Liturgy, ritual and truth
Some scattered reflections on truth, inspired by Catherine Pickstock’s philosophical theology
In her latest book, Aspects of Truth, Catherine Pickstock notes how “the Eucharistic liturgy, which represents the event of Christ as the advent of truth, is the theurgic performance and realization of this double vision: the bringing about and recognition of the divine truth of all things.”1 Likewise, in her self-presentation on the Cambridge University web page (under the research tab), she points out that one of her main interests as a philosophical theologian is a “reconsideration of the Platonic tradition (especially with Neoplatonic notions of ‘theurgy’ as the ritual performance of truth).” This phrase, ‘the ritual performance of truth,’ caught my eye, and I think this captures well not just Pickstock’s main concerns around liturgy, but also mine. Her central point is that the ritual and theurgic act delivers and reveals the truth, through performance or enactment. But what does that mean or entail? My aim is not here to present Pickstock’s view but to use here points to reflect on how Christian theology understands truth itself, its delivery, and its revelation.
In John 8,2 Christ states, amongst other things, that He is “the light of the world” and that whoever follows Him “will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life” (v.12). Later in the same chapter, Christ states, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (vv.31-32). And if “the Son makes you free,” He states, “you will be free indeed” (v.36). But how, exactly, should we understand this? In modern and postmodern thought, truth has been defined in many different ways, but usually in a conceptual and/or propositional manner. Some follow a correspondence theory of truth, where certain claims are made and assessed to find out if they correspond to reality.3 And some follow a coherence theory of truth, where truth is found by having the largest sample size possible.4 These systems have their pros and cons,5 but they do not fully capture what truth is. Now, you will never hear from me that truth is not conceptual or propositional, because that is, quite frankly, nonsense. There are true and false concept and true and false propositions. But truth is not merely conceptual or propositional, and not even predominately so. In fact, if you ask someone who’s Christian, they might say that truth is first and foremost a person. In John 14:6, Christ puts is this way: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” The Truth, then, with a capital T, is Christ Himself. But how can a person be truth? Well, that depends, of course, on what we mean by truth.
In order to make sense of the claim that Truth itself can be a person, we need to note that the theories of truth mentioned above are theories of epistemology, of how one may gain knowledge. But these cannot account for it or ground it, because that is not an epistemological question. It is, in the end, a metaphysical – and I would add theological – question. And for a Christian, Christ is not just a human being but the very Logos which grounds rationality in the first place. Truth, then, is a person, a divine person. And if that is true, it must also be true that in order to gain truth, we need to participate in some way in Truth itself. Truth is first and foremost God Himself, and we can be true, and express truth, because we participate in God. But more importantly, Truth Himself became a human being in Christ. To be fully true, therefore, we must be in Christ. In Him, you will “know the truth,” Himself, “and the truth will make you free” (John 8:32). Truth, then, is a person, and we know truth through participation in Him. But how do we understand the delivery and revelation of truth? What ways of communion has Christ revealed for us?
Looking at Christ’s life and teaching, we see three central points; baptism, the Eucharist, and prayer. Christ was Himself baptised, and through His baptism, He transformed the baptism of St. John the Baptist from an act of contrition and repentance to a gift of grace, a sacrament.6 Later, He took bread and wine in His hands, transformed them, and established a rite of participation in Himself. As noted, Pickstock points out that the Eucharistic liturgy, “is the theurgic performance and realization of this double vision: the bringing about and recognition of the divine truth of all things.”7 And He spent time in prayer, in contemplation of God, which can act like a blueprint for our lives. When we pray, we seen unity with God, and we acknowledge that we are dependent on divine activity or energy. Though this does not apply to Christ in the same way as to us, as Christ is God Himself (though He humbled Himself to live like a human being, subjected in obedience to God), I think Iamblichus’s words on prayer might be apt here. Answering Porphyry’s claim that “prayers of petition” are “not suitable for presentation to the purity of the Intellect,” he says:
Not so: for by reason of this very circumstance, i.e. that we are inferior to the gods in power and in purity and all other respects, it is eminently suitable that we entreat them to the greatest degree possible. The consciousness of our own nothingness, if one judges it in comparison with the gods, makes us naturally turn to supplications; and by the practice of supplication we are raised gradually to the level of the object of our supplication, and we gain likeness to it by virtue of our constant consorting with it, and, starting from our own imperfection, we gradually take on the perfection of the divine.8
Through prayer, we acknowledge our place and we are gradually made more like God, though not through our own struggles but through the divine prayer in us, in the Holy Spirit.9 And through this, we become perfect, as our heavenly Father is perfect (cf. Matthew 5:48). Christ, then, is available in very concrete things, not in the abstract, and He is available for all. And this is important, notes Pickstock elsewhere, because ritual, far from being trivial to the human condition, is it’s defining characteristic:
Indeed, rather than appending ritual activity to the normative instrumental activity of the everyday, it is implied that, if anything, it is the other way around. Far from being an aberrant or secondary species of action, ritual can be seen as a typical or defining mode characteristic of all action.10
Human beings are not merely creatures of thought but embodied creatures whose use of reason and intellect is always embodied.11 And if we are first and foremost embodied, living in communities, it makes sense that truth comes to us, and is preserved, ritually and narratively. In other words, theurgy, which is a participation in the divine work, in the ground of intellect and reason, is “the ritual performance of truth.” This shows us that truth is given to us not merely individually but in community. We form traditions, and these traditions preserve, deliver, and reveal truth. But then we must consider the elephant in the room, namely the fact that many of these traditions contradict.
While I would say that some of these contradictions can be exaggerated, this is a genuine concern. And that is where revelation comes in. As has been noted by Pagans and Christians alike, truth, and its ritual enactment or performance, must come to us as a gift. It must be revealed, it needs a divine institution.12 And that is the gist of Pickstock’s point. Truth is revealed to us from beyond, not created by us, but it is made manifest in rituals that have been instituted by the divine. And the chief channel is the Eucharistic liturgy, where Christ is present for us. So pray to God, receive His gifts, and do so to participate more fully in the Truth beyond all things.
Notes:
Catherine Pickstock, Aspects of Truth: A New Religious Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 280-281. Also see her seminal work on liturgy, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). Pickstock prefers using ‘philosophical theology’ rather than ‘systematic theology.’ See this video on YouTube. For my brief overview of theurgy, see this post.
If not otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are from the NRSV. See The Holy Bible: The New Revised Standard Edition, Catholic Edition, Anglicized (Nashville, TN: Catholic Bible Press, 1995).
See J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic/InterVarsity, 2003), 135-142.
See Nicholas Rescher, Philosophical Reasoning: A Study in the Methodology of Philosophizing (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).
See my term paper “Some methodological reflections in relation to my master’s thesis,” made in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the course KMA306.2 at NLA University College, Bergen, spring 2012.
Pickstock, Aspects of Truth, 280-281.
Iamblichus, De mysteriis, Greek and English, intro. and trans. Emma C. Clarke, John M. Dillon, and Jackson P. Hershbell (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), I, 15 (pp.58-61).
For my reflections on this, see Kjetil Kringlebotten, “Christian theurgy and divine indwelling” (Studia Theologica: Nordic Journal of Theology, 31 March, 2023).
Catherine Pickstock, “The Ritual Birth of Sense” (Telos 162, 2013), 31 (cf. 29-55, esp. 31–35).
I make this case in my PhD thesis, pp. 106-118, where I engage Pickstock’s views on the relation between rationality and ritual, showing how ritual can be rational, as it participates in the ground of being and rationality. There, I also engage Crystal Addey, who has shown that rationality cannot be purely conceptual. See Crystal Addey, Divination and Theurgy in Neoplatonism: Oracles of the Gods, ebook version (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 1-42, 171-213, 273-275.
See Iamblichus, De mysteriis, I, 21; II, 11; Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, commemorative edition (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2018), 27-37. Also see Knut Alfsvåg, “Gudsåpenbaring og virkelighetsforståelse: Kristen åpenbaringsteologi i dag” (Dansk Tidsskrift for Teologi og Kirke 42.3, 2015), 203-216 (esp. 204-206); Mark L. McPherran, “Socratic Religion,” in The Cambridge Companion to Socrates, ed., Donald R. Morrison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 111-137 (esp. 122-127).