The Eucharist and Catholic Social Teaching, Part 8: God in Things and People: Commodity Fetishism and the Eucharist

Episode Topic: God in Things and People: Commodity Fetishism and the Eucharist 

One of the pathologies that produce poverty in the current economic system is the simultaneous deification of things and reification of people: we invest divinity in material things, while people are treated as instruments toward profit. William T. Cavanaugh explores the Eucharist as an antidote to this idolatry. The Eucharist provides a better, sacramental way of seeing God's presence in the material world, while simultaneously offering an identification of people, especially the poor, with God in Christ.

Featured Speakers:

• William T. Cavanaugh, Ph.D., Professor of Catholic Studies and Director of the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology at DePaul University 
• Jenny Newsome Martin, Ph.D., Department of Theology, University of Notre Dame

Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: https://go.nd.edu/831a80.

This podcast is a part of the ThinkND Series titled The Eucharist and Catholic Social Teaching. 

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Transcript

William T. Cavanaugh 0:06

It's really good to be here again on campus and be among friends. The Eucharist is many things, but, one of the things it is a profound reflection on and practice of the relationship between. Humans and God and the material world. And Catholics, I think, have not always been good making those connections. There's also, there's often a kind of divide in parishes between, the kind of Eucharistic adoration crowd on the one hand and the social justice crowd on the other hand, for a certain kind of Catholic. The point of the Eucharist is transcendence of the material world, a kind of evacuation of substance, the breadness of the bread and the wineness of the wine, and its replacement with Christ. And so the Eucharist is a kind of miraculous portal for the individual soul to achieve spiritual oneness with God. For another kind of Catholic, this sounds like escapism. Eucharistic piety, if it's to be relevant, needs to be translated into a symbol for more pressing ethical concerns, and the first type of Catholic, suspects that the second is secularizing the Eucharist, reducing it to mere worldly concerns, and the second type of Catholic suspects the first type of collusion with injustice, of fiddling while the world burns. So what I'm hoping to do in this lecture is, and it sounds like people have been doing this in this lecture series before me, is present a view of the Eucharist that is simultaneously transcendent and deeply implicated in the material world. So both worships the presence of God, in the elements and is also directly relevant to the day to day realities of our economic system. So I'm going to do that by talking about the fetishism of commodities, that is, investing of divinity into, material things. And this is famously associated with Karl Marx, but I'm going to argue that it's a theme that's found at least implicitly in Catholic social teaching as well. But the investment of divinity in the material is also precisely what's at stake in the Eucharist. And so I want to explore the possibility that the Eucharist provides a better practice of God in things that can help heal some of the distortions produced by commodity fetishism. So I'm going to begin. by exploring the theme of commodity fetishism, both in Marx and in Catholic social teaching, and then turn to sacramental theology and suggest that a worthy practice of the Eucharist can help restore the fractured relationships among God and people and material things. Commodity fetishism. I think we misunderstand Marx's famous idea of commodity fetishism if we think of it as a manifestation of materialism, an obsession with things and favoring the material over the spiritual. For Marx, commodity fetishism is the opposite of materialism. In a capitalist economy, he writes, things have double lives, so a table is useful for writing on, but it can also be sold in the market. And as a commodity in the market, what matters is not what it can be used for, but its exchange value, how much money it can fetch. So its materiality is transcended. Quote, as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. End quote. And to grasp what Marx is saying here, think about what it's like when farmers dump milk, in order to support the price of dairy, or when the government, warehouses cheese in order to support the price of dairy. What matters is not the material nourishment that these products could give to hungry people, what matters is their exchange value. So the commodity is dematerialized by the market. It's, as Mark says, a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So besides a product's use value, the other thing hidden by a commodity is the labor that went into its production. So the social relationships among human beings that go into the production of things, right? Who's working for whom, under what conditions, for what pay, and so on. All of that is hidden, and all we see are products that enter into relationships of exchange with one another and with consumers. And Marx says it is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves, which assumes here for them the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There, the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hand. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor as soon as they are produced as commodities. Now, by fetishism, Marx doesn't simply mean obsessing about material things, he's using a term that was first pejoratively used by Portuguese colonizers for the ritual wooden objects used by certain African peoples. as if the rosaries and the scapulars that the Portuguese themselves carried had nothing in common with these things, right? Marx uses the term to describe the way that capitalism invests powers in material things. that appear to give them agency beyond human control. The actual humans that make the items at the same time are subjected to market forces. Commodities, in short, appear as the purchasers of persons. It's not the worker who buys the means of production and subsistence, but the means of production that buy the worker to incorporate him into the means of production. And he calls this the conversion of things into persons and the conversion of persons into things. And that's a really important phrase that I'm going to come back to. So the symmetrical deification of commodities and reification of human beings, and that exchange is central to what he calls alienation. Marx wrote, of course, before the full emergence of a consumer society, But what he's writing about here can be illustrated by looking at Amazon. When one shops online, all we see are images of products with prices and reviews and the people are gone, right? The people are absent, and any information about where people work, under what conditions they work, what they're paid, what the environmental consequences are, and so on. All of that has been eliminated from our view. All we see are products, and with one click, they can be summoned to appear on our doorstep. Abracadabra. Without having any contact, even virtually, with human beings. And so the Amazon packages wear a smile. On the commercials, they sing and dance. So things have been converted into persons, as Mark says. And this process really takes flight in the 19th century until the industrial revolution, people made most of the things they had, or they knew the person who made them, and even after the shift to a cash economy, You basically, stores sold generic goods. So you would scoop oats out of a barrel. you would, buy a shirt. You wouldn't buy a Calvin Klein shirt, right? This begins to change in the 1880s when you get the appearance of the Quaker Oatsman, and from then on products take on life. Tony the Tiger and Kylie Jenner and the great old, Oscar Mayer commercial from the 1970s, right? My baloney has a first name. If you're over 50, sing it along with me, right? yeah, so there's, and there's an extensive scholarly literature on animism, brand personality, anthropomorphism, fetishism in consumer products. So why, right? Why does my baloney have a first name? scholars think that once, products are disembedded from social relationships, right? Once we no longer knew, the producer or the person selling the, the item, advertising encourages us to develop relationships With products or brands. So the human need for relationship is transferred to things in order to better sell products. So we relate to commodities and this has the added advantage of dampening our curiosity about the people that actually make the products and deliver them to us, but if we peek behind the consumer society, We'll see that the people are still there, despite all of the effects to make the efforts to make them disappear. Globalization has moved much manufacturing overseas, far from our view. Transnational corporations seek places where they can pay the least and be free from labor and environmental regulations. The minimum wage for garment workers in Sri Lanka, where a lot of our clothes are made, is now 54 per month. Which is about an eighth of what the living wage is in Sri Lanka. outsourcing means that the corporations that brand and sell their products. don't have often direct oversight or knowledge of the manufacturing process. And that's not a bug, that's a feature of the system. A lot of corporations deliberately distance themselves from knowledge of this. And so rivers in Bangladesh and China have turned black and red and blue. from the garment industry's waste, one environmental cost of our colorful wardrobes. And the environmental costs of growing and mining the materials used in manufacturing are often even worse, but all of that is beyond what we see. but even if we don't go that far abroad, much closer to home, the hidden nature of labor becomes apparent. even the minimal human contact involved in buying items at a store has been greatly diminished by online shopping. Thousands of stores and other small businesses have gone out of business or been forced to sell through Amazon marketplace. Amazon is not just the disproportionately huge actor in the market, it actually owns the market, in this way. In an Amazon warehouse, unlike in a store, there are no, there's no downtime, there's no waiting for customers to come, no chit chat with co workers or customers. Amazon Fulfillment Center workers are monitored by handheld scanners, so 19 seconds to pick the next item four aisles over. Bathroom breaks and other drags on productivity are punished. Injury rates and turnover at Amazon warehouses are twice the industry average. A third of Amazon workers qualify for SNAP food assistance. In 2020 a year when Jeff Bezos's net worth increased by$67 billion, that's$183 million per day. Amazon reported its workers median annual salary was 28, 848, meaning half of their workers aren't less than that. According to an extensive series of reports in the New York Times in 2021, human resources at Amazon are highly automated, with humans absent from most decisions to hire, manage, discipline, and fire workers. According to James Bloodworth, who worked at an fulfillment center, it was all obsessed with productivity. People were told off for taking five minutes to go to the bathroom. They started treating human beings as robots. Essentially, if it proves cheaper to replace humans with machines, I assume they will do that. Now, all of that, I hope puts flesh on the twin notion of the conversion of things into people and the conversion of people into things. And that is not only Marx's concern, but I think also captures a central dynamic in Catholic social teaching. Marx himself, of course, uses biblical language, identifying capital with the beast of the Book of Revelation, and with Moloch, the Canaanite god associated with child sacrifice. But the idea in Marx that inanimate objects come alive by taking life from us was found long before Marx in the Bible, in the critique of idolatry. Isaiah 6, for example, those who craft idols out of wood and stone become as deaf and dumb and mute as their creations, although they imagine that their creations take on life. In Isaiah 44, a man uses half a block of wood to cook his dinner and the other half to make an idol to which he bows down and pleads, Save me, for you are my God. And although he imagines that the idol lives, in fact, it drains life from him. The narrator comments, all who make idols are nothing. Likewise, Psalm 135, the idols of the nations are silver and gold. The work of human hands, they have mouths, but they do not speak. They have eyes, but they do not see. And so on those who make them and all who trust them shall become like them. So the attribution of life to inanimate objects steals life from humans. this is a theme that you find in the Bible long before Marx. Pope Benedict XVI referred to this exchange in his commentary on Psalm 135, adding, This description of idolatry as false religion clearly conveys man's eternal temptation to seek salvation in the work of his hands, placing hope in riches, power, and success, and material things. In Centesimus Annus, Pope John Paul II warns of the idolatry of the market. that's a quote. I'll quote, The idolatry of the market, an idolatry which ignores the existence of goods. which by their nature are not and cannot be mere commodities. End quote. And no pope has been more insistent than Pope Francis on critiquing the elevation of material things into gods. His first encyclical, Lumen Fidei, makes clear that abandoning belief in God does not mean abandoning belief, but rather the proliferation of gods. He says, An aimless passing from one lord to another. Those who choose not to put their trust in God must hear the din of countless idols crying out, Put your trust in me. Francis frequently uses the language of idolatry when he talks about the current economic system. He decries, and these are just some quotes, it's all over, his speeches. Idols of profits and consumption, the road of covetousness, which ends in idolatry. We are subject to an idol called money. He talks about this God money, Dios Dinero. Our economic system, in Francis thought, is not secular. In Evangelii Gaudium, Francis refers to a deified market and the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system, and he says we have created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and above all their lack of real concern for human beings. Man is reduced to one of his needs alone, consumption. Furthermore, the elevation of material things to the status of divinities is accompanied necessarily by the degradation of the human person to the status of things. The death of human beings is what gives life to these new gods. And so Francis denounces, quote, The economic model which is idolatrous, which needs to sacrifice human lives on the altar of money and profit, end quote. So this language of idolatry and deification of material things I think is powerful for several interrelated reasons. First, it makes clear that the problem is not materialism as such. It's not the rejection of the spiritual for the material. It's instead a kind of, injection of spirituality into the material. A consumer culture transfers a kind of spirituality to the material. There's a migration of the holy in which people seek transcendence and material things. And secondly, the language of deification is also useful because it makes clear That the problem is not simply people having bad values. The problem is rather, it's more systemic, right? We're all enmeshed in this. The entire system has been arranged so that the relations of production, the humans have been disappeared, right? That's a term, used in Latin America to talk about a different kind of disappearance, right? But, but relevant here, I think as well. We spend our days immersed in marketing, building relationships with brands and products. Because labor has been disappeared and we're subjected to this, as to a God over which we have no control. And in a world in which there's growing inequality, the sense in which people are subjected to this God is varied. For consumers with money to spend, I think there is a sense of alienation. John Paul II talks about this in Centesimus Annus, and he rejects Marxism, but he says, There is, a kind of alienation, in Western countries. Quote, This happens in consumerism when people are ensnared in a web of false and superficial gratifications rather than being helped to experience their personhood in an authentic and concrete way. End quote. Personhood is a central theme for John Paul II. A person has dignity not because they have autonomy as in Kant. nor because they have money, which is the situation de facto today, but rather because they're capable of loving and being loved by God and by others. Before he became Pope, Karol Wojtyla defined the norm of personalism in this way, quote, The person is a good toward which the only proper and adequate attitude is love. End quote. So a person who relates to things rather than people has lost some of their humanity. Pope Francis referred to the depersonalization in a speech to economists and financiers in which he compared being a cog in the economic system to being passed through an organizational still such as those for making grappa. He says just as what results is no longer wine, the person passes through this still and ends up losing humanity and becoming an instrument of the system and when humanity is not at the center, another thing is at the center and the human person is at the service. of this other thing. I think he's being a little hard on grappa there, Frank. I don't know what he's got against grappa. Grappa is a perfectly good thing, but anyway, you get the idea. his main concern though is not managers or consumers, but the people who are excluded from sharing in the economic abundance. So the throwaway culture is a theme to which Francis often returns. It's a central metaphor that refers to trashing The earth's resources, but also the discarding of people. The metaphor captures the treatment of persons as things, to treat others as mere objects, he says. For Francis, the throwaway of human beings can refer to the exploitation of labor for profit, it can refer to the premature death of millions of poor people, to the status of migrants, to forced labor, to racism, to abortion, a host of other economics and social problems. In Evangelii Gaudium, Francis writes, quote, Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a throwaway culture which is now spreading. And he continues on to say it is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new. And so he expands the category beyond Marx. The excluded are not only the exploited, but the outcast. In other words, sometimes for some people, the only thing worse than having a job in a sweatshop is not having a job in a sweatshop, right? robotics and artificial intelligence are making increasing numbers of people redundant. And so when the ideal is more consumption and less work, the reality is a small inner circle of consumers and their commodities. and a vast expanse of discarded humanity whose labor is not even necessary anymore. Okay, so now I'm going to turn to the Eucharist. We've examined this dynamic of the deification of things and the reification of people, so I want to suggest that the Eucharist offers resources for countering both of these dynamics. And it should be said that Catholic, Catholic social teaching has not always been very good at making this connection explicit in the, amongst the encyclicals that are, commonly referred to as social encyclicals. other than Solicitude race sociologists and Lato C there's not a single reference to the Eucharist. so that's something that I think needs to be, worked on. So I'll talk first about the healing of the deification of things. One possible response to the deification of things would be to separate God from things, right? The spiritual for the material, opt for the spiritual against the material. And if that's the goal, then the Eucharist is counterproductive, right? Because it makes a radical identification of materiality with God. The claim that this particular bread and wine is Christ. Body, blood, soul, and divinity. If fetishization Is the investment of divinity into material form the Eucharist would seem to qualify, right? Which would explain, I think, the insistence in some Christian traditions that the Eucharist is only a symbol. Charles Taylor has traced the advent of secularization to certain reformers attacks. On the materialization of God as a kind of idolatry. Catholics have insisted on the other hand that the Eucharist is not the degradation of God, but the elevation of the material from mere matter to a sacramental portal to the divine. But at the same time, a sacramental view prohibits treating things as God. Because a true sacrament is not an end in itself, but points beyond itself to God. So the Eucharist is a participation in the Incarnation and is therefore certainly an elevation of matter. As John Paul II writes, the Word who became flesh imbues matter with a saving potential which is fully manifest in the sacraments. The elevation of matter is not for its own sake, however, but rather for the restoration of right relationships of people to God and to other people in the created order. And so he continues, to those who seek a truly meaningful relationship with themselves and with the cosmos, So often disfigured by selfishness and greed, the liturgy reveals the way to the harmony of the new person and invites them to respect the eucharistic potential of the created world. It's a wonderful phrase, the eucharistic potential of the created world. That world is destined to be assumed in the Eucharist of the Lord in his Passover, present in the sacrifice of the altar. So that phrase, the eucharistic potential of the created world indicates that not all Material things are rightly ordered, but they have the potential of being brought into relationships that order them. Commodity fetishism, as we've seen, extracts commodities from their context in God's created order and in the social relations of production. The Eucharist by contrast, is by contrast, is meant to offer both the fruit of the vine and the work of human hands. as a sacrifice of praise to God. as Joseph Ratzinger has written, the elements of the earth are transubstantiated, pulled, so to speak, from their creaturely anchorage. grasped at the deepest ground of their being and changed into the body and blood of the Lord. The new heaven and the new earth are anticipated, but it's not only the elements of the earth, what we call nature, that's elevated in the Eucharist. As Benedict XVI also writes, to develop a profound Eucharistic spirituality, that is also capable of significantly affecting the fabric of society. The Christian people, in giving thanks to God through the Eucharist, should be conscious that they do so in the name of all creation, aspiring to the sanctification of the world and working intensely to that end. The Eucharist itself powerfully illuminates human history and the whole cosmos. The Eucharistic form of life can thus help foster a real change in the way we approach history. and the world. So the popes have been critical of this idolatry of material things, the elevation of things into gods, but also the reduction of things to raw material just to be used as we see fit. Pope Francis Laudato Si seeks the antidote to both of those things in a kind of prayerful contemplation in which, as the title of the encyclical indicates, God is praised in and through God's creation. So material creation is neither an end in itself nor dead matter that's used to feed our desires, but we're rather to see the beauty of the divine pulsing in the creation that God has made. So he writes in Laudato Si, quote, This universe unfolds in God who fills it completely. Hence there is a mystical meaning to be found in a leaf. In a mountain trail, in a dew drop, in a poor person's face. The ideal is not only to pass from the exterior to the interior to discover the action of God in the soul, but also to discover God in things. And note the refusal here to separate nature from humanity, the leaf from the poor person. So he emphasizes further that it is in the Eucharist that all that has been created finds its greatest exaltation. The Eucharist is an anticipation of the sanctification of all matter, a time when all of creation is brought into harmony with God and with one another. And so Francis continues, in the Eucharist, fullness is already achieved. It is the living center of the universe, the overflowing core of love and inexhaustible life. Now, the danger of that sacramental view of the world is that it can remain just aesthetics, right? Look at all the pretty flowers, right? and not, enter into the ugly world of poverty and exploitation and exclusion. And that's why Francis refuses to separate human ecology from natural ecology. He uses the term integral ecology to show that care for the earth can't be separated from care for the human person. The throwaway culture that's trashing the earth. is the same culture that's discarding human persons, and the only way to restore the earth is to heal, distorted human desires that lead to exploitation and exclusion. I don't think we should pit a human centered approach against an earth centered approach. Sometimes you hear this talk that anthropocentrism, human centeredness, is the problem. the only healing approach is a god centered approach, one in which humans and animals and plants and all material things find their meaning in a loving God who creates and sustains them in harmony. And Francis connects the Eucharist in an integral, to this integral ecology, explicitly in his discussion of the Sabbath. And so he says, The Sabbath is a day which heals our relationships with God, with ourselves, and with others in the world. So Sunday, the day of resurrection and the first fruits of a new creation, is a day of rest and celebration, one which steps back from the 24 7 cycle of work and consumption, and we learn receptivity and gratuity. A Sabbath isn't just a waste of time or a cessation of work, but it's that which gives work purpose. The Sabbath, quote, protects human action from becoming empty activism. It also prevents that unfettered greed and sense of isolation which make us seek personal gain to the detriment of all else. So rest from work and consumption reinserts work and things into this context of relationships, with people and God and with other things. Those who are hidden by commodity fetishism come to light, and so he says, Rest opens our eyes to the larger picture and gives us renewed sensitivity to the rights of others. And so the day of rest centered on the Eucharist sheds its life on the whole week and motivates us to greater concern for nature and the poor. And so the healing of, from the deification of things, now I want to talk about finally the healing of the thingification of persons, the reification of persons. If the Eucharist gives us resources for finding God in things while resisting making a God of things, it can also be a practice of resisting the conversion of persons into things. you can see this in the Gospels for Jesus table fellowships was radically inclusive of outcasts, right? The Pharisees complain that Jesus ate and drank with tax collectors and sinners. In John's version of the last supper, Jesus washes the disciples feet. and commands them to do the same to others, a sign of profound love and respect and service toward persons. For Paul, the Eucharist resists the reification of persons by incorporating them into the body of Christ. So in 1 Corinthians 8 through 10, the antidote to table fellowship with idols is table fellowship with the body of Christ. In the Eucharist, the body of Christ is both what we eat and who we become, and so there's this weird thing that happens in the Eucharist, according to Paul, that the act of consumption gets turned inside out. Augustine puts it this way, God's words to us, I am the food of the fully grown, grow and you will feed on me, and you will not change me into you like the food your flesh eats, but you will be changed into me. And so the object of consumption here is not a narcissistic mirror of our own desires. Rather than isolating us into a relationship with things, we're consumed into this larger body in which Paul says, the eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you, nor the head to the feet, I have no need of you. So there cannot be any throwaway people because we're all members of the same body. and indeed were to treat the weakest members as indispensable. And so Paul says, we are to give the greatest honor to the most inferior, members. So for Paul, living eucharistically means sharing food with the hungry. In 1 Corinthians 11, he chastises the community for coming together to eat the Lord's Supper, but neglecting to share their food with one another. The Eucharist is meant to generate an economy of gift, where we gratefully receive what we have from God and continue the circulation of gifts. So the bringing up of the gifts at the Offertory is not just our gift to God, but our participation in the circulation of gifts. That God inaugurates. it's easy to forget this when the gifts is just money. I was a couple of years ago in a village in Nigeria where the gifts, people came dancing up to the altar to bring their gifts and they brought things like a bowl of rice and a yam and a live chicken and things like that. And that's when this whole kind of circulation of gifts becomes, a kind of reality. ignoring the hungry, according to Paul, is not just a lack of charity, but a failure to discern the body. A failure to see that we all participate in the same circulation of gifts in the body. And in fact, we all share the same nervous system in the body. So Paul says, if one member suffers, all suffer together with it. And if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it. Imagine if we took that seriously. Acts 2 describes this unity in economic terms. The early Christians not only broke bread together, but shared everything they had in common and distributed the proceeds to all who had need. So those hidden by our system of production and consumption are not only to be included in this sacramental economy, but sacraments of God's presence. the fetishism of commodities is countered by the sacramentalization of the exploited and hidden people who produce commodities for our consumption. The marginalized as sacrament of Christ is revealed in Jesus telling of the Last Judgment End 1 In Matthew 25, there the Son of Man identifies himself not with those good people who do good things, but identifies himself with the least of these brothers and sisters, those who are hungry and thirsty, strangers, naked, sick, imprisoned, and so on. God comes to us in material form in people, especially the most vulnerable, who are living icons of Jesus Christ. Both those who didn't care for them and those who did are surprised by this. They're unaware that they were in fact the Lord. And so Jesus's story of the last judgment encourages us to see those who are hidden. There is no indication that either the least of these or those who are cared for them are limited to members of the church. All the nations are summoned to judgment. But there's nevertheless a strong congruence between the Eucharist and the story Jesus tells here. Those who would be assimilated to Christ's body in the Eucharist, must see the weakest as the most honored members of Christ's body, and therefore as part of their very own body. So to recognize the presence of Christ in persons, especially the most vulnerable, we, it's not to lose sight of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. In the elements, Christ becomes vulnerable in both the bodies of the poor and in the humble form of bread and wine. in our polarized church, Eucharistic adoration is often divorced from concern for the pro throwaway people and vice versa. And it need not be Joseph Ratzinger wrote a short piece on the reservation of the blessed sacrament in which he acknowledged that the rise of Eucharistic adoration in the Middle Ages was accompanied by a loss in awareness of the communion the Eucharist is meant to affect among people. And so he writes, the Eucharist is not aimed primarily at the individual, Eucharistic personalism is a drive toward union, the overcoming of the barriers between God and humanity, between I and thou, in the new we of the communion of saints. But we shouldn't contrast, he says, a supposedly thing like presence of the reserved Eucharist with the action of eating and communion. The Eucharist is not a thing, but the personal presence of Christ, a person to person exchange, he says. The Eucharist is not the divinization of a thing, but the intensely personal presence of God in things. And so he says, eating it means worshipping it. Eating, this is a quote, eating it means worshipping it. Eating it means letting it come into me, so that my eye is transformed and opens up into the great we. so that we become one in him. End quote. So there shouldn't be a contrast between adoration and communion. Ratzinger points out as well that the reserve sacrament brings Christ's presence equally to the humblest church and the greatest cathedral, and so he implicitly acknowledges the way the Eucharist bridges the spatial divide between the poor and the rich that our economy polices. It's a crisis present. In the garbage dump parish of Payatas in Manila, just as he's present in St. Stephen's Basilica in Budapest. to conclude, environmental destruction is often blamed on anthropocentrism. there's that famous essay by Lynn White, but in some ways our economy is not human centered, it's commodity centered. Commodities are personalized where humans are depersonalized. The Eucharist is meant to be a practice of healing these broken relationships. The Eucharist de centers and un deifies commodities, restoring both material creation and human persons to sacraments. of God's presence. And of course, the Eucharist doesn't do that automatically, right? Without our cooperation, it doesn't bear fruit. Christians remain, in many cases, we are the worst idolaters, right? the reality celebrated in the Eucharist that a renewed creation Doesn't depend entirely on us. Thank God for that, right? That God is at work in creation can liberate us from despair. We often think that we're powerless, right? That the economy is just this big thing over which we have no control. we can take hope because of the Eucharist in the myriad experiments and personalized economies all over the world. Pope Francis extols those quote, cooperatives of small producers that adopt less polluting means of production and opt for a non consumerist model of life, recreation, and community. I think he feels as Dorothy Day feels that if God doesn't do it, it's not going to happen, but God is doing it. And we just need to witness to that. So the point of that type of economy is not a kind of backward looking nostalgia, but rather a forward looking convergence of humans and all creation and the love of God, which is what the Eucharist anticipates. So I'll give the last word to Pope Francis. All creatures are moving forward with us and through us. towards a common point of arrival, which is God, that in that transcendent fullness, where the risen Christ embraces and illumines all things. Thank you.

Jenny Newsome Martin, Ph.D 41:43

Hello, friends. Thank you to Professor Cavanaugh for that very thoughtful, provocative lecture, and especially to Professor Michael Baxter for inviting me to offer a brief response to it. I'm really honored to be here. The accomplishments of this talk It sends a shot across the bow to those who would be tempted to dematerialize and disembody the Eucharist or deny its liberative power in and beyond the polis. It deftly unveils the constitutive strangeness, even horror, of the zombie commodities which daily appear upon our doorsteps, eliding entirely the live contributions of the human labor it takes to conceive, source, produce, and distribute them. It marshals rich biblical and Catholic traditional resources in order to present a compelling alternative vision where the material is elevated, human work is not only made visible, but celebrated, even sacralized. And everyone is extended the invitation to come to the table of giftedness. As the prophet Isaiah says, everyone who is hungry and thirsty, come partake. You that have no money, come buy and eat, come buy wine and milk, without money and without price. The first question that we might reflect upon in light of the discussion of commodity fetishism is the status not only of the commodities themselves, but perhaps also the implicated status of money. When things are changed into commodities, as Marx suggests, they come to transcend sensuousness. Thus money as, quote, the direct incarnation of all human labor, Marx, is at a double remove from the material, resisting misinterpretation that what is really in the crosshairs here is materialism as such. No one who knows me well will be surprised that I thought immediately in this context of the poet and essayist Charles Péguy. If men are allegedly always thinking about the Roman Empire, I am always thinking of the French Catholic poet. Across many of his texts, and especially in his posthumous Notes on Descartes, money is elevated as the symbol of modernity's crass regime of efficiency and transactionalism. Peggy objects not only to the consumer capitulation to the rule of money, the deformative effects of its acquisition, Its uses, misuses, and abuses, but also, and more fundamentally, to its ersatz metaphysical status. For him, money is a counterfeit mediation because it is not an object itself in space or in time, but only the means of acquiring or exchanging for the desired object. It is strangely uncanny, an empty counter object, amassed not as goods are amassed, but as that for which he has sold his goods. It is the sacrifice, end quote. mummification of the flux and freedom of the present for the security of a determined future. Commerce and the worship of money presumes to rigidify, ossify, or freeze everything into buyable allocations that should rather, quote, be supple, free, living, fecund, Non interchangeable, non homogenous, non exchangeable, non buyable and sellable, non countable and calculable. Peggy critiques modern attempts to economize everything, and thus to homogenize and sterilize them, effectively to make them dead and barren. So first, a question we may or may not take up, what if anything do we gain or lose when we consider not only the fetishism of commodities, but also, and perhaps more fundamentally, the fetishism of money itself? Especially in the context of how the Eucharist resists and undoes the modern tendency to economize by, count, calculate, and consume. My second question has to do with the fascinating invocation of what is a very theological word, the deification of commodities. Maybe it is no accident that Marx recurred often to the metaphor of vampires. Capital, he wrote in Das Kapital, is quote, dead labor, which vampire like lives only by sucking living labor and lives the more labor it sucks. The vampire will not lose its hold so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited. Nor is it unremarkable to me that in his critique of the cult of money, Peggy invoked mummies and mummification. Or, even that I was compelled this very day to put the weirdness of commodified things in terms of the figure of the zombie. These metaphors, I know, maybe do something a bit different, a bit darker, too, than either the appeal to primitive fetishisms or to the language of deification. Should we, I suppose I am asking, just call a spade? Appeal to vampires, mummies, and zombies? means that those powers that appear to give material items and agency beyond human control are here not divinities or gods, but their darker counterparts. And at least in the case of the latter, they are scientifically, not supernaturally, reanimated corpses. In a consumer economy, any genuinely living element, chief among them evidences of human life and human labor, are elided. And in this zombified system, the human being, as Francis put it in Evangelium Gautium, is reduced to one of his needs alone, consumption. Maybe it's not brains as such, but with the mindless distance ways we consume, it might as well be. I can't help but think, too, about the vision of the counterfeit horror show Eucharist in the final pages of Dante's Inferno. Lucifer is there, of course, gnawing without consummation and without end upon the bodies of Brutus, Cassius, and Judas. Those Olympic level betrayers who made it their business to economize their relationships only in order to betray them, to turn persons and acts of reification both large and small into things. Scholars have noticed Lucifer's zombie qualities in this canto. He is described as a gigantic, hulking, masticating, undead creature, even as animate death. Sensate matter, neither dead nor alive. Who moobs, bats his wings, drools, and chews. If then consumer culture does in fact imbue transcendence in things, we have to say clearly in the same breath that it, like Lucifer himself, only possesses transcendence and deification in modes which are entirely counterfeit, upside down, and parasitic, animated by that which only brings death and not life. As Professor Kavanaugh suggests, however. A robust theology of the Eucharist denies in its tenacious commitment to sacramentality the possibility of dead matter, even dead matter artificially vitalized. Everything has potential to be truly living, pulsing with life and Eucharistic thanksgiving, and ought therefore to be treated as such. Here we might be well served to consider how Dante's Paradiso unstitches the horrors of Inferno. Instead of the counterfeit, we see not through a glass darkly. But face to face, the living God, what Francis calls our common point of arrival. Dante's paradisal vision of the celestial rose, where all the souls are gathered together in eternal Eucharistic thanksgiving, non competitive praise, and in relations of profound mutual interdependence, certainly witnesses poetically to Cabanat's vision of the convergence of humans and all creation in the love of God, which is what the Eucharist anticipates. Finally, while Professor Kavanaugh quite rightly resists the de evolution of the sacramental worldview into, quote, mere aesthetics, I wonder if there is room for an aesthetics which is not in the order of the mere. Is there something akin, perhaps, to Joseph Ratzinger's darkened aesthetics that has learned with Christ to incorporate profound suffering into beauty that is a cruciform aesthetics? Whoever believes in God, Ratzinger writes, in the God who manifested himself precisely in the altered appearance of Christ crucified as love to the end, knows that beauty is truth and truth beauty. But in the suffering Christ, he also learns that the beauty of truth also embraces offense, pain, and even the dark mystery of death, and that this can only be found in accepting suffering not in ignoring it. Such a thing seems to me to be profoundly Eucharistic. And in keeping with Kavanaugh's lovely reflections on those twin vulnerabilities of Christ, quote, in both the bodies of the poor and in the humble form of bread and wine, a sacramental economy which undoes and reverses and heals a consumer economy. does so in part by that sacrifice and luminous poverty which is at its very heart. To recur to Peggy once more, the poet illumines those free self sacrificial acts of love in the economy of salvation, which allow God to be perceived, seen, read, tasted, handed over in tradition, in time, in space, but also beaten, crucified, misread, ignored, received unworthily. In Peggy's poetry, the infinite God becomes Une tendre enfant laitue, a tender, milky babe, subject to the exigencies of flesh, to the ravages of time, and finally to the cross and to the spear. The infant body of Jesus is held in the hands of Simeon, quote, as one takes, as one holds up an ordinary child, a little child of a family of ordinary men. With his old tanned hands, with his old wrinkled hands, with his poor withered and puckered up old hands, with his two shriveled up hands, with his two parchment like hands, Christ has given his body to the discretion of the least of the soldiers, to the discretion of the least of the sinners. It is distributed daily by our sinful hands in the Eucharist. This of course is a great privilege and a great responsibility, as is the extension of those same hands. Even to the least of these. Thank you.