Abstract
This article draws upon the theology of Bernard Lonergan, particularly as expanded upon by Robert Doran in order to provide a theological basis for the claim that ‘the Eucharist makes the church.’ Doran’s use of the so-called ‘four-point hypothesis’ from Lonergan’s trinitarian theology provides the basis of a revised articulation of the psychological analogy for the Trinity, this one drawn from the supernatural order. A consideration of Lonergan’s theologies of eucharistic sacrifice and of the mystical body of Christ in concert with the revised psychological analogy affords a framework for understanding the Eucharist’s role in recruiting humanity into the mission of God and constituting the church as Christ’s body.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that ‘the Eucharist makes the church.’ 1 But while with this statement we are in possession of a good theologoumenon, we are also in want of an adequate understanding of it. That the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood lies at the center of the ecclesial existence (its ‘source and summit’ in the oft-repeated words of Vatican II’s Constitution on the Liturgy), that the church’s liturgies position it to better participate in the mission of God and work towards the world’s betterment, is a truism, nearly axiomatic in certain quarters of theological discourse. But precisely what that means or how it works tends to be a matter of hand waving if not prestidigitation. 2 Two foundational assumptions guide all that follows: first, the theologoumenon is true: there is an abiding and intrinsic connection between the church’s liturgy, particularly the Eucharist, and its life in mission. Second, it is better to understand church doctrine than not to, even with the proper caveats that this understanding will always be only partial, obscure, and incomplete.
In this essay, I turn to a perhaps unlikely source in the service of developing this understanding: the thought of Bernard Lonergan, whose reputation lies in cognitional theory and theological method, rather different theological terroir than either sacramental theology or ecclesiology. 3 And yet, given the heuristic nature of so much of Lonergan’s work, we cannot let this gap deter us. His labors were carried out in anticipation of their being put to work in specific contexts, so the fact that he himself was not yet operating in those contexts or loci is immaterial to the question of applicability. As foundational as Lonergan’s cognitional theory and theological method are to what follows, the most central point of contact is not heuristic at all, but is rather a positive theological proposal, drawn from his trinitarian theology. This proposal, which has come to be referred to as the ‘four-point hypothesis,’ particularly as it has been expanded upon by Robert Doran, now of blessed memory, provides us with a basis for understanding how it is that human action is recruited and elevated to share in the life and mission of God the Trinity. A consideration of Lonergan’s account of the eucharistic sacrifice in one of his early Latin essays provides a window for seeing the role of liturgical action in that recruitment. The eucharistic sacrifice is a participation in Christ’s loving self-gift, eliciting in the faithful a corresponding love, which binds together the mystical body of Christ and is itself a participation in the divine life. Such participation in the divine life leads to concrete action in the world.
The Four-Point Hypothesis, the Psychological Analogy, and the Trinity in History
Lonergan’s four-point hypothesis is found in the systematic portion of his trinitarian theology, originally published in Latin as a course text at the Gregorian University in Rome. 4 This provenance has relegated it to a relative obscurity, though it has received increasing attention over the last two decades, primarily at the instigation of Robert Doran, who saw in it the potential for constructing a ‘unified field structure’ for contemporary Catholic systematic theology, 5 particularly when integrated with a theological theory of history and the heuristic structure of the integral scale of values — ‘vital, social, cultural, personal, and religious values in an ascending order.’ 6 What follows will be focused more or less exclusively on the trinitarian portions of Doran’s appropriation of Lonergan’s theology, though I assume throughout the validity of the theory of history and the normativity of commitment to the integral functioning of the scale of values.
While, thanks to these efforts from Doran, the four-point hypothesis is fairly well known among Lonergan scholars, it still merits quotation in full at the outset of this argument: First, there are four real divine relations, really identical with the divine substance, and therefore there are four very special modes that ground the external imitation of the divine substance. Next, there are four absolutely supernatural realities, which are never found uninformed, namely, the secondary act of existence of the incarnation, sanctifying grace, the habit of charity, and the light of glory. It would not be inappropriate, therefore, to say that the secondary act of existence of the incarnation is a created participation of paternity and so has a special relation to the Son; that sanctifying grace is a participation of active spiration and so has a special relation to the Holy Spirit; that the habit of charity is a participation of passive spiration, and so has a special relation to the Father and the Son; and that the light of glory is a participation of sonship, and so in a most perfect way brings the children of adoption back to the Father.
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This hypothesis is articulated in the context of Lonergan’s explanation of the divine missions, which, following the mainstream Western and especially Thomist account, are identical to the divine processions, only with the addition of a created term. The missions are the processions directed outwards to creatures with the aim of giving those creatures a share in God’s own life. 8 As can be seen above, Lonergan develops the basic Thomistic position, which had insisted that the created term of the divine missions must be sanctifying grace, which renders creatures capable of participation in God, by further differentiating those created gifts by which we are elevated into God’s life. 9
Here Lonergan builds upon his previous work in a course on the theology of grace at The College of the Immaculate Conception in Montreal, Canada. The first thesis of ‘The Supernatural Order,’ which has its origin in that course, is that ‘there exists a created communication of the divine nature, which is a created, proportionate, and remote principle whereby there are operations in creatures through which they attain God as he is in himself.’ 10 Note, then, that the focus is upon the bringing forth of ‘operations’ in the creatures who are the recipients of the divine missions. Lonergan will go on to ground this created communication of the divine nature in the uncreated communications of the divine nature that are the divine processions. 11 When these eternal, necessary communications of God’s nature are joined to a created, contingent term, there is a divine mission, and these missions are likewise ordered towards the communication of God, which is done by way of the operations brought about in the creature. Because these operations are beyond the proportion of any created nature, they are absolutely supernatural. 12
This theology of the divine missions is one key ingredient to understanding what Lonergan is up to in the four-point hypothesis. The other is the place of the divine relations in it all. Here, once more, Lonergan follows Aquinas in the broad strokes. 13 The trinitarian persons are distinguished from one another by their relational oppositions, which relations are specifically relations of origin, i.e., the processions. The relation of the Father to the Son is paternity, of the Son to the Father is filiation, of the Father and Son to the Holy Spirit is active spiration, and of the Holy Spirit to the Father and the Son is passive spiration. Of these four real relations, three are really distinct, while the fourth is only conceptually distinct. Paternity, filiation, and passive spiration are subsistent, naming the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, respectively. Active spiration is the Father and the Son together, and so not really distinct from paternity or filiation. 14
By integrating his theology of the divine missions with the divine relations, Lonergan is able to provide a far more differentiated account of God’s redemptive and saving activity. With these pieces in place, we can attend to the supernatural realities that Lonergan suggests are created participations of these real relations; see Table 1.
The Four-Point Hypothesis, Schematically Represented.
The schematic presentation in Table 1 and subsequent tables obviously does not exhaust the meaning of the terms or their relations. For instance, each of the ‘created participations’ are not merely correspondences, but rather the base of a relation with its term in one of the four real divine relations, and, hence, to one (or two, in the case of active spiration) of the divine persons. 15 Each of these, then, not only imitates or resembles, but actually shares in God. But such presentation does provide conceptual clarity, particularly as we trace the development of these ideas and bring them into a sacramental ambit.
As noted above, Robert Doran saw great promise in this four-point hypothesis, suggesting in What is Systematic Theology? that it, in concert with a theological theory of history, could provide the unified field structure needed for a contemporary Catholic systematic theology. The three volumes of his The Trinity in History begin to bear this out. Doran’s project in these works makes multiple significant contributions, including an account of social grace and an expanded notion of the invisible missions of the Word and Spirit within the context of the multi-religious world within which the church is situated. One particular proposal from Doran helps us to carry this argument forward. He found in the four-point hypothesis the basis for a revised version of the psychological analogy for the Trinity, this one grounded in the supernatural order as opposed to the natural order. It is this revised psychological analogy, an account of which I provide momentarily, that will afford us a point of connection with the presenting question of the church’s Eucharist.
The psychological analogy for the Trinity is perhaps well known, but surely not much loved (and perhaps even less understood) these days. 16 From the time of Augustine onward until perhaps Rahner, the Western theological tradition has found in the dynamic activity of the human mind a remote and obscure, but nevertheless fruitful analogy for understanding the triune God. Augustine appeals to the mental triad of memory, understanding, and will/love, to aid in understanding the inseparable operations of the Trinity. 17 Thomas Aquinas, and, following him, Lonergan, appeal to the operations of the mind to understand how there can be procession in God. 18 Lonergan’s presentation of this analogy, particularly as his thought matured, specifies that the intellectual act corresponding to the procession of the Word is best conceived of as a judgment of value, with the procession of the Spirit as notional love conceived as the love/affirmation following upon such a judgment of value. 19 We can add these intentional operations to our growing trinitarian cartography; see Table 2.
The-Four Point Hypothesis and the Psychological Analogy.
Later in his life Lonergan also gestured toward a different iteration of the psychological analogy, premised on a consideration of the experience of being in love, 20 which we can, once more add to our concept map; see Table 3.
The Four-Point Hypothesis and Lonergan’s Later Psychological Analogy.
From this analogy of the Trinity as verbum spirans amorem, Doran shifts the register to that supernatural gift of charity by which our natural love is exceeded and perfected, articulating a psychological analogy grounded in the supernatural order with an assist from the four-point hypothesis’s identification of certain missions as participating in and imitating the divine relations. 21 Of the four points, two in particular are relevant to our considerations here: active and passive spiration and their participations sanctifying grace and habitual charity. The other two are not available to us in this life. The secondary act of existence, which shares in paternity, is strictly proper to the incarnate Word, while the light of glory, which shares in filiation, is that by which we shall finally attain to the beatific vision. 22
So the two relevant terms of the analogy are sanctifying grace and the habit of charity. As Lonergan demonstrates, the notion of sanctifying grace is a synthetic category, derived from a diverse array of biblical testimony, but which can be summarized as follows: To those whom God the Father loves [1] as he loves Jesus, his only begotten Son, (2) he gives the uncreated gift of the Holy Spirit, so that (3) into a new life they may be (4) born again and (5) become living members of Christ; therefore as (6) justified, (7) friends of God, (8) adopted children of God, and (9) heirs in hope of eternal life, (10) they enter into a sharing in the divine nature.
23
Doran transposes this into categories derived from intentionality analysis: the recalled reception of unqualified love. 24 We recognize that in Christ God loves us with the same love with which God loves God; our affirmation of this belovedness is the virtue of faith. And so in the pair memoria-faith, we have a created participation in active spiration, which, as we have seen, is the Father and the Son who together breathe out love. 25
What of the other term, charity? This is our love in return, springing from our recognition that we are loved in Christ with the divine love. As a created participation in passive spiration, i.e., the Holy Spirit, it is a supernatural love beyond that of which we are naturally capable. Just as the Father and Son together and eternally breathe forth the Holy Spirit, so sanctifying grace (as our own belovedness and recognition thereof) breathes forth the return-love of charity. 26 The created participations are isomorphic with the uncreated relations that they imitate and in which they share. The recognition of love and responding with love in return, then, provides an analogy of the Holy Trinity, isomorphic with the classic analogy, but grounded in the order of grace and tied to the economy of salvation instead; see Table 4.
Doran’s Modified Psychological Analogy.
This analogy involves fewer terms, for it conceives of the Father and the Son as active spiration, which is conceptually but not really distinct from the subsistent terms of paternity and filiation, yet it encompasses all of the data conveyed by the classic analogy.
The Notion of Sacrifice
With these theological positions in the background, we are able to turn our attention to the question of the Eucharist in order to see how it fits into the framework of elevation into the divine life already articulated. Nearly a decade ago, Neil Ormerod suggested that a consideration of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist was another instance of God’s action in history that might be fruitfully integrated with the four-point hypothesis, specifically as another created participation in paternity, because it, like the esse secondarium, makes the person of the Word present to humanity. 27 In what follows I shall follow a slightly different path, one which focuses more upon the Eucharist as a sacrifice than the question of real presence, and which operates within the ambit of the modified psychological analogy posited by Doran. Its basic affinity with Ormerod’s proposal will be made clear in due course.
To develop this account of the eucharistic sacrifice, we turn to a relatively minor essay within the Lonerganian corpus, ‘On the Notion of Sacrifice,’ which originated as a text for a course taught at The College of the Immaculate Conception in the early 1940s. 28 While sacrifice is a controverted topic in contemporary theology, often associated with sacralized violence and/or retributive justice, 29 it is a dogmatic given, particularly within the context of the Eucharist, to which we now turn. A sacrificial understanding of the Eucharist is endemic in the theological tradition from the New Testament onward, receives a dogmatic definition at Trent, is reaffirmed at Vatican II, and pervades the General Instruction of the Roman Missal. Hence, the theological task is to develop speculative explanations of sacrifice that avoid the darksome punitive dimensions that are so often associated with it. The association of sacrifice with violence is an a priori assumption rather than a necessity inherent in the reality (an instance of the conceptualism Lonergan sought to avoid with his empirically grounded intellectualism). The understanding of sacrifice operative here is, essentially, the loving gift of oneself, what Lonergan and Doran after him called the law of the cross, which brings ‘the long history of “sacrifice” as a theological category . . . to fulfilment, transcending all other notions of sacrifice and even definitively negating some of them.’ 30 This notion of sacrifice as self-gift shall be borne out in due course.
Lonergan adopts the standard Augustinian-Thomist position that a sacrifice is a proper symbol of a sacrificial attitude, which essentially distills the virtue of religion: the proper comportment of an intellectual creature towards God. 31 The chief instance of sacrifice, from a Catholic Christian perspective, is Christ’s redemptive act upon the cross, which is sacrificial because it was a proper symbol of the sacrificial attitude that Christ enacted while undergoing his passion. 32 In other words, it was not Jesus’ suffering or death that made the cross a sacrifice. Indeed, if we follow Thomas Aquinas, it was quite the opposite: his killers, i.e., those who inflicted the suffering and caused the death, do not offer a sacrifice, but instead commit a grave evil. Instead, it is the love that informed Jesus’ suffering and death that made these sacrificial and redemptive. 33 Already with the introduction of love into the picture, we are at the threshold of being able to assimilate this perspective into our trinitarian considerations, but taking a few additional steps before making that application will yield dividends.
The cross is a sacrifice because it is a proper symbol of Christ’s sacrificial attitude. Based upon the Last Supper traditions, argues Lonergan, the Eucharist is also a sacrifice, because it is a proper symbol of the cross. 34 On the night before his suffering, Jesus used this meal to provide an interpretation and explanation of what he would undergo the next day. On the cross, he offers himself to the Father for the salvation of all. At the table, the night before, he gives himself to the disciples as food. Crucially, the sacrifice of the Eucharist is the same sacrifice as the cross, because they both symbolize the same sacrificial attitude. For Lonergan there’s something of the transitive property from mathematics in view: Eucharist symbolizes Cross, Cross symbolizes sacrificial attitude, therefore Eucharist symbolizes sacrificial attitude, therefore Eucharist is sacrificial. QED. 35 I view that intermediate step as unnecessary, though. Both Eucharist and cross symbolize the same sacrificial attitude of Christ upon the cross. While Lonergan is, no doubt, motivated by a desire to maintain the centrality and singularity of Calvary, a laudable goal indeed, I would actually suggest that the relation between the two—cenacle and cross—is so intrinsic as to make his mathematical detour superfluous.
In fact, it is from the Last Supper traditions that we gain our understanding of the cross as sacrificial. Nothing in the phenomenology of crucifixion suggests a cultic or sacrificial act. It is removed from the temple, carried out by pagan political authorities, and involves death by asphyxiation, rather than a priestly act of blood-letting. Instead, it is Jesus’ words of institution, which evoke oblations, blood manipulation, and the offering of one’s life on another’s behalf, that bespeak sacrifice. 36 This is not to suggest a reversal of the relationship, making the cross dependent upon the Eucharist instead of the other way around. One is not dependent upon the other, at least not in any unilateral manner. Rather, it illustrates that they are a unity, for they bear the same intelligibility: Christ’s gift of himself. That they are one single sacrifice is dogmatically defined by the Council of Trent, and Lonergan’s account of proper symbolization provides a speculative explanation for stating why and how this can be so. 37
The Sacrifice of the Mystical Body
Drawing upon another Augustinian trope, Lonergan posits a further way in which the Eucharist is sacrificial: it also serves as a proper symbol of the sacrificial attitude of Christ’s mystical body the church. For the Augustinian tradition, the idea of the church as the body of Christ is not a mere metaphor, but an organic reality and hermeneutical principle. The totus Christus, head and members, is indeed one whole Christ. 38 And in this body the members are assimilated to their head. What was his sacrificial attitude on the cross (and at the Last Supper) becomes ours, as we share in this meal and so share in his body, more fully becoming what we already are. This sacrificial attitude exists differently in the head and in the members of the body of Christ. It is in Christ the head as the origin and in the members as elicited. 39
By the Eucharist, the faithful gain a participation in Christ’s sacrifice, and are drawn through its exemplarity into the same attitude that characterized Christ in his making of that sacrifice. 40 This sacrificial attitude is properly and essentially in Christ the head, and is thus represented in the eucharistic sacrifice as an originating symbol, while it is properly, accidentally, and derivatively in the members of Christ’s body, and is therefore symbolized as originated. 41 The distinction between essential and accidental is key here. All that is essential for Christ’s sacrifice to be what it is is the sacrificial attitude that informed his act of oblation. Our assimilation to that sacrifice adds nothing to his singular act, which needs neither supplementation nor augmentation. Our participation in Christ’s sacrifice depends entirely upon him, and not at all the other way around. 42 This notion of exemplary causality provides another point of connection to the four-point hypothesis, where the created participations of the divine relations function by way of imitation. 43
Lonergan’s account of sacrifice, then, involves the elicitation of a disposition of love, most especially love for God, but also, subordinate to that, a love for humanity and all of creation, because to love God is also to love what God loves. Indeed, God knows and loves all things in knowing and loving himself. And this is a love particularly characterizing us as members of Christ’s mystical body. With these considerations in place, we are able to return to our initial trinitarian considerations and draw several threads together.
The Eucharist, the Divine Missions, and their Participation in the Divine Relations
The purpose of the divine missions is to bring about the participation of human beings in the life of God. This is accomplished through the bringing about in those human beings of those intellectual processions that are themselves created participations in the divine life, namely faith, hope, and love. 44 More specifically, what a metaphysical theology called sanctifying grace, and what a systematic theology grounded in intellectually and religiously differentiated consciousness understands as the recalled reception of being on the receiving end of unrestricted love—memoria-faith—breathes forth love, just as the Father and the Son together breathe forth the Holy Spirit.
Christ, in instituting the Eucharist instructs us: ‘Do this in remembrance of me.’ The memorial dimension of the Mass calls forth our response of love. But all this in a rather ‘thick’ sense, overlaid with the categories provided by Doran. It’s not just that we think fondly back on good old Jesus and find our hearts strangely warmed. Instead, the memory and the love are themselves participations in God, and so entirely dependent upon divine activity. Above, I mentioned Ormerod’s suggestion that the eucharistic presence is a participation in paternity. Similarly, though conversely, John Dadosky has proposed that our sharing in the Son’s passion, with its sacramental and non-sacramental dimensions, should be understood as a participation in filiation. 45 My proposal affirms and builds upon theirs, for active spiration is conceptually but not really distinct from paternity and filiation.
It would be fitting for the real presence to be a created participation in paternity like the secondary act of existence, for in both cases the created participation is not something in which ordinary humans can directly share in in this life. Whatever union with Christ we might enjoy, we are not hypostatically united to the eternal Word. Though we can adore and reverently consume—and, in the case of bishops and priests, confect—the sacramental body and blood of Christ, we are not ourselves transubstantiated. 46 Yet, when we speak of the eucharistic sacrifice, as we have seen, there is indeed a real participation in the sacrifice available to us in this life. Indeed, Christ offers up his body and blood and bids us, do this; see Table 5.
The Modified Psychological Analogy and the Eucharistic Sacrifice.
Our participation in the eucharistic sacrifice is a participation in the notional love that is the Holy Spirit, a participation that flows from our reception of the love of God in the Father’s gift of the Son for the life of the world (thereby also incorporating Dadosky’s observations about filiation, which is only notionally different from active spiration).
The sacrifice of the Mass is the sacrifice of Christ because in the Mass we receive Christ’s body and blood (and soul and divinity) through transubstantiation. Hence, we can offer Christ because he becomes present to us. If Ormerod is correct, this is a participation in paternity. Similarly, the sanctifying grace we receive in the economy of salvation derives from the mission of the incarnate Word, a mission that is possible because of the created term of the secondary act of existence—that which makes it true to say ‘the man Jesus is the eternal Word of the Father,’ which is also a participation in paternity. In both of these instances, we are given a remote and obscure correspondence to the way that the Father (paternity) is the origin of all Godhead, what Eastern church fathers referred to as the divine monarchia. It is fitting that in the order of salvation the font of all grace should be a created participation in paternity.
The Finality of the Divine Missions and the Mystical Body
Thus far we have adverted to, but not yet sought to understand Lonergan’s account of the mystical body. Doing so will be crucial to understanding how it is that the Eucharist informs ecclesial life and Christian action in the world. An understanding of the mystical body is best attained by recourse to the finality of the divine missions, which provide the proper context for the life of the mystical body. Lonergan’s account of the invisible missions of the Word and Spirit begins with a consideration of goodness, because in order to judge the fittingness of the invisible missions one must have a notion of the finality of the missions so as to judge the appropriateness of invisible missions to that end, and because an end presumes some good. The divine nature is subsistent good. Creatures participate in the divine goodness according to two modalities: as act and as order. 47 In God, the good of act and the good of order are conceptually but not really distinct: the divine order consists of the relations of origin among the divine persons, and these real relations are identical to the divine nature. 48 Because finite creatures are composite rather than simple, this is not the case, and so we distinguish between particular goods and goods of order. It’s the latter category that concerns us here. A good of order is distinguished from particular goods, as that which promotes the recurrence of particular goods. 49 A chair is a particular good, the economic order whereby we get from a tree in the forest to a chair in my living room is a good of order.
A good of order takes on specific characteristics among human creatures. Lonergan notes that such a good of order will involve:
(1) a certain number of persons, (2) cognitive and appetitive habits, (3) many coordinated operations among many persons, (4) a succession and series of particular goods, and (5) interpersonal relationships. 50
In other words, a human good of order will be concerned particularly with relationships between persons, their common and coordinated activities, and the intellectual operations that facilitate that cohesive operation. With that established, Lonergan asserts that: The ultimate end [of the divine missions] is of course the divine good itself communicated immediately in the beatific vision, while the proximate end is that good of order which, according to various analogies with human goods of order, is called either the kingdom of God, or the body of Christ, or the church . . . or the economy of salvation, or the city of God.
51
Of course after Vatican II, theologians are considerably more careful in how we discuss the relation between the reign of God and the church, avoiding the relation of identity, and being sure to distinguish between them, but the basic point Lonergan makes is well taken. 52 The mystical body of Christ, which is constituted by the divine missions, is ordered towards our coming to share in eternal beatitude and consists in the cognitive and appetitive habits, coordinated operations, and interpersonal relationships of a number of persons, along with the particular goods attained by these all. In particular, we can observe that love is ingredient to the good of order that is the mystical body of Christ.
In The Redemption (originally a portion of his De Verbo Incarnato [1964], which grew from a course on Christology taught at the Gregorian University in Rome), Lonergan offers a similar, though more refined, account of the mystical body, one which he expresses in terms of what he calls ‘the just and mysterious law of the cross.’ The law of the cross refers to the way that Christ has addressed the evils of the human race not by power, but by converting them to a supreme good through his bearing of the evil of suffering. 53 The law of the cross has its origin in Christ himself and is subsequently reproduced in those whom he saves, though it exists differently in them. It is in Christ as the redeemer and in us as redeemed. 54 This parallels the discussion of Christ’s sacrificial attitude in ‘De Notione Sacrificii,’ where the attitude is originated and elicited in Christ and in his members, respectively. Hence, the two are more or less synonymous terms. The detour into sacrifice, though, has allowed us to make the liturgical and eucharistic connection explicit, even as our engagement with the law of the cross steers us away from imagining sacrifice in violent, punitive terms.
As in the discussion of the mystical body in the trinitarian systematics, Lonergan’s treatment in The Redemption turns upon a consideration of the good for which the divine missions (here, specifically the visible mission of the Word) aimed: The supreme good into which human evils are converted is the whole Christ, head and members, in this life as well as in the life to come, in all their details and concrete relations. This supreme good includes (1) goods by communication, (2) the good of order in that quasi-organic unity that is Christ and the church, and (3) the particular goods of both Christ the head and his members.
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Lonergan, then, conceives of the mystical body of Christ under the auspices of a good of order and as a proximate end which tends toward and serves the ultimate end of participation in the divine life.
From here, Lonergan expounds upon the economy of salvation in hylomorphic terms and does so in a manner that echoes the four-point hypothesis. The matter of the economy of salvation is sinful humanity, and its end is twofold. There is an intrinsic good and an extrinsic good towards which it aims. The latter is the summum bonum of God himself, while the intrinsic good is the order of the created universe.
56
The universe attains its end not naturally, but supernaturally, though in such a way as to preserve the integrity of that natural order. This leads Lonergan to note that the divine goodness is communicated to creatures in the hypostatic union, in the gift of the Holy Spirit, and in the beatific vision.
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Finally, the form is the whole Christ, head and members. For in the whole Christ we grasp both the threefold communication of the divine good and the order brought about among persons in this communication of the divine good through the wisdom of apprehension and charity of will, whether in the stage of this life or in that of the life to come.
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And this form is realized through the law of the cross. 59 Three of the four terms that comprise the four-point hypothesis are indicated as communications of the divine life and as bringing about the mystical body, and are said to do so by way of the law of the cross/Christ’s sacrificial attitude. In The Redemption’s account, the gift of the Holy Spirit/sanctifying grace and of charity are elided, and, of course, there is no identification of the terms of created grace with the divine relations, but despite this variation in the details, the basic affirmation is discernible. 60 These connections remain largely inchoate, but their synthesis unfolds in harmony with Lonergan’s basic affirmations.
The church, then, is located within an overall context of the divine intentionality wherein it serves an instrumental purpose. This is in continuity with the Christology of the Summa Theologiae’s tertia pars, where the humanity of Christ is the instrument of the eternal Word, used to bring about the redemption of humanity. 61 However, and crucially, it is not a matter of the outdated idea that the church is an ‘extension of the incarnation.’ The church is a creature of the divine missions, but this is not quite the same. The four-point hypothesis, by casting its net wider than the visible mission of the Word, allows for a more nuanced position. As the Word used the assumed humanity to bring about redemption, so God uses the church to advance the divine intention of bringing the redeemed to share in the divine life, but the church is not another incarnation, even if it has its basis in the incarnation.
It is within this context of the divine intentionality and of instrumental causality that the Eucharist finds its place. The blessed sacrament is a particular and central element in an overall economy by which God elicits the loving response of Christians, which loving response finds its origin in Christ and is itself a participation in him and, through him, in the life of the Trinity. The Eucharist makes the church by exercising the members of the church in love, a love that was first operative in Christ, and by which Christians share in the love and life of God. ‘For the divine persons are sent in accordance with their eternal processions, to encounter us and dwell in us in accordance with similar processions produced in us through grace.’ 62 The same pattern of love-received and love-returned that constitutes Doran’s revised trinitarian analogy also characterizes our coming to share in the divine life through sanctifying grace and habitual charity, and also characterizes our participation in the eucharistic sacrifice. We come to love because we have first been loved (1 John 4:19), and all this not as isolated individuals, but as members of the body of Christ, the body which is given and realized in the eucharistic communion.
The bearing of this upon intra-ecclesial and liturgical contexts is probably obvious enough. We are, after all, discussing what happens in the liturgy. Crucially, though, a wider context is also in view. Lonergan gestures towards this in a pastoral essay ‘Mass and Man.’ After dismissing the notion that the sacrifice of the Mass can rectify social ills through quasi-magical means (celebrate the Mass and watch oppression give way to justice!), because social renewal will necessarily involve human agency, he writes: It is on this prior and deeper level that the Sacrifice of the Mass is the source of the power to save human society. Those who believe and hope and love do so in virtue of the Sacrifice of Calvary applied to the needs of the hour by the Sacrifice of the Mass. If their faith and hope and charity are to be intensified to the point where they become effective in human affairs, if their numbers are to be increased to the point where such effectiveness is operative on a sufficiently broad scale, that will be because, in greater numbers and more intensely, men put on the sacrificial spirit of Our Lord and with Him offer in the Mass the world-redeeming sacrifice of the Cross.
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In other words, through sacramental participation, there is elicited in us a set of operations which come to inform the whole of life. These operations are the expression of the sacrificial attitude of Christ, which elsewhere is called the just and mysterious law of the cross. They are the same reality that informed Jesus’ redemptive act. When we add to our considerations the four-point hypothesis, we can affirm that as the law of the cross comes to its term in us, we participate in the mystery of redemption and the mystery of God, for these operations are created participations in the four real divine relations. The social expression of these operations as they come to constitute a good of order is the mystical body of Christ, which is itself informed by these virtues, dispositions, and operations, most especially charity.
As Doran has demonstrated, when we speak of recruitment into the mission of the Son and Spirit, we are necessarily dealing with the arena of history. And the form of our participation in the missio Dei—the outcome of the coordinated operations that comprise the good of order that is the mystical body of Christ—will involve work towards promoting the integral functioning of the scale of values: vital, social, cultural, personal, and religious, in an ascending structure, which Doran persuasively argues is a heuristic anticipation of the reign of God. If we come to appropriate Christ’s attitude, we will engage in carrying forward his mission and priorities. While the scale of values remains heuristic, needing to be filled in by attention to particular circumstances, problems, and proposed solutions, it also provides an anticipation and measure of the ministry and mission of the church, which depends upon the law of the cross for its very being, and for the proper exercise of its ministry. 64
To bring Doran’s contributions back into an explicitly eucharistic arena, as well as to add some concreteness, we can consider M. Shawn Copeland’s articulation of a ‘Eucharistic solidarity’ within the mystical body of Christ, which fleshes out these heuristic anticipations in a particular concrete circumstance, namely white-supremacist oppression. While white supremacy is particularly characteristic of the North American context in which Copeland and I both work, it is also operative elsewhere as part of the ongoing legacy of colonialism. While material details may vary across contexts, matter is broadly applicable. Solidarity refers to a praxis of ‘intelligent, active, compassionate love for the other,’ even and perhaps especially in distorted states of affairs, and it takes as its measure ‘that most resonant, inexhaustible, gratuitous act of love—the Father’s donation of the Son for the world and the Son’s embrace of the Father and the world.’ 65
Echoing Lonergan’s account of the law of the cross, Copeland explains that ‘solidarity sets the dynamics of love against the dynamics of oppression.’ 66 Through the eucharistic sacrifice, we recognize not just a sanitized ‘Christ crucified,’ 67 but the ‘lynched Jesus,’ recognizing in his body all those despised, oppressed, and forgotten bodies, which he has made his own, and we come to recognize in their bodies that of the crucified Lord, being led out from this recognition into action on behalf of those suffering under their own historical crosses. 68 This action unfolds in dependence on and participation in the love of God given in the missions of the Son and the Holy Spirit. Sharing in the judgment of value eternally uttered by the Father in the Word, we also affirm the dignity and value of all those whom God loves, and so enter into solidarity, in imitation of the Son in whom God loves all things, and in the giving of whom, God expresses that love.
That solidarity flows from the ‘loving self-donation of the crucified Christ . . . [which stands as] its origin, standard, and judge,’ highlights that the solution is not and cannot be merely human, but rather must be supernatural. 69 In this way, with her evocation of the mystical body of Christ, Copeland ‘reaffirm[s] that salvation in human liberation is an opaque work . . . [which] resists both the reduction of human praxis to social transformation and the identification of the gospel with even the most just ordering of society.’ 70 In other words, the eucharistic formation of the mystical body of Christ both impels Christian action in the world in the service of liberation and exceeds such action. The Eucharist and the mystical body cannot be reduced to mere technique, hence the opacity. There is nothing automatic about the results—Copeland is well aware of the legacy of complicity in racist oppression among Catholics who have regularly participated in the eucharistic assembly. 71 And yet, opacity does not equate to absence. We stand assured that ‘at the table that Jesus prepares . . . the Son of Man gathers up the remnants of our memories, the broken fragments of our histories, and judges, blesses, and transforms them. His Eucharistic banquet re-orders us, re-members us, restores us, and makes us one.’
Conclusion
The foregoing has provided an account of how eucharistic participation gives rise to participation in the mission of God. Crucially, the mechanism of this participation is not mere didacticism. It is not a matter of merely thinking about Jesus and realizing the connections between him and the oppressed and deciding to take up a stance with them and then to work towards justice. Instead, all of these acts on our part are informed by supernatural realities by which we are drawn into the life of God himself. The recalled reception of unqualified love (memoria-faith) shares in the relation of the Father and Son to the Holy Spirit, and the love we give in turn, not just toward God but to all those whom God loves, shares in the relation of the Spirit to the Father and Son. The praxis we undertake is informed by this state of being in love, which has been brought about by God and which itself participates in God. Moreover, though, this account also avoids the tendency towards handwaving we noted at the outset of this article, by articulating precisely how it is that the Eucharist makes the church, and how it is that a church so made is led beyond itself into the rest of the world in mission. The four-point hypothesis allows us to see how it is that genuinely human acts are elicited and recruited by, and share in God, while ‘De Notione Sacrificii’ helps us to see where the sacramental Eucharist fits into this recruitment and participation.
I have drawn one point of connection to a concrete exigence, that preeminent sign of the times that is racist white supremacy. M. Shawn Copeland’s account of eucharistic solidarity holds forth the prospect of recruitment into the praxis of dismantling this oppressive structure by way of sacramental participation. Her account is deeply resonant with the dynamics we have explored in this essay. But the points of contact and application extend beyond just matters of race and oppression. Jesus’ mission involved all dimensions of human being, all levels of the scale of values, from spiritual/religious matters to social justice, to vital values and concerns about the just distribution of goods and the proper ordering of society, and, we must also note in our present context ecological concern, for the mission of God extends to the whole of the created order.
It would be absurd to suggest that mere sacramental participation can address any of these issues, because they must all be addressed through authentic human agency, through concrete and thoughtful policy, through the careful, wise, and just implementation of such policies. We cannot realize our commitment to all of these dimensions of the mission of God within the confines of a Mass. But we can be recruited into that mission, as through the eucharistic sacrifice we are drawn into the life of God. And as we are so drawn, we can come to share in the same judgments and valuations that will be needed in order to more fully approximate the reign of God.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.