Adamic Overcoding

In last week’s post, we looked at the notion of how God, in his neverending creativity, is able to overcode the events of our lives, creating new meaning to those events even if their form remained the same.

While confidently expressing this point, one question some will ask is the dogmatic basis for this possibility.

At first, I simply presumed this to have firm dogmatic basis, but when pressed, I struggled to identify it. The answer only came to me when listening to the Gospel passage from John 6, in which Jesus issues the biblical imperative to eat his flesh and drink his blood (52-59), at mass one morning.

I have heard this Gospel read countless times before, but listening to this Gospel that morning made me remember reading Graham Ward’s reflection on the Eucharist in his Cities of God. More accurately, the relevant passage was the crucial act of naming that comes at the crucial Eucharistic moment, in which Christ takes bread and says “this is my body”.

Ward focuses on the way in which this act of naming could and should jar the hearer, especially given that our naming relies on collective perception, consensus and memory. “To call ‘bread’ ‘body’”, says Ward, is to jar that collective perception, consensus and memory"; it is an interruption to the normal working of things, what Walter Benjamin called a “messianic cessation of happening” of the things in this world.

Put more constructively, Ward says this that to call ‘bread’ ‘body’ is an act of renaming world. More provocatively, he calls this an “adamic act" and “an act at the origins of the world” (84). Ward recalls the acts of naming that Adam undertook when God presented the animals he created.

Acts of naming are more than the slapping of labels onto inert substances; in the Christian tradition, acts of naming are also acts of identifying the very essence of that which is named, which made the first Adam, in the act of naming the animals, a participant in God’s creative act.

In calling ‘bread’ ‘body’, another act of Adamic naming is undertaken by Jesus, the second Adam. The difference here is that this is an act of renaming, and with that, an act of re-establishing a new substance within that which is named. In the same way that the Eucharistic bread, now turned into the Body of Christ, is the transubstantiation of bread into body, what the second Adam introduces in his act of renaming is a re-establishing of new substances into the whole order of creation.

In this renaming, everything in creation, including the events in our lives, are no longer inert, unchanging. In the wake of the second Adam, the substances of all things, including the events in our lives, are subject to renaming, and with that, changed into substances that work not only for our good, but for the good purposes set by God.

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