The Memory, the Eros, the Salvation

In last week’s post, I mentioned Ann Astell’s excellent essay in Seeing with the Eyes of the Heart, with her piece specifically linking pornography’s effects on the memory, and the subsequent healing of the memory that is needed.

Having finished reading that piece, I went over to Nathaniel Peter’s essay in the same volume, which dealt more specifically with the reception of the Eucharist, in particular its spiritual reception.

While the main foil of Astell’s essay was the Song of Songs, Peters’ main point of reference was the turn of the millenium Cistercian William of Thierry, who wrote extensively on the role of the Eucharist in the monastic life.

One of the most fascinating points that Peters alerts the reader to is the role the memory plays in the reception of the Eucharist. As Peters points out more generally, the fact that a person has a memory at all requires that the person undergo both moral and spiritual formation.

More specifically, and more surprising, surprising, is the erotic dimension William gives to the reception of the Eucharist, which is evident in the eighth meditation of his work The Sacrament of the Altar. In describing the reception of the Eucharist, and making use of the imagery of the Song of Songs, William writes:

When you say to the longing soul “open wide your mouth and I will fill it” and she sees and tastes your sweetness in the great sacrament that surpasses understanding, then she is made that which she eats, bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh. Thus is fulfilled the prayer that you made to your Father on the threshold of your passion…This O Lord is the face with which you meet the face of him who longs for you. This is the kiss of your mouth on the lips of your lover; and this is your love’s answering embrace to your yearning bride who says “My beloved is mine and I am his. He shall abide between my breasts” (195)

A second significant point comes in the importance William places on the memory of the Eucharist. Peters refers to a letter William wrote to the Carthusians of Mont-Dieu in France, and the former’s instruction that the latter take at least an hour a day to

…an attentive passing in review on the benefits conferred by [Christ’s] Passion and the redemption he wrought…(196)

In doing so, William says, one

…is spiritually to eat of the Body of the Lord and drink his Blood in remembrance of him who gave to all who believe in him the commandment: Do this in remembrance of me (196).

As Peters notes of this instruction

Here, meditation and spiritual reception of the Eucharist are effectively identical. Because meditation on the Passion allows a monk to grow in love of Christ and store it in his memory, it produces the same spiritual fruit as receiving the Eucharist in the Sacrament. (197)

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