in hope for this judgment. The poet-theologian Paul Claudel says “God came to

pierce each soul; it was His way of opening a passage for Himself.” His judgment already begins

to exert its pressure upon us, and if we are pure, we will welcome it.

Our conscience has found what it longed for above all else: a Judge … There are so many

things heap up inside us already and only waiting to become an answer for the question to

be put. A question, challenge, a presence. … Someone has fought his way through to us.

Someone is urging us to say outright the real name, our own real name.6

As numerous commentators on the Psalms have noted, the poor are eager for judgment and the

rich are fearful of it, because when the Judge comes he will bring righteousness and repair
injustice. That will be good news to the poor, freedom for the prisoners, recovery of sight for the

blind, and freedom for the oppressed (Luke 4:18, building off Isaiah 42:1 “Behold, My Servant,

whom I uphold… He will bring forth justice to the nations”).

The Eucharist makes the Church, and the Church is an eschatological entity because,

Alexander Schmemann says, her “essential function is to manifest and to actualize in this world

the eschaton, the ultimate reality of salvation and redemption.”7 The Eucharist translates the

eschaton. To “translate” means to carry over and lay in a new location. We use the word to

describe the process of picking up a meaning from one language and laying it in another; the

Church uses the word for the “translation of relics” when the bones are taken from the graveyard

and laid in a Church. While we await our eventual translation to heaven, the Eucharist gives us

strength by laying the eschaton under our feet: with this under-standing we see the passage of

time, the economies of power, the durability of governments, the demise of rulers, the

preciousness of each soul, and the immediacy of God. Claudel adds, “On the day of the Last it is

not only the Judge who will descend from heaven, the whole world will rush forth to meet him.”

It may sound so far that I have circumscribed the Eucharist to a sacred terminal where we

await our transportation to bring us to that pie-in-the-sky. It may sound so far that I have

described the Eucharist as concerned with souls and not bodies. The small element of truth to

that impression is due to the fact that the Eucharist is indeed concerned with what lasts and not

with what perishes, but that does not mean its eschatological dimension is irrelevant to the polis,

which is the thesis of Cavanaugh’s book. The Church is concerned about souls, yes. She is

concerned about souls in the state of sin. Sin concerns the sacred, but it can be committed in the

profane. One does not have to restrict oneself to the sacred realm to discover sin. The soul can be

corrupted even in the secular, profane, political realm. Louis Bouyer says this is how the neutral
definition of profane as merely that which is not sacred turns into the diabolical definition of

profane. “Modern man assumes reality was from the first profane and in order to have something

sacred it was first necessary to take hold of that which was profane and consecrate it. The truth,

however, is the very opposite to this rather smug opinion. … In fact, it is the profane that has

come into being through a desecration of the sacred. Human beings circumscribe a limited area

in this reality as their own to the exclusion of God. At this moment the profane makes its

appearance.”8

Jesus responded to his litigious bushwhackers by pointing out that they should render to

Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. Things bearing images

belong to the one whose image they bear, so we can surrender the coin to Caesar. But human

beings bear the image of God. They belong to him, and must be surrendered to him.9 And what is

the image of God? Gerhard von Rad objects to interpretations that operate with “an anthropology

strange to the Old Testament [which] one-sidedly limit God’s image to man’s spiritual nature,”10

overlooking the body. To the contrary, he says, the Hebrew term for image – selem – included

the whole person, because it meant an actual plastic work, a duplicate. An earthly King might set

up an image of himself to indicate his claim to dominion in the provinces of his Empire where he

does not appear personally. So when Genesis says man and woman are images of the King of

kings, it is affirming God’s dominion over the whole earth. Things bearing images belong to the

one whose image they bear. If a Jew in the first century were to knock down a statue of Caesar

put up by the Roman soldiers, indicating that Caesar now ruled this land, that Jew would be

thought guilty of insurrection and treason against Caesar himself. Would not, then, by the same

logic, the Roman soldier be guilty of insurrection and treason against Yahweh if he knocked

down the Jew? Doing violence against any person is doing violence against the one whose image
that person is. If one gouged the statue of Caesar with a nail and disfigured it, one would be

guilty of an act against the Emperor; and if an embodied imago Dei is marred, disfigured,

violated, tortured, it is an act against God.

That is Cavanaugh’s thesis in a nutshell. The sacred Eucharist does not leave the profane

world untouched, but rather we learn the skill of interpreting the designs of God in the signs of

the time. That is a prophetic power, according to Gregory the Great. Though we are accustomed

to thinking of profits is only a step above a carnival fortuneteller, Gregory describes St. Benedict

as a prophet because “this servant of God must of been aware of the hidden designs of

Providence.”11 The monk prophesied, Gregory says, by giving a rebuke to the King for his

crimes and foretelling everything that was going to happen to him. “You are the cause of many

evils. You have caused many in the past. Put in and now to your wickedness. You have nine

more years to rule, and in the 10th year you will die.” There are hidden designs, laws, and

directives of Providence under the surface, and the prophet can detect them, like a cat detecting

tremors before the earthquake strikes. Because the prophet knows the consequences of a state of

affairs, we think he knows the future, when actually it is the law of Providence he knows. He

knows the consequences of an action, and so anticipates the reaction.

I close with a quotation about prophetic insight – insight that I think is given to every

partaker of the Eucharist from its eschatological enlightening – made by Msgr. Ricardo Urioste

at the Romero conference here at Notre Dame in 2005.

The entire world sees the events. Nonetheless, the people tend to stay at the level

of appearances (or the fruit’s skin, if you will) with regard to these events. The prophet,

on the other hand, goes deeper (and goes beyond the skin) and penetrates into the core to
 find the secret or sense possessed or signified by the event. In other words, he sees in

these events God’s own plan, which may be realized.

Why do most of us fail to see what the prophet sees? … Those who benefit from

a given system impose these ideas and interpretations because they do not want changes

since doing so would hurt them or end their privileges. As for those who are dominated

by the system, they are incapable of knowing and understanding the truth because the

truth is presented to them after the same people who maintain the system have interpreted

it.

The prophet simply refuses to accept such a manipulated version of reality.

Standing before situations and events, he does not trust their current interpretations and

instead goes to the core of the matter through an analysis of reality that allows him to

discover what God wants to tell us through them.12

1
Letters 255
2
Gregory the Great, vol. III, Book XXIII, ch 47.
3
Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: Dacre Press, 1945) 161.
4
Fr. Francis Libermann, Letters [four meanings of Eucharist]
5
George McDonald, Unspoken Sermons, series I. II. III.
6
Claudel, Lord, Teach us to Pray, 19
7
Alexander Schmemann, “The Missionary Imperative,” in Church, World, Mission, 211-12
8
Louis Bouyer, Rite and Man (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963), 80-81.
9
Huezenga, Lion 215
10
Gerhard Von Rad, Genesis, The Old Testament Library(Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1972) 57-8.
11
Gregory the Great, Dialogues
12
Mons. Ricardo Urioste, President, Archbishop Romero Foundation. Notre Dame 2005, Translated by Victor
Carmona from the text provided in Spanish.