It is right for a religion to echo its primitive origins

Taking Holy Communion the other day, I reflected how grossly physical religious observance is, even though the progress of humanity tends to turn its more primitive aspects into symbolism. Occasionally I participate in a Jewish Sabbath meal, and find it a calm and decorous occasion, religious ritual at its most civilised. But it is important to remember that such a practice had its distant origin in services at the great Temple in Jerusalem. They ended with a ritual drinking of wine, scripture readings, and the singing of hymns and psalms. But the physical and earthy aspects were tremendous. The Temple, built by Solomon on a princely scale but enormously enlarged by Herod the Great, was a theatre of conspicuous consumption in Yahweh’s honour. For instance, its regular incensing used up annually 600lbs of the most costly material available, made from a secret recipe by the priestly Avtina family, whose womenfolk were forbidden to use scent to avoid accusations of corruption. We now know that the compound consisted of Sodom salt, ground sea-shells, camphor gum-resin or myrrh, a rare cyclamen, terebinth gum-resin or frankincense, spikenard, cassia, cinnamon, gum-balm, saffron and maaleh ashan, a substance which made the smoke rise majestically.

Moreover the incense was essential because of the reek of blood and burning flesh. Two lambs were sacrificed at dawn each day, and another pair at sunset. But on feast days, attended by pilgrims from all over the world, the quantities of sacrifice were enormous. A rich man might order a hecatomb or a hundred beasts. The noise was deafening: screams and bellows of terrified cattle, punctuated by ritual cries and chants and ear-splitting blasts of horns and trumpets. Blood everywhere. One eye-witness description which has survived noted 700 priests conducting the sacrifices, silently handling the heavy carcases with professional skill on to exactly the right part of the altar. The speed at which the hundreds of animals were slaughtered, drained of blood and carved up was phenomenal. The great stone platform was not solid but hollow, to get rid of the vast quantities of blood quickly. It had a gigantic cleansing system of 34 cisterns, the largest, or Great Sea, holding over two million gallons. In winter it stored rainfall and in summer additional water was siphoned from the Pool of Siloam. The water was pumped up through pipes to the platform surface, and sprayed over the altar to carry off the torrents of blood through openings at its base, invisible to all except the priest sacrificers. The eye-witness was amazed at the celerity with which the system carried off the oceans of blood and water.

In Jesus’s day the Herodian temple was still going at full capacity, continuing to do so until the Great Revolt a generation after his death, when the Romans demolished it. Jesus’s Last Supper, marking the bifurcation between Judaism and Christianity, was an attempt to move away from the blood and thunder of the Temple which he found distasteful and wrong like much else in traditional Hebraic religion. He was not the only one: Josephus, writing later in the century, clearly preferred diaspora Judaism, with its symbols, to Zion itself, with its ties to its barbarous origins in the second millennium bc.

Yet the alternative sacrificial meal Jesus introduced is, when you come to think about it deeply, itself a hair-raising phenomenon. On the eve of his arrest and crucifixion, Jesus asked his followers to eat his flesh, in the apparent shape of bread, and drink his blood, in the form of wine, to mark his sacrifice to redeem mankind from the sin of Adam; and he urged them to continue this ceremony regularly in his memory. There was nothing in the Hebrew past to inspire this ritual and it is curious that the apostles and disciples were not shocked (or if they were there is no record of it). Later, when Christianity spread, the Romans were shocked. One of the charges they brought against Christians, when persecuting them, was cannibalism. And among Christians themselves there developed in time an argument as to whether the flesh and blood of the Saviour thus ingested were the actual substance of Christ’s body (transubstantiation) or in some sense a symbolic presentation of it (consubstantiation). This controversy, one of the central disputes of the Reformation, is now dormant if not defunct, and there were some at the time who dismissed it as a storm over words, the truth lying in the intention of the person participating in the sacrifice. Among them was Queen Elizabeth, who was credited with the neat quatrain:

’Twas God the word that spake it,He took the bread and brake it;And what the word did make itThat I believe and take it.

While the Catholics continued to (and still do) believe they were literally eating Christ’s flesh when they received Communion, the Protestants took a less absolute line. But evangelicals, and many of the Nonconformist sects, stressed the Blood of the Lamb in a way the Catholics avoided. Blood, in enormous quantities, saturated their hymns. There is a startling description, in Chapter 12 of Arnold Bennett’s realist novel Clayhanger (1910), of a revivalist meeting round the turn of the century, in which an immense mass of working people under a huge banner, ‘The Blood of the Lamb’, sing Cowper’s verse:

There is a fountain filled with bloodDrawn from Emmanuel’s veins,And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,Lose all their guilty stains.

The torrent of blood, albeit symbolic, pouring down upon that service, so typical of many at the time, recalls the blood rivers of Herod’s Temple, and drove the sceptical and disgusted Bennett, in the person of his hero Edwin Clayhanger, to compare this form of Christianity to a horrible Oriental rite on the banks of the Ganges, the worshippers ‘all gloating over inexhaustible tides of blood’.

Catholics did not revel in this bloodbath. But it struck me as a child that there was something amazing about sticking out your tongue at the altar-rail, and the priest placing on it the actual body of Christ in the form of a host (as we called it). It still amazes me, and sometimes prompts disturbing thoughts. Some time ago, at a Catholic memorial service, I found myself at the altar-rails between Alan Clark on my right, and a famous or notorious princess on my left, both sticking out their tongues; and I could not stop myself reflecting, ‘I wonder where those tongues have been recently.’

A similar irreverent moment occurs in Anthony Burgess’s novel Earthly Powers, when he parodies a Betjeman poem:

Thus kneeling at the altar railWe ate the word’s white papery wafer.Here, so I thought, desire must fail,My chastity be never safer.But then I saw your tongue protrudeTo catch the wisp of angel’s food.

Perhaps to eliminate such blasphemies, the modernisers in the Catholic Church have introduced the practice of the priest simply placing the wafer in outstretched hands, so that the communicant himself puts the body of Christ into his mouth. But elderly people like myself continue to receive Communion in the old, earthy way. True religion should echo, however faintly, its primitive origins, when people were physically closer to God than they ever can be again.