See and Taste the Lord is Good: Ocular Communion as Real Communion

Yesterday’s post on the curious practice of ocular communion included a brief citation that Ann Astell excerpted in her Eating Beauty. That brief citation from Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity and Secular Culture caused the most consternation, because it argued that in medieval practice and popular piety (lex orandi, lex credendi?) ocular communion was considered to be real communion, even superior to ingesting the Eucharist.

Here is a much fuller bite of Image as Insight to give you a taste for these practices:

The engagement of vision in worship and piety, trained for centuries by instruction and practice, was experientially validated for medieval people by its results in increase love and piety. It was also . . . supported by an ancient theory of physical vision that described vision as occurring when a quasi-physical ray is projected from the eye of the viewer to touch its object. An impression of the object, in turn, travels back along the visual ray to be imprinted on the soul and preserved in the memory. In this theory, as we have seen, the viewer is active, both initiating and completing the act of vision in a stored memory of the object.

Vision was thus the strongest possible access to an object of devotion. The culmination of the late-medieval mass was the elevation of the consecrated bread so that it could be seen by the congregation, a practice introduced in the thirteenth century. The sight of the host, the touching of the body of Christ by the visual ray of the worshipper, was thought to have a salvific effect. A sermon on the mass by the late-thirteenth-century German preacher Berthold of Regensburg describes what occurs as the worshipper gazes on the elevated host: “See the Son of God who, for your sakes, shows his wounds to the heavenly Father; see the Son of God who, for your sakes, was thus lifted on the cross; see the Son of God who will come to judge the living and the dead.” Since the wine, the blood of Christ could not actually be touched by sight, the practice of elevating the chalice was begun at a much later date, and even then out of formal rather then devotional requirements.

Understood in the context of medieval popular visual theory, the insistence of medieval worshippers on contact by sight strikes one less as “superstitious” and misplaced seriousness than as a desire by the worshipper to place himself or herself in the most immediate and strong contact with the object of devotion. Viewing the consecrated bread with concentrated attention was considered of equal or superior value to ingesting it, and medieval congregations were often urged by their priests to communicate “spiritually,” that is, visually, rather than physically. Vision was considered a fully satisfactory manner of communicating, so that people frequently left the church after the elevation.

Therefore the so-called “spiritual communion” was considered to be real Communion, even superior to ingesting the Host. At the same time it was considered to be something like ingesting the host–with the eyes! If not that, then at the very least touching the host with the eyes as one might with the hands.

Does this mean that just looking could singe your entire being?

Image as Insight is published by Wipf and Stock, which publishes a large selection of Catholic-interest books (See: my TOP10 list of their great Catholic books)