ABSTRACT
Lacoste insists that something like a non-representational spiritual bond occurs between those who pray together, who chant together, who read sacred scripture together, and who share in the eucharistic elements of bread and wine together. The advance a sacramental body, in a phenomenological framework, explores the self’s properly incarnational structure, one formed in its relation to the mystical body of Christ, the eucharist. The church’s juridical laws, liturgical rights, and ritual practices as well as its hierarchical governance with a singular head at the top constitute the visible manifestation of the mystical body of Christ and thus illuminate it as a set of embodied social practices. For Lacoste, the “mystical body of Christ” gives to Christian practice the focus and power to remove the Christian from the world. The mystical body of Christ is precisely “mystical” in that it describes a form of asceticism.
