The Imagined, the Imaginary and the Symbolic by Maurice Godelier

Author:Maurice Godelier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Here we find what we were saying about sacred or holy objects. They do not represent the divine; they presentify it. The bread and the wine are neither signs nor figures of Christ. To be sure, they are symbols for Christ when they have not yet been consecrated by the priest’s words. But once these words have been pronounced, they are more than that. It is Christ as God who sacrificed himself on the cross who is entirely present in the species and with whom the faithful are going to be able to communicate, to incorporate into themselves.52 As in the case of the boli made by a priest in the service of the Bambara king – who, through his prayers and rituals, made the god present in the object he had made with his hands, and who would help the king be victorious in war – the Catholic priest or the Orthodox pope, through the formula consecrating the bread and wine made by human hands, brings about the presence of Christ in person in the bread and the wine. The presence is ‘real’, because the bread and the wine no longer invoke an unreal, virtual presence, as in play or art, with the teddy bear or the Mona Lisa. They have become not only the container for a god, but the god himself, who, in offering himself to his faithful in communion, reproduces the sacrifice he made of his person by allowing himself to be crucified to redeem humankind from sin. In this, the Eucharist differs in two aspects from all other sacraments. It renders Christ bodily present, whereas the other sacraments contain only God’s grace. Contrary to the other sacraments, it is a sacrifice through which believers communicate with their God, ‘find themselves’ in him, ‘incorporate’ him into themselves.

The religious imaginary thus effects a veritable mutation in the nature of the symbols. This is a fundamental point. Religious symbols are no longer merely material, cultural realities made by humans and chosen to signify the god (his body, blood and soul) and communicate with him. They are transformed by the divinity into a means for him to communicate with humans and act on them from within. It is no longer humans who, on their own, give meaning to their symbols; it is also the god who, through these symbols, speaks to them and acts on them by his presence and his actions. God or the gods add meaning to the symbols invented by humans in order to speak to them, a meaning that humans could not have invented by themselves, a meaning they receive. However, in order to follow this meaning that emanates from God or the gods, we must believe in it. And to believe, in this case, is to believe the unbelievable; not to believe in what we see, but in what we do not see; to set aside the doubts that experience and/or reason can raise. To believe is to have absolute trust in what is said; it is to have ‘faith’.

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