“a mystic signification”: Liturgical Interpretation and Eucharistic Pedagogy in Hugh of St. Victor and Guido of Monte Rochen

Carthusian monks debating during weekly recreation.

Philip Gröning, Into Great Silence, DVD (Zeitgeist Films, 2007).

In the 2005 documentary, Into Great Silence, a group of Carthusian monks enjoy a debate during their weekly recreation. They’re discussing what some brothers argue is a trivial ritual: on their way to meals, they wash their hands with a few perfunctory drops of water that fall sparsely from a spigot. Certainly, there’s not enough water there to really clean anything, so some of the brothers think that the community would be better off without this useless ritual. But then one of the older monks steps in and says, “The symbols are not to be questioned; we are.”[1]

While this statement could be read in an authoritarian way (“shut up, believe, and behave”), it also suggests that as much as we like to interrogate rituals for their meanings, they also interrogate our own subjectivity, asking us questions about the ways our perceptions and beliefs interact with the divine.

Put another way, rituals aren’t just there for us to unlock their significance through a decoding interpretation: the ritual changes the very subjectivity that would like to forward those interpretations. In what follows, I’d like to turn to Hugh of St. Victor and Guido of Monte Rochen in order to discover the ways that they conceive of the Mass as a dialogic space, both an object for interpretation and, in its consecrated host, as a subject who instructs.

The mass as an object for our decoding interpretation fits well with certain approaches to religion in modernity—perhaps even across confessional boundaries. Thus, a liturgically conservative Catholic like Martin Mosebach mourns the loss of symbolic action in the Novus Ordo mass because he feels that essential meanings have been lost through the disuse of liturgical gesture; his book interprets the lost gestures—the joining of the priest’s thumb and index finger after the consecration, the bishop’s use of gloves—in order to show how they are theologically necessary and not needlessly cryptic. He interprets the symbol so that its meaning becomes evident.[2]

From an academic perspective, we might point to the anthropologist of religion Clifford Geertz as exemplary in his approach to the symbol; for him the symbol is “any object, act, event, quality, or relation which serves as a vehicle for a conception—the conception is the symbol’s meaning.”[3] Geertz’s approach to the symbol places the act of interpretation front and center: it is precisely interpretation that allows us to peer into the symbol and divine its “meaning.”

We see both Hugh and Guido approaching the mass in a similar way: their interpretative skills show that every gesture is, in fact, saturated with divine intent. To take just one example from Guido, he writes that, after the fraction of the consecrated host into three portions, “the priest puts one part of the host into the chalice, and this signifies…those who are in paradise.”[4]

Hugh also devotes his interpretative energies to explaining the fraction. He argues that one of the fragments “is placed in the chalice signifying those who still live in suffering until they themselves go out of this life…”[5]

I choose these two examples from Guido and Hugh because, as you’ll no doubt have noticed, the two interpretations contradict one another—for Guido, the chalice is the place of inebriating divinization, while, for Hugh, it is the place of earthly suffering. Yet the very incoherence of interpretation—rather than pointing merely to the constructed falsity of all analysis—may instead point to a semiotic superabundance, a pedagogical paradox meant to rend the faculties of the mind into a state of astonished contemplation. To take one explanation without the other would impoverish the communicants’ interpretative intelligence, leaving them poorly prepared to receive in the sacrament the Christ whose very nature plays on precisely these fault-lines of interpretive paradox.

Which brings us to the second aspect of the mass: for here is not only an object for interpretation but, in the consecrated host, a subject who instructs.

In Hugh, the appearance of bread and wine is central to the eucharist’s pedagogical program: by showing us earthly food, we are taught that our spiritual hunger is satisfied by Christ. He writes, “the appearance of bread and wine is proposed, that the full and perfect refection may be taught to be in the taking of the body and blood of Christ, by reason of the divinity of Christ.”[6] Importantly, Christ’s appearing in visible food is a function of God’s loving condescension; as Hugh argues elsewhere, since we have lost the ability to “know the invisible,” we “could by no means have recognized divine things unless stimulated by the human.”[7] This is to say the sacrament beckons us through its visibility towards interpretative acts that ultimately result, through a play of paradox, in invisible knowledge. Even our physical eating of the sacrament is an act of interpretation: we treat God as food and thereby recognize God’s nourishing love. To speak in paradoxical terms, we are taught through visible means to see that which cannot be seen.

Guido, borrowing from St. Ambrose, likewise conceives of the sacrament as a subject offering instruction to our perceptions; he writes that the sacrament forms us “in the catholic faith” by washing “the spiritual eyes of the soul” with the “blood of Christ” so that those “things that belong to the faith” become available through physical means.[8] This seems to indicate that one’s participation in the sacrament ultimately clarifies one’s perception of the sacrament, so that a dialogic pattern is established in which we are able to ascend to the Word through our perceptive and interpretive words, words that falter and dissolve in paradox at every point so that we are sustained only by the silent eating of that “viaticum,” that “journey provision” which “strengthens the recipient lest he grow faint on the path of this world.”[9]

Again, we can point to a consonance between these medieval writers and modern scholars of religion, especially Geertz, who notes that we don’t simply interpret symbols: they, in turn, are capable of “establish[ing] powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by…formulating conceptions of a general order of existence…”[10] Here is an echo of Guido’s assertion that, through the sacrament, “we are formed…”[11]

By placing Geertz in dialogue with Hugh and Guido, I don’t intend to fabricate a simple historical continuity in the interpretation of religious symbols. But the fact that their approaches to interpretation of “mystic signification” seem to have at least points of consonance calls for further investigation and research. Why does medieval interpretation of the mass map so easily onto Geertz’s symbolic anthropology? And what are the places of difference—when do their interpretive projects cease to align? Perhaps most importantly: how have the eucharistic debates of the last millennium effected the way the academic study of religion encounters religious cultures that didn’t play a part in those debates?

As Talal Asad points out, “Geertz’s treatment of religious belief…is a modern, privatized Christian one…”[12] This is to say that his academic approach to religion results from “a particular history of knowledge and power…”[13] Ultimately, the mass isn't just there for our interpretation; it has already formed many of us as we undertake interpretive endeavors outside of Christianity. For this reason, the historical study of sacramental interpretation proves itself helpful not only for those whose personal beliefs arise from the Christian tradition but also for those who want to engage both with other religious traditions and with recent theorists of the academic study of religion.

-Dawn Treader

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[1] Philip Gröning, Into Great Silence, DVD (Zeitgeist Films, 2007).

[2] See Martin Mosebach, The Heresy of Formlessness: The Roman Liturgy and Its Enemy, trans. Harrison Graham (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006).

[3] Qtd. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993), 30.

[4] Guido of Monte Rochen, Handbook for Curates: A Late Medieval Manual on Pastoral Ministry, trans. Anne T. Thayer, Medieval Texts in Translation (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 99.

[5] Hugh of St. Victor, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, ed. Joseph Saint-George, trans. Roy Deferrari (Ex Fontibus Company, n.d.), 311–12.

[6] Hugh of St. Victor, 310.

[7] Hugh of St. Victor, 157.

[8] Guido of Monte Rochen, Handbook for Curates, 60–61.

[9] Guido of Monte Rochen, 51.

[10] Qtd. Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 29.

[11] Guido of Monte Rochen, Handbook for Curates, 60.

[12] Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 47.

[13] Asad, 54.