In his Etymologies, St. Isidore of Seville describes wisdom (sapientia) as a kind of tasty knowledge. The wise person “is able to distinguish things and their causes, because he understands each thing, and makes distinctions with his sense of truth. The opposite of this is a fool (insipiens), because he is without taste, and has no discretion or sense.”
The world tells us that taste is something impossible to discuss. To each his own, they say: de gustibus non disputandum est. There’s no disputing taste. It could be the motto of a technocratic age, the slogan of the kind of hedonistic dystopia imagined in Huxley’s Brave New World, where matters of pain and pleasure do not matter very much so long as economic productivity endures.
But it is very difficult—no, let’s just say it: it is impossible—to reconcile this view with the Catholic and biblical understanding of the human vocation. We are, as the divine and natural law teaches us, called not merely to do the right things, but also to desire the right things. So matters of taste—whether we’re talking morality, aesthetics, or food—are tied, like everything else, to our integral humanity. O taste and see how gracious the Lord is. The psalmist doesn’t say: O taste and see if your completely subjective taste is into God, or not. God is good. And the fact that sometimes he and his ways are not always “to our taste” is just another way of saying that we live in a world corrupted by sin and death. Our tastes are skewed by addiction and disorder. How can they be made right?
It takes time, for a start. “Only through time time is conquered” (T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton”). Our illness happened in time and must be healed in time. Killing the virus, quickening the nerves, is only the start. We need slow nourishment, subtle medicine. The Eucharist, in its veiled reality, sneaks into our consciousness, slowly enters our souls and bodies, hides its virtue. It is not much to look at, is it? A wafer. Hardly even the appearance of “bread.” Such a small thing. It is almost absurd to look at it and imagine that the Catholic claims about it are true: how could our Lord suffer himself to be so gazed upon, so reduced, so deprived, so used? How could he allow himself to become mere food?
“My flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him” (John 6:55-56). So said the Lord, losing many disciples. It is too much, really, the Catholic teaching on the Eucharist. It cannot be borne.
But imagine the alternative. Well, there are two, really. The one proposed by many of our separated brethren is far more tolerable, proposing a kind of spiritual reality given by a spiritual Lord. No carnal eating required! No flesh and blood lurking under visible signs! Pure spirit! Put aside the body, that useless thing that has nothing to do with the spiritual life. Christianity is the Great Idea, the triumph of the Word . . . and this alternative is tolerable just insofar as it robs us of our nature, wishing that we could just be like the angels, beings of pure intellect and will. More tolerable, we might think, but utterly foreign to the whole historical experience of Christianity from the start.
The other alternative is that the absolute real presence of the divine Son should visit us unveiled: that he should again and again, in his ubiquitous reality, assault us with the overwhelming glory of his light and goodness, that he would plunge us into the infinite fire of the divine sun, destroying us and recreating us only to be destroyed again, confronted by the prospect of an eternal sacrifice, the blood entered, as Hebrews tells us, into the heavenly places, poured out endlessly, age upon age, from the never-ending source: that we would drown in the electric blood of the God-Man, that we would imbibe it to our utter dissolution as if we were trying to drink the ocean, swallow the sun, wrap our hands around the incomprehensible cosmos. How could we cope with such a reality? How could we begin to understand and accept such a salvation? I think we would go mad.
But we do not go mad, because in fact the Catholic teaching about the Eucharist is true. Christ gives us his whole self, but in a particular form. As one twelfth-century commentator puts it,
Christ willed that his flesh be taken up by the faithful so that through this eating of flesh he might invite them to the taste of divinity, and that what we carry here temporally might follow to eternal joys; that here it might be for medicine and there for delight. He willed that both be taken, that our body and our soul alike might be glorified with him. He is not taken in the species of flesh and blood, lest the human soul shrink back and sense be frightened by something to which it is unaccustomed. . . . It is taken under the sacrament and not under its proper form so that the faithful might accept what is not seen from those things that are (Speculum de mysteriis ecclesiae).
Sometimes, when distributing Holy Communion, I confess that I tremble under the weight of what is real. I imagine my hands collapsing under the weight, melting in the heat of that dread chalice. But I confess that at other times I forget entirely, and my eyes see only what they see and think for a time that the altar of sacrifice is some ordinary human vessel containing ordinary human things.
The veil of the sacraments is a gift. It is part of our medicine, our healing, drawing us from visible things to invisible things, sanctifying not just our intellect, but our sight, our taste, our imagination, our desire.
But what I want to emphasize today is that what that twelfth-century writer says is true: it is here for medicine but there for delight. The role of the sacraments is temporary, if by that we mean that the current sacramental economy will not last for eternity. But they are not temporary if by that we mean that we are supposed to merely pass through them for the sake of what is beyond, that they are merely vessels containing greater things. They train us not just to know eternal things, but to enjoy them in our temporal nature. We cannot handle the direct vision of God in the body now, but that vision is our destiny. We will, actually, walk into the sun and not die. We will drink the ocean of infinity and not collapse. But for now we have to learn to put away our small toys and reach for something greater. The Eucharist isn’t merely Presence, but Person. In it we meet not something, but someone. We learn to love and be loved.
Perhaps you’ve heard this eucharistic prayer of St. Bonaventure: “May my heart ever hunger after and feed upon thee, whom the angels desire to look upon, and may my inmost soul be filled with the sweetness of thy savor; may it ever thirst for thee, the fountain of life, the fountain of wisdom and knowledge, the fountain of eternal light, the torrent of pleasure, the fullness of the house of God.” To the unprepared mind, this is shocking language. God the “torrent of pleasure”? This is not, as many a postmodern cynic would have it, some kind of delusional psychosis in which the saint’s carnal desires accidentally transfer themselves to the next available spiritual thing. Rather, it is a recognition that the deepest human impulses, both bodily and intellectual, find their fulfillment and meaning in the knowledge and love of God.
Eating was supposed to be our downfall. Our bodies were supposed to be our doom. Our tastes are supposed to be our downfall, something we cannot control or change. That is what the demons tell us every time we fall into lust or gluttony or the countless sins of the flesh that weigh us down and reveal our weakness. That was what the ancient serpent wanted in Eden. Eating became death. And eating is death, in many literal and metaphorical ways, for to eat something is to destroy it, to kill it. But in the most Blessed Sacrament, eating becomes our life. Something physical becomes infinite. As today’s wonderful sequence proclaims:
Whoso of this Food partaketh,
Rendeth not the Lord nor breaketh:
Christ is whole to all that taste.
Thousands are, as one, receivers;
One, as thousands of believers,
Takes the Food that cannot waste.
Praise the God who meets us in our weakness and offers far more than an idea: he gives us food. And in this food is medicine, strength, comfort, joy, hope, and above all the love that cannot be conquered and cannot die. May the heart of Jesus, in the most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, be praised, worshiped, and adored, with grateful affection, on all the altars and tabernacles of the world, now and even to the end of time.