Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Social Imagination in Early Modern Europe

Sometimes it is best just to give in to the obvious. When I was asked to be part of a series on sacrifice sponsored by the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, my theological antennae immediately began picking up strong signals from the Reformation debate over sacrifice in the Mass. I was initially loath to go rummaging through such a standard textbook debate, on the assumption that it had already been picked clean, but I eventually succumbed to the sheer appropriateness of the topic. Here, after all, is a major, public, and--for fun--acrimonious debate over sacrifice which stands precisely at the transition from the medieval to the early modern. And as I have been recently combining my interests in eucharistic theology with the way the political is imagined, ¹ I thought it might be a worthwhile exercise to see what light, if any, the debate over eucharistic sacrifice could shed on the transition of the European social and political imagination from the medieval to the modern.

Standard theological approaches to the Reformation debate over sacrifice tend to treat the theological issue in abstraction from larger cultural and political changes, limiting the historical nature of the argument to an analysis of previous scriptural, patristic, and medieval theological writings on eucharistic sacrifice. Other approaches concentrate on the economic implications of cutting off the system of mass stipends associated with repeated offering of the sacrifice. ² Yet another possibility is relegating the question of eucharistic sacrifice in the Reformation to the class of essentially intractable theological controversies which led to violence and the consequent necessity of the secular state to keep the peace. ³

By way of contrast, I would like to treat the issue of the sacrifice of the Mass as a theological question with its own integrity--one admitting of greater and lesser approximations to truth based on criteria of the Christian tradition--while simultaneously exploring doctrines of eucharistic sacrifice as metaphysical images which both reflect and shape the social and political imagination of early modern Europe. I am not interested in establishing causality in either direction, from politics to doctrine or doctrine to politics. For the purposes of this essay, I will accept Raymond Williams's judgment that material and cultural production are only formally separable, thus working on the assumption that the way in which a community envisions and embodies sacrifice is part of its larger social and political imagination. ⁴ My explorations will proceed by way of showing the "fittingness" of the rise of the modern social order with certain conceptions or misconceptions of sacrifice in the Reformation era.

I will begin with an examination of Martin Luther's critique of the Mass as sacrifice. Then I will show how Luther's arguments on sacrifice--as well as those of his opponents--serve as a bridge from the medieval to the modern, specifically in partially reflecting the shift from an organic idealization of society to a contractual conception of social processes. Finally, I will conclude with some brief comments on alternative Christian conceptions of sacrifice which do not succumb to the modern logic of gift and exchange.

Receiving the sacrifice

No other sin, according to Luther, not even "manslaughter, theft, murder or adultery is so harmful as this abomination of the popish Mass." ⁵ To call the Mass a sacrifice is to deny Christ's sacrifice, yet the papists fail to see "what a terrible abomination the repulsive devil is carrying on every day and everywhere in the secret mass." ⁶ The idea that the Mass is a sacrifice is the third captivity of the sacrament of the Eucharist, "by far the most wicked of all," which abuse has "brought an endless host of other abuses in its train." Luther adds, in a somewhat different tone, "As I have received the truth freely, I...