The Eucharistic Society

Christianity is thus defined by its ability to capture narrative through normative order, while animating it with the perpetual movement of gloss, creating the conditions for a never-ending event. But what is its figura, that "sketch of fiction" that shapes, invents, represents and feigns society all at once? The hypothesis here is that it is the Eucharistic mystery that configures society as a whole, or is, to use Hans Blumenberg's terminology, its rector metaphor. But it is the Eucharist in the sense that the Gregorian reform transformed it, from the moment the Church took the turn towards the Eucharistic realism of transubstantiation. Here, we recall the major historical stages, the theoretical cost and the political significance of such a decision, which runs counter to the Augustinian theory of the sign. The coup de force of the real presence has consequences for the architecture of the ecclesiastical edifice and the ecclesiastical institution. But it is also difficult to believe: this is why the lecture ends with a discussion of the unbelievers of the real presence, who resist this orthodoxy of the unbelievable, as revealed by famous cases documented by judicial sources.

Contents

• God "made the first man mute with earth, then in the dark wake, still taciturn, He also made all the other animals with earth" (Pierre Michon, "Trois noms de bêtes pour W.B.", in Trois cailloux pour Walter Benjamin)
• Adam says the names of
• Man's smallness in the face of the silent block of "golden idols with wasp eyes, camped at the gates of darkness and whose lost gaze no one dares to face" (Georges Duby): first appearance of Bernard d'Angers at Conques
• What is the nature of Adam's dominion over living beings? Was there politics in the Garden of Eden?
• After the Fall, power for want of something better, while waiting for something better
• But the civitas terreni is a city in spite of everything: the trajectory of political Augustinism
• A philosophical-political counterfactual: what would have happened if Adam and Eve had not sinned? (Irène Rosier-Catach and Gianluca Briguglia eds, Adam, la nature humaine, avant et après. Epistemology of the Fall, Paris, 2016)
• From Thomas Aquinas to John Locke via Marsilio of Padua: man was a political animal before the Fall
• Mark Twain's Adam's Diary (1893) and the Bible's "anti-tragic tendency" (Emanuele Coccia)
• God's trial of humanity, God's trial of humanity
• A look back at the previous lecture: a narrative captured by normative order and the endless event of glossing
• Dicordantia et dissonantia : la complicité cognitive de la théologie et du droit au XIIe^siècle dans la construction de la vérité (Alain Boureau, "Droit et théologie au XIIIe^siècle ", Annales ESC, 1992)
• Christian genealogy of the persona and legal construction of the person as truthful fiction: Abstract
• Does political fiction produce "warnings"? Remarks on the brutal updating of 1984
• When Antonio Gramsci reads Machiavelli: Prince, Party, "Ministry of Truth" (Orwell)
• Why four Gospels? Étienne Nodet's methodological astonishment(Histoire de Jésus ? Nécessité et limites d'une enquête, Paris, 2004)
• Divergent narratives converge in the fulfillment of a ritual: the Eucharistic mystery
• Singing, sacramentality, sending: God gives men the power of a word that transcends them
• A hypothesis: the Eucharistic society
• It's a figura, a "sketch of fiction" that shapes, invents, represents and feigns society
• It's a metaphor in Hans Blumenberg's sense of the word, and thus, in a way, a prefiguration: ahead of our capacity for conceptualization, it anticipates the readability of the world
• Initially, an act of remembrance: "You shall do this in memory of me"
• Ambrose of Milan, De sacramentis : do not confuse what you see with what you believe
• Augustine(Sermo, 272): "We call them sacraments, my brothers, because what we see in them is not what we understand intellectually. What we see has a corporeal appearance(speciem corporalem), what we understand intellectually has a spiritual effect(fructum spiritualem)"
• The cognitive function of the sign, which brings something to knowledge by offering itself to the senses (Irène Rosier-Catach La parole efficace. Signe, rituel, sacré, Paris, 2004)
• Symbolic conception of sacrament, proximity to ritual
• When Béranger de Tours, defending the conversio intelligibilis in the strict Augustinian tradition , found himself at odds with the Gregorian cut and thrust of the sacraments, he found himself at odds with the sacraments
• The Gregorian break and the coup de force of the Real Presence. Is it a reform? No, it's a revolution
• Measuring the political impact of Eucharistic realism (Jérôme Baschet, La civilisation féodale, Paris, 2004)
• The elevation of the host as a substitute for communion: manducatio per visum, "eating by sight"
• Its monumental consequences: architecture as a system "that makes visible, at a given point in space, the real presence of Christ" (Roland Recht, le Croire et le voir)
• Spatial consequences: polarization of consecrated places, itineraries taking possession of space(Corpus christi, de la fête-Dieu à la fête-roi)
• Its social and political consequences: Alain Guerreau's ecclesia and dominium , or how to come to terms with the all-encompassing theory of the feudal whole?
• And yet, there is no such thing as a medieval Big Brother : understanding what the metaphor lets slip, what it authorizes in terms of doubts and counter-conducts..
• For Domenico Scandella, a.k.a. Menocchio, "I don't see anything but a lump of dough; how can it be our Lord God?" (Carlo Ginzburg, Le fromage et les vers)
• Yet "the mass is an invention of the Holy Spirit, like the adoration of the host, so that men are not like beasts"
• Anthropology of man and orthodoxy of implausibility
• Aude Fauré's weakness to believe, questioned by Inquisitor Jacques Fournier in July 1318: "When I'm in church," she confessed to the Inquisitor, "and the body of Christ is raised, I can neither pray to it nor look at it, and when I think of looking at it, a kind ofanbegament [impediment] comes before my eyes" (Jean-Pierre Albert, "Qui croit à la transsubstantiation?", L'Homme, 2005)
• In the footsteps of Bernard d'Angers, on his way to Sainte-Foy de Conques: the Liber miraculorum as a conversion story, the other side of the conversio intelligibilis
• The jokes of a prankish little girl: "The inhabitants of Conques, understanding things in rustic terms, call them the joca of Sainte Foy"
• "If the extraordinary novelty of these miracles worries you, I ask you one thing, above all, my brothers: when I return from Conques, go there, not so much to pray as to observe, so as not to categorically judge false something you don't know. In fact, you will proclaim its truth on your own once you have experienced it"