The Political Limits and Possibilities of the Eucharist: A Theatrical Intervention

Introduction

In her 2018 work, The Dangers of Christian Practice, Lauren F. Winner argues that Christian practices have ‘come to do a particular kind of burnishing in the Anglophone theological landscape’. ² By this she means that whenever church practices are invoked, it is almost always in the form of a commendation, namely, an extolling of their virtue and power. ³ At the centre of these accounts of practice, fundamental to their claimed capacity to form practitioners, is the Eucharist. It is the Eucharist (particularly in the post-liberal account) that Winner claims is asked to do ‘a lot of work’. The Eucharist is framed as the ‘authorizing ritual and … founding myth’ of the church as alternative polis. It is a practice commended as making ‘possible a set of behaviours and actions decidedly at odds with the behaviours and actions invited by late capitalism and her coercive handmaiden, the nation state’. ⁴

Winner is one of several recent critiques of theological accounts of the Eucharist which, it is argued, idealise the practice and overextend claims of its political potency. These critiques often focus on the way such idealised accounts obfuscate the historical reality or dismiss contemporary political dynamics, rendering the practice not only ineffective but a potential sight of malformation and harm. I begin this article by outlining some of these recent critiques and the apparent need to reconfigure the relationship between the Eucharist and the formation of a Christian ethic or political practice. Such a reconfiguration, I argue, requires holding a more distinct line between a practice which raises political consciousness and an activity of material politics.

To develop this reconfiguration, I suggest an interdisciplinary approach. First, I connect the theological critique to the ways political capacity and ethical potency are claimed and contested in art. In this section I observe that arguments for art's moral and political power and responsibility, like the pristine accounts of the Eucharist, over-simplify the efficacy of the practice. In doing so, I seek to identify the logics essential to such accounts, that by getting a practice right certain political results will follow: good art equals good politics, and right liturgy equals right praxis.

To push beyond this collapse of responsibility and efficacy requires not only theological and historical critique but a way of approaching practice which recognises its potential and limits. To develop this I will engage contemporary German theatre director, Thomas Ostermeier. Ostermeier, himself concerned with effusive claims of theatre's political potency, distinguishes—in both polity and performance—theatre from material politics. Yet his concern with the anti-autonomous age of capitalist realism drives him to contrive of theatrical techniques which aim to frustrate audience catharsis, raise political consciousness, and generate dramatic action in the world beyond the theatre where the audience lives.

The attention to theatre is thus motivated less by a preference to speak of the Eucharist as drama (or as staged) than by seeking a resource to consider (and reconfigure) the relationship between a performance practice and resultant ethical obligation and formation. Naturally there are points where theatrical and eucharistic practice touch, and so the insights about audience expectations and interruptive staging will inform proposals regarding the way the Eucharist is approached and performed. But greater attention is paid to developing a distinction between a practice where those in attendance might encounter a moment of realisation, remembrance, and raising of consciousness, and the wider (often subsequent or parallel) communal work of addressing material political realities.

Thus, having considered Ostermeier's approach, I will return to the relationship between the Eucharist and Christian ethics. In this final section I first consider the nature of divine activity within a deflated account of eucharistic practice. Here, the post-resurrection eucharistic accounts in the gospels of Luke and John (where Christ's unexpected and elusive presence brings forth a moment of realisation and remembrance in those he hosts and sends) serve as paradigmatic. For it is not solely the historical account, but the theological reality of Christ's faithful and yet uncontained and uncompelled ascended presence that deflates over-confident or over-extended claims of the practice's efficacy. Second, I develop my proposed reconfiguration of the relationship between eucharistic practice and the formation of Christian ethics and political engagement around three themes: depristinising in practice, disrupting catharsis, and being sent. Here, the theatrical interventions allow for clearer recognition of the practice's ethical and political limits while also commending its potential to lead us into material political activity.

Criticism of the Eucharist's Ethical Potency

Winner, drawing on the work of Nicholas M. Healy, contends that the ‘crucial flaw in the postliberal account of Christian practices’ is that they operate under the assumption that ‘the practices of the church are at least for the most part performed according to their abstract and ideal descriptions’. ⁵ This leads to a pristinisation of Christian practice that fails to observe the impact of the Fall, sin, and history. Winner engages a ‘depristination’ whereby she proposes that all things—including hallowed practices rightly understood as a gift from God—are characteristically damaged. By this she means that ‘some damage belongs to the form of a thing damaged’; it is, to say it another way, deformed. ⁶ As Winner writes, ‘when Christian practice goes wrong, often it does so not incidentally but rather in ways that have to do with the practice itself’. ⁷ To develop this argument, and as a pointed corrective to the postliberal idealising of practice, Winner examines particular historical moments in which the characteristic damage of a Christian practice is evident.

In terms of the Eucharist, Winner demonstrates how ‘host desecration narratives’ served as flint stones for Christian on Jewish violence in Europe during the Middle Ages. Winner argues that ‘[T]he principal good of the Eucharist … conformity and intimacy with the [Jewish flesh] of Jesus’ reveals one of its characteristic deformities, ‘the consumption of Jewish flesh living in the neighbourhoods of, and regulated by the conciliar and synodic pronouncements of the church’. ⁸ Anxiety evoked by this intimacy spills from the table into the streets, where the church considers how to preclude intimate mingling between the bodies of Jews and the body of Christ (the host and the church). ⁹

Winner also observes that the history of host desecration (well known by historians) has been largely erased from the church's eucharistic memory, forgotten by ‘even those postliberal theologians for whose thought the Eucharist is so critical’. ¹⁰ This is why the postliberal abstraction and political overreach of accounts of the practice are dangerous. Host desecration narratives render these accounts an act of ‘curious optimism, almost magical thinking’. ¹¹

To ward off the charge that she is working backward from historical misuse to theological position, Winner draws attention to the first eucharist. The presence of Judas (and his possible partaking of the Eucharist) ‘tells us forcefully that the Eucharist carries both gift and deformation’, ¹² having been ‘fractured’ from the beginning. ¹³ Through a speculative reading, Winner describes Judas’s betrayal of Christ as being unmasked (and unprevented) by the first eucharist. His reception is corrupted and thus she asks, ‘why do we imagine that any subsequent Eucharists will be less deformed than the first one?’ ¹⁴

Winner does not suggest the cessation of Christian practices such as the Eucharist, but asks for the characteristic damage revealed through the historical account to be reckoned with. She likens this process to the image of a diptych in painting, where two images are placed side by side but connected by a hinge. On one side, the image of the commendable politics issuing from the Eucharist (such as Cavanaugh’s accounts of protest in Chile), while on the other, images from mediaeval Franconia (where people also took to the streets in response to their formation at the table, though this time out of a sense of anti-Jewish protectionism). ¹⁵

Winner is not the only recent theologian to question some of the claims to the Eucharist's inherent ability to create an alternative polis. Shannon Craigo-Snell and Hwa-Young Chong have similarly pointed to the historical record to check some more robust theological claims. Craigo-Snell, within the context of a chapter on lynching in the US, questioned whether ‘Christian liturgical performance always, necessarily, work[s] to such good effects? [And that] If we recognise the power of Christian performance [or practice] to be a force of good in the world, should we not also recognize its power to do ill?’ ¹⁶ As a corrective she has commended the act of alienation (in the Brechtian mode) to interrupt and prevent our eucharistic performance from becoming harmful. ¹⁷ Chong has countered Cavanaugh's contention that ‘torture always ends up creating bodies marked by fear’, with the example of Korean resistance to three decades of military and dictatorial rule where ‘in the face of grave injustice, people had power greater than fear’. ¹⁸ Chong is also concerned that Cavanaugh's distinction between martyr and victim leaves too much room for ambiguity on the question of violence, and as an image does not offer much help to the violated. Instead of martyrdom Chong suggests that if the Eucharist were to be a counter-liturgy it would be in its potential to subvert power and gather people so they might envision an alternative future. ¹⁹

Taking a different approach, Traci West argues that Christian liturgy and practices can tacitly reinscribe or sanctify racialised politics and white supremacy. In Disruptive Christian Ethics, West charts the way predominately white congregations communicate and inculcate white privilege in worship, prayer, announcements, and sacraments. ²⁰ Such practices collapse the privileges received from racist cultural elevation with the blessings and gifts of God, ²¹ deny racial inequality through the positioning of worship practices as universal and neutral, ²² and distinguish themselves from their non-white neighbours through a logic which sees themselves as dependent on God while others are, consequently, dependent on them. ²³

On communion specifically, West, drawing on the work of Joe Feagin and Hernán Vera who argued that white supremacy requires the almost religious sacrifice of alien others, asks what the perpetual return to Jesus’ suffering as a path into blessing does to these congregations. ‘Does this ritual encourage whites in taking for granted the suffering of others and maybe even the deaths that benefit them (whites)?’ Might ‘communion merge with and inform white people's sense of entitlement … [and] function as a kind of liturgical reinscribing of the privileges of whiteness?’ ²⁴

Like Chong, Craigo-Snell, and Winner, West does not abandon the practice (or Christian worship and ritual) as a site of ethical formation and anti-racist work, but insists on interrogation and disruption of the way in which worldly privilege and violence are sanctified as heavenly blessing and sacrifice. She further introduces attendant practices which emphasise multicultural patterns and experiences, ²⁵ connect—in communion—the execution of Jesus with present and historical acts of state-sponsored terrorism, ²⁶ and invite testimonies of life lived amidst the indignities and inconveniences caused by a society with a neutral/privileged race. ²⁷ For any liturgical strategies that seek to intervene in the deformation in these congregations must attend to the ‘distinctive socioeconomic class circumstances that might inform the spiritual and social identity of these congregants’. ²⁸

Eucharistic Idealism and Immigration Politics

Over-emphasising the ethical potency and pristine good of the Eucharist can have other detrimental effects when it comes to developing Christian ethics and political engagement. To move us from the varying critiques outlined above toward our work of reconfiguration, I will outline briefly a recent controversy where this point was contested in the context of the immigration debate in the US.

In 2018, American pastor and author Brian Zahnd received criticism for commending his church for having both Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and undocumented immigrants in its pews and at the table. ²⁹ Much of the criticism centred on the way that this purple church (a mix of the red and blue of Republican and Democrat) is not the success story it is often made out to be. Rather, it signifies a settling with a situation in which those with societal power can feel safe, while the undocumented have to wonder whether the person sitting a few rows over might show up at their house the next day wearing a uniform and remove them from their family.

Zahnd, and those who defended him, pointed to the unity of the Eucharist (grounded in our universal sinfulness and the universal grace of Christ) as a kind of politic that trumps national politics. The table, it was espoused, has the potential to transform the way we see one another, and so ‘an ICE official whose heart is changed by his or her exposure to the kingdom of God is going to cause less harm than one who is not’. ³⁰ This, however, is another form of the ‘magical thinking’ Winner notes, for arguably the only way an ICE official is going to cause less harm, is to stop being an ICE official.

Indeed, following West's critique, the risk of such thinking goes beyond ineffectiveness. The ritualised nature of eucharistic liturgy can merge with the ritualised practices of whiteness (which deny and condone racial inequality or state violence), meaning the practice itself—rather than creating an alternative polis—lends a sense of ‘stability and order to conservative social patterns’, preserving and sacralising established patterns of behaviour within and beyond the gathered community. ³¹

Many of these accounts of the Eucharist slip between the normative and descriptive. In commending the virtue of the Eucharist within a particular theologian's conception or experience, what should be is presented as what is (or presented without accounting for the is and has). An abstraction (or pristinisation) occurs at the expense of the material and historical (after all, ICE agents have breached church grounds to remove undocumented immigrants who have been offered sanctuary). ³² Winner demonstrated that the particular way the Eucharist has been damaged (and causes damage) cannot be excised from accounts of the is (or should be). Abstraction and idealism leave the church prone to repeating old mistakes to terrible ends. The political potential of the Eucharist must not be spoken of in a way that elides its political limits and risks.

In this case the limit is found in the measure of safety and unity that the sacrament can provide (particularly when material realities of inequality and political enfranchisement are ignored). The risk emerges in foregrounding the political potential of the Eucharist to the point of obfuscating the need for material political practice (organising coalitions of solidarity, attending local council meetings, developing systems of mutual aid and material support, etc.). ³³ In light of the dangers, damage, risks and limits identified through this critique, the question might now be posed, how might the relationship between the Eucharist and Christian ethics and political engagement be reconfigured? In order to bolster our resources for such a task, I wish to take us out to the theatre.

The Political Potency of the Theatre

On the cover of Modern American Drama: Playwriting in the 1990s is an image from the ‘Rally to save the National Endowment of the Arts’ held in Union Square Park, NYC in 1990. ³⁴ In the picture someone holds aloft a sign: ‘GOOD ART IS GOOD POLITICS’. Art, undoubtedly, has a political dimension; it can also have an effect on the material politics of a society. And yet, this sign's claim is an extension (and I would argue, overreach) of this more modest observation, one which proposes that getting the form and intent of an artform ‘good’ necessitates a result of ‘good’ politics. And lest the reader be concerned that I am making too much of a placard, it is emblematic of an existing and reoccurring school (it was, after all, chosen for the cover).

In a recent essay, Garth Greenwell noted that the debate on art's responsibility to (and required usefulness for) our politics and moral relations has swung heavily to the side of meaning and moralism. The current cultural mood seems to insist that the ‘most important questions we can ask about a work of art are whether and to what extent it furthers extra artistic aims, to what extent it serves a world outside itself’. ³⁵

The ebb and flow of the argument for or against art's responsibility or freedom, tends to draw with it attendant claims about its ability to be politically meaningful. An argument for responsibility and usefulness depends on a prior belief that art (should it wish to) can produce the desired effect. Take for instance an argument from the more moralistic 80s (though admittedly the 1780s), where Friedrich Schiller argues, ‘The theater is the common channel through which the light of wisdom streams down from the thoughtful, better part of society, spreading thence in mild beams throughout the entire state’. ³⁶ Alternatively, a case for art's freedom might take a more deflated view of its ability to serve a world outside itself. Philip Roth, for instance (back in the 1980s now), argued that novels do not ‘effect serious changes in anyone … novels provide readers with something to read. At their best writers change the way we read’. ³⁷

The point I am seeking to draw out is not one which argues whether or not art is political, or that it can (or should) remain a-political. Rather, I observe that arguments for art's moral and political power and responsibility, like the pristine accounts of the Eucharist, over-simplify the efficacy of the practice. There is an underpinning assumption within such accounts that by getting a practice right, certain political results will follow: good art equals good politics, and right liturgy equals right praxis.

Countering the insistence of responsibility and the presumption of efficacy while also reconfiguring the relationship between the Eucharist and ethics/political engagement takes both de-pristinsation and a rigorous effort to distinguish between a practice's ability to raise political consciousness and the activity of material politics. To do this, I turn now to the work of Thomas Ostermeier.

Theatre is Not a Political Event: Thomas Ostermeier and An Enemy of the People

Thomas Ostermeier is the current artistic director of the Schaubühne Berlin, a position he has held since 1999. Known for his critiques of neoliberalism and contemporary a-politicism, as well as his ‘canon-mauling aesthetic’, ³⁸ Ostermeier might strike one at first glance as firmly on the side of meaning and moralism highlighted in the preceding section. ³⁹ And yet, as I intend to demonstrate through attention to his influential adaption of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, and work in the organisation of the Schaubühne, Ostermeier has a far more complex, even depristinising, approach to the political potential and limits of the theatre.

As the audience shuffles to their seats to watch Ostermeier's production of Ibsen's play about Dr Stockman (a man punished and reviled for jeopardising a small town's potential economic boom by holding to the unfortunate fact that their waters are polluted), a paragraph of text appears on a semi-transparent curtain. The text is an excerpt from the 2007 anti-capitalist, anti-globalisation book, The Coming Insurrection, written by an anonymous French collective called The Invisible Committee. Seven pages of the book were also printed in the program for the production, and extracts from those pages make up much of Dr Stockman's famous speech at the public meeting later in the play. ⁴⁰

When Stockman draws from The Coming Insurrection in his nine-minute speech it follows the text with one exception—a small note that takes aim at the futile desire to save society through the theatre. As Ibsen scholar Frode Helland notes, this punchline ‘functions as a meta-theatrical antidote to any naïve belief in the transformative power of the performance itself’. ⁴¹ It is not a deflation of Stockman's commitment to the truth in his speech (he is still earnestly trying to save his town), it is rather to draw the audience's attention to the ‘fact that his claim is made in the theatre, an arena where anything can be said without any direct effect on the outside world’. ⁴²

Here, Ostermeier signals his wariness of overextended claims of theatre's inherent political virtue and potency. Just because a theatrical performance includes ‘good politics’ does not necessitate an audience member enacting those politics. Indeed, even the production's most inflammatory, participatory, and contextual section (which we will come to shortly) is not, for Ostermeier, a political event, nor does he think ‘any political event could take place in the theatre or in art, in the first place’. ⁴³ Politics happens where we live—it takes the form of organising, budgets, local committees, political movements, ‘when social movements unite and begin to shake up and change the existing conditions and power relations in a society’. ⁴⁴ A line in a play is different in kind, not degree when it comes to making material difference. ⁴⁵

To demonstrate such a distinction—important in our stated efforts to distinguish between the raising of political consciousness and the enacting of material politics—one needs to look at how Ostermeier approaches not only this play, but the wider workings of the Schaubühne. For if politics happens where we live it also needs to happen where we work (backstage as opposed to on stage, as it were). When Ostermeier became the co-artistic director at the theatre, he was clear that he did not intend to curate a theatre with a political program. And yet, he initiated a scheme of equal pay amongst the acting ensemble, saw that representatives of the ensemble sat on decision-making bodies (from budget to programming), and also initiated weekly general assembly meetings, where they sought to democratise the functioning and direction of the theatre. Not all of these policies and practices remain at the theatre—a reality that represents the ‘biggest failure’ of Ostermeier's life—and yet they signal to us a distinction in Ostermeier's approach where political ends are met through distinctly material political processes, with tangible ends, not through theatrical practice, which deals with consciousness.

And yet, this does not mean Ostermeier detaches politics from the theatre. Returning to An Enemy of the People, at the beginning of the public forum, where Stockman delivers the speech, the house lights come up and the audience of the play join the forum—they are invited into the discussion with the characters of the play. The effectiveness of this device is significant, audiences take the moment seriously and engage the characters in discussion, and varying reactions to this moment of the play have been reported as the production has toured.

When the production toured France an audience member yelled out, ‘What is a German doing telling us how to think about our lives, when you think what you did here, or have you forgotten?!’ ⁴⁶ Eva Meckbach, one of the actors, reflected on the strangeness for the cast being confronted with their Germanness, something that they had never before experienced so viscerally and emotionally. ⁴⁷ In India, audiences brought to the discussion questions of pollution, corruption, and postcolonial struggles. In Buenos Aires the scene triggered a riot in the theatre, with audiences standing on their seats, shouting at one another, and demanding politicians in the audience to make themselves known and explain their failings. In Turkey, a newspaper accused the production of being anti-Erdoğan propaganda, evidence of the international leadership behind local protests. ⁴⁸ In China the tour was pulled after chants for free speech erupted during a censored version of the scene. ⁴⁹ And yet, despite all of this and more, Ostermeier does not ‘believe for a second’ that this is a political event. He describes himself sitting at the back of the theatre rejoicing ‘like a schoolboy who has managed to play a prank … this is the joy of playing with fire, of kindling conflicts which already exist beneath the surface … I wouldn’t say it is political—because there is no consequence to it’. ⁵⁰ There are no consequences, because while the reactions and interactions of the audience and actors are authentic and variable, the end of the forum (where Dr Stockman is publicly denounced) is fixed. After all, the curtain has to come down eventually. ⁵¹

This paradox is vital. Both Ibsen's forum scene as written, and as staged in this manner, point to our living and participating in a democracy—we are invited to share our voice—and yet the fixed outcome pulls the rug out from under the audience. As Helland notes, the audience becomes united in a ‘shared experience of being manipulated, tricked, and forced into submission … we had our say, even voted and won, but to no avail’. ⁵² In this way the production, while mirroring forms of the political theatre of the 1970s in raising political consciousness and empowering action, consciously constructs this effect ‘as transitory and illusory’. ⁵³ Ostermeier wants the audience to ‘recognise the cynical mechanism [and] acknowledge that we are manipulated and coerced’. ⁵⁴ This is vital to Ostermeier's view of theatre within the anti-autonomous age of capitalist realism which posits an ‘inherent contradiction between capitalism and democracy’, where, despite our best individual efforts to be ethical, despite our suffrage, we seemingly have less and less say in the organising of our social, economic, and political lives together.

Ostermeier, in other words, deflates (or depristinises) arguments for the theatre's inherent political potency or virtue, by revealing the illusory nature of the kind of conscious raising and change it can engender. Further, through meta-dramatic devices Ostermeier intervenes in a cathartic audience experience in which the play becomes a closed circle—an experience that can sometimes allow the audience member to believe a problem solved (or unsolvable) by curtain close. At the same time, in provoking experiences of anger at the anti-democratic nature of the plot and production, riling up audiences to shout at authorities or side with the words of a radical manifesto, the question is posed—does the rage I experienced tonight appear in other parts of my life where my autonomy is similarly stifled?

These are the ‘interesting’ moments that appeal to Ostermeier in his production, where ‘boundaries start to blur and playful irritation sets in, and where as a result moments of an emerging political consciousness suddenly appear’. ⁵⁵ These are the moments that approach Ostermeier's manifesto (produced at the beginning of his Schaubühne tenure), which framed theatre as a place where ‘attempts to comprehend the world in a new way intensify into a shared common view of the world … [meaning] Theatre can therefore be a place of realization, and thus repoliticization’. ⁵⁶ As Helland concludes, the production offers an invitation ‘to think beyond the stories presented on stage, to a world outside where the audience lives and tries to act’; by frustrating and undermining the ability of the theatre to impact the world of the play, Ostermeier's production emphasises ‘the relevance of dramatic action for our own social world’. ⁵⁷

Rethinking the Political Possibilities of the Eucharist

So far, I have outlined critiques of theological accounts of the Eucharist's ethical and political virtue that elide the characteristic damage of the practice observed in the historical account. I also noted critiques of how overextended claims of the Eucharist's political potency obfuscate the danger and damage of unequal societal relations around the table. In the wake of these observations, I argued a need for a different way of configuring the relationship of the practice of the Eucharist to the formation of a Christian ethic and political engagement. The work of Thomas Ostermeier was highlighted to observe how his theatrical practice resists a line of thinking where good art necessitates good politics (or any political end, really). What Ostermeier offers instead is a way of both revealing the mechanical, transitory, and illusory way in which the theatre raises political consciousness while directing the audience toward the need for autonomous dramatic action in their lives outside the theatre.

However, before turning to considerations of the Eucharist's political limits and potential in light of what we observed from Ostermeier, I must attend to the question of divine activity (and presence) within a deflated eucharistic practice. For the event of communion is one both human and divine, and despite the attention to sin such depristinisation intensifies, where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more.

Conclusion

Drawing on a range of critiques I have sought to highlight how pristine accounts of the practice of the Eucharist obfuscate its chequered history and elide the risks of elevated ethical expectations. For those wishing to reformulate the relationship between the Eucharist and Christian ethics and political engagement in a manner acknowledging its limits while believing in its possibilities, I have offered as a resource conversations and practices concerning the political efficacy and responsibility of the theatre, through particular reference to the work of Thomas Ostermeier. Drawing the lessons gleaned from Ostermeier's work adapting Ibsen and organising at the Schaubühne into a reconfiguring of the relationship of the Eucharist and Christian ethics, I gestured to the ways in which the church might put deprisitinising into practice, disrupt catharsis, and distinguish between the practice of gathering at the table and our responsibility in being sent.

To summarise and conclude, I am proposing that the church's eucharistic theology and practice pursue the development of theatrical interventions that celebrate the divine gift of the Eucharist as a site of realisation and remembrance, while also acknowledging that it is not solely the historical record, but the elusive, unpredictable, and elsewhere presence of the host himself that ought to unsettle overconfident or comprehensive accounts of the practice's formative effects. Such theology and practice seek communally resonant ways to incorporate the depristination that comes through attention to the historical damage of and to the practice, and arouses in the practitioner a distinction between the transitory political consciousness raised in the Eucharist and the need for material political engagement beyond the practice. In this both limit and potential are observed, and the Eucharist might be unshackled from the untenable amount of work it has been asked to do in order that richer political ends might be attained. For those who encountered the unexpected presence of Christ at the table in Emmaus, ran with heart's aflame to be one with those in Jerusalem. Here, alongside the breaking of bread, they sought to order the material politics of the community, holding all things in common and distributing what they had to any who had need.