The Altar Is Not a Stage

Feb 5th, 2021 | By Justin Ferrugia TD ‘23+1

Pictured: A glass of wine stationed next to a wine bottle and a bowl of stew

As is the case for many American towns, driving around my hometown on a Sunday morning, one is guaranteed to see families dressed in their “Sunday best” walking down the street, crowded church parking lots, and groups gathering and mingling around an ornately dressed figure.

To this day in America churches are the focal points of Sunday.

But why? Why are some members of the community so tied to this seemingly antiquated and allegedly cult-like ritual? At the end of the day, isn’t it just to be social? Why can’t people just socialize in a “normal” way?

I personally have never encountered a moment of doubt so severe as to lead me to those questions. But I do, at times, struggle to keep at bay the (incorrect) assumption that forms the foundation of contemporary culture’s misunderstanding of religious ritual. This assumption is that religious ritual is inherently performative. The performative view of faith focuses on others rather than God: faith becomes more show than substance. 

That is to say that when I go to Mass, when people gather outside church, we are doing it primarily for others to see and to remain members of our community. This means that acts of the faithful—prayer, devotion, and participation in the sacraments—are outward demonstrations of our own possession of faith. To put it simply, this assumption posits that ritual is a means by which we prove our righteousness and holiness. 

In Luke’s parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, the performative view of faith is that of the Pharisee. In the time of Christ, Pharisees were learned Jewish jurists and theologians. They were in the upper echelons of Jewish theological and legal authority. Tax collectors, to use a hip priest’s analogy, held a similar place in Jewish society as the IRS does in American society. They were the lowest of the low. 

The parable is written as such. “The Pharisee took up his position and spoke this prayer to himself, ‘O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity—greedy, dishonest, adulterous—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income” (Luke 18:11-12). Here, we see the Pharisee using the ritual in which he participates as justification for his righteousness and holiness with respect to the tax collector. 

I slip toward this trap more often than I should. But when a culture allows this view to cloud its perception of all religious ritual, it allows the aberrant to become the norm. When the aberrant is the norm, it leads to the exasperated question: why participate in this ritual?

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The answer to this question lies in resolving this perceptual aberration and exploring the act that Christian ritual sustains: faith. Too often, we forget that faith in God is a paradox, a struggle, and a fight. We do not have faith, we do faith.

Ritual, far from being performative, is the sustenance—the food—fueling the ongoing, constant, and concerted struggle (though full understanding of God can never be had in this life) towards faith. 

St. Thomas Aquinas, a prominent figure in the Christian intellectual tradition to which I subscribe, describes faith as “a mean between science and opinion.” [1] (ST II-II q.1 a.2). This six-word-story of faith encapsulates the truth that faith cannot be described as static—at rest. Rather, faith is a constant activity.

To understand how St. Thomas and many theologians both before and after him view faith, I find it helpful to consider a question with which many of us grappled in middle school geometry. When presented with an idea, say a triangle, I can easily form the opinion, because my teacher proclaimed it as truth, that its interior angles sum to 180 degrees. Once I form this opinion, I can hold it as long as I want and it takes no additional work to do so. If I want to reach full understanding, however, I need to complete a geometrical proof. This state of full understanding is also static. But what happens in between? 

It takes work to move from opinion to understanding, described by St. Thomas (and St. Augustine in a slightly different way) using the Latin verb cogitare. St. Thomas says that this cogitative act, “…properly speaking, [is] the movement of the mind while yet deliberating, and not yet perfected by the clear sight of truth.”[1]  This cogitative act is the mechanical crux of Christian faith. It is not something possessed, but an action partaken in or lived—a habitus, as St. Thomas would say. This constant state of active deliberation is necessary to achieve stability in the middle region between science and opinion. 

In the deliberative act of faith, one stands in a paradoxical position. We are able to experience a certainty (usually promised by science), even if we only possess the limited understanding of opinion. This is not full sight or full comprehension. Rather, it is a delicate state of the intellect held in balance through a constant act of the will—a constant state of thinking.

For some, this account of faith might be overly logical. To understand why faith is not, indeed cannot be performative, I find it helpful to clarify the mechanics of faith and the necessary spiritual and intellectual exertion it requires. It’s hard and it requires great courage. Only through this lens can one understand why Christians are so wedded to ritual. The faithful are constantly in need of the nourishment and sustenance that Christ, through his death on the cross and the institution of the sacraments, gives us. Like water stations at regular intervals of a foot race, Christ, through the sacraments, gives us not ways to demonstrate our faithfulness, nor a list of requirements, but rather the fulfillment of our foundational necessities when running the spiritual marathon that is a life of faith.

In its true state, Christian ritual, far from being performative, is instead a humble acceptance of Christ’s sacrifice. The reason this performative view of ritual is so insidious and has the ability to corrupt not only those who partake but the perceptions of those who do not, is because it perverts the accepting of a gift that is necessary for our survival in a life of faith into something worthy of praise.

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There is no more concrete way to apply the Christian concept of ritual to St. Thomas’s account of faith than through the Eucharist or Holy Communion. St. Thomas himself acknowledges that “…spiritual life has a certain conformity with the life of the body.” The Eucharist is unique because it is nutritive both in the corporeal sense, and in the spiritual sense.

In Catholicism, the celebration of the Eucharist is one of seven sacraments. It culminates the sacrifice of the Holy Mass, which is the most well known and commonly celebrated ritual among Catholics. It is easy to see how an observer may misconstrue the celebration of the Mass as a spectacle. After all, the Mass takes place on an altar that often resembles a theater. Many people also point to the perceived opulence of churches as evidence of self-aggrandizement.

However, in the realest sense possible, the celebration of the Eucharist is no more than an invitation to a meal. As Catholics, we believe in transubstantiation, which simply means that when we consume that wafer of unleavened bread we are, in the realest sense, consuming the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ. 

In a corporeal sense, this wafer of unleavened bread provides us with real caloric nutrition. In a spiritual sense, this meal gives us the nourishment and energy we need to continue the marathon of faith that St. Thomas describes. This spiritual nourishment is anything but small. Every time the Mass is celebrated, we are invited to the last supper of Christ and given what we need to survive, indeed to thrive in the paradoxical life of faith.

The Pharisee would accept this invitation and gift with self-serving thanksgiving. If the Pharisee were invited to share a meal with a friend, he would give thanks that he had the opportunity to show everyone around him how good a friend he was by accepting a gift necessary for his survival. When he walked in the door he would say “Thank you, not for the gift you have given me, but for allowing me to show those around me how important I am to you.” 

This is the danger of viewing Christian ritual like the Eucharist as performative. We instinctively feel that the Pharisee’s attitude is wrong—it is not something that we would ever consider doing. That is why it is so essential for us as Christians both to guard against the view of faith as performative in our own minds but more importantly, as a culture, to not let this aberrant idea of ritual obscure the norm.

I want to make explicit that agreement on correct ritual is not necessary to reject the view that Christian ritual is performative. I do not want to convey the relativistic idea that everyone of every faith or no faith must see all religious rituals as equal. I do not, and plenty of people would say the same about me. But, what I can say, and what I hope we as a culture can say, is that even if we do not see all rituals as equal, we understand their very real necessity.

Even if these ideas about Christian rituals might seem irrelevant, the idea of ritual itself is foreign to no one. The rich stereotypes of American suburbia yield an abundance of examples of the American sacred liturgy. These daily rituals are the parts of our lives that corporeally sustain us. Perhaps you derive great peace from your NPR-filled commute, or perhaps your daily trip to Dunkin’ Donuts provides some necessary predictability in your life while giving you the energy to begin a new day. Whatever they are, our rituals, our routines, sustain us. If this current world is any indication, we see that many people are willing to risk their lives—crawl over broken glass—to continue with their ordinary rituals. Even if we cannot agree, many can empathize with this feeling. Why must we view Christian ritual differently?

What starving person would not crawl over broken glass to a thanksgiving feast? What parched person would not climb a mountain to reach a lake on top? What Christian would not risk their life, endure suffering, or encounter hardship to attain the one thing necessary to sustain the real marathon that is faith?

Notes

[1] Aquinas, Thomas. Summa theologica. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Brothers, 1911-1925. II-II q.1 a.2.

[2]  Aquinas. Summa theologica. II-II q. 2 a.1.

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