The (Processed) Vegetal Body and Blood of the Markan Messiah
Abstract
:1. Tracing Liberatory Manifestations of the Eucharist
Dussel implies that consecration is liberation. For the peasant Galilean Jesus to commemorate the bread as his body is to ground the Eucharist with the bodies of the oppressed. Reflecting on de las Casas’ change of heart and the materiality of Eucharist, Mayra Rivera echoes Dussel’s statement: “An elemental materiality connects the bodies of workers with shared bread, with consecrated bread. These are not arbitrary metaphors—bread is produced by the labor of human hands and the fecundity of the earth” (Rivera 2015, p. 23). The bread is not just there to be broken and eaten perfunctorily. They are the “real” bread, product of someone’s hand. My addition to this discussion intersects the gift of life given by the plants, and the divine’s ontological offering to become fluidly reconfigured with the struggles of the people and the earth.Bread is the product-food for the alienated-poor who are forced to work, but do not consume, their life is objectivized in the product but it does not come back to them in the form of life-consumption. When bread is not life to the poor, the poor die.
This article is my contribution to further reflect on the sacramentality of the eco-justice approach to the Eucharist. It participates by reimagining the ontology of the messiah who celebrated this feast. If the divine is commonly interpreted as transgressing to the material/creation in the Eucharist, then could the material/creation also have transgressed back (affectively, ontologically, and even materially) to the divine? In other words, could we imagine an ontological reconfiguration of the nature of the messiah by the bread and the wine?The story of the bread and wine, like our own story and that of humanity itself, includes a painful chapter. It is a chapter that tells of oppression and death. The grain must be grounded into flour and the dough kneaded to become bread; the grapes must be crushed and trodden underfoot to become wine. In that bread and wine, the death and dying of so many people in our world every day, precisely through a lack of food and drink, is placed on the paten and poured into chalice.
2. Vitally Materializing the Elements
The bread and the wine of the Eucharist are not just food; they are (consecrated) actants. Human hands (or other devices) might have picked them up and directed them to (human) digestive organ; but, the Eucharistic elements are the ones who generate affectivity. To eat food/elements is/are “to enter into an assemblage in which the ‘I’ is not necessarily the most decisive operator” (Bennett 2010, p. 40). Food nourishes and produces energy/life. Yet, it also debilitates and even kills. Like matryoshki dolls, as Bennett describes, a human body is an assemblage that “contain a sequence of ever small ones—functioning groupings of actants in a series of larger, more complex congregations” (Bennett 2010, p. 45). These “ever small ones” include food. Their emergence in the human body assemblage has the capacity to change the larger assemblage: They are “assemblage converters”: (Bennett 2010, p. 42) They have the power to alter direction and decisions, to irritate, and even to desensitize (food coma).A source of action that can be either human or nonhuman; it is that which has efficacy, can do things, has sufficient coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events. It is “any entity that modifies another entity in a trial,” something whose “competence is deduced from [its] performance” rather than posited in advance of the action.10
Méndez Montoya expresses the Eucharist in its “metaxu or in-betweenness: God and creation, transcendence and immanence, word and action, desire and satiation, eros and agape, self and other” (Méndez Montoya 2009, p. 159). Although she does not explicitly engage the in-betweenness of (the Markan) Jesus’ ontology, one can find traces from her work the possibility for a messiah whose in-betweenness is also ontological. That is, the Markan Jesus is an assemblage of human and nonhuman metaxologically. Here, Méndez Montoya does not neglect to say that this in-betweenness includes and even highlights humans’ interdependence with all creations.Eucharist allows the partaker to enter into a deeper unity between the human and the divine, the immanent and the transcendent. Matter is divinized, but only through its own materiality. Humanity is deified but only in the midst of its situatedness. The bread and the wine become Christ’s body and blood, but without setting aside their edible characteristics of bread and wine. In this sense, transubstantiation is not a mere extrinsic act but intrinsic, a radical expression of divine intimacy and love enacted by the Holy Spirit from within creation and at the core of human flesh. The gastroeroticism that takes place in the Eucharist is this divine desire-love already nourished from within the situatedness of the particularities of creation and local communities.
This instrumentalization of plant life is not unheard of in Mark. In the infamous cursing of the fig tree narrative (11:12–14, 20–21), Mark depicts his Jesus as “someone who was influenced by the colonial and anthropocentric desire to interfere, manipulate, and commodify plants” (Jeong 2018, p. 114). Cursing the fig tree reflects Jesus’ mimicry of the “oppressive temporality that demanded un-vegetal ripeness or the commodification of plant time” (Jeong 2018, p. 114). In the same way, the Eucharist could be misconstrued as instrumentalizing plants by processing them materially and symbolically for human (sacramental) consumption. Even before encountering, attending, and being responsive to the plants, their ontology could have already been exhausted for anthropocentric ends.Through the sanctified human activities of cultivating certain kinds of plants and transforming them into edible or drinkable substances (here, I repeat, we are dealing with a very telling example), the subaltern plant, itself incapable of speech, is represented by and commences to speak with more than one voice and in more than one tongue: it comes to ventriloquize at once the voice of Reason and that of Revelation … and so ceases to be a plant.
In other words, Marder’s ontophytology or understanding ontology from/with plants provides a way to perform the Eucharist that is responsive to the plants. That is, Marder invites us to ask: “How am I to eat ethically?”The use of fruit, roots, and leaves for human nourishment; rather, what it objects to is the total and indiscriminate approach to plants as materials for human consumption within the deplorable framework of the commodified production of vegetal life. If one is to respect vegetal existence, one will facilitate, not restrict, the proliferation of its various ends, not to mention celebrate the lack thereof.
To ontologically reconfigure the Markan messiah as an assemblage of humans and nonhumans is “to eat like a plant” or to be in rhizomatic16 connection with all of creation. Such connection demands caring for the other not just in the plane of charity (or handouts) but constant (re/de)-territorialization17 of the ontological with the other. This territorialization is first to admit that we cannot completely live harmlessly or without depending upon the other for food. Second, as Wendell Berry suggests, “we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament” (Berry 1981, p. 281). The sacramentality of the Eucharist, aside from all of its theological expositions, is found when we, like Jesus, reconfigure our ontology with the (processed) plants. To consecrate is to become (processed) vegetal.To put it succinctly, if you wish to eat ethically, eat like a plant! Eating like a plant does not entail consuming only inorganic minerals but welcoming the other, forming a rhizome with it, and turning oneself into the passage for the other without violating or dominating it, without endeavoring to swallow up its very otherness in one’s corporeal and psychic interiority.
3. Vegetal (Rice) Covenant
Funding
Conflicts of Interests
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1 | Sacrament is a term for Christian ceremonies that reflect an outward sign of inward grace of God. |
2 | I am heavily indebted to Enrique Dussel’s account on the life of Bartolomé de las Casas. See (Dussel 2003, pp. 41–43). |
3 | For detailed discussions on Eucharistic theology (symbolism versus real presence), see (Bieler and Schottroff 2007, pp. 127–55). |
4 | This article primarily employs NRSV. |
5 | For comprehensive introductory texts on the Eucharist and the New Testament, see (LaVerdiere 1991; Kodell 1988; Moloney 1990; Ossom-Batsa 2000). |
6 | After thoroughly marshalling various instances of its usage, Richard J. Ginn defines anamnesis as “remembrance.” See (Ginn 1989, p. 19). For a more political and praxis-inclined understanding of anamnesis, see (Morrill 1989). |
7 | This shift assumes that the author of Mark knows the Eucharistic traditions and their liturgical expressions. This assumption may include Mark’s knowledge of 1 Corinthians 11:23–26’s incorporation of anamnesis in its recollection of the Last Supper. Other scholars argue that there is a possibility for a shift in framework in explaining Mark’s lack of anamnesis. This shift in framework is explained as follows: “We have moved some way from the framework of the Jewish meal and its graces, perhaps to a purely gentile milieu. Those who hold that Mark has preserved the original tradition have to look elsewhere for their models: To ‘the blessed bread of life,’ ‘the blessed cup of immortality, and ‘the chrism of incorruption’ in Joseph and Aseneth, to the Essene meals as described by Josephus (Wars II, pp. 139–43), or to the solemn formal meals at Qumran, of which none may partake until the priest has blessed the bread and the wine” (Jones and Hickling 1992, p. 196). Kodell concisely summarizes various Jewish meals that could be the model for the Eucharist (ex: daily Jewish meals, festive meals, Passover meal, Kiddush, Haburah, Essene meal, and Todah)—see (Kodell 1988, pp. 38–52). Joachim Jeremias even mentions the possibility of tracing this event to third-century Christian groups, the Quartodecimans (celebrates Eucharist by following the Jewish calendar in which it is celebrated on the 14th day of Nisan)—see (Jeremias 1966, pp. 207–18). |
8 | Manuel DeLanda defines assemblage or agencement “to the action of matching or fitting together a set of components (agencer), as well as to the result of such an action: An ensemble of parts that mesh together well.” See (DeLanda 2016, p. 1). Other references/definitions on assemblage are found here: (Deleuze and Parnet 2002, p. 69; Deleuze and Guattari 1987, pp. 34, 38, 67, 73, 88, 90, 97–98, 323–24, 330, 356–57, 368, 503; Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 36; Guattari 2011, pp. 47, 55, 147, 188 and Guattari 1996, pp. 154–55). |
9 | “By ‘vitality’ I mean the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs of human but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own. My aspiration is to articulate a vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans to see how analyses of political events might change if we gave the force of things more due” (Bennett 2010, p. viii). |
10 | From (Bennett 2010, p. viii). Bennett quotes (Latour 2004, p. 237). |
11 | (Hooker 1991, p. 341). Bieler and Schottroff echo Hooker’s sentiments: “The Greek word sōma refers to the physical body, not to a bodily existence outside the present reality” (Bieler and Schottroff 2007, pp. 62–65). |
12 | This expression comes from Moore’s description of the Johannine Jesus as an edible matter. See (Moore 2017, p. 117). |
13 | The feeding narratives allude to the manna received by the Hebrews in the wilderness. See Exodus 16:13–35. |
14 | LaVerdiere alternatively frames it in the context of Nero’s persecution of the followers of Jesus at Rome. See (LaVerdiere 1991, p. 48). |
15 | Moore quotes Aimé Césaire’s use of this expression (Moore 2017, p. 118). See (Césaire 2000, p. 36). |
16 | “Six principle characteristics of the rhizome: (1) Connection (vs. order or model), (2) heterogeneity of coding, where semiotic chains connect other assemblages; (3) multiplicity in determination, magnitude, or dimension (vs. unity in subject or object), (4) a-signifying ruptures of segmentation, stratification, and territory, (5) cartographic production (vs. tracing), and (6) ‘decalcomania,’ in that any tracing (as with a decal that is transferred onto another medium) would be in fact ‘be put back on the map’ because apparent reproduction gives way to asymmetry or difference” (Young et al. 2013, p. 262). |
17 | DeLanda defines territorialization as referring “not only to the determination of the spatial boundaries of a whole—as in the territory of a community, city, or nation-state—but also to the degree to which an assemblage’s component parts are drawn from a homogenous repertoire, or the degree to which an assemblage homogenizes its own components” (DeLanda 2016, p. 22; cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 315; Young et al. 2013, pp. 306–12). |
18 | (Van Iersel 1998, p. 426). The shedding of blood is found in multiple passages that use it for slaughtering sacrificial animal. For example: Ex 29:12; Lev 4:7,18,25,30,34; 8:15; 9:9; 2 kings 16:15. cf. (Van Iersel 1998, p. 426). |
19 | See Jeremiah 31:31–34. cf. (Bieler and Schottroff 2007, p. 61). |
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Jeong, D.H. The (Processed) Vegetal Body and Blood of the Markan Messiah. Religions 2019, 10, 1. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10010001
Jeong DH. The (Processed) Vegetal Body and Blood of the Markan Messiah. Religions. 2019; 10(1):1. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10010001
Chicago/Turabian StyleJeong, Dong Hyeon. 2019. "The (Processed) Vegetal Body and Blood of the Markan Messiah" Religions 10, no. 1: 1. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10010001