This was published as "What It is Appropriate to say About the Person in the Eucharist" pp. 301-311. Annual Proceedings of the AmericanCatholic Philosophical Association. 2001.

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WHAT PHILOSOPHY CAN APPROPRIATELY SAY ABOUT THE PERSON IN THE

EUCHARIST

Professor J. KowDepartment of Philosophy,King's College,266 Epworth Avenue,London, Ontario,Canada. N6A 2M3.College : 1-519-433-3491 Ext 4429On leave until September, 2015.

Home : 1-519-858-0902E-mail : jkow@uwo.ca

There are many different and conflicting theological and

philosophical approaches to the Eucharist. These seemingly

irreducible, interpretive differences provide a prima facie

justification for turning to an examination of the liturgy, while

holding in abeyance intellectual exploration of this topic. I do

not subscribe to the notion that a non-theological, a non-

philosophical approach to the Eucharist is desirable. This would

be like living without attempting to think. In other words, there

is no non-detached liturgy. Every liturgy is attached to and

rooted in its community of faith. The actions of the liturgy are

imbued with the religious community of faith's interpretation,

which is saturated with meaningful truth-claims. The liturgy is

part of the community's self-understanding. It would be

intellectually inappropriate if philosophy did not engage this

self-understanding.

As Aristotle notes, one's method must be appropriate to the

subject-matter under study. Yet Aristotle was only aware of the

possibility of philosophizing from what is naturally first-to-us

(pros emin) to what is first-in-itself (kath autos). With this rich

1

Greek heritage how can we philosophize in the context of the

subject-matter of an explosive spiritual revelation? Precisely because it

is a supernatural revelation, I submit that philosophy must make

crucial distinctions in order to illuminate the meaning of the

actuality of the Eucharist.

As human beings we are divided beings. For this reason, we

may deem it fitting that we are unable to say only one thing

about fundamental experiences and events. Phenomenologically our

words are separate from our deeds. Human action, all to often,

lags behind human speech. Louis Bouyer points out, that in God,

"saying and doing are one and the same thing."1 God's Word is His

deed. But the word of a man or woman, is not their deed.

Analogously Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, asserts that finite

sensible intuition is derivative, and that intellectual

intuition, which belongs to the "primordial being," is

originary--it creates its own object (CPR B72).2 Goethe grasped

this insight at the beginning of his work Faust by writing that

"In der Anfang war die Tat." Many understand Goethe as intending to

replace John's logos in the Gospel phrase "en arche en o logos" with

2

"die Tat." This is incorrect. Goethe was really saying: "In der

Anfang war die Tat-Wort." This harkens back to the Hebrew word

"dabhar," which unites both word and deed in one semantically

charged field.3 So there is an action verb in all verbal events.

To turn directly to the topic, let us ask from a

philosophical point of view, who acts and speaks in the

consecration of the Eucharist? If a human being speaks, the deed

he talks about either may or may not be done. If God speaks, the

deed is done. I contend, first that in a strong sense it is God

in Jesus who speaks and acts, and that a philosophical reflection

on language can illuminate this extraordinary event.

The oldest text on the Eucharist says that Jesus took bread,

gave thanks, broke the bread, and gave it to his disciples. He

said to them: "This is my body which is for you. Do this in

memory of me." And then he did the same with the cup of wine--his

blood. (I Cor. 11.23-26; Luke 22.19)4 In retrospect, we can say

that this is the Pasch or Passover. A mysterion or sacrament is

presenting itself, which embraces the Passover and the Exodus,

gives thanks, anticipates Jesus' sacrificial redemptive death,

3

and His living presence. This occurs whenever and wherever the

Eucharist is celebrated and performed in deed and word. The

priest, in the liturgy, quotes Jesus at the Last Supper. "Take this

...and eat it: this is my body," and "Take this ... and drink from

it: this is the cup of my blood." Jesus stated this in the first-

person singular, in persona Christi. He said "my" and "this" to present

himself in His Real Presence--the spiritual presence of a divine

person. Consequently, the priest verbally and bodily quotes what

Jesus said and performed at the Last Supper.5

Lest we misunderstand this statement, in normal quotation

the quoter names, refers, and contains in his words, what someone

else said. ie. "[Y said X]". The quoter presents Y's statement

again, but he does not merely assert it. He is engaged in stating

someone else's report, registration, or proposition.

Phenomenologically and linguistically we need to distinguish

between a report and a registration. A registration displays, pre-

eminently in language, the facts ingredient in the perceptual

objects, present to the registrar. In an act of registration I

articulate the parts which belong to the whole perceptual object

4

which is present to my senses. On the other hand, a report

presents the facts resident in the absence of their perceptual

ingredients.6 In a report I articulate the parts of the whole

perceptual object which is not present to my senses. Quotation is

a different activity from reporting. In quotation the fact is

taken as registered, reported, or proposed by another individual.

I report what someone said as fact; I state and assert it. If the

priest is quoting Jesus, then he is stating, from second hand at

least, from a text, which purports to report, what Jesus said and

did on a specific occasion. In registration and reporting, we

entertain, assent, and assert the facts. But this is not all. We

can also turn these facts into facts as supposed, into facts as

proposed (a proposition), and as propositions we can examine

them. So we can consider the registered or reported facts as a

proposal. We thus interrogate the facts. Propositions concern the

facts-as-supposed. Propositions are not about sentences; they

concern realities in a novel manner.

Now we can turn the facts the priest seems to refer to, into

facts-as-supposed, in order to verify them. We can treat the

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priest's words as a judgement as supposed. This is still a

judgemental achievement. It does not subtract from experience. We

entertain the facts-as-supposed, but we do not assent to them.

Normally this makes good human sense. It provides us with an

intellectual distance to appreciate the perceptual objects we are

dealing with. In the case of the Eucharist, however, this

constitutes an incoherence. The issue in the Eucharist does not

concern verification--namely, returning the propositional turn to

perceptual experience either for verification or for

falsification. The priest in the self-understanding of the

religious community is not merely reporting on what Jesus said

and did. Instead, he gives his voice and his hand to Jesus. The priest, in

consecration, does not represent the people or himself, he

presents Jesus.

On the basis of this philosophical analysis I suggest that

we should conclude that Jesus is the speaker-agent who performs Eucharist.

Consequently, the Eucharist event (eucharistein) enacts a unique

word-act. What occurs on the level of the unified divine word-act

is conveyed in a fractured way when we try to explain it. Of

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course, referring, quoting, and all that is linguistically

familiar, occur in the Eucharist. But they occur in a unique

manner because of who the speaker-agent is. The person makes the

difference. In consecrating Eucharist, the non-worldly

transcendent is revealed in the natural immanent world. The

performance of this sacred act of eating is a theophany. The mass

presents the Last Supper. It is originary and primary, not

primitive, and not a repetition. To simply repeat Jesus'

sentences and actions would not activate His proposal and challenge to

us in them to join in communion in a new way of life.

Imagine counterfactually that the priest, by going through

similar motions and words in quoting Jesus, is reporting what he

the priest is saying and doing. Imagine counterfactually that

Jesus is not present to speak and act substantively through the

priest in the consecration. What then is happening inside the priest's

quotation (verbal and bodily) of Jesus?

Well, the priest quotes Jesus at the Last Supper, but in his

choice of doxic modalities.

- (a) he can quote believingly.

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- (b) he can quote disbelievingly.

- (c) he can quote indifferently.

- (d) he can quote vaguely.

In sum: what the priest does is simply report on what Jesus said

and did, and not truly quote Him. And so, the priest's speech-act

of consecration would implicate only himself--the priest--in the

facts of the present states-of-affairs. He might decide to make

himself a more explicit ingredient in this state-of-affairs. He

does say, "Take this ...and eat it: this is my body," "Take

this ... and drink from it: this is the cup of my blood." Since

"my" in this context refers only to the priest, this eliminates

Jesus as the proper speaker-agent from the consecration.

Jesus, however, is not eliminated. I submit that He is

mysteriously present. The speaker of the words, and the

individual who performs the actions cannot be the priest, as the

particular natural individual he is, for he cannot humanly

register his own enacting consecration. If he tries to do so, an

incoherence results. He would be saying in effect, 'I see or say

that the congregation should "Take this ...and eat it: this is my

8

body," and "Take this ... and drink from it: this is the cup of my

blood."' The understanding of the consecration, as an act

complete in itself, would be reduced to the finite reality of one

human being's rather odd sentences and gestures.

To avoid this interpretation we are tempted to say that the

priest is referring to the words and deeds of Jesus. But if a

speaker refers to a singular performative, which can only be

enacted in the first-person, by the Word-Incarnate, then no

consecration occurs outside this singularity. What we fail to do

here, is to register the singular fact, that unique shifters7 are at

play in identifying the voice speaking, and the hands moving, in

consecration. The words and actions are not just the priest's.

The priest quotes Jesus' words and deeds, but he does not, unlike

in the case of human quotation, mention or use Jesus' statements,

and mention the statement-maker. Instead, Jesus, who is seemingly

quoted, actually uses the apparent quoter (the priest), not to

make something holy, but to do the holy thing, which only God can do!8

Jesus speaks and acts through the priest. In the priest, Jesus

registers His enactment of a new unprecedented state-of-affairs

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in His words and deeds. God's Word is His deed. Jesus registers

that the doxa/glory of the Eucharist includes the praxis of the

Cross.

It is difficult for us to grasp this disclosure. we cannot

discern the divine Word in the human words. We are accustomed to

executing and achieving, phonemes, words, sentences, and propositions, but without

realizing what is being accomplished. These are elusive achievements. When

we turn to human speech-acts or performatives, we naturally

expect to register the human display of enactment in what is said

and done. These words, logically and structurally, seem to

accomplish themselves. They display a change in the process of

its occurring. However, in the unique instance of sacramental

performatives, although words convert actuality, the question is: who

is the agent or speaker? Here and now, in the Eucharist, the

initiative is with God in Jesus. For only God can offer to God. The

normal indexicals and shifters have been reversed because the I

speaking, originates from a sui generis Trinitarian divine voice,

not a human voice. Although the words, and the Word, turn us

towards the unique fact of the Eucharist, we in our natural

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attitude remain thing-fixated and image-fixated. Instead of being

turned by the words of consecration to the speaker, who blends

with the transformed bread and wine eucharistically, we focus on its

various worldly dimensions.

Mistakenly, the priest is often perceived to be playing a

role; he is interpreted as depicting the actions of Jesus at the

Last Supper in a Christlike manner.9 His words are interpreted

basically to echo and repeat what Jesus said. In sum: the liturgy

dramatically depicts the Last Supper, and the priest plays the

role of its key performer. If so, then the priest could do this

mechanically, or portray Jesus for the congregation, or act like

Jesus in imitating him. This turns all Eucharistic events into

copies of the numerically and propositionally singular Eucharist

of Jesus celebrated at the Last Supper. The priest would be

trapped in his role as an actor or understudy for the true Priest

of Melchizedek. But such a drama of play-acting only brings about

a catharsis, while the real scene of the liturgy--the presencing of

the Eucharist--completes and culminates itself. Acting involves

the human person playing a role. The priest would be acting like

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Jesus, in a Christly manner, but we mean in himself as this

priest, another natural individual. This approach fails to see

that the priest has to give up his role and blend into the missio

of Jesus. He is neither echoing, nor repeating, nor copying, what

Jesus said and did.

In dramatizing the liturgy, we are snared by a picture.10 We

lapse into viewing the Eucharistic liturgy, the priest, and the

community, as pictorially related to the Last Supper, Jesus, and

the Apostles. But pictures can neither quote, nor refer to the

original. These are impossibilities for pictures because

pictorial structure qua structure lacks these possibilities. A

speaker refers, quotes, and articulates. Language is self-

reflexive. Thus pictures and words can be nested within words,

but words cannot be pictured and remain words. While language

presents things in words, in a grammatical, and in a determinate

manner, a picture absorbs us into itself. If the Eucharist is

experienced, as standing in a pictorial relation to the Last

Supper, then there will be Eucharistic controversies.

But the words of the Eucharist arrange the facts of the

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world by letting things be. The words of the Eucharist name their own

unique truth-conditions. The notion of truth-conditions presupposes a

metaphysics of relations of esse as the Spiritual Principle of

Being with the transcendentals which supplement and succeed a

substance metaphysics. The Spiritual Principle of Being is

Trinitarian.11 It lovingly donates the personal relations of the

Real Presence in the Eucharist. Pilate, in confronting Jesus,

asks "What is truth?" The striking fact is that truth in this situation

is a Who, not a what! Jesus has already said that "I am the way, the

truth, and the life." If truth is a Who, a person, then a non-

person based substance metaphysics will be unable to explain it

adequately. Unless we acknowledge this, we will experience the

Eucharist, and its slipped referent--the Last Supper--as a means,

or as an instrument, instead of as the manifestation of God's

Kingdom. We will not register that the Eucharistic Last Supper is

not Jesus' action on the Cross. Instead it anticipates the Cross.

In sum: the unique quoting and actions of the Eucharist, blend

the Exodus, Last Supper, the Cross, and all Eucharists into

communion. Consequently, in the Eucharist, the original words and

13

actions of Jesus are fulfilled again, and identified as His

present words and actions, here and now. This does not detonate

the natural intelligible necessities of experience, but it does

explode the solid, pragmatically, complacent attitude of natural

consciousness towards experience.

He who would see the Divinity must see him in his Children,One first, in friendship & love; then a Divine Family, & inthe midstJesus will appear; so he who wishes to see a Vision; a

perfect WholeMust see it in its Minute Particulars. (Blake)

We register vaguely the presencing of Jesus in the Eucharist.12

Normal registration and reporting can be either vague, or

confused, or languid, or clear. In the Eucharist, the priest's

words and actions, are Jesus' originary words and actions, owned

by Jesus in this unique quotation. The Eucharist is the Kingdom,

but it is hard to discern. What does the Kingdom look or sound like? It is the

Eucharist. It is Jesus' originary presence, not a quasi-Lockean

representation of it.

We can achieve a sentence without registering the

Eucharistic proposal, or proposition. We hear the words, but the

meaning eludes us. In the Eucharist both referential opacity and

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referential transparency are present. This is not due to linguistic

structures, but to the presence of the principal speaker and

agent: Jesus.13 Despite our ineradicable vagueness, the Eucharist

activates the original setting of its performance: the Last

Supper with Jesus speaking and acting. The appropriate response

is, not merely to try to understand this, but to acknowledge that

this understanding only originates from an acceptance of the

reality present in the way that it is presencing itself.

The Christian sense of the divine in the Eucharist is that

the divine action and word present is a person, who eucharistein,

who gives thanks (efcharisto), for his missio in life. This sense of

the divine is in Jesus, in living life Eucharistically--thankfully

for the gift of a graced life, and giving in turn. In this

interpretation, the divine liturgy makes a space for God to speak

and to act in Jesus in the priest. This is not an opaque

reference. The priest is a pure sign, transparent to Jesus. In

him the Church acts in the name of the Lord.

The Eucharist cannot be authorized in an external Hobbesian

fashion.14 God does not authorize us to act and speak divinely--

15

except in grace, but grace is God himself, not us. This is the

philosophical issue of representation and presentation. The

Church and the priest, by recognizing their own state of

dispossession, in their dispossessed acts and words, by opening a

space for God, lets Him be present, ie. vacare Deo. One needs to

be empty for God.15

Moreover, the Eucharist is Jesus' enactment in time before

the Father. Jesus performed his sacrificial death to his Father,

and the Father performs it too. He initiates it. Jesus responds

to his Father's will. The suffering Word is the sacred "quotation" addressed to

the Father. The death of Jesus, which the Eucharist anticipates, is

a graced worldly event overcoming non-worldly sin and death.

Jesus in obedience to his Father's will performs his death. This is

unlike any human action. In regard to Jesus' death on the Cross,

we enter into, and participate in this event, by acting sacredly,

by accepting our personal missio in life. We act and speak

Eucharistically. We are not the nouns (the realities), or the

verbs (the activities), or the glowing adjectives (personalities)

of our world. We are between being and nothing, adjuncts to the

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Incarnate Verbum. We are essentially adverbial beings as spiritual

beings.16

The time of the Eucharist is exclusive by being all-

inclusive. It recalls the Exodus and Passover, enacts the Last

Supper, pre-enacts Calvary, the Kingdom come, and the Eschaton.

So the Eucharist recalls, invokes, performs, and anticipates. Its

anticipation is not a Socratic melete thanatos, but rather a

Christian melete theou--already, but not yet. Thus the Eucharist

brings temporality forward, distinctively. True temporality is revealed

as eternity. There is a joining of the beginning and the end of

human life together in the Eucharist. This is experienced with a

gracious dimensional shift. It answers the classical crux:

"Alcmaeon says that men die...[because] they cannot join the

beginning to the end."17 In the Eucharist we experience the alpha

and omega thanks to a transcendent personal initiative.

We can now touch on some Eucharistic issues.18 Before

appreciating transubstantiation, the Real Presence, the

persistence of accidents or species, and other topics, we need to

undergo a transformation to prepare for what is to ad-vent. To

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expect to participate in the Eucharist from a third-person point

of view, and to understand it, is a glaring performative inconsistency.

What does the background of Jewish Dietary Laws tell us

about the Old Testament context of the Eucharist? According to

Leon Kass,19 dietary laws were not intended for the purpose of

restraining and moderating the naturally immoderate appetites,

but rather for the purpose of bringing human beings to godliness,

and for distinguishing a chosen people. Hence dietary laws

prepared the people for sanctified eating. Why? Because those who eat

become what they eat. Hence they are enjoined to eat only what is

clean, what will lead to holiness. Through this sacred eating the

gap between the sacred and the profane is reduced. In regard to

the Eucharist, eating and participating in Eucharist involves the

high coming down to the low, and the low being graciously

elevated to the high. The gap between the sacred and the profane

is closed in communion.

In terms of humanity's original rebellion against God this

makes good sense. Human kind was punished for its disobedience by

being expelled, human kind, deemed to be sinful, was doomed to

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the exile of punishing toil, labour, and death. Focus upon toil

and labour. Rather than gathering fruits and nuts, human beings

were forced to cultivate the rude earth, to engage in

agriculture. They had to grind wheat to make bread, and to press

grapes to make wine. Bread and wine appear to be the tangible

symbols of our exile. So the transformation of bread and wine

into Jesus' body and blood symbolically overcomes our exile.

Grace introduces us to a new condition--to an original creation.

It removes the condition of sin.

This is not a simple restoration of these natural elements

to their original form, but rather their sanctification. Grace

breaks open a new creation for a new creature. It opens up a new

order of intimacy with God, which Jesus' words and acts make

possible. The Incarnation discloses how we ought to live: not

simply the Socratic good life, but rather the graced life. We are summoned to say

"eucharistein": thank you God for the gift of being (esse) spiritual

beings in creation. This reveals an asymmetry between God and

creatures. His gift cannot be matched. It only can be freely

given away to others. It cannot be given back to the original

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giver. This is not a quid pro quo situation.

I have neither focused on the ontology of things, nor

directly upon the reality of the Eucharist as a thing. This is

the thing or noun dimension detaching us away from all contexts.

Instead I have tried to follow the Eucharist's presencing in both

its verbal and adverbial dimensions, the theophany of God-with-

us. We can only respond to the Eucharist in grace, with the

infused theological virtues, and maybe with infused moral

virtues, which are the primary instance of virtue for Aquinas

(Q.65.2)! Thus the individual's Eucharistic participation

displays God's mysteriously hidden involvement with her. We need

spiritual discernment, not phenomenological registration or intuition,

to behold this form.

Why is the Eucharist so hard for some of us? Because it is difficult

for us to be together, to be intimate with one another, let alone

with God, who makes fluid the fixed, and puts everything into

spiritual flux. The Eucharist is a provocation calling for a

gracious response. But it is not obvious who Jesus is. Moreover,

what do we have to be thankful for? Otherwise, why do we treat

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each other as we do? Why are we so miserly with our thank yous,

our eucharisteins? Some deny the need to be grateful, others find

themselves spiritually, barely subsisting, in Camus' world beyond

grace. Gilbert Meilander writes so profoundly: "... grace

hurts."20

The Eucharist reveals, not special propositions for the

privileged to debate about, but a new life and perspective, an

opportunity for converting our possibilities into actualities, by

participating in the divine life. But we never asked for this.

And it is hard to accept it. It is easier to be philosophically

vexed, and to engage in the sublimated anger of argumentative

inertia, going nowhere, but at least getting there fast.

The Christian setting reveals that a Person is more ultimate

than the natural setting. This upsets nature's density with its

necessities and finalities. Now they are not so necessary, and

not so final. This disturbs us.

We are strange creatures. If revelation is possible, then

philosophy is not necessarily, or self-evidently, the right way

to live.21 The good life is succeeded by the graced life. But

21

revelation is not logically impossible, therefore revelation is

possible, consequently philosophy appears to be refuted as a way

of life. Or, if the Eucharist is, we have a choice, either to

give thanks for the gift of being, or to be angry that we have

been placed in the position of being given everything for

nothing, and so of feeling that we are obliged to be grateful. It

all comes home to one quiet utterance: thank you or eucharistein.22

22

End-Notes

1 Louis Bouyer, Liturgical Piety (Notre: University of Notre Dame Press, 1955), 105.

2 I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith (New York: St.Martin's Press, 1929).

3 Cf Thorleif Boman, Hebrew Thought and Compared with Greek Thought (NewYork: W.W. Norton & Company, 1960), 66, 185. Cf George Steiner's critical remarks on Boman. George Steiner, After Babel, 3rd Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 165 note 1.

4 Cf Phillippe Béguerie and Claude Duchesneau, How to Understand the Sacraments, trans. John Bowden and Margaret Lydamore (London: SCM Press LTD, 1989). This is a useful primer.

5 In developing my understanding in the following paragraphs, I have profited greatly from following works of Monsignor Robert Sokolowski, Eucharist Presence (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1993); "Quotation" in the Review of Metaphysics 37 (1984), 699-723. See E. Husserl, Logical Investigations Vol 2, trans. J.N. Findlay (New York: Humanities Press, 1970).

6 Frege says that the sense of a sign is the "mode of presentation" of the object. But how does sense present an objectto us? A sense is the thought of a sentence. But then how does one grasp a thought? And how do different speakers grasp the samethought in regard to the same sentential sign? Unfortunately, Frege does not say enough about sense and thought to clarify the important issue of presence. See Gottlob Frege, "Logic" in Posthumous Writings, trans. Peter Long (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 126-151. See M. Dummett, "The Intelligibility of Eucharistic Doctrine" in Religious Belief: Essays in Honour of Basil Mitchell, eds. W.J. Abraham and W. Holtzer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 231-261.

7 See Otto Jespersen, Language, Its Nature, Development and Origin

23

(London: Allen and Unwin, 1922), 123.

8 The priest is not captured within Donald's Davidson's "samesayers." See "On Saying That" in Synthese XIX, 1/2, (December, 1968), 130-146. He does not establish himself as the same. The initiative is God's, rather than his.

9 It is of singular importance that Hegel places the Christlike posture of forgiveness at the threshold of religion in his Phenomenology. For Hegel we must assume the Christlike posture in our acceptance of our finitude. Yet Hegel denies the relevance ofthe proper name of Christ! A description of the universal processof spirit replaces the name of the individual person for Hegel. On forgiveness see G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V.Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), #669-671.

Hegel's theory of unnaming anticipates Derrida and Marion. See Jean-Luc Marion 'In the Name: How to Avoid Speaking of "Negative Theology,"' and with J. Derrida, "On the Gift: A Discussion between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion," in God, The Gift, and Postmodernism, eds. J.D. Caputo and M.J. Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 20-53, 54-78. Derrida talks of "...the name of God, as a proper name which is never proper," and Marion concurs that "...every proper name has a property not to be proper." Cf "In the Name," 45, 47. It is a small step from this to Derrida and Marion separating the gift from a more primordial givenness (Gegebenheit). Cf "On the Gift," 58, 68. While for Hegel the Christlike replaces Christ, for Derrida and Marion, in different ways, givenness supplants the gift--of creation and being.

Jean-Luc Marion offers a deep examination of the Eucharist in his God Without Being, trans. T.A. Carlson. See especially Hors-Texte, 161-182. Marion opens the Eucharistic discussion to the dimension of gift and givenness. For a contrasting Anselmian approach to the Gift of Being (esse) see the The Aquinas Lecture 1982 by K.L. Schmitz, The Gift: Creation, (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1982), especially 29-34.

10 Cf R. Sokolowski, "Picturing" in the Review of Metaphysics 31

24

(1977), 3-28.

11 For my effort to explore this issue see J. Kow, "The ChristianDistinction" in Communio (Winter, 1993), 603-615. Cf Gabriel Marcel, "On the Ontological Mystery" in the Philosophy of Existentialism, trans. Manya Harari (New York: The Citadel Press, 1967), 9-46. For Marcel the principle of being is not indifferentto Persons.

12 This is not a contingent fact. It is part of being human that the Eucharist will always be a mystery of both presence and absence for us. In Husserlian idiom, admittedly inadequate, such a phenomenon, much like the philosophical judgements we frame, isa morphological eidos: experientially it embraces a necessary a priori vagueness that cannot be dispelled. Aristotle has already remarked on the ontological indeterminacy that pervades the humansituation, which requires the presence of the spoudaios--the great-souled prudent man.

13 See W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1965), 221. Quine rightly rejects propositions as mental entities. But propositions and propositional attitudes can be preserved in the manner in which we speak about things. They are not necessarily linked to logical or linguistic structures.

14 See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C.B. Macpherson (London: Penguin Books, 1980), "Of Persons, Authors, and things Personated," 217-222. Hobbes provides a model of authorization that detaches the authorization from the original author, but nevertheless makes him the owner, in the strong sense, of the actions and words of the person she has authorized.

15 For this paragraph and the following see the extraordinary work of Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 1, Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982). The implicit context of this discussion is the Trinity. See L. Dupré, "The Glory of the Lord: Hans Urs von Balthasar's Theological Aesthetic" in Communio

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(Fall, 1989), 384-412.

16 For a subtle account of the adverbial beings we are see Michael Oakeshott, Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).

17 G.S. Kirk and J.E. Raven, The PreSocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 235. Note the inability of Kant to close the moral circle in the Critique of Practical Reason without the [religious] Postulates. For a succinct and rich treatment see Emil Fackenheim, "Kant's Philosophy of Religion" inThe God Within, ed. John Burbidge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 3-19.

18 For a good discussion see Dom Anscar Vonier, O.S.B., A Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist (Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press, 1960). Also see Louis Bouyer, Eucharist, trans. Charles Underhill Quinn (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968).

19 Leon Kass, The Hungry Soul (Toronto: Macmillan Press, 1994), 193-225.

20 Gilbert Meilander, "Goodbye, Sally, Goodbye" in The Limits of Love (London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 15.

21 See Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 75.

22 I would like to thank Professor Hunter Brown for his comments on a draft of this paper.

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