ABSTRACT
In this essay, I explore Catherine Pickstock’s reading of the eucharistic words of Consecration, a reading that invokes Plato’s view that ‘language exists primarily, and in the end only has meaning as, the praise of the divine’.2 Immediately, we need to be aware that Pickstock is articulating a relational theology, where community, the divine, language, symbolic practice and action are inter-related and interpenetrate. However, I argue that her account too literally interprets the alleged words of Jesus which traditionally have been construed as the very institution of the Eucharist, and that this is contrary to a relational theology based in ethics. Pickstock shares with Louis-Marie Chauvet a commitment to the importance of the socio-ethical context of Christian
life.3 Whereas Chauvet situates Christian community within language and culture, however, Pickstock traces the emergence of civil society and secularity from the religious world of the Middle Ages. As I read her, Pickstock seems to hold the view that the theological is the semantic ground of the social. She focuses on meaning as theologically derivative, arguing that any certainty around meaning owes its origins to the words of Consecration in the Mass. In my view, this bold thesis renders all non-Christian and all secular meanings as irrelevant and/or insignificant: meaning lies within and between communities of speakers, their cultures and orientations towards the world. The ethical implications of Pickstock’s view for anyone who either does not share her views about the Eucharist or who rejects outright any theological claims about the world, meaning and language, are considerable. Implications range from relegating non-believers to a meaningless domain of existence where no stability of the sign will be possible, to a re-affirmation of the supercessionist claims implicit in some readings of Christianity.4 In my view, what I regard as the intellectual and social generosity of Chauvet’s position precludes such implications.
