One of the major catalysts for the USCCB’s National Eucharistic Revival (2022-2025) was a 2019 Pew Research poll on Eucharistic belief that concerned the bishops. This poll suggested that only 39% of Catholics believed the Church’s teaching on transubstantiation, whereas 61% believed that the Eucharist was a “symbol”.1 The U.S. bishops’ concerns were well warranted: It would appear, at first glance at least, that the Church’s teaching on Eucharist, despite being the “source and summit of the Christian life,” was somehow one of the least understood doctrines of the faith.2
However, a deeper consideration of the question may be necessary. For starters, we must analyze the binary proposed by the poll: Is it the case that the Eucharist is either the transubstantiated Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ, or a symbol? Are those the only options? A doctrine as timelessly deep and rich as Eucharist almost certainly cannot be distilled to a simple multiple-choice question.
It is likely the case that the poll accurately suggests that the Church’s teaching on Eucharist — that it is the true Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of the living Christ under the physical signs of bread and wine — is not widely understood by many Catholics, despite the centrality of the sacrament. In this sense, the predicate for the Revival is valid. But the framing of the poll presents an imprecise binary — we must admit as well that the Eucharist is also a symbol. A symbol, defined by Cambridge English Dictionary, is “a sign, shape, or object that is used to represent something else”.3 In addition to being Christ himself, the Eucharist also represents concurrent historical and ecclesial truths that operate alongside transcendent sacramental realities, like the nature of our relationship with God, our relationship with each other, and the stage of salvation history that the Eucharist enters into. These relationships are made hyper-real sacramentally, but still have meaningful symbolic significance. British theologian Monika K. Hellwig considers the Eucharist to be “the symbol of our relationship in and through Jesus Christ and with one another”.4 It has valid symbolic elements in being “an expression of joy and celebration,” with its institution during the sacred Passover night of Seder, whereby the Judaism solemnly remembers when God liberated Israel from slavery. Secondly, it creates “a gathering of the people of God” where divisions among men are broken down, and all people eat of one meal to strengthen our bonds. Finally, it is the signal to the world of God’s “redemptive divine hospitality to a world gone astray”, a reminder of God’s ultimate intention to reunite with a wayward Creation.5
The arc of Creation becoming wayward and led back to itself is told in salvation history, as recounted in Sacred Scripture and carried in the Church’s tradition. The concurrent truths of Eucharist in being both God Himself poured out for mankind as well as being representative of our relationships and our history summarizes the dual sacramental contributions of Louis Bouyer and Jean Daniélou. Salvation history tells the story of mankind having its relationship reconciled with God in Christ, and how the sacraments are symbolic of and make happen again — as if for the first time — the occurrence of that saving history. Bouyer and Daniélou are important to study because they both propose a living history of the world that the sacraments bring the faithful into and make alive.
Bouyer considers the phenomena of “myth” as a “preamble to the development of rational thinking or of biblical revelation”.6 Myth is a stage in the evolution of the religious consciousness of mankind, a tool that approximates perceived truths from interacting with the cosmos to graspable stories. These graspable stories are akin to the process of assigning concepts to perceptions by rationalist philosopher Immanuel Kant in Critique of Pure Reason: “So then, all human knowledge [Erkenntnis] begins with perceptions, goes from there to concepts, and ends with ideas”.7 Pre-biblical examples of these stories include the conceptual assignment of the Babylonian king as a servant of the fertility gods to favor a good harvest, or on another level, the worship of the Pharaoh as the bodily incarnation of the Egyptian god Horus to please the powerful gods Osiris and Isis.8 The evolutionary process of myth culminates itself in fuller shades of transcendent truth found in biblical revelation and the progression of rational thought.
Unlike secular rationalists such as Kant (who wasn’t necessarily an atheist but certainly rejected the reliability of biblical revelation), Bouyer believes that biblical revelation is a critical stage in the collective consciousness of man grasping truths about the cosmos. Biblical revelation is key for Bouyer because it makes “fully explicit and literally fundamental in the Bible, that nothing exists except by the sovereign will of God”.9 Biblical revelation affirms above all else the kingship of God, and the story of salvation history as told in the Bible is the story of mankind participating in the kingship and life of the living God in the cosmos we find ourselves in. This cosmos, which “exists only for the glory of the creator,” is “a celebration of uncreated glory through the whole time of creation”.10 Therefore, when one participates in the sacraments, they are entering into that celebration for which the world was created for, bringing the most core function of the cosmos to the forefront.
As classic biblical theology has long held, the Old and New Testaments reveal one another, and from this foundation Jean Daniélou argues that the mutual revelation in their typology is the very story that we enter into when we participate in the sacraments. This shows how In Daniélou’s view, salvation history is not a static history in the past, but a living history that the sacraments unite us to. “The sacraments present two aspects. First there is the reality already accomplished, and this is in continuity with the works of God in the two Testaments. But there is also the visible sign…by means of which the action of God operates”.11 He uses Baptism as an example: Baptism connects with the Jewish symbolism of destruction, both the destruction of the Earth in the Deluge and the Egyptians in the Red Sea. But this is typologically fulfilled with the “creative” waters of the New Testament which “bring forth a new creature”.12 Therefore, when we receive the sacrament of Baptism, we become the new creature that is purged in the Old Testament, shown anew in Christ in the Jordan River, and made anew in our lives in our own Baptism.
An important additional element Daniélou’s sacramental view draws from the writings of Cyril of Jerusalem, where the participation is made more apparent in the imitation. In this sense, salvation history is participated in by being imitated and made real in the present. “A sacrament is…a real participation in the grace of Christ, by a sacramental imitation of his life”.13 Consider the connection between this and the Pew Research poll referenced at the start: The Eucharist is a symbol in that in imitating what Christ instituted during the Passover meal, but in addition, it is also an active participation in the transcendent life of Christ by becoming his Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. There is a meaningful relationship between the symbolic nature of sacraments and the sacred reality that they make real, since the sacred reality permeates higher realities in our lives, and the symbolism extends the sacred realities across broader domains of our lives.
The world is a stage for the worship of the divine, and salvation history tells the story of God’s guiding hand alongside our awakening of a fuller celebration of this worship. In acting out biblical history in the sacraments, it becomes even more real, and a more intimate worship of the transcendent God sensed by all open hearts becomes radically alive in the world. Bouyer and Daniélou suggest that salvation history is not a benign collection of old stories locked in the past, but a living history accessible in the sacramental life. When we participate in that living history, the sacred becomes tangible, both making our lives in intimate contact with the divine, more fully themselves, and aligned with meaningful symbolism that permeates countless domains of our being.
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Cover art: “The Last Supper” (1977), by Japanese artist Sadao Watanabe (1913-1996).
- Pew Research, “Just one-third of U.S. Catholics agree with their church that Eucharist is body, blood of Christ”, August 5, 2019: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/08/05/transubstantiation-eucharist-u-s-catholics/ ↩︎
- CCC 1324; Lumen Gentium (LG), 11. It is worth noting that the Vatican uses other equivalent language in its current English translation of LG that has an interesting sacramental undertone, calling the Eucharist the “fount and apex of the whole Christian life”: https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html. The term “fount” here, connected to the term “fountain”, highlights inherent unity between Eucharist and the sacrament of Baptism. ↩︎
- Cambridge English Dictionary, Cambridge University Press: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/symbol ↩︎
- Hellwig, “The Eucharist as Symbol“, Way Publications, The Way, p.73, January 1, 1990 ↩︎
- Ibid., p.75, 81 ↩︎
- Bouyer, Cosmos, p.23 ↩︎
- Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1787), B 730, republished by De Gruyter, 1923. My translation. From the original German: “So fängt denn alle menschliche Erkenntnis mit Anschauungen an, geht von da zu Begriffen, und endigt mit Ideen.“ ↩︎
- Bouyer, p.29-30 ↩︎
- Ibid., p.36 ↩︎
- Ibid., p.200 ↩︎
- Daniélou, The Bible and the Liturgy, p.6 ↩︎
- Ibid., p.7 ↩︎
- Ibid., p.118 ↩︎