Truth in Incarnation and Eucharistic Repetition: Proportion Between Things and Mind

Abstract

This article argues that truth can be disclosed and found in incarnation and eucharistic repetition in a proportion between things and mind. Truth as a Christian concept is explored in the Gospel of John, and more specifically in the interaction between Jesus and Pilate, where Pilate at Jesus’ trial asks the question: ‘What is truth?’ The work of biblical commentators is examined in relation to truth in John’s Gospel. The importance of the Word made flesh and its eucharistic repetition is seen as central to truth. This is expanded using the concept of non-identical repetition, as discussed by several scholars, including David Ford and Catherine Pickstock, arguing that Jesus Christ in his incarnate form and in eucharistic repetition calls attention to truth as the proportion between things and mind. The implications of an ontological approach, as opposed to an epistemological approach are drawn in relation to eucharistic theology, with reference to signs (things of this world) and reflective processes (mind) in such a way that where there is a proportion between things and mind, truth is disclosed and found in incarnation and eucharistic repetition.

1. Can We Speak of Truth?

To speak of truth appears to be too grand a venture. To speak of truth suggests that we know for certain. To speak of truth raises suspicion in the minds of speakers and listeners. Some say, ‘There is no such thing as truth,’ but to say this is itself a truth statement, and so a logically implausible argument. To argue ‘there is no such thing as truth’ suggests that such a statement is truer than the statement ‘truth exists.’ The question of truth has, however, occupied the minds of philosophers and theologians for centuries in the belief that if there is no concept of truth, we could not make any statements at all. For some truth is a matter of correspondence, suggesting that a proposition is true because there exists a fact corresponding to it. The proposition that snow is white is seen as true because there is a fact that snow is white. To provide a rigorous, substantial and complete theory of truth, such correspondence must be supplemented with an account of what the facts are and what it means for a proposition to correspond to a fact, and this is where correspondence theories of truth experience difficulty. Another theory of truth relates to coherence, that is, a belief is justified as truth when it can be verified as being part of an entire system of beliefs or where there is a procedure for finding out whether it should be believed or not. This is heavily reliant on propositional knowledge and tends to exclude the idea of mystery in a search for the ‘facts’. Pragmatists argue that a prominent property of truth is selected as the essence of truth and where this essence of true beliefs is a good basis for actions. Apart from these traditional theories of truth, truth can also be seen to involve ‘conjunction’ in the sense that the conjunction explains function or ontological being rather than trying to answer the question ‘What is truth?’. This idea of conjunction is pursued in this article in relation to Jesus’ claim that he was ‘truth,’ where there was conjunction between his divine life and his incarnate nature in the world, and where this conjunction can be expanded to the idea that truth can be found in incarnation and eucharistic repetition in what is described as non-identical repetition.

Truth is central to the Christian faith and was a matter of importance for Jesus, who described himself as truth (John 14:6) and stated that those who listened to him were invited to belong to and to be sanctified in that truth (John 17:19). The question of truth features in John’s Gospel, where Word becomes flesh and lives among humans in a glory that is full of grace and truth (John 1:14). Word becoming flesh is an ontological expression of truth where truth is found in the being of the incarnate Jesus. In the incarnation, there is a proportion between things (in this case the human body of Jesus) and mind (the idea of God being present in incarnate form), such that Jesus Christ is the grace and truth that comes into the world (John 1:17). This coming of truth affects worship and indeed John’s Gospel tells us that true worship is in spirit and truth (John 4:23) where the Spirit of God impels such worship (John 4:24) and where the Spirit of truth testifies on behalf of Jesus (John 15:26), guiding people into all truth (John 16:13). The truth is seen as powerful and makes people free (John 8:32), and it is Jesus who tells the truth (John 16:7).

This coming of truth in its power and in making people free is not known by propositional means alone, but rather in the relationship with the Word made flesh: Jesus Christ. God is ontologically known in Jesus Christ. This is therefore not merely about knowing God through information about Jesus Christ in an empirical or scientific sense but rather the knowing of God through the being of Jesus Christ in a relationship that leads a person to all truth. The way Christ’s incarnate work functions in the world and among people leads to this knowing (John 17:3). Christ brought truth into the world through his incarnate life of service, even to death and resurrection and it is the Spirit’s role to lead all people into that truth as they live in fellowship with God and one another. In the sense we encounter truth in John’s Gospel, truth is a matter of relationship between the incarnate Christ and those who follow him. The distinction between truth as knowledge and truth as relationship is brought out powerfully in the interaction between Jesus and Pontius Pilate following Jesus’ arrest.

When Jesus stood before Pontius Pilate, Pilate asked him ‘What is truth?’. Jesus prepared the way for Pilate’s question about truth by saying he was testifying to the truth, suggesting that his very incarnate presence was the truth. This exchange is recorded in chapter 18 of John’s Gospel and discusses the nature of truth:

Pilate asked him, ‘So you are a king?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’ Pilate asked him, ‘What is truth?’

(John 18:37–38 NRSV)

This suggests that those who listen to Jesus’ voice and follow in his way belong to the truth as they enter into relationship with him. In John’s Gospel, the witness of Jesus to truth can only be grasped by those related to Jesus and his truth and who come to its light, and so John’s Gospel says, ‘But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God’ (John 3:21). Grasping the truth is about being in a relationship with Jesus Christ.

2. Some Biblical Commentary on Truth

Brendan Byrne defines truth as used in John 18:37 in a relational sense as ‘the revelation of God that exposes and strips away delusion and self-centredness and draws human beings into the divine communion of love’ (Byrne 2014, p. 231). There is something eternal about the truth which Jesus proclaims, and which brings the hidden to the light, where Jesus reveals himself as a comprehensible phenomenon. Jesus’ proclaiming and bearing witness to ‘the truth’ was the divine reality revealed to all people by his incarnation, which he says was the reason for him coming into the world. What was hidden is now revealed as light, full of grace and truth. Indeed, ‘Jesus’ mission in the world can be summed up in terms of witness and truth’ (Lincoln 2005, p. 463). Byrne says that ‘the Son who is ever “with God” (John 1:2, 18), became incarnate (literally “was born” John 1:14) for this and entered the world for this: that human beings, who are of the world, might share the (eternal) life of God (3:16)’ (Byrne 2014, p. 231). This truth, or in the original Greek text ἀλήθεια (alētheia), is, says C. K. Barrett, not mere knowledge of reality, dependent upon subjective awareness and understanding, but truth in motion, that is, truth in the living being known as Jesus Christ who enters the world, speaks to the world and who liberates the world and those who hear and experience it (Barrett 1985, p. 538). This suggests that those who hear the voice of Jesus as truth, participate in the divine communion of love, as a relationship, in a way that points away from subjective and empirical understanding or mere knowing, towards a more universal divine relationship. David Ford calls this ‘a habitus of blessing’ which ‘offers hospitality’ through ‘the theological heart of non-identical repetition’ (Ford 1995, p. 376), and it is in the concept of non-identical repetition that truth is found in the link between incarnation and eucharistic repetition.

3. Non-Identical Repetition and Sacramental Implications

Non-identical repetition involves ‘the mediation of the transcendent in and through the immanent’ (Pickstock 1998, p. 25), that is, where there is universality bound up with particularity and where symbols participate in what they symbolise in a real way. David Ford argues that ‘it is intrinsic to Christian faith that it is true to itself only by becoming freshly embodied in different contexts’ where there is ‘the particularising activity of the Holy Spirit—a flourishing of distinctive and different realisations of the eventfulness of God’ (Ford 1995, p. 365). Indeed Ford, speaking of the Eucharist, refers to this as ‘an astonishing scandal of particularity’ where ‘the remembering of this person [Jesus] through this event becomes the context for one’s vocation and the bond of one’s community’ (Ford 1995, p. 368). In so doing, truth, as Catherine Pickstock points out, is found in the ‘proportion between things and mind’ (Pickstock 2020, p. ix). This is so in the Eucharist where ‘the words of Jesus draw extraordinary attention to the bread and wine (or cup)’ and where ‘those elements are drawn into the drama of the occasion with the force of paradox or of the prophetic gesture’ such that ‘the realm of the ordinary has been taken up and involved in the most momentous events without rejection, contrast or competition between the two’ (Ford 1995, p. 371). All this Ford links with the concept of non-identical repetition, as opposed to identical or strict repetition, where ‘the eucharist at its best has been a non-identical repetition which is the characteristically Christian form of universality with particularity,’ and where ‘the past is repeated in such a way that it is fruitful in a new way for the present and the future’ (Ford 1995, p. 375).

Joshua Mobley helps here by reflecting powerfully on symbols and argues that ‘a symbol is a sign that mediates the presence of the symbolized’ (Mobley 2022, p. 1) and where there is ‘a holistic engagement in and through symbols with their hidden source’ (Mobley 2022, p. 2). As such, symbols ‘carry within them the “ontological trace” of their source’ and so ‘symbols manifest in their very being what they symbolize’ (Mobley 2022, p. 4). Pickstock’s idea of a proportion between things and mind means that the Eucharist involves the truth that things, such as bread and wine, manifest in a real manner what they symbolise to the communicant and what the mind comes to see as the body and blood of Christ. The paradox, of course, is that the symbol is not the symbolised in a strict or numerical sense, and so bread and wine are not literal flesh and blood, but a real presence nonetheless in that the symbol operates in what David Ford calls non-identical repetition. This paradox allows for the situation where the signs of bread and wine really convey what they signify while at the same time not being strictly identical with the body and blood of Christ and yet conveying the life of Christ to those who receive them. Brian Douglas and Terence Lovat call this ‘moderate realism’, where signs really convey what they signify but do not become strictly or numerically identical, hence moderate, with the reality they signify (Douglas and Lovat 2010, pp. 847–61). Hans Boersma assists here and argues that where there is a participatory relationship between earthly objects or signs and the heavenly reality, as the ‘earthly objects (as sacramentum)’ receive ‘the reality (res) of their being from God’s own being.’ It is in the non-identical repetition of a participatory relationship between earthly signs and spiritual realities that truth is found. Others, however, see ‘earthly objects possessed of their own being’ (Boersma 2011, p. 75), where there is a nominalist separation between signs and what they symbolise. Such univocity, Boersma argues, ‘renders the created order independent from God’ (Boersma 2011, p. 76), and so severs the participation of one in the other and eliminates the proportion between things and mind, that is, between the symbol and what is symbolised. In such a nominalist analysis, the natural and the supernatural become two distinct orders rather than one that is intimately linked as proportion between things and mind. Truth in such a nominalist and univocal framework becomes a matter of mental reflection and empirical knowledge alone without any need for earthly objects to convey the reality they symbolise.

4. Truth as Ontological Participation

Truth as a proportion between things and mind in the sense of non-identical repetition or participation, becomes a matter of ontological participation in the divine, where the blessing and the hospitality are non-identically repeated, such as in the Eucharist. Truth is therefore less about subjective understanding as knowledge or the property of knowing, but the entering into a relationship where there is the ontological being of the incarnate Christ in the life of the person who listens to truth, which is Christ, and in so doing the person belongs to and is sanctified in that truth (John 17:19).

The word used for truth in the Greek text of John’s Gospel, ἀλήθεια (alētheia), suggests a realm of pure and eternal reality (Barrett 1985, p. 538), that is, universal truth, in distinction from any changing phenomenon or mere appearance of truth known by a person as a fact in a mentalist conception. Such a view of truth has not escaped philosophical reflection, and indeed Martin Heidegger argues for the meaning of ἀλήθεια as ‘unhiddenness’ (Heidegger 2013, p. xii), or the unconcealed, by which he meant ‘that truth is primarily that aspect, or those aspects, of being by which it shows itself to one in comprehensible phenomena,’ or the relationship ‘between Being and beings’ (Pickstock 2020, p. 25), suggesting proportion between things and mind. For Heidegger, the notion of Being (Sein) is hidden or concealed and so things as they truly are (das Seiende) come to be ‘unconcealed’ through careful attention to the world. This implies that things pre-exist and can be unhidden or unconcealed in a process of coming into being as part of the truth. It also implies an idea of truth-as-unconcealing, standing in contrast to the idea of truth-as-correctness, that is, being static and unchanging.

For Iain McGilchrist, this suggests that ‘truth as unconcealing is a progress towards something…never fully seen, whereas truth as correctness is given as a thing in itself, that can in principle be fully known’ (McGilchrist 2012, p. 151). And yet, as McGilchrist observes, truth for Heidegger also involves concealment. ‘Everything that purports to be the truth is, according to Heidegger, inevitably an approximation of true things, things that really are, rather than as we may apprehend them, are in themselves ineffable and ungraspable’ (McGilchrist 2012, p. 151). This means that ‘to have the impression that one sees things as they truly are, is not to permit them to “presence” to us, but to substitute something else for them, something comfortable, familiar and graspable’ (McGilchrist 2012, pp. 151–52). Signs working in the sense of non-identical repetition permit this grasping of ‘presence’ though the use of signs that are comfortable and familiar. Signs, therefore, function as an approximation in the way of non-identical repetition. Signs do not become what they symbolise in a strict or numerical sense (identical repetition) such that bread, for example, becomes a piece of human flesh, or wine becomes a cup of human blood, but signs which work in an ineffable and ungraspable sense, and which can be the vehicles of what they repeat, non-identically. Signs then, such as the bread and wine of the Eucharist, convey the real presence of Christ’s identity to the communicant in a way that conveys truth: the truth that makes us free and the truth to which we belong in relationship and by which we are sanctified through the power of the Spirit.

5. Epistemological and Ontological Approaches to Truth

The recent work of Catherine Pickstock is helpful here in distinguishing between epistemological and ontological approaches to truth, arguing that truth in an epistemological approach ‘is an object of knowledge’ or ‘a property of…knowing’ whereas in an ontological approach, truth ‘is a property of…being’ (Pickstock 2020, p. 1). In prioritising the ontological approach in a theological perspective, Pickstock ‘calls attention to truth as proportion between things and mind’ (Pickstock 2020, p. ix). Such an ontological approach gives a high place to both things of this world and reflective mental processes and as such has important ramifications for sacramental theology in that it embraces both the use of outward signs and propositional reflection on those signs: proportion between things and mind. This is what McGilchrist is suggesting when he argues that to see things as they truly are, we need to substitute something else for them, something comfortable, familiar and graspable. The knowing of Christ in an epistemological and objective sense is ungraspable: we cannot grasp or eat or drink the literal body and blood of Christ as a physical reality. All we have in the Eucharist are approximations of his presence with us, where the real flesh and blood are not graspable by the communicant in a literal or physical sense as strict or identical repetition implies. In non-identical repetition, bread and wine are comfortable, familiar and graspable, conveying what they signify in a way that is real, life-changing and the truth of Christ’s real presence with his people. Truth, then, is not simply teaching where the aim is to convey knowledge as matters of fact or to have the correct mindset or propositional theological understanding in a purely mentalist conception. Truth for Pickstock ‘is only possible for God in human flesh’ and so ‘the Incarnation becomes hereby the precondition of truthfulness’ (Pickstock 2020, p. 39). The Word made flesh, the incarnate Jesus Christ, is therefore central to truth as a real live person, Jesus Christ, but is now known in the present in its eucharistic repetition through the signs that allow for proportion between things and mind. This is what McGilchrist describes as ‘the simultaneous hiddenness and radiance of truth,’ such that truth is present in the approximation, which could be seen as the celebration of the Eucharist with its elements, where there is ‘a respectful nurturing of something into disclosure, in which we already have some idea of what it is that it will be’ (McGilchrist 2012, p. 152).

For Pickstock, ‘truth is always subjective, and an approximately true life is one which participates in the life of the God-Man through the sequence of apostleship’ (Pickstock 2020, p. 39). The ontological approach emphasises the relationship and has important implications for sacramentality and calls attention to truth in what Pickstock sees as the proportion between both things such as sacramental signs and the processes of mind. Sacramentality, involving the use of signs, and rational processes are therefore not in opposition to one another but work together in the relationship which becomes the discovery of truth. Remaining in the truth means that ‘one must repeat non-identically, in order to be faithful to the truth, the moment of Incarnation’ (Pickstock 2020, p. 39). This implies that truth is found in graspable historical events where there is conjunction between things and mind. The Eucharist is such a place as an historical event where truth is found in ways that are for ever new and involve ‘an ontological bond between mind, matter and eternity’ (Pickstock 2020, p. 40), and where the comfortable, familiar and graspable signs of bread and wine disclose the hiddenness of Christ’s real presence with his people and so convey the power of his work through these outward forms. It is in the eucharistic repetition that the truth of the incarnation is disclosed and found.

6. Truth as Proportion Between Things and Mind—Returning to Pilate

Truth then is more than a set of ideas or factual knowledge, even though Pilate by his question was seeking an objective definition of truth and imagining that such an objective definition was possible. Rather, truth is a participation in the divine life of God and the incarnate Christ in an ontological sense which involves the subjective nature of relationship. Jesus is not speaking of truth in the abstract or as the distinction between what is correct or false, but specifically in relation to his own presence and being in the incarnation (Beasley-Murray 1999, p. 331), and the way that those who listen to him belong to and are sanctified in that truth in relationship with him. Pilate does not see this and can only pose an abstract epistemological question of the mind, ‘What is truth?’, guessed at in that moment and seeking an objective answer.

Andrew Lincoln sees Pilate’s question as neither ‘sneeringly sarcastic nor as profoundly philosophical but simply as an attempt to evade Jesus’ witness and a sign of his failure to listen’ (Lincoln 2005, p. 463). Pilate’s failure suggests that he does not see or belong to this truth, standing right in front of him, and that, for him, entering into a relationship with Jesus was not ontologically possible, but a matter of objective encounter in which he sought the answer to a question so that he would have the knowledge of it. For him there was no connection between the truth of the incarnate Christ, standing before him as a material being (thing), and the mind. For Pilate, there was no proportion between things and mind in his search for truth. He merely wrestled with the abstract notion of truth in his mind and so utters his sceptical question as a worldly person alone, employing an epistemological approach.

David Ford helpfully observes that focusing on Pilate’s motives in asking this question about truth is the wrong approach. He suggests that it is ‘better to notice how this question works in the context’ (Ford 2021, p. 366). For Ford, in discussing the drama of the trial, the moment does not lead to any exposition in line with the truth that Jesus is. Ford observes that ‘the irony is that Pilate, faced with “the truth” in person, is asking a “what” instead of a “who” question’ and so for the Christian reader, the right question is really ‘Who is truth?’ (Ford 2021, p. 366). In the drama of the trial, Jesus relies instead only on the reality of his eternal and objective presence, his ontology, as truth, and makes no attempt to answer the question Pilate asks. Jesus quite simply, by his own admission and presence, and in the context of his standing before Pilate as the incarnate Son of God, is the ‘who’ of truth, even if Pilate fails to realise it and seeks to know that the ‘what’ of truth.

Pilate failed to see in his limited subjective knowing, by mind alone, that truth was more than an object of knowledge or a property of knowledge alone. Pickstock’s distinction between the epistemological and the ontological approaches has immediate resonances with John 18:37–38 since, for her, truth is the ‘proportion between things and mind’, that is, between Jesus an incarnate being (thing) and the abstract notion of truth (mind). For Pickstock, the ontological or metaphysical approach moves past the epistemological approach to philosophy ‘which begins with subjective knowing’ since ‘such an approach can never be certain that its apparent knowledge has arrived at truth, nor that truths to which it does lay claim are more than temporary circumstances.’ The epistemological approach is sometimes ‘seen as objective, indifferent to knowing awareness, something which should be ideally escaped from, or rendered free from the taint of the subjective,’ but, in fact, it has difficulty maintaining such a position. Such a prioritising of subjective knowing ‘struggles onwards to reach objective reality, often within the confined scope of a concomitant ban upon reaching beyond supposed finite limits’ (Pickstock 2020, p. ix).

This commitment to subjective knowing emerged from what Pickstock calls ‘traditions of scepticism’, where there was a ‘transition from an ontological to an epistemological approach’ (Pickstock 2020, p. 1), often associated with the rise of scientism, or the naïve belief in truth with empirical limits alone where the particular cognitive interest focuses on ‘the reduction of all knowledge to that furnished by the empirical sciences, where these are conceived as an unproblematic reflection of reality’ (Outhwaite 1994, p. 20). Traditions of scepticism also emerge in some forms of evangelical thinking, where there is an emphasis on personal appropriation as subjective knowing within the confines of a personal faith relationship, which works to deny the enchantment of sacramentality. David Brown has referred to this as ‘the disenchantment of the world’ (Brown 2004, p. 5), which, from the sixteenth century onwards, denied the idea of enchantment as divine generosity through the sacramentality of things of this world in a realist framework and instead emphasised propositional thought and subjective knowing. This was the sort of knowledge that Pilate sought. Where this sort of approach is adopted in theological and biblical reflection, then for those who adopt it, they embrace ‘a theology that reflects upon revelation’ which ‘may tend to consider the arrival of truths as extrinsic to a finite realm, and a finite understanding to which they will appear alien’ (Pickstock 2020, p. x). In comparison, an ontological or metaphysical approach, often experienced in the catholic tradition, here broadly defined to include those traditions which prioritise sacramentality and so includes not only the Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions but also the Anglican tradition of Christianity, argues that ‘truth is taken to reside in things and in the mind, and also in the proposition and affinity between them’ (Pickstock 2020, p. xi). This has particular importance for sacramental theology, such that ‘realism ceased to be marked by the notion of what is true in the absence of the mind, while, at the same time, not being idealistically reduced to the mental sphere’ and so there is ‘form between material realities and mental realities’ (Pickstock 2020, p. xi).

7. A Participatory Vision

Andrew Davison also argues for the idea of participation as the basis of a realist analysis, advancing a metaphysical perspective which downplays the subjective knowing of the epistemological approach and its subjective framework and so employs the notion of proportion between things and mind. For Davison, participatory thinkers ‘tend to be objective, or “realist”, over how we know things’ (Davison 2019, p. 1). He therefore argues that there is what he calls ‘a participatory vision’, that is, employing realism where participatory thinkers ‘recognise a depth to things, grounded in their origin in God’ (Davison 2019, p. 2) in things and mind and not merely in the mind alone as rational and propositional processes. The participatory vision does not, however, guarantee divine wisdom, and so he ‘stresses that our knowledge of God fails not out of poverty but out of abundance’ (Davison 2019, p. 2), suggesting that the superabundance of God is far beyond the poverty of anything we as humans can ever fully know or understand by our own subjective means, and so the participatory vision emphasises the abundance of signs rather than their poverty. Our knowledge of God, he argues, must always rest in modesty, although, at the same time, we can come to know the depth of God through material things and so the depth of things in themselves as they participate in the abundance of God. The very being of God is not easily captured by propositional knowledge and is experienced more than being defined as a proposition. The truth, which is Jesus Christ, is not defined by our subjective knowledge and exists apart from us and in a way that we can never fully know, and yet material things given in God’s superabundance convey the depth and truth of God’s being in a way that we can belong to it and be sanctified in that truth (Douglas 2021, pp. 6–21). In the same way, material things, bread and wine in the Eucharist, non-identically repeat the presence and identity of Christ in a way that we can never fully know and yet we become aware of the superabundance of God’s gift to those who receive it.

Pickstock, emphasising the objectivity of such a realist framework, criticises the type of theology that tries ‘to ground belief in a surety of understanding, and yet has assumed that the guarantee of the purity of objects of belief is their objective indifference to subjective inflection and shared affinity within the believer.’ For Pickstock, ‘such an approach has impossibly attempted to ascend to the heavens, forgetting that Jacob’s ladder must first be let down to us.’ The ladder of which Pickstock speaks is ‘”philosophical” participation and “theological” revelation,’ where the reality of gift ‘reveals more than itself’ and ‘calls us back to the source of the giver’ (Pickstock 2020, p. xii). Such is the function of the Eucharist in the way it acts as a proportion between things and mind, where truth as a proportion between things and mind is found in the incarnation and non-identical repetition.

8. Sacramental Poetics

Sacramental poetics (Schwartz 2008, 2014, pp. 469–97; Schwartz and McGrath 2021, pp. 1–17; Douglas 2022) embraces the participatory vision of which Davison speaks, and is here interpreted as that language, broadly defined, and therefore more than speech and text, operating propositionally in the mind, but also as signs, material and creaturely things, which point beyond themselves, to the divine: to truth. Sacramental poetics refuses to be weighed down by polemics. In so doing, sacramental poetics explores how people come to know the abundance of God, where sacramental signs in a realist analysis can be vehicles of God’s abundant grace by participating in the life of God, or rather, more accurately, by God participating in signs and creatures. This means that the initiative is with God to not only create but also to use the sign or creature as a vehicle of grace and truth. Sacramental poetics therefore embraces the Eucharist as the proportion between things and mind.

Williams (2007), using the sacramental poetic of participatory, non-identical repetition, argues that ‘in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel on “the bread that comes down from heaven” seems to be more to do with a kind of extension of the reality of Jesus’ presence to the bread and wine’ (Williams 2007, p. 116) in such a way that the signs of the Eucharist convey the reality of the body and blood of Christ. This sixth chapter of John’s gospel sees Jesus’ flesh and blood as ‘true food’ and ‘true drink’ (John 6:55), making a link with the Eucharist and the reception of the body and blood of Christ through the signs of bread and wine. The particulars or the signs of the Eucharist, however, and the particulars of Christ’s body and blood are not numerically or strictly identical, even though the signs share a strict identity of nature. The life and identity of Christ, Christ’s nature, are therefore to be found in both his literal body and blood and in the signs of the Eucharist, but the signs of the Eucharist, the bread and wine, can never be strictly identical with his literal body and blood in the sense that bread cannot turn into or be strictly identical with flesh and wine cannot turn into or be strictly identical with blood, or involve any change in the substance of the bread and wine as the doctrine of transubstantiation proposes. Transubstantiation argues that the substance of the bread and wine are replaced by the substance of Christ’s body and blood, but not in a physical manner. The metaphysical change in substance is crucial to the doctrine of transubstantiation. Williams, in his analysis, and the position of this paper is that instead of a change in substance, emphasises the idea of truth in incarnation and its eucharistic repetition, the signs of the Eucharist function as truth in the proportion between things and mind, where the signs disclose the reality of what they signify. The life and identity of Christ can, however, be present as a sacramental poetics, a non-identical repetition, in the signs of the Eucharist. Williams says, in excluding any fleshy realism implied by numerical or strict realism (identical repetition), while at the same time attempting to affirm identity of nature as a sacramental poetic, that:

The force of the Gospel text… seems to be more to do with a kind of extension of the reality of Jesus’ presence to the bread and wine. They too bear and communicate the life of Jesus, who and what he is. By eating these, the believer receives what the literal flesh and blood have within them, the radiant action and power of God the Son, the life that makes him who he is.

(Williams 2007, p. 116)

Williams is here embracing the proportion between things and mind in relation to eucharistic theology while at the same time advancing a realist participatory vision as an ontological approach to truth.

It is in such an analysis of non-identical repetition that Christians are called to enact the whole action of the Eucharist, not simply as a memory of or knowledge about Jesus, but rather as the making present of the Lord in the community of faith and where the effect of his death is made new again (anamnesis) and through signs in liturgical celebration and worship. This is what Ford has called the ‘habitus of blessing’ and ‘offer of hospitality’ (Ford 1995, p. 376), received in the Eucharist, and which both Ford and Pickstock call ‘non-identical repetition’. It is here that transformation occurs as Christ, the truth, is relationally known in the non-identical repetition of the incarnation and received in a way that involves much more than mere knowledge of a past and completed event.

As Jesus stood before Pilate, he was truth in his incarnate form. The same proclamation of truth is found, as Pickstock argues, in incarnation and its eucharistic non-identical repetition. The truth proclaimed in the incarnate Jesus and in the Eucharist involves the proportion between things and mind, such that in incarnation and eucharistic repetition, truth is disclosed and found.

9. Conclusions

This article has argued that the disclosure and finding of truth is central to Christianity and to Jesus in his statements as found in the Gospel of John, but that this is more than the mere transmission and possession of knowledge as an epistemological conception implies. The disclosure and finding of truth, it is argued, concerns the form between material and mental realities, where an ontological conception is a proportion between things and mind where there is the offering of hospitality and a habitus of blessing. The distinction is drawn between knowing information about Jesus Christ by propositional means alone and knowing that is based on relationship with the Word made flesh. An ontological conception is inherent in the Gospel of John, where the prologue declares that ‘the Word became flesh and lived among us, full of grace and truth’ (John 1:14), such that truth is found in the incarnation of Jesus Christ and in the relationship into which people enter with him. The disclosure and finding of truth, it is argued, is also in eucharistic repetition, where there is non-identical repetition, with the enchantment of signs conveying what they signify and where the transcendent is mediated in and through the immanent. Truth is seen as ontological participation, where a participatory vision or sacramental poetic discloses truth through signs such as the incarnate Jesus Christ and the elements of bread and wine in the Eucharist. Ontological participation is therefore about entering into relationship with the being of the incarnate Christ as a person listens to the truth which Christ is, and in so doing belonging to and being sanctified in that truth (John 17:19). This truth is found in both incarnation and its non-identical eucharistic repetition. The work of David Ford and Catherine Pickstock is important in the development of an ontological conception which argues that there is a proportion between things and mind, such as is found in both incarnation and eucharistic repetition. This proportion allows a person to remain in the truth of Christ where the moment of incarnation is repeated non-identically, such that a person remains faithful to the truth that is Jesus Christ through the use of graspable signs. Both the incarnation and its eucharistic repetition are seen as the characteristically Christian form of universality with particularity and so have important ramifications for sacramental and eucharistic theology.