The Incarnate Purpose: Essays on the Spiritual Unity of Life

by G. H. Percival

The wine was His blood. In an agricultural and vine-growing country such as Judæa, bread and wine were suitable examples of nutriment necessary for the maintenance of physical life. The flesh and blood of men are drawn from the products of the earth, and are resolved into their elemental parts when the spirit is separated by death from the body. Starvation weakens and finally destroys the body, but nourishment restores waste and makes continued manifestation of the spirit possible. Christ's blood had been formed from the fruits of the earth. Now it was to be shed. Sacrifice according to the Jewish law necessitated the shedding of blood. Was not the Feast of the Passover, which He was then keeping with His apostles, a sacrifice of blood? But He announced the institution of a new testimony of His blood which should not only witness to His death, but should show forth the victory of the Spirit over physical dissolution. The symbol of sacrifice was to be spiritualised. Whereas the old Jewish idea of worship necessitated the taking of life and emphasised the shedding of blood as pleasing to God, the spiritual significance of sacrifice was now re-illustrated by Christ's new interpretation of the sacrament of life. The kindly fruits of the earth; the increase of the earth; the bursting forth of vital energy from the earth—was now to yield the symbolism of the communion of life. Not death, but life was to be emphasised as the will of God. The veil of the Spirit was to be lifted, showing Nature as the outer sign of life, as the veritable vesture of God.

It is noteworthy that this interpretation of the rite of communion in no way contradicts the constructions placed upon it by the Catholic Church. Instead, it reconciles certain differences of opinion, and may be seen to offer a point where religion and science may meet in a special endorsement of the unity of Nature.

The doctrine of transubstantiation is coherent and reasonable if prefaced by recognition of God as the supreme Spirit of Life present in all form. It is absence of this spiritual acknowledgment that has laid the teaching of the Church of Rome open to the charge of idolatry. Both before and after the "consecration," the bread and wine are most truly the body and blood of God if Nature be recognised as the vesture of the Divine Spirit. The repetition of the words spoken by Christ at His institution of the rite serve to emphasise this spiritual truth. The idea of corporal union with Christ, obtained by partaking of the consecrated elements, does not adequately illustrate the fact that all life is one, and that all form is pervaded by the same one Spirit of Life. His body and blood is not the only touch-stone of union among men, since the whole of Nature is one communion of life, wherein all creatures are one by reason of their common spiritual source of life. The same principle by which the fruits of the earth built up and sustained the human body of Christ works to-day throughout Nature. Here, indeed, is the outer sign of the sacrament of union, as illustrated in His rite of communion. But the spiritual significance of this kinship of Nature there made evident, although latent in the Roman interpretation of the rite, suffers neglect in practice, and its symbolism is thus in danger of degeneration towards idolatry.

The English version inclines towards the other extreme by unduly neglecting the outer sign of union, thus detracting from the full significance of the rite. It does not emphasise the corporate brotherhood of man, and it does not therefore appear fully in accord with the scientific doctrine of the unity of Nature. In striving to avoid the supposed idolatrous errors of Rome, the rite has been deprived of half its meaning. The Church of England strains towards a spiritual interpretation at the expense of the actual; whereas the Church of Rome accentuates the actual to the neglect of the spiritual. Neither version attains an adequate appreciation of the fact that the rite of communion is primarily a symbol, whose meaning can only be properly gauged by due attention to both its outward sign and its inner meaning. The spiritual is manifested through the actual, as the infinite through the finite. Understanding of essential truth is gained through the senses, not in spite of them. But the word is neither of greater or lesser importance than the thought. Is not the one an expression of the other, as Nature—the vesture of God—is the expression of the Spirit of Life? Thus, in the words of Christ: "I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world: I have given them thy word. Thy word is truth" (St John xvii.).

If God be recognised as the supreme Spirit of Life, love must be seen to be the expression of life, and the perpetuating principle of life. Life is a whole, and the Spirit of Life pervading all form is manifested by the intercommunion of all its parts. Thus, the formation of flower and fruit secure the perpetuation of plant life, with whose existence is entwined the preservation of other forms of life. With higher organisms propagation is achieved by the same principle of sacrificial love, the intercommunion of all forms of life being necessary for the continuity of life as a whole.

Thus considered, love appears as a symbol, the outer sign of the sacrament of life, wherein individuals are united in spirit, and as a consequence of this union obtain increasing consciousness of their immortality. The attainment of such spiritual consciousness entails the subservience of personal identity to the consciousness of kinship with the Whole of Life. Christ's gospel of love, with its repeated assertions of the necessity for self-surrender as prefatory to the acquirement of spiritual joy, finds a parallel in the pursuit of happiness undertaken by men and women in the occurrences of everyday life. Do not the joys of love in its human relations between friends, husband and wife, parents and children, rest on a mutual surrender of self-interest?

The rite of communion can thus be resolved into a sacramental work of art, whose outer sign is love, and whose inner meaning is life. Through Christ's symbolic work of art, the vesture of God which manifests the Spirit of Life is seen to rest upon all form. The symbols chosen by Him to summarise His teaching are of an exact appropriateness. By His illustrations of bread and wine, designated by Him as His flesh and blood, the gospel of love and the scientific doctrine of the common derivative union of all forms of life are brought together and shown to be the inseparable accompaniment of the whole of manifested life. Therefore the declaration, "This is my body.... This is my blood ..." is not only true of the physical relationship which He Himself bore to Nature as the vesture of the Spirit of Life, but is applicable in its verity to every man who, in obedience to Christ's command to "Do this in remembrance of me," comes to recognise in his employment of the prescribed formula the true expression of his own union with the elements of Nature, and his own relation to the supreme Spirit of Life as a child of God, made manifest through love.

Christ's words are not therefore to be repeated only as a quotation of a formula applicable solely to Himself as a being differing from all other men, by reason of a divine origin possessed by Him alone; but as living truth, capable of realisation by every thinking man and woman as an epitomised testimony to the essential unity of all forms of life, a unity manifested in form by the perpetuating principle of love.

This unity of Nature is attested by the intercommunion maintained between its parts through the mutual surrender of individual advantage and personal identity, which sacrifice enables the perpetuation of the whole of manifested life to be carried on.