Chris Jackson at the Substack Hiraeth in Exile has generated some controversy recently with a number of hot takes on Pope Leo; I’m focusing here on one in particular, because it epitomizes a way of understanding the Church and the world. I’ve noticed Jackson’s work before; I truly admire the mastery with which it articulates a specific mindset – one that many people can feel amorphously – with great precision and linguistic specificity. To do so, you have to really own it, if you know what I mean. Moreover, Jackson has a gift for identifying and expressing the metapresuppositions which condition the discourse. I need not always agree with the views expressed to respect and approve work written with integrity,[1] by the author’s lights. I have nothing against Chris Jackson at all.

Jackson is alarmed by Leo’s Corpus Christi preaching: “Leo’s Angelus meditation focuses on the miracle of the loaves and fishes, not the Last Supper. A curious choice for Corpus Christi, but not an accidental one.”

And I get it, on one level. The Last Supper is the presumptive gold standard for a certain type of Eucharistic piety. The tableaux is literally priestly, highly dramatic, acted out on the precipice of heroic struggle, suffering and triumph. But as we see in the Gospel of John the Institution supplanted by that of the washing of the disciples’ feet, there is a tradition of mysticism to complement a literal narrative, one which seeks to explicate its inner content from another angle.

Yet here it is not Leo who chose the subject; it is offered by the liturgy. I understand that Jackson would not think of this, without consulting the current lectionary – which offers, in the context of a three-year cycle, a more extended version of the excerpt from the Bread of Life discourse in John found in the 1962 Missal, the Marcan rendition of the Institution narrative itself, and (this year) the Multiplication of the Loaves in Luke. Lex orandi, lex credendi.

I would hope that Jackson would not be scandalized that Pope St. John Paul II named this Lucan passage integral to a particular “Eucharistic triptych,” together with the story of Abraham and Melchizedek in Genesis and St. Paul’s invocation of the Institution in 1 Corinthians,11. St. John Paul says, as a matter of fact, “In the liturgical setting of Corpus Christi, this passage from the Evangelist Luke helps us to understand better the gift and mystery of the Eucharist.”

While these Year C readings may not meet the images and sensibility most accessible to a certain strand of the devout, they are hardly less authentic on that account. Jackson takes this for an orientation toward a “horizontal theology”; though I would like to be wrong, I fear that familiarity with the current lectionary and the teachings of recent popes would not assuage these concerns.

Jackson goes on to lament:

What looks like orthodoxy from a distance dissolves under closer scrutiny. As with all things post-conciliar, the gestures remain Catholic; the theology behind them no longer is.

Once again, to a spiritual athleticism trained on brute-force catechetics of “hard sayings,” subtlety and texture may well come off as ambiguity. What troubles Jackson (and the commenters on Hiraeth in Exile) the most is the notion that Christ’s miracle hinges on sharing.

Let us take really seriously what Jackson is saying: Isn’t this the kind of naturalism, embarrassed at the simple embrace of dogma, which makes a compromise with the hyperrational? Isn’t Leo, by sleight of hand, presenting something much more palatable under cover of reference to the Real Presence, by gutting the latter of its content and all the while maintaining plausible deniability? With the sacraments are we not in the province of something bigger, deeper, more majestic, and more mind-bending on that account?

But Leo’s approach is foreign neither to theology nor to papal preaching on the topic. Let us listen to Benedict:

In the Gospel passage, a second element catches one’s eye: the miracle worked by the Lord contains an explicit invitation to each person to make his own contribution. The two fish and five loaves signify our contribution, poor but necessary, which he transforms into a gift of love for all.

There are other popes I could quote, but Benedict is apropos, as it is he who has traced what he considered to be a crisis point for the modern Catholic mind. His foil is the Protestant theologian Karl Barth:

Karl Barth saw the essence of what he called the Catholic apostasy in the insertion of what is Christian into the common analogy of the human – an apostasy that reduces to the merely human what in God’s new activity in Jesus is unique, with no point of reference and incapable of being deduced. Thus the divine is now deduced from what belongs to us, from the human, and so misses precisely what is uniquely Christian.

I would assume that Jackson (and commenters) might be a bit discomfited at their agreement with Barth. Such theology postulates equivocity, not analogy, between the action of Christ and all other human action; there can be no continuous flow between the two. Christ is God, and thus there must be a hard break. Such a Christ is not predicted, nor reflected, nor echoed in the common goings-on of the race of men; to seek common ground is tantamount to blasphemy. To such a mind, an arm’s-length distance is quasi-integral to the virtue of the fear of the Lord. He is other, and therefore what attends him is, in a certain contemporary parlance, enchanted.

Let’s begin to unpack this a bit. Fr. Antonin Sertillanges, Dominican, speaks to a humbler and less discontinuous divine grandeur, one which might leave us disappointed:

The veil of the Temple – perhaps carried away by a violent wind, the black sirocco which is supposed to bring darkness in its train – is torn from top to bottom. This is the first veil, that which separates the Vestibule from the Holy Place. It reveals the secrets of Christ and the mysteries which Christ has taught, leaving only, behind the veil of the Holy of Holies, the greatest mystery of all.

Such is God’s demonstration. If He uses nature in making it, this is only one more example of the harmony of His works. He proclaims His terrible mercy in the language of events.

The sincerity and doctrinal orthodoxy of the author of The Intellectual Life is not open to question. Nor is his evident love for Christ. Yet what he describes is no primitive special effect of an Old Hollywood epic. We encounter in the Dominican’s thinking the esteem for secondary causes, for the autonomy of the natural world, and for the seamless interplay between Providence and creation which so characterize perennial Catholic tradition. The Triune God is not a pagan deity who, being limited in scope, must control things tightly and from without. The omnipotent Fullness of Being bears an altogether interior relation to each existent, yielding an efficacy fully transcendent and completely in line with each created nature as it stands. God works no harm, nor disruption.

For Ratzinger, it is precisely the literal-mindedness of modernity, “an interpretation that reads the texts by looking back in time and wishes to lock them into their earliest original meaning,” that has destroyed, not only our authentic intellectual connection to sacramentality, but also our capacity to understand even the New Testament.

For Sertillanges, God speaks “in events,” that is, events constitute their own conceptual language. Ratzingerian sacramental theology corroborates this insight. Using as his prime example St. Paul’s citation of Genesis in Ephesians, to the effect that the original joining of man and woman in marriage is a mystery pertaining to Christ and to the Church, Ratzinger writes:

It is here no longer simply a word of the Bible interpreted “typologically,” that is, in a Christological sense, but a reality of creation… This creation event is included in the Scripture and it has, as the Scripture shows, its own mystery and even carries Christological transparency in itself. For this reason the “mystery” is no longer the meaning of the biblical text, as we have come to know up to now; rather, it is the meaning of an event. It dwells in the event, which reaches down to the center of creation and reaches up to the innermost and definitive will of God.

That last sentence makes a claim that exceeds the scope of the exegetical and hermeneutic. Let’s look to another Dominican writer, one whom I trust implicitly. Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange is ever insistent:

The infinite distance which separates the most perfect nature, even that of the most exalted angel, from the slightest degree of sanctifying grace, which St. Thomas declares “superior to the natural good of the entire universe” (See Ia IIae, q. 113, a.9 as 2um) of matter and spirit. All angelic natures taken together are not equal to the slightest movement of charity.

On this point, he quotes Pascal: “All bodies together and all spirits together and all their productions are not equal to the slightest movement of charity, which is of another and infinitely more elevated order.”

Now, because this is the case:

The slightest degree of sanctifying grace is infinitely superior to a sensible miracle which is supernatural only by train of its cause, by its mode of production (quoad modum), not by its intimate reality.

And so: “The ‘modal’ supernatural, or the preternatural, does not count, so to speak, in comparison with the essentially supernatural.”

And what is the essentially supernatural? – It is the divine life of love, in which we participate. This explains why the Christian concept of God is surpassing. Because God can share his very life, love can move secondary causes from within.

Yes, the humanity of Christ was invested with the plentitude of gratia data, but this gift itself would necessarily include the wisdom, discretion and restraint to use them only insofar as they would accord with the will of God, that is to say, as consonant with love and with reason. Apart from such, they are impressive but utterly worthless. It was to this that our Savior was tempted, in the desert… and not only to an indiscriminate display of the modal supernatural, but to make bread out of stones, nourishment from sterility, blaspheming in advance the Eucharist and the mystery of sharing and gift, risk and sacrifice, in the matter of the sacrament, in its ontological grounding and inner content.

Turning back to Leo:

The Lord’s actions are not some complicated magical rite; they simply show his gratitude to the Father, his filial prayer and the fraternal communion sustained by the Holy Spirit.

Jackson takes this as a dig against traditionalism; I see it as a specification of Christ’s relationship to the Father. It is, again, love – thanksgiving, eucharistia – not esotericism, which moves the heart of God. Absolutely nowhere does Leo say this is not a miracle; this is the miracle. Divine charity is the true miracle; the modally supernatural, and the preternatural glamours and magics that mimic it, are only manipulations of the natural, whose origins we can discern to no more than moral certainty.

Not too long ago, Italian “seer” Maria Giuseppe Scarpulla (aka “Gisella Cardia”) duped her devotees by supplying “seemingly never-ending portions” of regional specialties, courtesy of the Mother of God – so she claimed. (Here in Connecticut, we too have famed Mystic Pizza, but it means something different.) This celestial Olive Garden, with rabbit (who would eat a bunny?) and gnocchi in the frenzied, all-you-can-eat abundance known well to the American consumer should have been evident as a little too good to be true. Who wouldn’t mind a free meal, no shopping to be done, no dishes to wash, no pots to scrub after long soaking, presumably no damage to the body after gorging – all while toddlers with whom we share the earth scream not even for food but for nutritional supplements and are mowed down in their need.

Yes, our Lord responded to the “pragmatic” concerns of Judas, to the effect that “the poor you will always have with you.” And indeed you will, strictly on the level of modus ponens: where greed and thievery reign, exploitation and poverty will follow. Against the technologies, religious or otherwise, which would seek to dominate a market of wants, needs and appetites – or to awe with their prodigious production capacities – it is Scripture which reminds us that man does not live by bread alone. But again, that we may grasp Scripture at all, we must be open to the meaning of symbols. The point of reference for all symbols and more, for sacramentality itself (so again Ratzinger) is precisely the feast. A feast is no collection of adjacent diners; it is a grand communal sharing. And it is not so cheap as all that.

Yet Jackson is averse to any social consequence of religious dogma: “This is the Eucharist of the Novus Ordo turned inside out. What was once a sacrifice for sin has been reimagined as a communal sharing of bread.” But return to the episode above as reported in Luke 7:36-50, where Simon the Pharisee sneers at the sinful woman who anoints the Lord’s feet. Being conformed to God in love, the lavish sacrifice of resources, is exactly what defeats sin. Apart from Christ’s loving obedience to the Father, the Cross would be blasphemous, a Promethean act of performative rebellion.

Jackson protests, again:

The political subtext is hard to miss: wealth redistribution, ecological awareness, and human fraternity. These themes have replaced the Gospel. This isn’t Christ crucified, it’s Christ as community organizer. The Redeemer becomes a facilitator of equitable distribution. The Corpus Christi procession becomes a parade for horizontal charity.

But: Ita missa est. We receive the Eucharist, and so we are sent. And as for the concrete mission: James 5:1-6, Psalm 148, Daniel 3:57-88, Matthew 5:43-48, et al. It is only in mission, in works, that the substantially supernatural is wrought within us, because the life of God is a happening, not a thing.

In conclusion – I can’t ever seem to help myself – I’m sorry Chris Jackson [ooh…] I am for real. And so is Leo.

It is remarkable that, as I was in the throes of writing this (and I never discuss my work while it’s in process), a friend well-known for his regular outreach to some of New Haven’s poorest, decided to leave three loaves of best-quality bread and many tins of fish at the porch (the latter having been passed on to Paul, and incidentally to Callista).

Note

[1] Shown, particularly, through a commendable 10-part series addressing fascination with the occult in influential trad circles.

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Image: Mosaic in the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves und the Fishes at Tabgha near the Sea of Galilee (Yam Kinneret), Israel. By Grauesel – Photo taken by Grauesel, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=192570