The Wedding Feast of the Lamb: Eros, The Body, and the Eucharist by Emmanuel Falque (review)

Since 2012, the French phenomenologist Emmanuel Falque’s work has become available to an English-speaking audience through Fordham UP’s Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series. His “philosophical triduum,” completed in French in 2011, is now available entirely in English. Le passeur de Gethsémani. Angoisse, souffrance et mort (1999, available in English as The Guide to Gethsemane: Anxiety, Suffering, Death, 2019) is a study of Christ’s Passion that gives careful attention to the corporality of his suffering and relates this to the universal human experience of anxiety and death. Métamorphose de la finitude. Essai philosophique sur la naissance et la resurrection (2004, available in English as The Metamorphosis of Finitude: An Essay on Birth and Resurrection, 2012) tries to understand the nature of a bodily resurrection and its import for humans living out a corporal existence. The text under review here, The Wedding Feast of the Lamb: Eros, the Body, and the Eucharist, is the final volume in the triduum (originally in French as Les noces de l’Agneau. Essai philosophique sur le corps et l’eucharistie, 2011). Whereas Gethsemane understands Christ’s past taking on of the limitation of finitude, which is is then transformed in the future in Metamorphosis, human embodiment in the present time is the concern of The Wedding Feast. Falque’s 2013 Passer le Rubicon. Philosophie et théologie: Essai sur les les frontières (available in English as Crossing the Rubicon: The Borderlands of Philosophy and Theology, 2017) which argues for a harmonious interaction between philosophy and theology that enables a mutual fruitfulness, serves as a Discourse on Method to his entire project, although it was composed after the triduum was complete.

In each work, Falque, Honorary Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the Catholic University of Paris, speaks comfortably and competently about both philosophy and theology, seemingly never self-conscious of his movement between the two disciplines. Falque elegantly carries out the task Augustine encourages in De doctrina Christiana: claim for our use whatever thoughts are true, regardless of their origin, just as the Hebrews plundered gold from the Egyptians. Indeed, The Wedding Feast of the Lamb quickly slips between discussions of Tertullian, Irenaeus, and the Gospel of John to inquiries into Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, harvesting from these thinkers many of their fruitful insights. He thus employs a wide variety of sources in what he identifies as a “philosophical study of the body and the eucharist” (xxv), successfully responding to John XXIII’s injunction at the beginning of Vatican II to present the Christian mysteries through the “literary forms of modern thought.”

After an insightful analysis of the Van Eyck brothers’ well-known altarpiece at Ghent, Falque begins his “descent into the abyss,” an attempt to probe the mystery of Freud’s unconscious or Kant’s “mass of sensations”—what Falque calls chaos or tohu-bohu— a Hebrew term used in Genesis 1 to describe “formless and void.” He identifies this tohu-bohu as a characteristic feature of the “animality” that was taken on by Christ in the Incarnation. The Lord takes on our animality without taking on “bestiality,” as there is no trace of sin. But in forgetting the bodily nature of the Incarnation, one runs the further risk of angelizing or over-spiritualizing the Eucharist, missing the corporal nature of the Sacred Species.

Falque then studies the relationship of eros to agape. He rejects both a univocal treatment of the two (which reduces charity in such a way that it leaves nothing specific to God) or an equivocal treatment (which risks a dangerously distant separation of divine charity and human love). Rather, he puts forth the transforming power of agape for eros, especially in the context of marriage. Along with Benedict XVI, Falque believes there is no fulfillment of marital eros without the guiding hand of God’s agape. So too...