On the Arts: The Human Body at Eucharist
Deborah Sokolove
Deborah Sokolove recently retired as the director of the Henry Luce III Center for the Arts and Religion at Wesley Theological Seminary, where she is now professor emerita of Art and Worship.
At different times and places, people have sat, reclined, stood, or knelt during Eucharist. Individual worshipers have received the bread and cup from leaders, passed the bread and cup from hand to hand along the pews or around a circle, or served themselves from plates or baskets set on a table. While there are texts that prescribe how individual worshipers should conduct themselves, the evidence for what people actually did in any particular time and place is often found in pictures from that time and place.
Some of the earliest images of Christians participating in worship come from the catacombs outside the ancient walls of Rome. In the Catacomb of Priscilla, for example, there are at least two such frescos, dating to sometime between 100 and 350 CE. The first is generally referred to as the Fractio Panis, or bread-breaking; and the second is simply described as “communion with fish.” In both cases, seven figures (it is unclear whether they are men, women, or mixed group1) sit or recline on one side of a long or curved table on which there are plates with bread and fish. In the Fractio Panis image, one figure appears to be breaking a small loaf, while in the other, one of the figures lays hands on one of the loaves.2 Similar images are found on several sarcophagi of wealthy Christians from the same period. These images of people sitting or reclining at a table laden with bread and fish suggest that participants are eating a real meal, just as described in the letters of Paul.
Following the conversion of Constantine in the fourth century, the physical substance of Eucharist was no longer an actual meal, but rather symbolic eating and drinking consisting of only a piece of bread and a sip of wine. To emphasize the unity of political and divine power, many church buildings were lavishly decorated with mosaics. Among the most famous of these are two images that face one another across the altar in the sixth-century Basilica of San Vitale, in Ravenna, Italy. In them, the elaborately clad emperor Justinian I and his empress Theodora lead matching processions across a golden field, eternally bearing the communion vessels in the form of a golden basin or paten for the bread and an elaborate chalice for the wine. Like the ordinary worshipers who gathered beneath these glittering reminders of who they should thank for the provision of food and drink, and like Orthodox worshipers today, everyone in the images stands as a sign of respect for the Divine.3
Illuminations like the fifteenth-century Communion of Louis IX of France4 indicate that when medieval lay people received communion, they knelt before the priest, signifying their submission to God as they would to their king or local lord. Fearing that a single crumb of the Holy Body might fall to the floor, worshipers opened their mouths for the priest to place the wafer carefully on their tongue. Other images, like the Elevation of the Consecrated Host found in folio 55 in the Rothschild Prayerbook,5 show people either standing or kneeling as they participated in what came to be known as “ocular communion.” For them, it was enough to simply behold the miracle in which the wafer was transformed into the literal body of Christ.
During the Reformation, some churches revived the custom of sitting for Eucharist, either remaining in their pews and handing the elements along, or moving to tables in groups. Elsewhere, the custom remained for people to walk towards the altar to receive, forming a kind of procession. Towards the end of the twentieth century, some liturgical dancers began to argue that procession is a prototype of dance, and some churches have experimented with inviting the entire congregation to take that literally. At St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, a mural called The Dancing Saints surrounds the rotunda above the altar. Completed in 2009 by iconographer Mark Dukes, the icon consists of seventy saints who were chosen by members of the congregation, and includes such figures as Malcolm X, Queen Elizabeth, Rumi, and Ella Fitzgerald as well as more traditional Christian saints. Wearing clothing appropriate to the time and place in which they lived, the saints hold hands with one another while standing on one foot, the other lifted in a posture which suggests a step in the dance. As the Liturgy of the Word ends and the Liturgy of the Table begins, the congregation rises and turns towards the altar, each person placing a hand on the shoulder of the one ahead, echoing the saints above them by dancing their way towards the altar as they sing songs of praise and thanks.6
As these images remind us, there are many ways for the people of God to show their gratitude and joy for the gift of God’s love and forgiveness. Whether they sit or kneel, stand or dance, they present their bodies in order to become what they receive, the body of Christ.
Notes
1. Sarah Cascone, “Does Fresco in Ancient Rome Catacombs Show Woman Priest?” in Arnet Art and Exhibition at https://news.artnet.com/art-world/does-fresco-in-ancient-roman-catacombs-show-woman-priest-270018/.
2. For more on images of communion in the early church, see https://earlychurchhistory.org/beliefs-2/communion-in-the-early-church/; and Gabriela E. Ingle, “The Significance of Dining in Late Roman and Early Christian Funerary Rites and Tomb Decoration” (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2017), Edinburgh Research Archive, https://era.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/25949.
3. For more information and images from San Vitale see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica_of_San_Vitale and “Why Orthodox Christians Stand During Services,” Saint John the Evangelist Orthodox Church, https://www.saintjohnchurch.org/standing-orthodox-church/.
4. Communion of Louis IX de France, in William of St. Patrus, Life and Miracles of St. Louis, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 5716, fol. 61 verso, circa 1330-1340, illumination on parchment, https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_IX/.
5. Anonymous (Ghent or Bruges), Elevation of the Consecrated Host, from the Rothschild Prayerbook, fol. 55, private collection published in Ruben Suykerbuyk, “Parish Liturgy,” 2020, 10.1163/9789004433106_007, https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Anonymous-Ghent-or-Bruges-Elevation-of-the-consecrated-host-from-the-Rothschild_fig2_372028445/. More information and images of Eucharist in medieval manuscripts may be seen in Illuminating Faith: The Eucharist in Medieval Life and Art at The Morgan Library and Museum, https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/illuminating-faith?id=73/.
6. For more information and images of the dancing saints, see https://saintgregorys.org/dancing-saints/.
