On the Eucharist and Deep Time
Before this week’s offering, a couple of other items of note: I will be aiming from here out at an essay of some length and depth at least once a week, along with one or two shorter posts each week either of my own thoughts or presenting the work of another, with or without commentary. I have been telling myself for some time that I should do short book reviews at least once monthly so look for that soon. Forthcoming essays include a long meditation on the history and present of the periodical cicadas (a major theme in our household right now!), and an essay on the intersection of manuscripts and digital technology, a topic I will be teaching this summer and which I will be unfolding at greater length in the months to come.
Second, while I suspect most of my readers are familiar with my personal website/blog, if not let me draw your attention to two recent posts: A Palestinian Saint of the Early Ottoman Era, adapted from a chapter of my recent dissertation and part of my presentation of Ottoman sainthood in rural contexts; and Peace to You O Holy One of God, O Saint Mūsā, Who Seized the Kingdom of Heaven by Force, a translation and short discussion of an eighteenth century Coptic Orthodox devotional text.
Those things said, let us begin our exploration of the Eucharist and the context of deep time.
i. deep time and providence
For the Orthodox Christian (and indeed for all liturgical Christians) there are few substances as central to our liturgical life and to our spiritual imaginations as bread and wine—they appear again and again in various sorts of ritual use and consumption, in iconography, in scripture and hymnography, and of course most importantly as the transformed substances of the Eucharist, the central component of every Divine Liturgy and the heart of our collective liturgical life and worship of God, by means of which mystically we receive the very Body and Blood of Christ. In my parish as we walk, arms crossed, to receive the Eucharist we behold before us upon the lower wall of the apse a depiction of Christ holding the Bread and the Cup, His disciples to His left and right ready to receive. On the morning of this year’s Paschal liturgy I was looking up at this beautiful image, moving along in my place in line, when it hit me- perhaps due to exhaustion beginning to set in!- that those substances, bread and wine, have long and complex histories and resonances that we in Orthodoxy tend to never think about due to years of accustomization, but which might be worth exploring.
But let me start with a theological preface, a theme that I will be developing, God willing, in greater depth in these digital pages: the way in which God’s work in the history of life on earth, and within human history particularly, is revealed in the truth of the Cross, and that it is outward from and through this reality that we must think about God’s role as Creator, His work of providence and of salvific preparation and transformation. It is no original observation of mine of course that it is in Christ crucified that we see God and that we understand Him: one could well argue that if there is any single proposition that informs and makes distinct Christian faith, it is that one, and not just for Orthodox Christians but for all creedal Christians from origins to the present; perhaps no other theological proposition marks the Christian faith off from other forms of theism. What I want to talk about here is a subset of that revelation, namely, ways in which we can think about the deep past and the long trajectories of human history as they both relate to God’s creative work and to His presence and care to each and every created being, including His shaping and direction of the world towards, ultimately, what St. Paul speaks of as an act of transformation through the divinized sons and daughters of God. What the Cross and Resurrection and the ongoing work of divine salvation and transformation in the world reveal is that God’s relationship to the created order is not immediately obvious, it does not broadcast the sorts of signals humans would in and of ourselves right away perceive (this is very much what St. Paul argues in the well-known, but often truncated, passage in Romans 1—the created order speaks of God, but one must be properly attuned, and generally we are not!). The Cross is the paradigmatic example: it is ‘foolishness,’ it is not the sort of thing we would at all expect. God’s work in the Cross and in the Resurrection is a hidden work, even if the effects become (to some degree at least) more and more manifest in the stuff of human history, in the witness of the Church and of the saints. It tells us that God’s creative work and His salvific work (which are, in fact, conterminous) takes place within the flow of human history and within natural processes and dynamics, working within and through them in ways that are not always, or often times not at all, obvious or evident to unaided human observation. He reveals Himself through and with the material of the natural world and the historically developed and unfolding materials of human culture and history—and in so doing He transforms them and reveals to us His hidden work and will. For as we will see bread in particular is perhaps not so obvious a sign and means of God’s grace as we might unreflexively imagine.
With this overall frame in mind, we can begin to think about the bread and the wine and how we might think about these ‘ordinary’ substances as coming to us out of deep historical trajectories, from long before humans walked the earth, trajectories which we can think about in a broadly theological manner, ultimately in light of the transformative effect of Christ’s use of them in the Eucharist, a transformation in which Christians continue to participate down to the present. I want to suggest that this experiment, if you will, can help us to think about God’s providence, His creative work, and His relationship to the history of life on earth in new and I hope better ways that deepen our understanding and rebound to thanksgiving and the offering up of the world in both its beauty and its human-induced brokenness to God. We could perhaps call this a devotional or doxological ‘reading’ of evolutionary history and of deep human history, approaches that, so far as I can tell, have not really been developed but perhaps represent much more intellectually and spiritually productive ways of thinking than the usual lines of debate or interaction between ‘science’ and ‘religion.’1
ii. where does bread come from
We begin with bread, in the case of the Eucharist, wheat bread specifically (I will discuss wine in a future, and most likely, shorter essay). Wheat is of course a grass, itself an angiosperm, a group of plants that is today far and away the most dominant but which are in the long history of plant life on earth relatively new-comers, probably originating in the late Jurassic but certainly present, if in a very modest role, by the early Cretaceous. The grass family and hence the ancestors of today’s wheat emerged a little later, probably in the late Cretaceous, but remained in the ecological shadows for a long time, as hard as that is to believe in today’s world which is so dominated by grasses (much to the ire of my immune system every spring and, alas, into the summer, even as I type, having earlier walked through a tall stand of members of Poaceae). There seem to have been at least two crucial periods for the rise to dominance of the grasses: first, a period of intense radiation during the Eocene and into the Oligocene, as climates globally cooled and dried out from the hot and humid peak during the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum. Through earth system processes that are still not fully understood the global climate began to cool, and despite occasional reverses in the warming direction through the Oligocene and the following Miocene, the cooling trend continued, with a particularly dramatic drop during the middle Miocene, after one of the last sustained periods of warming, the mid-Miocene climatic optimum. The years following this warm peak were crucial in the formation of the ecosystem assemblies with which we are now familiar, including grass-dominated ones, across the world. The ancestors of the grasses, including wheat, that would become the wild stock for the development of cultivars emerged in the ecological niches generated from the late Miocene forward, up to the much more recent past of the late Pleistocene.
Before we think about the place of wheat and bread in human history, we should ask how to think about all this deep evolutionary and climatic history (highly condensed here of course) in light of God’s providence and creative power. There are different approaches we could take, but there are two fundamentals: one, that even when we cannot descry any single ‘signal’ or ‘proof’ we trust that God’s providential care and will were—are—present within all those transitions and changes to earth’s history which proved so vital for the development of the grasses and ultimately of wheat itself, and that at every point in that trajectory God knew— are we ought to say knows—what the ultimate mystical ‘goal’ of the evolution of grasses was, namely, to be taken up into the Eucharist, to become part of the very substance of the Body of Christ, of God Himself, both in Christ’s physical bodily life on earth eating bread (and drinking wine) and in His transformation of bread in the institution and perpetuation of the Eucharist. The manner of God’s providence within earth history is not something to which we are privy, at least not in our current condition of seeing in a glass darkly, but is rather a part of the hiddenness and mystery revealed in the Cross but present in all of history, the simultaneous reality of a created order proceeding in orderly freedom but also within the providence and will of God, a tension that we cannot and should not in fact worry ourselves with resolving (doing so risks falling into rather soul-crushing heresy, but that’s another story). Second, the evolutionary history of grass is a particularly powerful manifestation of the sheer creative power which runs through our world, of the order and vitality God spoke into being in the primordial beginning and which He upholds through His power and will in every single moment and instance from beginning to end (and beyond), and through which the divine command as it is expressed in Genesis for life to come forth from the earth and to fill it is realized.
So far, the reader might note, the presence of bread in the Eucharist is not so surprising or redolent of tension, and the reader would be right: the ‘natural’ history of wheat when expressed in evolutionary terms is clearly an example of God’s good creation and of His ever-present love and care within the lineaments of deep time. The Eucharist in this reading can be seen as an endpoint in a marvelous historical trajectory unmarred by evil, and so it is. But of course there is a further segment in that history that gets us from the phylogeny of wheat to the bread of the Eucharist, and it is rather more complex.
The cultivation of wheat is very recent in human history, and is the sort of discovery that hardly seems obvious—wheat, particularly wild wheat, is a lot of work for relatively little immediate payoff, but nonetheless at some point in the early Neolithic humans dwelling in the Near East, perhaps earlier, discovered the nutritional possibility of wheat, and began cultivating it to reduce some of the difficulty. Now, while other plants were also being cultivated around this time, and while permanent settlements in fact somewhat predate the Neolithic ‘green revolution,’ the cultivation of wheat in particular (and its analogue rice further east, to be followed by maize in the Americas) would have truly earth-shattering implications. While the nutritional value of wheat is not all that great comparitively—and in fact the overall health of Neolithic populations compares rather poorly to their Mesolithic and Paleolithic ancestors—it has the immensely powerful value of being easy to store and relatively easy to transform through cooking into, yes, bread, with all manner of possibilities proceeding therefrom. That wheat can be stored for long periods was clearly key to its success, and to rising population sizes, since even if overall health suffered as a result of the change in diet, being able to store food in such quantities could bridge hard times in a way the more subsistence-based diets often could not. But this quality of wheat (and of other grains of course) had darker and more troubling implications, and it is here that human sin writ ever larger appears in the story. Wheat encouraged population growth and population concentration, which in turn invited or even operated in tandem with organized and to some degree centralized political power and organized violence. To over-simplify somewhat, wheat-fed populations could be controlled, dominated, and mobilized. The Neolithic revolution began to fill the earth with humans, to be sure, but it also filled the earth with violence and with emergent human systems and ways of life deeply contrary to God’s will and desire for the world and particularly for humans. This is, I would argue, one of the fundamental messages of the entire Book of Genesis: urban settled civilization, made possible in no small part by cultivated grains, grew out of human sinfulness and became the locus of ever greater sin and destruction, inviting God’s judgment and His establishing a new salvific trajectory, that which would ultimately lead to Christ. Indeed in scripture it is striking the degree to which grain-based civilization appears again and again in a negative light, from the curse in the expulsion from Eden to the murder of Abel (the animal-raising pastoralist) by Cain (the grain-growing sedentary farmer), upset that God has rejected his offering of grain but accepted the meat offering of Abel, down to the calling of Abraham away from the grain-dominated urban civilization of idolatrous Mesopotamia with its god-kings and ruler-priests, the antithesis of God’s intention for human beings (even if we in the present have held it and the long myths of progress embedded therein as the model of progress). In the train of grain comes murder, war, slavery, idolatry, organized theft, and all manner of evil; it is no surprise from such a perspective that God rejects Cain’s offering and accepts that of Abel, or that He calls Abraham out into a life of pastoralist wandering at the edges of the grain-dominated ‘civilizations’ of his day. Bread’s human origin is fraught, to put it mildly; and in the first acts of ritual worship recorded in Scripture the fruits of agriculture are rejected outright.
iii. redemption
But of course the story does not end here. If we had the time we could proceed through Scripture and see what we might call the redemption of grain, the gradual transformation of the meaning and place of bread in the divine oeconomy, from the mysterious offerings of Melchizedek to the ritual use of bread among the Israelites and on forward, culminating in the institution of the Eucharist with wheaten bread. God chooses a substance that He had, we might go so far as to say, rejected in the long-ago age of its emergence, revealing not a rejection so much as a beginning point of transformation. If the cultivation of wheat led to its use as an instrument of human sin and evil, this did not entail God’s rejection of it or of the human history through which wheat and bread production developed. Rather, God worked in and through that history, shaping the cultural history and spiritual meaning of bread, both in the hidden and mysterious operation of His will and providence always present, and in His work of overt revelation and salvific activity, what we call (though it is a very imperfect appellation) the miraculous, His direct and personal stepping into the flow of human history, though even then in a humble and synergistic manner, His revelations making use of the ‘natural’ processes of human cultural development and language. Much as the Hebrew Scriptures reveal the redemption and transformation of language and ideas originally rooted in the myths and social systems of pagan cultures and polities, God has redeemed the meaning and use of wheat bread, despite its dark and troubled past, culminating in the Eucharistic transformation of this historical precipitate of human sin and disobedience to God into the very Body of God offered up in His hands in thanksgiving to the Father, restoring the essential goodness of wheat visible in its pre-human history, interrupted (from our temporal perspective at least) by human misuse and corruption, but not destroyed.
As such, as others have more eloquently expressed, the Eucharist is both a type of and a prefigural realization of the return of the created order to being a cause of thanksgiving and praise and of contemplation of God, and not just return but something more, a transformation and transfiguration, one which does not utterly erase the traces of the past but rather works through them. Christ offers up the bread and the wine to the Father, and in that act offers up their deep and recent histories as well, the good and the bad, realizing their ultimate meanings and purposes. Better understanding the evolutionary origins and deep past of these substances, as well as their fraught and complex histories of human development and use, helps us to better appreciate the span and depth of God’s creative work and His work of redemption both.
One reason for this situation is no doubt the fact that discussions of ‘creation and evolution’ among Christians are so often overshadowed by the ongoing debate in our communities between young earth creationists and everyone else; taking that debate as a central factum is fine in some cases—and I’m tackling such things here myself—but it is also counterproductive in other ways, and should probably be increasingly laid aside, which might lead to more illuminating directions anyway.