I was reading someone say that there is no way that the Eucharist could’ve originated within a first century Jewish culture because “Blood was not just ritually impure, it was culturally internalized as disgusting and gross to the same degree as human waste”. Which is just, blatant bullshit! Not only is blood not culturally recognized as “disgusting” or “impure”, not only is blood “pure” in Hebraic thought, blood is purity itself. Leviticus is very clear: the blood is life, and life is purity, cleanliness, holiness. Someone else said, “I would not categorize the culture as viewing blood as akin to waste [though] certain kinds of blood are ritually impure, e.g. Menstrual blood” but even then, it is not the blood which is nonclean, anymore than a man’s semen is nonclean. It is the person who is made nonclean by the blood when it is outside the body. Ancient Israel and Judah were not ignorant of how blood worked; they understood that the body was filled with blood, that this blood keeps us alive, and that if too much of it leaks — or worse, pours — out of our bodies, we will die. In fact, the mere presence of bodily fluids, like blood or semen, leaking out of our bodies’ holes is a sign that we are dis-eased: not diseased, though bodily illness can be a manifestation of this; but rather we are unstable, unruly, unwhole. We are alive but marked by Death. We are in a constant, ever present state of dying. Sheol, that voracious gut we call “the Grave”, hungers to devour us and we can already feel its teeth and drool on our skin.
Now, it is important to acknowledge that the text itself does not tell us why menstrual blood or nocturnal semen emissions make one nonclean. It is my belief, which I believe is well supported by biblical scholarship and Church theology, that the reason is due to being marked by signs of mortality, not itself Sin nor even in this theology strictly due to one’s own moral failures, but God is Life and thus when Death, or that which is enslaved to Death (which is all of humanity living outside of Eden), comes into contact with his holiness — his raw power, violence, righteousness, passion, glory — Death itself must die. Blood, then, being as it is liquid-life, comes directly from God who is the Ground of all being, the Source of life. The blood of a created Other is not to be consumed by the Self because it belongs to God and is sacred. Likewise also with semen, and the reasoning for why semen is not wasted in Apostolic thought: it too is liquid-life, coming directly from God who is the Ground of all being, the Source of life. It belongs to God and is sacred. And both go back to God: the blood of the sacrificial offering is poured out upon the alter to be consumed by The Holy One; semen proceeds from the husband and fills-full the wife, who are both made in the image of God, for the procreation of life.
But, blood and semen are liquid-life in two very different ways. Blood is life in the way God is Bringer of Order in Genesis 1, days 1-3: subduer of darkness and chaos. Blood is liquid-life as a cleansing detergent for the pollution that is Sin and Death, liberating both humanity and the environment from its slavery to futility. Semen is life in the way God is Bringer of Life in Genesis 1, days 4-6: procreator of life and goodness and beauty. Semen is liquid-life as a procreative energy which enters into the subject to create within them an ontology of life.
And before we forget, it is St Thomas Aquinas, Doctor of the Roman Catholic Church, who said that “the spiritual semen proceeding from the Father, is the Holy Spirit.” So just as we receive the blood of Christ to purify us from the stain of Death, so also we have the semen of God which is the Spirit of Holiness which births fruit within us, transforming our beings to conform to the image of God.
Now, because humanity is made imago Dei, an extension of his own goodness and life and beauty, the disconnect between humanity and God as a result of our slavery to Sin and the fear of Death is a great tragedy. This is why Real Physical Presence comes as a scandal. Yet, God desires us (“I am loved/desired, therefore I am”): he longs for us to be one with him. God became humanity, assumed all that we are, so that he could redeem all that we are, and thus we could become God. And this refers not just to a single moment of enfleshment — a person is not merely their body but their embodied experiences as well: the entirety of salvation history is the history of the Holy Trinity unifying himself to humanity. Through our devotion and allegiance to the life of Christ we are washed clean by the blood of God (“the blood is the life”) which is the only liquid-life powerful enough to conquer Death and liberate the cosmos from its slavery to Sin and the fear of Death. Now, cleaned by the life-blood of the God-Man, humanity is unblemished and we offer our bodies as living sacrifices — that is, divine meals intended to bring near the Self and Other — so that God is able to consume us as he consumed the unblemished offerings of the time before.
Let it matter to us that the Holy Spirit comes upon us in a form evoking the image of a tongue. And let it matter that the Spirit fills us in a way evoking the image of seed, semen. Let it matter that after we are consumed by and filled-full (that is, “fucked”) by the Holy Spirit in the liturgy, we are invited to partake of the Meal of the Eucharist in which we eat God and are eaten by him in that it is not we who live but Christ who lives in us. And let it matter that in the Eucharist we preach Christ’s death until he returns.
The eros drive and the thanatos drive are one: all desire, all urge, all drive, is one — the eros for total transcendent continuity with the Other. And this eros is so all consuming that it is more powerful than our will-to-live — and necessarily so! When the beloved disciple writes to the soon-to-be-martyrs to “shrink not back from Death”, he is telling them to allow their erotic desire for God to become one with God’s erotic desire for them: so abundant and excessive and ecstatic that he would die. And he did. And they did. Christ, as God, offers himself in the ultimate taboo, the ultimate transgression in excess of nature: he gifts us the opportunity to become like God by offering his blood to drink and his flesh to eat: pure flesh unblemished by the curse of Sin and Death — ironically, considering that it is the broken body of Christ that we consume. And yet, this broken body is resurrected/recreated precisely because it does not belong in the possession of Death.
Christian Cannibalism is sooooo fascinating because it resists the desire to corrupt eros into the consumption of the Other, but through asceticism trains us to learn to love without consuming and instead to offer up our lives to be consumed. It is right to say that cannibalism is a love language, to say it is erotic. Of course it is: to love someone is to love God by loving them, to worship God by offering yourself to them, to gift yourself as a "thing-bringing-near" (qorban; this is the word "offering" in hebrew) and place your being upon the alter to be consumed. To love someone is to drink their blood and eat their flesh; to love someone is to offer our blood and offer our flesh. To love someone is to engage in mutual eating. God unmakes himself because he loves us and wants to be part of us, to nourish us: in being consumed by him, we too are unmade. Humanity eats God and is eaten by God. Theophagy is only possible and cannibalism is only made-holy because of God's self-emptying, because God becomes the qorban, the thing which brings near, first by becoming human, and then by becoming bread and wine.
Liquid-Life: Eroticism and the Ancient Israelite Roots of Christian Cannibalism
