ELEONORE STUMP
INTRODUCTION
In this paper, I want to explore the nature of the connection between the atonement of Christ and the Eucharist. (I recognize, of course, that the names for this rite vary among Christians, but it is necessary to have some name by which to refer to it, and so for purposes of this paper I will call the rite “the Eucharist.” Nothing hangs on this name, and those who are uncomfortable with it should feel free to use the name they prefer.)
It is reasonable to suppose that, in order to explore the nature of the connection between the atonement and the Eucharist, one would first need a full account of each; only then could one begin to explore what the connection between the two of them is. But those are preconditions that are virtually impossible to fulfill, not least because there is no one orthodox interpretation of the doctrine of the atonement and no one universally agreed upon interpretation of the Eucharist.
It is widely supposed, by both Christians and non-Christians alike, that the doctrine of the atonement is the distinctive doctrine of Christianity; and Christians often speak of the value of the atonement itself as infinite, or so great as to be incommensurate with all other created goods.1 Given that this is so, it is noteworthy that the doctrine of the atonement differs from other major Christian doctrines, such as the doctrine of the incarnation, for example, in having no formula specifying its interpretation. Although creedal or conciliar statements rule out some interpretations as unorthodox, nevertheless, for the doctrine of the atonement there is no analogue to the Chalcedonian formula for the incarnation, for example. For this reason, it is possible for there to be a variety of interpretations, all of which count as orthodox; and, in fact, in the history of Christian thought, there have been highly divergent interpretations.2
As for the Eucharist, the general consensus among Christians is that Christ instituted the rite of the Eucharist, that the rite involves eating bread and wine,3 and that there is some kind of significant relation between the bread and wine on the one hand, and the body and blood of Christ on the other hand. After these basic points, there is not much agreement.
Nonetheless, even with all the divergent views about the rite, the general Christian consensus includes the conviction that something about this rite makes a powerful connection between those participating in it and the passion and death of Christ. Somehow, whatever exactly it is that atonement does, the Eucharist, whatever exactly it is, is part of that story.
And yet, even with the consensus that there is some kind of connection between the Eucharist and the passion and death of Christ, the nature of that connection is often enough neglected in discussions of the atonement. Here I want to explore that connection; but, given the great diversity of views about both the atonement and the Eucharist, I will need to sidestep the major points of controversy dividing Christians as I do so.
In order to go around the differences among the varying interpretations of the atonement, I will focus just on the salvific effects4 of Christ’s passion and death.5 I will concentrate on the impact of Christ’s passion and death on human sinfulness and on the problem in the human will that makes it liable to future sin.6 In addition, virtually all Christians agree that however Christ’s atonement is understood, its effects have to be applied to a person in order for it to be efficacious for the salvation of that person.
What this application consists in is controversial, but the claim that there has to be some kind of application is not. And virtually all Christians also agree that, at least at sometimes in his life, a person can refuse whatever good it is that is offered by Christ’s atonement; and the good in question will therefore not come to that person, just because he has rejected it. So for the atonement to be efficacious for a person, it has to be the case that he does not reject (tacitly or explicitly) what is offered to him in it.
With regard to the Eucharist, I will adopt a minimalist account. On this minimalist account, whether or not the rite is properly described in any richer way, it at least reminds those participating in the rite of the passion and death of Christ. At least, as the participants eat the bread, they are made mindful of the body of Christ, which they believe was broken for them; as they drink the wine,7 they are made mindful of the blood of Christ, which they believe was shed for them. In my view, what follows in this paper is compatible with all richer interpretations of the atonement and the Eucharist. That is, what I say below is compatible with, for example, a Catholic belief in transubstantiation and the real presence of Christ in the consecrated bread and wine. But it is also compatible with the significantly different accounts of the rite found among other mainstream Christian groups.
Within these fairly severe limits which attempt to bypass divisions among Christians in regard to interpretations of the atonement and of the Eucharist, I want to try to show one significant way in which the Eucharist is part of the redemptive work of Christ’s passion and death.
ATONEMENT AND THE BEGINNING OF SALVATION
The word atonement is a relative newcomer to the English language.8 It is an invented word composed of at and one jammed together with ment, and it was devised to express the idea that the atonement is a making one of things that were previously not at one, namely, God and human beings. So if at-one-ment is the solution to a problem, then, it seems, the problem should be thought of as the absence of unity or oneness between God and human beings.
However exactly we are to understand closeness and union between persons, it will at least include harmony between their minds and wills.9 Let’s say a person Paula does something contrary to the will of a perfectly good God and thus introduces distance between herself and God. Understood in this way, distance between God and Paula has at least a partial source in Paula’s failure to will what God wills.10 The problem to which the atonement is the solution therefore can be thought of as having at least one main source in the human proneness to moral wrongdoing.
On orthodox Christian views, the atonement is a sufficient solution to this problem. That is, the atonement offers sufficient help for the problem to all those who do not refuse it; it makes union with God available to everyone who does not reject it.11 Somehow,12 the atonement brings it about that, in the end, a human being Paula who does not reject God is eventually united to God. And, in complete and full union with God, her will is internally integrated around the good that God wills.
It is important to see here that, because the problem is in the will, it is particularly intractable.
If Paula could effectively choose of her own accord to be integrated in goodness, she would already be wholehearted in goodness, or on her way to that state. Her lack of internal integration has its source in her unwillingness to unify her will around the good. Her will is not internally integrated in the good because Paula does not want it to be. So, the defect in the will is such that it could be fixed by Paula only if she did not have the defect.
On the other hand, no one else can unilaterally fix Paula’s will for her either, not even God. To the extent to which God fixes Paula’s will by himself, he wills for Paula a certain state of Paula’s will. But, then, to that extent, what is in Paula is God’s will, not Paula’s. If the lack of internal integration in Paula’s will is an obstacle to God’s being united to Paula, God’s determination of Paula’s will is an even greater obstacle. Mutual closeness of the sort required for union depends on an agreement between two different wills. But if God determines Paula’s will, then the only will operative in Paula is God’s will. In that case, there will not be two wills to bring into union with each other. There will be only one will, God’s will which is in Paula as well as in God. Union between Paula’s will and God’s will is not established by such means; it is precluded.
It seems that the obvious solution would be for Paula to want God’s help and for God to bring Paula’s will into harmony with God’s will in response to Paula’s wanting God’s help. But orthodox Christian theology is committed to eschewing Pelagianism. That is, it is committed to rejecting the view that there is anything good in a human will that is not infused into it by God’s grace, and Paula’s wanting God’s help is a good state in her will.
Nonetheless, it is possible for grace and free will to interact in such a way as to solve the problem. The rejection of Pelagianism still leaves a person Paula with free will.
On the rejection of Pelagianism, Paula still has alternative possibilities for willing: she can refuse God’s love, or she can cease refusing it. And if Paula ceases to refuse God’s love, then God can give Paula grace by infusing into Paula the will to accept God’s grace. And, once this will is established in Paula, then the second part of the process of salvation can occur. As long as Paula does not return to rejecting God, God can help Paula’s will grow in integration around the good without violating Paula’s will, because in helping Paula’s will in this way, God is acting to make Paula’s will be what Paula herself wants it to be.13 This second part of the process is Paula’s sanctification, and it will eventuate in Paula’s complete and permanent union with God if it continues to its end.
But the first part of the process of bringing Paula to union with God is one place where God is entirely dependent on what Paula does. Or, to put the point another way, if Paula were never to cease rejecting God’s help, it would not be God’s fault that she did not. Unless and until Paula of her own accord surrenders to God, God cannot help her, at least not by acting directly on her.
The process that is enabled by the atonement and that leads to union between God and a human person therefore begins when a person ceases to resist God; but it is up to that person, and her alone, whether to cease resisting.
ATONEMENT AND THE INDWELLING OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
It is not implausable to suppose that the passion and death of Christ can be a catalyst in bringing a person to this state of quiescence in the will as regards God. Christ’s willingness to die for human beings in their post-fall condition, with all its sins and ugliness, will show Paula God’s great love for her. In the passion and death of Christ, God does not manifest wrath or rejection of human beings. He does not display his regal character, his almighty power, or his role as dreadful judge. On the contrary, in the incarnate Christ God allows himself to be put to death in a painful and shaming way because of his love for human beings and his desire to bring them to himself.
If anything can help Paula to cease resisting God, it does seem that the spectacle of Christ’s passion and death could do so. A display of power can prompt fear and submission, but the manifestation of deep love with great vulnerability can elicit the surrender of resistance to that love.14
If Paula’s response to the passion and death of Christ is to give over resistance to God’s love, then Paula’s surrender to God will be followed by God’s providing Paula the will she needs. When Paula stops rejecting God’s love, then God gives Paula the will with which to ask for God’s help. This is a second-order will, in which a person wills to will what God wills. Its presence in a person is compatible with a lot of willing that is not in accord with God’s will. But as long as Paula has this second-order will — that is, as long as she continues to will what God wills, God can continue to give her the help she needs to integrate her will fully around the good in the process that is her sanctification.
So in addition to whatever other effects the atonement may bring about, it has a role in eliciting in a person Paula this delicate and tricky, freely willed surrender to God, which is the necessary condition for her sanctification. That surrender is the first part of the entire redemptive process, and it results in full union with God if it persists to the end of Paula’s life.
At this point, someone might suppose, with disappointment, that the account I have just given is simply an Abelard-like psychological theory of atonement that empties atonement of any real power. But this supposition would be a mistake.
That is because, on virtually all Christian accounts, a person’s surrender of resistance to God is followed immediately not only by God’s giving her grace but also by God’s giving the Holy Spirit to dwell in her.15 The consequence of Paula’s surrender to God is therefore that Paula receives not only God’s grace but also God himself. The Holy Spirit comes to dwell in her when she ceases closing God out. And however exactly it is to be understood, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit puts God within Paula’s psyche in some sense and to some degree.
Science fiction is replete with stories in which malevolent nonhuman beings indwell a human mind,16 and folklore has sometimes tended to explain certain kinds of mental illness along the same lines.17 Stories about such cases are frightening and revulsive because the indwelling alien mind invades the mind of a human person against her will or at least without her consent. Typically too in such cases, the invader has only hatred and contempt for its human victim.
But the indwelling of the Holy Spirit requires an openness on the part of a person Paula that is dependent entirely on Paula. The Holy Spirit comes to indwell in Paula’s psyche only when Paula herself ceases resisting God, and it is up to Paula alone whether or not she does. The indwelling achieved by the Holy Spirit therefore is the opposite of the alien invasion of science fiction stories. And it comes with love for Paula.
For these reasons, although the Holy Spirit comes to dwell within Paula, nothing of Paula’s own personhood is lost in consequence. Paula’s mind remains her own, and her awareness of her mind as her own also remains. Nonetheless, when the Holy Spirit indwells her psyche, Paula has God as present as is possible within herself.
So whatever other effects the atonement has, this one effect is not lame and restricted to the psychological, in an Abelardian way, but powerful and efficacious of metaphysical change in a human person.
UNION, SECOND-PERSON EXPERIENCE, AND STORIES
Here I need to pause to say something more about union. As I have characterized it elsewhere,18 union is a kind of mutual second-person presence; it is a kind of mutual closeness together with maximal shared attention.
Shared attention is notoriously difficult to describe in a philosophically suitable way, but it is easy to illustrate. An infant engages in shared attention when the infant looks into the eyes of its mother, who is looking back into the infant’s eyes. In adults, shared attention is at least partly a matter of mutual awareness, of the sort that prompts philosophical worry about the possibility of an unstoppable infinite regress: Paula is aware of Jerome’s being aware of Paula’s being aware of Jerome’s being aware, and so on.19 Roughly put, then, one can say that shared attention is a kind of second-person experience between two persons who are mutually and simultaneously aware of each other.20
In that earlier work, I also argued that second-person experience gives Paula some degree of a non-propositional knowledge of persons where Jerome is concerned. Knowledge of persons is different from ordinary knowledge that something or other is the case. One of the noteworthy things about the knowledge of persons is that it can be transmitted by means of stories. While a person cannot express the distinctive knowledge of his second-person experience as a matter of knowing that, he can do something to re-present the experience itself in such a way that he can share the second-person experience to some degree with someone else who was not part of it, so that at least some of the knowledge of persons garnered from the experience is also available to her.21 And this is generally what we do when we tell a story.22
A story takes a real or imagined set of second-person experiences of one sort or another and makes it available to a wider audience to share.23 So a story can be thought of as a report of a set of real or imagined second-person experiences that does not lose (at least does not lose entirely) the distinctively second-person character of the experiences. It does so by making it possible, to one degree or another,24 for a person to experience some of what she would have experienced if she had been an onlooker in the second-person experience represented in the story. That is, a story gives a person some of what she would have had if she had had unmediated personal interaction with the characters in the story while they were conscious and interacting with one another.25
What is noteworthy here, then, is that, to one degree or another, a story about a person Jerome can connect another person Paula with Jerome in such a way that, although Paula is not face-to-face with Jerome, she nonetheless has a kind of second-person experience of Jerome;26 and because of that experience gained through the story, she has some knowledge of persons with respect to Jerome.
If, after having appropriated the story, Paula actually meets Jerome and Jerome is open to Paula, then some mutual closeness, some shared attention, some union is possible between them. But in this case, any union that occurs will have had its beginning in Paula’s appropriation of the story about Jerome and the knowledge of Jerome that the story gave her.
I have highlighted this point about stories because it matters for my purposes here. It is important to see that, with the exception of those few people who were present during Christ’s crucifixion, everyone who responds to Christ’s passion and death by surrendering resistance to the love of God has to do so in consequence of a story.
Christ is a particular person, and his passion and death are historical particulars. Information about a particular person and particular events in the life of that person, however, cannot be given in abstract and universal form. It has to be given in the form of a story for everyone who was not actually present to that person during those events. And so, for every person who was not present to Christ during Christ’s passion and death, she ceases resisting and surrenders to God because of a story about Christ’s passion and death through which she has come to know Christ with the kind of knowledge of persons that stories can provide. Neither the story nor the knowledge of persons she gains from it act on her will with efficient causation. Nonetheless, they can prompt in her the yielding of resistance needed to begin the process of salvation for her.
And here is the second important thing to see. When the knowledge of Christ mediated to a person through the story elicits in a person a ceasing of resistance to God, then, on Christian doctrine, she meets God in the person of the Holy Spirit, who not only comes to her but stays with her as indwelling. What was a unilateral experience on her part provided by the story becomes an actual mutual second-person experience for her in consequence of God’s coming to her when she ceases to resist him.
The story of Christ’s passion and death is therefore central to the work of the atonement in the process of bringing a person to union with God; this is true for all people except those who were present at Christ’s passion and death. The surrender in response to the knowledge of persons with regard to Christ which is garnered from a story is the beginning of the process that results eventually in a person’s complete and permanent union with God, as long as she does not return to her original rejection of God.
PERSEVERANCE
That last caveat — “as long as she does not return to her original rejection of God” — is necessary, on the view of virtually all Christians, because as long as Paula is in this life, she always retains the possibility of returning to her original resistance to God.27 And so there are actually three parts to the process that brings Paula to complete and permanent union with God. There is the beginning, when Paula ceases rejecting God. There is the ongoing process of sanctification, which culminates in Paula’s complete internal integration around the good. And then there is also what Augustine called “perseverance,” which is the continuation of the original ceasing to resist God.
The rejection of Pelagianism implies that there cannot be any good in a person that is not put there by God. But nothing in any doctrine implies that there cannot be evil in a person put there by that person. Whatever else a human will may be capable of, on any Christian views, a person is always capable of willing what is evil, including the evil of returning to the original resisting of God. And so the process of bringing a person Paula to union with God requires Paula’s original surrender to God, her sanctification, and her perseverance in the process.28
Where perseverance is concerned, then, the process of coming to union with God is like marriage in the contemporary Western version of marriage. In that version of marriage, there is a falling in love, followed by the commitment of marriage. But the commitment vowed in marriage has to go on day after day. And on any given day, that original commitment can be retracted. For the marriage to last, it is not enough that there was an original falling in love followed by commitment to marriage. There has to be persevering in that commitment, too.
So perseverance is crucial to the process of salvation, as it is to marriage; but a little reflection shows that perseverance is as delicate and tricky as the original surrender to God is. At one time, Augustine considered the possibility that God could give a lifetime of perseverance as one single gift of grace given at a particular time to a particular person.29 But this way of thinking of God’s part in sustaining a person in perseverance is mistaken, as Augustine himself came to think too.30
In explaining the beginning of the process that brings a person Paula to union with God, I said that God could not by himself alone produce the necessary state of will in Paula without destroying the possibility of the union God wants with Paula. That is because two wills are needed for union; but if God puts a state of will in Paula, then that state of will is God’s and not Paula’s. Then there is only one will, God’s will, that is in God and in Paula. But then there also will not be two wills to unite. And that is why the beginning of the process is as tricky as it is. It has to depend on Paula, who is in no condition to will anything good of herself (given the rejection of Pelagianism). But, as I explained above, even in that condition, Paula can be so moved by the knowledge of Christ which is mediated to her by the story of Christ’s passion and death that she surrenders her resistance. She just ceases to will to reject God.
So Paula has alternative possibilities: to resist God or to cease resisting God. And it is up to Paula alone which of these possibilities constitutes her will. If at a particular time her will ceases to resist God, then, in that state at that time, she can be helped by God to will the good without thereby losing her own will. But it is up to Paula alone whether or not she ceases resistance; it depends on Paula whether or not God gives her this will at this time.
It is important to see that similar considerations apply in the case of perseverance. If God were to give Paula in one fell swoop the gift of a lifetime’s perseverance, as Augustine at one time wondered whether God could do, what God would be giving Paula is the inability ever to return to her original condition of resisting God. But then God would have taken away from Paula the alternative possibilities of free will that are truly her own, even on the rejection of Pelagianism, namely, the possibilities of either resisting God or ceasing to resist him. And so if God gave Paula one gift of grace that cemented her in a lifetime’s perseverance, then in this case, too, there would be just one will, God’s will, in Paula and in God.
Consequently, it is a mistake to think that God could give a person perpetual perseverance as one single gift of grace. The problem of perseverance is just as tricky as the problem of the original beginning of the process that brings Paula to union with God, or more so. And whether or not it occurs has to depend ultimately on Paula. God cannot give it to her as one gift of grace.
EUCHARIST AND PERSEVERANCE
It doesn’t follow, of course, that God can do nothing to help a person achieve perseverance. The analogy with marriage helps illustrate the point. Married to Paula, Jerome cannot unilaterally guarantee that Paula will never divorce him, but there are many things he can do to stabilize the marriage and strengthen Paula’s bond to him. In the same way, there are myriad things that God can do in his providence to help maintain a person in her commitment to him.
Traditionally, the Eucharist has been supposed to be central among those things. On views already traditional by the time of Aquinas, Christ’s passion and death work their effect of saving human beings through faith from the human proclivity to sin, but the means by which this process is effected can (and ideally should) include the Eucharist.31
Probably the most famous line about God’s love is that in the gospel of John: “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.”32 On Christian doctrine, the truth of that line is most manifest in Christ’s passion and death. The story of Christ’s passion and death shows God in the guise of one naked man being tortured to death before his mother, his friends, and his hostile, mocking enemies for the sake of saving human beings. Surely, this picture shows as poignantly as possible the love of God, and so it also has power to elicit the melting of heart, the giving up of resistance, that is the essential first step in the process of salvation.33
One way to begin thinking about the role of the Eucharist in the process of salvation effected by Christ’s passion and death is to highlight the fact that bread and wine are eaten in the rite.34 Here it is noteworthy that the words by which Christ instituted this rite identify the bread as his body and the wine as his blood and speak of them as being eaten.35 So, for example, Christ says, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53).
Even for those Christians who reject the real presence of Christ in the bread and wine of the Eucharist and who take these words of Christ to be only symbolic, there is a kind of shocking intensity about the words and so also about the rite. For a person who participates in the rite, some things that are symbolically (or really) the body and blood of the incarnate Deity are brought entirely inside that person by being eaten. Manifestly, the imagery (or the imagery and the reality) are of a union that is consummate in its energy and intimacy.
So although some incipient union with Christ in love is needed to participate in this rite appropriately, union (that is, increased union through increased love) is also the effect of this rite. In one of the few lyrical passages in his scholastic prose, Aquinas says that in the sacrament of the Eucharist a believer’s soul is inebriated by the sweetness of the divine goodness.36
As I explained above, for virtually all people their acquaintance with the events of the passion and death of Christ has to come through a story. But because of the way in which a person Paula can come to know a person Jerome through a story, even a story can serve to produce a direct and immediate intuitive knowledge of persons of the kind characteristic of actual second-person experience. If Jerome, the person in the story, is a real person who is able to come into second-person experience of his own with Paula, then the process begun by the story can eventuate in mutual closeness and even shared attention. And this is exactly the way that the doctrine about the indwelling Holy Spirit holds that the process works for a person who comes to faith. On that doctrine, when a person appropriates the story of Christ’s passion and ceases to resist God, she comes to have with Christ a closeness so powerful that the mind of God, in the person of the Holy Spirit, is actually within her, sharing attention with her in mutual love.
And here we should note that on every occasion on which a person participates in the Eucharist, in a forceful way she is brought back into connection with that same story about God’s love in the passion and death of Christ.
It will help in this regard to sketch briefly what that forceful way is. So consider Paula as she participates in the Eucharist. However various the rite is among Christians, it almost invariably contains some reminder not only of the passion and death of Christ but also of the fact that the point of Christ’s passion and death was to save people and bring them to union with God. When Paula comes to participate in the rite, then, she will have in mind her own need for help in consequence of things in herself that she herself finds hateful. But she will also have brought home to her that, however alienated she may be from herself, God is not alienated from her. God, who is perfectly good and who knows Paula intimately, does not hate her for what she is, but rather loves her so intensely that he took on humanity and endured shame and agony for her. And for what purpose? To unite her to himself in love.
The moving knowledge of persons with respect to Christ mediated by the story which originally brought Paula to second-person experience of Christ is there again for her in every instance in which Paula participates appropriately in the Eucharist. And the person about whom the story is, namely, Christ, is actually powerfully present to Paula, at least in the person of the Holy Spirit who indwells her.37 So not only does the force of the story give Paula knowledge of persons with regard to Christ, but in addition the Holy Spirit is closer to Paula and more intimately united to her than it is possible for another human person to be.
When she participates appropriately in the Eucharist, these things will be brought vividly to the forefront of Paula’s psyche. (And obviously this effect will be only stronger for those Christians who believe that in receiving the consecrated bread and wine they are receiving the very body and blood of Christ.) Insofar as Paula eats the bread (and drinks the wine) in faith, then in doing so Paula is both reconnecting with Christ’s passion and death and also reenacting her original surrender and acceptance of God’s love.
Furthermore, between one participation in the Eucharist and the next, Paula will have lived life as a post-fall person; that is, she will have new things in her self or her life that grieve or trouble her, so that she is tempted to give up instead of persevering. But every time she participates in the rite, she will find that, however inclined she is to give up on herself or on God, God is still there, still loving her, still wanting her to come into union with himself. The result will be to elicit ever more love of God in Paula, and also joy and peace. And so, with every participation in the Eucharist, Paula will be strengthened for perseverance, in virtue of growing in love of God and in experience of God’s continued love and presence to her.
So, without directly acting on the will of a person Paula, by means of the Eucharist God nonetheless provides an effective aid to Paula’s perseverance. Without violating Paula’s will, God strengthens it for perseverance. Through the Eucharist, Paula is vividly reconnected to the story of Christ’s crucifixion and through the story (or through the story and the real presence of Christ in the bread and wine) to Christ’s very passion and death.38 In this reconnection, Paula will also reenact her original surrender to God’s love — only because she is doing so again, with all that her history and experience bring to this repeated reenactment, she grows in her commitment to Christ as she participates in the rite. By this means, then, through the Eucharist Paula is strengthened in perseverance.
CONCLUSION
However we interpret the doctrine of the atonement, and however exactly we understand the work of Christ’s passion and death in the process of bringing human beings to complete and permanent union with God, we can see that the process of salvation has three parts. There is the difficult and delicate beginning of the process that depends ultimately only on the human person in the process. There is sanctification, the extended part of the process in which a person cooperates with God to bring about her increased integration in goodness.39 And then there is perseverance. We might call this third part the negative correlate of sanctification. It is the extended and ongoing failure to give up on sanctification and return all the way to the original rejection of God.
In both the beginning of this process and in the last part, perseverance, God cannot get what he wants by acting directly and unilaterally on the human will. Union would be lost, not achieved, if God did so. But the passion and death of Christ are a powerful means to elicit from a human person Paula the surrender that is the beginning of the process. By means of the story of Christ’s passion and death, Paula comes to know Christ with the knowledge of persons. And when she does so and surrenders to God’s love because she does so, then God himself comes to her in the indwelling Holy Spirit, so that in a way mediated by the story Paula comes into union — incipient union — with God.
When Paula participates in the Eucharist with faith, she is reconnected with the passion of Christ; and, as she is, she also reenacts her original surrender to God. This repeated psychic movement would by itself strengthen her in her commitment to God. But because the reenactment takes place within the unfolding of her own life, with its sorrow and sin, Paula’s experience in the Eucharist is not strictly speaking an exact repetition of her original surrender to God. It is more nearly like the renewal of a marriage vow, which has the force it does because it takes place in the face of all those things and all that history that might tempt a person to give up.
There are no doubt many other things to be said about the role of the Eucharist in the process of salvation, and there are certainly many other things to be said about the atonement. But these reflections show that one important connection between the atonement and the Eucharist is the role of the Eucharist in strengthening a person in perseverance. This connection holds even on a minimalist interpretation of the Eucharist. It is manifestly more powerful on interpretations of the Eucharist that take Christ to be really present in the consecrated bread and wine.
Perseverance is as essential to the process of salvation as the original surrender to God is, and it is as delicate and difficult to elicit as surrender. The Eucharist has the power to elicit perseverance, time after time, throughout the life of a person in faith. In the Eucharist, a person knows Christ in his suffering for her, at least through the story and the indwelling Holy Spirit; and in knowing Christ, again, she grows in her awareness of his love of her and his presence to her. The result is that she is strengthened in love of Christ. And so, with the Eucharist, she perseveres, with love and joy and peace, even in the sorrows and sins of her life.
1. See, for example, Alvin Plantinga, “Supralapsarianism, or ‘O Felix Culpa,’ ” in Christian Faith and the Problem of Evil, ed. Peter van Inwagen (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004). For some critical commentary on the theodicy Plantinga proposes in this paper, see Marilyn McCord Adams, “Plantinga on ‘Felix Culpa’: Analysis and Critique,” Faith and Philosophy 25 (2008): 123 – 39. I share some of her concerns about attempts at theodicy based largely or wholly on comparisons of the summed value of worlds.
2. I have discussed some of these in Eleonore Stump, “The Nature of the Atonement,” in Reason, Metaphysics, and Mind: New Essays on the Philosophy of Alvin Plantinga, eds. Kelly Clark and Michael Rea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 128 – 44, and in “Conversion, Atonement, and Love,” in Conversion, eds. I. U. Dalferth and M. Rodgers (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013).
3. Or grape juice. This disjunction should be understood throughout. My purposes in this paper do not require my taking a stand on whether the ritual requires that the juice of the grapes be turned into wine in order for the ritual to be valid. For ease of exposition in what follows, I will simply talk of wine.
4. In fact, traditionally, the passion and death of Christ have been thought to have not just one effect but several. Aquinas, for example, says that in addition to its redemptive effects, Christ’s passion operated as a source of merit, as a sacrifice, and as satisfaction for human sins. Cf., e.g., Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1981), III.48.
5. For some people, Christ’s atonement is a matter not just of his passion and death, but of his life, passion, death, and resurrection. Nothing in this paper turns on the distinction between the longer and the shorter formulation. For ease of exposition, therefore, I will just refer to the passion and death of Christ as the atoning work of Christ; those who prefer the longer formulation should feel free to substitute it throughout.
6. And that leaves aside considerations of any other effects of Christ’s passion and death. In particular, in this paper I will be omitting consideration of the way in which Christ’s passion and death make satisfaction for past sin.
7. Not all participants in the rite receive the cup, and those who do sometimes drink some other grape liquid besides wine. But it is not easy to put all these qualifications into one simple description of the rite. So readers should take the qualifications as understood throughout.
8. Of course, although this word is relatively new, the thing designated by the word is old. Rituals of atonement figure prominently in the Hebrew Bible, as, for example, in the prescriptions for the Day of Atonement laid out in Leviticus.
9. For a detailed discussion of the issue, see chapter 6 of Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
10. For discussion of the issue and arguments for this claim, see Eleonore Stump, “Atonement and the Cry of Dereliction from the Cross,” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4.1 (Spring 2012): 1 – 17.
11. These claims are true even for those who accept a doctrine of double predestination. On that doctrine, those who reject the salvation provided by the atonement were predestined by God to reject it. In that sense, the atonement was not intended for them, even if the value of the atonement was in itself so great that it would have sufficed for salvation for everyone.
12. The various interpretations of the doctrine of the atonement differ in their understanding of this “somehow.” There is no creedal formula that effectively distinguishes among them and privileges just one as orthodox. For some discussion of the main kinds of interpretation in the history of Christian thought, see Stump, “The Nature of Atonement.”
13. For a discussion of the relative contributions of grace and free will, see the chapter on grace and free will in Eleonore Stump, Aquinas: Arguments of the Philosophers (London and New York: Routledge, 2003).
14. For the distinction between submission and surrender, see Stump, Wandering in Darkness, ch. 8.
15. The indwelling Holy Spirit is a common topic of Christian theology, but it is actually not easy to specify what this indwelling comes to. We can start by saying what it is not. God’s indwelling in Paula is not merely a matter of God’s having direct and immediate causal and cognitive access to Paula’s mind. God has this kind of access to the mind of every human being, both with regard to propositional knowledge and also with regard to mind-reading. For every person, it is possible for God to know the mind of that person with direct and unmediated cognition; it is also possible for God to communicate in a direct and unmediated way with the mind of that person. So these kinds of relation between God and human beings hold for every human person. The indwelling of the Holy Spirit, however, is found only in those people who have opened up to God. For more discussion of this issue, see Eleonore Stump, “Omnipresence, Indwelling, and the Second-Personal,” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 5/4 (2013): 63 – 87.
16. Robert Heinlein’s The Puppetmasters is an example.
17. If one Googles “schizophrenia and demon possession,” one will find that this sort of belief is still prevalent in some communities today.
18. See Stump, Wandering in Darkness, ch. 6; and Stump, “Omnipresence.”
19. Because philosophers take knowledge to be a matter of knowledge that, a more common philosophical formulation of mutual knowledge would be in terms of knowing that: Paula knows that Jerome knows that Paula knows that Jerome knows, and so on. In the case of infants, of course, shared attention cannot be a matter of knowing that in this way. For an interesting study of mutual knowledge in connection with joint attention, see Christopher Peacocke, “Joint Attention: Its Nature, Reflexivity, and Relation to Common Knowledge,” in Naomi Eilan et al., eds. Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 298 – 324.
20. Joint attention is most often mediated by vision, but it can be mediated by other senses as well. A congenitally blind child can share attention with its mother by sound or by touch, for example. In the case of an immaterial God, joint attention can occur without any mediation by the senses, provided that there is iterated mutual awareness. The senses are typically the vehicle for establishing joint attention, but they are not essential to it. For more discussion of joint attention, see chapters 4 and 6 of Stump, Wandering in Darkness.
21. In this respect, a second-person experience differs from a first-person experience of the sort we have in perception. There is no way for me to convey to someone who has never seen colors what I know when I know what it is like to see red.
22. I am not here implying that the only function, or even the main function, of narratives (in one medium or another) is to convey real or imagined second-person experiences. My claim is just that much less is lost of a second-person experience in a narrative account than in a third-person account, ceteris paribus.
23. Someone might object here that any information which could be captured and conveyed by a story could also be conveyed by an expository account. I have no good argument against this claim, for the very reasons I have been urging — namely, that we cannot give an expository description of what else is contained in a story; but I think the claim is false. Consider, for example, some excellent and current biography of Samuel Johnson, such as Robert DeMaria’s The Life of Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), and compare it to the pastiche of stories in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and you will see the point. There is a great deal to be learned about Johnson from DeMaria’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, but Boswell’s stories give you the man as the biography cannot.
24. The degree will be a function not only of the narrative excellence of the story but also of the sensitivity and intelligence of the story-hearer or reader as well.
25. I do not mean to say that the storyteller or artist does not contribute something of her own in the narrative presentation. On the contrary, part of the importance of narrative is that its artistry enables us to see what we might well have missed without the help of the narrative, even if we had been present as bystanders in the events recounted in the narrative. It is for this reason that the quality of the artistry in a narrative makes a difference to what there is to know on the basis of it.
26. Or an analogue to a second-person experience. Whether it is a real second-person experience or an analogue to one is a complicated matter that cannot be dealt with adequately in passing here.
27. Some Christians might suppose that if Paula rejects God and dies in that rejection, then it never was true of Paula that she was justified, even if it seemed as if she was. Other Christians suppose that Paula could reject God entirely even after having received justification. But this difference of view makes no difference to my point here. What everyone agrees on is that it is possible for a person who seems to be a devout Christian to reject God and die in that state of rejection. And that point is all I need for my purposes here.
28. Aquinas describes this process in a more fine-grained way, in terms of five effects of God’s grace on a human soul: (1) healing of the soul, (2) desire of the good, (3) carrying out the good desired, (4) perseverance in good, and (5) attainment of eternal life. It is noteworthy that perseverance is on the list just before the last element, eternal life. See Summa Theologica IaIIae.111.3.
29. See, for example, his treatise De dono perseverantiae.
30. For a discussion of Augustine’s views of grace and free will, see Eleonore Stump, “Augustine on Free Will,” in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, eds. Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 124 – 47; revised and reprinted in expanded edition of The Cambridge Companion to Augustine (2014).
31. Summa Theologica IIIa.49.3.
32. John 3:16 NRSV.
33. Summa Theologica IIIa.49.1.
34. Aquinas says that the bread and wine of the Eucharist are nourishment for the psyche (Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, trans. Charles J. O’Neil [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989], IV.61) and that they provide growth in virtue because of the way in which the Eucharist connects a person of faith to the passion and death of Christ (Summa Theologica IIIa.79.1).
35. See Matt 26:26, Mark 12:22, Luke 22:19, and 1 Cor 11:23.
36. Summa Theologica IIIa.79.1 ad 2.
37. See Romans 8:9 for the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Christ.
38. For detailed discussion of the way in which this same process contributes to a person’s growth in cooperative grace and to a person’s incorporation into the mystical body of Christ, see the chapter on atonement in Stump, Aquinas.
39. Nothing about this description of sanctification implies Pelagianism. For more discussion of sanctification, see the chapter on grace and free will in Stump, Aquinas, and chapter 8 in Stump, Wandering in Darkness.