I published a follow-up piece to this one at Covenant, "Orientation and eucharistic sacrifice: Continuing a Discussion." It can also be read on this site by clicking here.
What I appreciated most especially was the fact that Bishop Martins insisted that this question is tied to what the Eucharist is. I agree completely, and have written about this before on Covenant and elsewhere. Bishop Martins wrote:
All sacramental actions are sacralized versions of common actions — taking a bath, sharing a meal, embracing, therapeutic touching, and the like — though sacraments carry rich and polyvalent layers of meaning that transcend their common antecedents.
When we come to naming the common action sacralized in the Eucharist, our differences of approach become starkly apparent. Bishop Martins said:
Sound sacramental theology requires us to make the connection between the common and the holy as clear and robust as we can. Baptism is more than a bath, but it is at least a bath. The Eucharist is more than a meal, but it is at least a meal. The phenomenon of liturgical practice — what the event looks like and feels like to a participant — must not obscure that connection.
A meal is an event where people gather around a table. That is its phenomenology. The Eucharist is a meal. So, a celebration of the Eucharist should somehow look like that and feel like that. Versus populum celebration — placing the celebrant and, quite often, assisting ministers, ordained and lay, across a table from the congregation — is the simplest and most direct way of maintaining this connection.
The bishop notes in a response to some questions about his essay, “I should add that I have a quite Catholic view of the sacrifice of the Mass. But I don’t see how that relates either way to which side of the altar the celebrant is on.” I wish to suggest just the opposite: to argue that the Eucharist is primarily a meal might produce much fruit. But what it does not do is lead inevitably to the conclusion that the celebration of the Eucharist versus populum “is the simplest and most direct way of maintaining this” fact.
The argument strikes me as especially odd because he agrees with me that the Preparation Rites (the Acclamation through the Collect of the Day, in the 1979 BCP) “should take place ‘west’ of the altar and in the center.” The Preparation Rites are no less a solemn address to God than the Eucharistic Prayer. In fact, is there any more solemn and laudatory address to God the Father than the Eucharistic Prayer? So why is the nature of the Eucharist and the Eucharistic Prayer best maintained when the priest faces the people for this prayer?
“Because,” the reply goes, “the Eucharist is at its heart a meal.”
But is it?[1]
The “meal” portion of the eucharistic liturgy is really only seen in three actions: (a) in the Offertory, when the bread and wine are brought to the altar, (b) in the Fraction, when the consecrated Bread and Wine are prepared such that those Christians present can receive the elements once offered, and (c) in the distribution, when the people come forward to consume said Bread and Wine. Note these are three of Dix’s fourfold actions: taking, breaking, and distributing. The “blessing” takes place in the Eucharistic Prayer, of course. And it is exactly for this part of the eucharistic liturgy that Bishop Martins argues the priest should face the people in order to avoid obscuring its “meal” character.
The “blessing” of Dix’s fourfold action, the Eucharistic prayer, is precisely the place in the liturgy where it is most unlike a meal. No doubt, Christians give thanks to God before consuming their food, and a typical emphasis of 20th-century liturgical reform was to link the Eucharistic Prayer to Jewish blessings over meals: the Berakah. But what distinguishes the Eucharistic Prayer from typical table prayers of thanks is precisely what distinguishes the Eucharist from meals in general: the “thanks” of the Eucharistic Prayer (eucharistia) lies below the more fundamental reality and context of sacrifice. All biblical sacrifice, is, in some fashion, eucharistic: an expression of adoration and thanks to God for what God has first given. The Church expresses this by offering back to God the things that are his already but which he deigned in love to give us. “All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee.”
Moreover, the “table” plays a minimal role in the Eucharist: no one sits, stands, or reclines there, save the priest, who is not standing at a table to eat, but at an altar to pray and to offer. The people do not consume the Sacrament at the table.
To view the Eucharist through the primary lens of “meal” is (permit me the image and the gross oversimplification) to play in the sandbox of Western eucharistic theology after the controversy of Berengar of Tours (999-1088). What do I mean by this? Simply that after Berengar, we see a tendency in Western eucharistic theology to overemphasize the transformation of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ — and more broadly, to emphasize what we get — such that the Eucharist’s doxological and thanksgiving character is muted.
The sacrificial character of the Mass (something Bishop Martins and I both affirm) also remained central in the West, but in a rather lopsided way. The rich and polyvalent character of sacrifice in the Ancient Near East all but receded into the background of history and was replaced by a narrow and even more wonky notion of sacrifice that focused in a misleading way upon death. As a result, there was a search for the location of Christ’s death in the sacrifice of the Mass.
A common answer, provided by Thomas Aquinas, is that the death can be seen “in the double consecration of bread and wine and hence in the mystical separation of Christ’s body from his blood, which signifies his death on the cross.”[2] René Girard took a similar “history of religions” approach to sacrifice as death, such that it is wrapped up in scapegoating and violence. Relying on Girard, the French theologian Louis-Marie Chauvet, whose exercises significant influence in contemporary Catholic sacramental theology, was so bold as to claim that the language of sacrifice “is in no way necessary to express the meaning of Jesus’ life and death” (Symbol and Sacrament, p. 301). There is no doubt that the self-offering of Jesus brings a new quality to “sacrifice” as it had been known before in Judaism. But Chauvet is highly influenced by a history-of-religions approach to sacrifice (i.e., that primitive religions develop away from violent animal sacrifice toward spiritualized internal worship) and reads this scheme onto the Old Testament (i.e., Judaism has a similar sort of development that comes to its apex in Jesus) – such that he believes the meaning of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection can only be connected to sacrifice if the very notion of sacrifice is turned inside out. But we must say that Chauvet is quite wrong: the work of Christ devoid of sacrifice is something less than the Christian gospel.
By his one oblation of himself once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world.
The Eucharist has aspects of a meal. It would be absurd to suggest otherwise. But the Eucharist is not a sacrament of a meal, nor is it a sacrament of the Last Supper.
For that reason, we should take great care not to make leaps in our judgments: trying to imagine exactly how Jesus and the disciples were situated at the Last Supper, and assuming we can draw conclusions from this event, which will apply directly to the church’s eucharistic ceremonial practice (Bishop Martins is not doing this, by the way!). An extremely noteworthy development in early Christianity was precisely the separation of the Agape fellowship meal from the ritual Eucharistic one (a change one may not like but is nonetheless incontrovertible). As a recent article from Andrew McGowan highlights, “Lord’s Supper” (and thus the priority of the meal) “was not a name used for the sacred meals otherwise known as Eucharist in the first three centuries.”[3] Both this development and the lack of “meal” nomenclature for the Eucharist would seem to indicate that early Christians did not view “meal” as the primary lens through which to understand the Eucharist.
The Eucharist, I suggest, is a sacrament of the Paschal Mystery: the sacrifice of Christ that was vindicated by the Father’s resurrection of the Son and his ascension to the right hand of power, in which God placed everything under his feet, establishing him as the Great High Priest and Mediator of the Heavenly Temple. There his one oblation of himself is shown to be what it truly is: the eternal, inexhaustible, and most perfect singular act of worship and co-union with the Father ever enacted by a human being. This mystery comprehends also the sending of the Holy Spirit and the establishment of Christ’s ecclesial Body, the Church.
The 1979 BCP catechism sums it succinctly in answer to the question, Why is the Eucharist called a sacrifice?
“Because the Eucharist, the Church’s sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, is the way by which the sacrifice of Christ is made present, and in which he unites us to his one offering of himself” (1979 BCP, p. 859).
I recognize that I have not made an argument for ad orientem celebration, and simply claiming that the Eucharist is a sacrifice does not lead to the conclusion that one must say the Eucharistic prayer ad orientem. My question is this: What does the priest facing the people during the most solemn address to God communicate better than all facing God together?
Cardinal Ratzinger famously suggested a via media solution in The Spirit of the Liturgy (Ignatius Press, 2014), an option that has become known in some places as the “Benedictine Arrangement.” Instead of trying to re-affix altars to the east wall, he writes, “nothing is more harmful to the liturgy than a constant activism, even if it seems to be for the sake of genuine renewal.” He continues:
I see a solution in a suggestion that comes from the insights of Erik Peterson. … Where a direct common turning toward the east is not possible, the cross can serve as the interior ‘east’ of faith. I should stand in the middle of the altar and be the common point of focus for both priest and praying community. In this way we obey the ancient call to pray: “Converte ad Dominum,” Turn toward the Lord! In this way we look together at the One whose death tore the veil of the Temple—the One who stands before the Father for us and encloses us in his arms in order to make us the new and living Temple. Moving the altar cross to the side to give an uninterrupted view of the priest is something I regard as one of the truly absurd phenomena of recent decades. Is the cross disruptive during Mass? Is the priest more important than the Lord? This mistake can be done without further rebuilding. The Lord is the point of reference. He is the rising sun of history. (pp. 83-84)
[1] My hunch is that a more effective tack to argue that the priest should stand versus populum when celebrating the Divine Mysteries is either a) the “fully active and conscious” participation route that plays such a key role in the argument of Vatican II’sConstitution on the Sacred Liturgy: Sacrosanctum Concilium, or b) to emphasize that Christ is present in the priest, the Scriptural word, and the whole baptized assembly who are called to “become what they receive” (thanks to Neil Dhingra for reminding me of this). It is well worth noting that Henri de Lubac argued in Corpus Mysticum for a significant shift in language and thus understanding about the Eucharist in the West, where once the term “true Body” (verum corpus) referred to the Church and “mystical Body” (mystici corpus) to the Eucharistic species; but after Berengar the terms are reversed in their usage in order to emphasize Christ’s presence in the Sacraments.
[2] Uwe Michael Lang, “Augustine’s Conception of Sacrifice in City of God, Book X, and the Eucharistic Sacrifice,” Antiphon 19:1 (2015), p. 48. See Thomas Aquinas, ST, III, 74, a1, and III, 76, a2, ad1. Lang cites Garrigou-Lagrange’s summary of this position: “The essence of the Eucharistic sacrifice consists in the consecration, taken, not absolutely, but as sacramentally and mystically, separative of the blood from the body. On the cross the sacrifice consisted in the real and physical separation of Christ’s blood from His body. The action, therefore, which mystically and sacramentally separates that blood is the same sacrifice as that on the cross, differing therefrom only in its mode, which there was real and physical and here is sacramental.” See Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Reality: A Synthesis of Thomistic Thought, trans. Patrick Cummins (St. Louis: Herder, 1950), p. 254.
[3] See “The Myth of the ‘Lord’s Supper’: Paul’s Eucharistic Meal Terminology and Its Ancient Reception.” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 77, no. 3 (July 2015): 503–21).