Repeat the Song! The Psalms and the Eucharist

Introducing the Dialogue

Sacred time is indefinitely recoverable, indefinitely repeatable. ‘Reversibility,’ ‘reintegration,’ ‘reactualization,’ ‘recoverability,’ ‘repeatability’—all of these parallel words in Eliade’s vocabulary point to what he considers to be the central fact about sacred time. It does not pass away. It existed before, as first instituted by the gods or God, and it will continue to exist into the future, as ensured by the traditions of religious ritual. The problem of irreversible time, which is coterminous with human existence in the world, is resolved by the mediation of religion, whose root meaning, of course, is ‘to connect again.’ ¹

In the midst of our fractured and distorted temporality we are given to participate in a temporality in which our past, present, and future can be at peace, co-inhere. ²

Before the mountains were begotten or you brought to birth the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. ³

This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, for my remembrance. ⁴

Herbert Levine’s adoption of the perspective of sacred time in the works of Mircea Eliade parallels the adoption of the divine perspective of time in the Psalms, which in turn prefigures the intrusion of divine eternity reincarnated time and again in the performance of the Eucharistic words. Eliade, a philosopher and historian of religious experience, repeatedly ponders the mysteries of time in the world’s religions. Levine hints at the potential of the Psalms as ritual and repetitive prayer. Begbie examines the power of the sacred in overcoming the brokenness of time-bound existence in the celebration of the Eucharist. These writers and prayer texts are therefore here brought into dialogue to explore not only their intersections, but also the intersection of time and eternity.

Time and Eternity in Ritual: Eliade

Eliade’s distillation of sacred time runs:

[B]y its very nature sacred time is reversible in the sense that, properly speaking, it is a primordial mythical time made present. Every religious festival, any liturgical time, represents that reactualization of a sacred event that took place in a mythical past, “in the beginning.” Religious participation in a festival implies emerging from ordinary temporal duration and reintegration of the mythical time reactualized by the festival itself. Hence sacred time is indefinitely recoverable, indefinitely repeatable.… Hence religious man lives in two kinds of time, of which the more important, sacred time, appears under the paradoxical aspect of a circular time, reversible and recoverable, a sort of eternal mythical present that is periodically reintegrated by means of rites. ⁵

Carl Olson understands Eliade in terms of a “theology of nostalgia”: the desire to “return to an idyllic age” or to “a kind of paradise where communication existed between heaven and earth” may be fulfilled. “By an indefinitely repeated invocation of archetypes, homo religiosus could remain near the real and meaningful.” ⁶ Olson himself appears influenced by Eliade’s ritual interpretations. Reflecting on the Sabbath and how the repeated enactment of this Hebrew Biblical injunction points to the importance of remembered and remembering time in man’s relationship with God, he later writes: “Liturgy creates and shapes memory, which in turn shapes our core commitments, actions, and beliefs.” ⁷

Prayer in the Psalms often involves remembering, at multiple levels of the text. Textual and semantic analysis has demonstrated that Hebrew remembering in prayer can be said to be relational, actualizing, and effective. ⁸ The experience of remembered times, remembered divine-human relationships, and remembered prayer in the Psalms thus resonates with—even exemplifies—Eliade’s understanding of sacred time. “Primordial mythical time”, or illud tempus, is in Hebrew prayer not only a time-bound primordial myth that is remembered and reactualized, but even a primordial divine-human relationship. Thus, when Eliade’s paradigm is linked with the Psalms, this primordial myth encapsulates not only the creation myths but also the covenant, literature, and the sense of ongoing creation: above all, it points to an ongoing relationship as remembered and continually relived as well as a mythical moment in time that is pursued again and again. Primordial mythical time, paradise, or illud tempus, for which the one who prays yearns, involves communication and nearness between man and God.

That yearning for a primordial time when the divine-human relationship was complete and perfect, when God was the unassailable king, when righteousness reigned supreme without exception, is clearly indicated by the repeated re-enactment of the Psalms in the cult. While form critics debate the specific Sitz-im-Leben of many psalms (arguably itself a mythical illud tempus that later generations continually seek to recapture), the very tradition, remembering, and continued re-performance of the Psalms illustrate that nostalgia. Each performance of praise or prayer was a reactualization of that primordial relationship, a returning to and recapitulation of right relationship between God and man. It was the human response to the repeated divine offering of grace in covenant renewed. Hence Eliade later writes:

It may, then, be said with truth that the Hebrews were the first to discover the meaning of history as the epiphany of God, and this conception, as we should expect, was taken up and amplified by Christianity. ⁹

Eliade develops his thinking from a philosophy to a theology of history, where the incarnate God of Christianity sanctifies time. As the Christian participates in liturgical reactualization of the illud tempus of Jesus Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection, such historical times become theophany re-experienced. The history in which God has participated and revealed himself has a “trans-historical purpose—the salvation of man”. ¹⁰

Time is itself effectively transcended as history is sanctified by theophany and its liturgical reactualization. Thomas Altizer, writing on Eliade’s concept of time, highlights the connection made with Kierkegaard that “eternity is the true repetition”. ¹¹ Time and eternity are both intimately present in the prayer texts of the Psalms.

Time and Eternity in Prayer Texts: Levine and Psalms 90 and 145

Levine’s reflections on Eliade, quoted above, accentuate how the worldly time frame in which prayer is made reaches toward this sacred time, the eternity of God. He later writes:

the collective memory of ritual helps a people overcome time’s irreversible flow by allowing it to repeat in historic time acts originating in mythical time. Acts of private memory, as we see in this context, can make time similarly malleable, subject to the reinterpretation of a new perspective on life. ¹²

Repetition and memory, as themes explored in relation to Eliade, can be analysed in ritual texts, remembered prayer texts such as the Psalms. Levine on the Psalms indicates how memory can make time malleable and therefore go beyond an earthly perception of time to a sacred perspective on time. This is relevant in prayer both public and private, referring to everything from specific historical events, particular times of day, week, and year, to the succession of the generations. If indeed “eternity is the true repetition”, then memory is clearly a means by which time intersects with eternity. Past events, such as creation, the Exodus, and the destruction of the Temple, although physically unrepeatable are made repeatable in prayer. They become part of the present and future of the worshipping community and individual. Times which are essentially repeatable, the time of days and seasons and festivals, become the stable, repetitive heartbeat within which shared memory reconstructs time. The times of generations past and future are the security of an ongoing voyage into sacred time, the continuous engagement of time and eternity.

Old and new are both valuable here. “A sharp dichotomy between the old and the new, or between the traditional and the innovative, can rarely be sustained.” ¹³ Levine’s liminality of the Psalms, prayer as standing on not only the threshold of the inner sanctum, but also on the cusp of old and new, past and future, unfolds this further. ¹⁴ The understanding of the Psalter as a collection of ‘liminal’ texts reverberates with Brueggemann’s recent reading of the creativity in these prayer texts:

The Psalter…is inherently subversive because it tells insistently and relentlessly against every closure. It speaks a sub-version of reality that inescapably will subvert settled versions of theology, politics, or economics. That subversion is the voice of protest that will not settle for any unjust worldly arrangement; but that subversion is also the voice of wonder that acknowledges and celebrates new gifts, new life, and new miracles beyond all that the rulers of this age can manage and administer. That subversion is an act of insistent imagination. ¹⁵

The Psalter is the voice of the past, remembered, repeated, and therefore sustained in present and future. It looks forwards as well as back, but it does yet more: it challenges both what has been, what is being, and also what will be perceived and experienced, and in doing so it refuses to be contained and bounded. In another way, then, the Psalms reach from worldly time-bound experiences to sacred time and infinite eternity.

This ‘speaking against endings’ necessitates the text’s having different audiences through the ages and therefore emphasises the nature of the Psalms as texts that were designed to be memorable and were intended to exist through many generations. They were to shape the community through the years. They were to continually challenge the past and look ever forwards to the new, tying in with the difference between ‘real’ and ‘implied’ audiences. ¹⁶

The Psalms were therefore passed down from one generation to another, whether informally through repetition in communal worship, or formally in study. ¹⁷ Speakers—or pray-ers—of these texts, and their audiences or congregations, would be continually changing throughout the years, as students became teachers, and those led in worship became leaders of worship. So even though, as subversive texts, the use of the Psalms was and is ongoing and repeated, each repetition, each performance, naturally had a beginning and an end. Each performance was itself momentary, pointing to how Scripture was meant to be reiterated. ¹⁸

Old and new, past and future: reception history points to how these prayer texts were used and re-used throughout different historical eras and traditions. ¹⁹ Memory in and of the Psalms is an iterative tool, a creative means of reactualization and repetition by means of which text, prayer, and the relationship between God and man may persist.

All acts of remembering in prayer, and remembered prayers, are set in the Psalms in the context of an eternal God. Words for eternity recur in the Psalter, often in contrast with limited humanity. Humanity and divinity come close in times of prayer and worship; just so human time intersects with divine eternity. ²⁰ Historical, physically unrepeatable, times become repeatable in memory and prayer: offered to God, sanctified in his presence, they become petitions that such experiences might never be repeated. By such retelling, the memory becomes part of both present and future of both worshipping community and individual. Repeatable times in the cult, such as the time of days and seasons and festivals, offer a framework of prayer within which memory reconstructs time. Repetition and remembrance offer a finite, but indefinitely repeatable, means of engaging mortal time with divine eternity.

Grounded in the past, the Psalms look to the future. Speaking from the old, they always hope for the new. They often desire the ‘old’ to be over, the past to be passed, indeed, that change and new life may come about. Past, present, and future are all experienced in the present. A prayer text exists in time and speaks of time; its performance both consists in and is constrained by time; its ongoing tradition endures through time, while its divine subject, audience, and addressee, is eternal. For Augustine reading the Psalms, time allowed for anticipation as well as repetition, expectation as well as memory. ²¹ Two texts—Psalms 90 and 145—will illustrate and explore this notion more fully.

Time and Eternity in Prayer Texts: Begbie on the Eucharist

The renowned ambiguity of the words of institution repeated in each and every celebration of the Eucharist echoes this intertwining of God’s and man’s ongoing commitment to enact remembrance. ²⁵ Time, eternity, repetition, and remembrance are indivisible from concepts of past, present, and future, relevant to the Psalms as well as to the Eucharist. Augustine’s reflections on reading a psalm were that “the scope of the action which I am performing is divided between the two faculties of memory and expectation, the one looking back to the past which I have already recited, the other looking forward to the part which I have still to recite”. ²⁶ This gives rise to the distentio animi on which much modern philosophy of time is built. ²⁷ Thus, “we cannot speak meaningfully of things which no longer exist as existing now except in memory, nor of this not yet existing as existing except in expectation”. ²⁸ I have briefly explored how what is past, present, and future, is at one and the same time distinct, yet experienced all in the present, with respect to the Psalms; similar themes are evident in reflecting on the Eucharist.

Jeremy Begbie treats just such themes, culminating in a study of the Eucharist. What he says of the relationship between time and the Eucharist can be considered true also of the relationship between time and prayer in the Psalms. Thus the Psalms reflect much of the same thinking on time and prayer as was instituted in the Eucharist. In a way, then, the Psalms may be viewed as a tupos or precursor of the prayer that is to come in the NT. ²⁹

Connecting Begbie’s work in general with Psalm texts themselves is methodologically straightforward: the Psalms were sung, and were composed to be sung. ³⁰ To consider them simply as poetry is like studying an opera only as a libretto, even though little may be known of the music and tonality of the Psalms. They were also performed as prayers, often in public contexts, whereby they might be remembered and transmitted. Oral performance takes time: time lapses between the beginning and end of that performance. ³¹ Texts—whether the Psalms or liturgical texts built around dominical commands—exist all at the same time, even if their reading does not. Thus both texts have the performative possibilities that “the word changes the world”. ³² Considering the performance of the Psalms contributes considerably to understanding the texts as effective prayer texts that are repeated and both time-bound yet also timeless.

Indeed performance of a text is not a one-dimensional linearity, but it involves “different kinds of temporal succession, which intersect, interpenetrate and enhance one another as the music unfolds”. ³³ Similarly, different readings of the Psalms are not mutually exclusive, given that different kinds of succession, continuity, discontinuity, and so on may exist side by side. In fact, different interpretations, arising from different historical, social, and cultural contexts, will ideally be read together, insofar as this reflects the “multiplicity of temporal continua operating concurrently” that is experienced both in music and in our human perception of time more broadly. ³⁴

Begbie makes five broad statements about the performance of the Eucharist. “Eucharistic repetition both stabilises and destabilises”; “Eucharistic repetition can ‘go flat’”; “Eucharistic repetition does not efface the temporal integrity of the initial appearance of the theme, or of its repetitions”; “Eucharistic repetition means improvising”; and “Eucharistic repetition depends on and enables a particular kind of interpenetration of past, present, and future.” I will deal with each of these in turn, relating Begbie’s reflections to the Psalms.

Concluding the Dialogue

The intersections between time and eternity, the Psalms and the Eucharist, are thus demonstrated by the intersections of thought of Eliade, Levine, and Begbie. Time is highlighted as a fascinating lens through which to read the texts themselves, and also as a means of reflecting on hermeneutic methods.

Both within and beyond the two Psalms texts considered, Ps. 90 beginning Book IV and Ps. 145 perhaps once ending the entire Psalter, the Psalmist commits future generations to upholding Israel’s relationship with God, in the existence of the text itself, in each and every reading by anyone of faith. ⁴⁷ The universality of the texts in style and content echoes the comprehensiveness of their message: an infinity with which mortal limitations can hope to intersect only momentarily. The perpetual nature of these texts in their repeated enactment is profoundly performative: the relationship between God and man is perpetuated as praise is continued and communal memory and existence thereby secured. God is a continual dialogue partner: both congregation and divinity are ever-present audience or addressee for these prayer texts. The mortal pray-er engages with the infinite God, and repetition and remembrance allow time and eternity to connect. Time and memory are indissolubly bound in the texts of the Psalms and their ritual repetition. As such they inform present and future generations of the means and mechanics of prayer.

With such prayer texts and repetitive habits ingrained in the Jewish psyche (or even, as Eliade would have it, the religious psyche), such an understanding of prayer and ritual offering an intersection between historical time and sacred time, or between time and eternity, would have been natural by the time of the historical Jesus’s last supper. The institution of the Eucharist is built on the foundations of repetitive prayer for remembering in Jewish worship as exemplified in the Psalms: prayer that is remembered and prayer that remembers, re-enacting time past to impact on the future, in the present.

So Eliade, conversation partner with Levine, has highlighted some of the importance of repetition and remembrance in ritual and sacred time; two Psalm texts have offered an outworking of this intersection. Begbie’s study of theology and time through the lens of music has shown similar considerations to be at play in the Eucharist, and this has once again pointed back to the Psalms. Repetition and performance have indicated the relevance of the ever-changing audience and performers to any sacred text or ritual; so there is a vast amount of remembering going on, at a multiplicity of levels, in both the Psalms and the Eucharist. Pointing to the importance of continuation and preservation, complete with stability and permanence in creative tension with instability and improvisation, this study has contributed afresh to the tradition of textual transmission of prayers, both scriptural and liturgical. Each text explored here contributes to the understanding of the other, despite their different historical and theological beginnings.

In terms of time beyond the texts, time as a means for reflecting on hermeneutics, the repetition of remembering in prayer improvises a new creation from the backdrop of old events, times remembered. Times are remembered and experienced afresh at each telling, at each listening. The texts may be remembered, read, and improvised with novelty and change. The ongoing existence of the texts themselves through time allows for readings to change and develop, the old continually made new. The Psalms are a textual locus par excellence for the understanding of the importance of remembering in and of prayer, and as such are a prototype for the prayers of the New Testament. In the Psalms, as in the Eucharist, man was present to God, man is present to God, and man will be present to God. In the words of institution of the Eucharist, as in the Psalms, God was present, God is present, and God will be present. Through such sacred texts and experiences, the present time offers an intersection with eternity.

Such conclusions can inform not only an understanding of these selected texts and rituals, but also the dynamic possibilities of Biblical interpretation alive, continued, remembered, and authentically improvised, from one generation to another. This in itself is a dialogue that should not be concluded.