A Ritual Theory View of Communion: ‘goal-demoted behaviour, ‘special relationships,’ or a mode of knowing reality?

This paper examines communion, as reflected, described, and enacted in the early church, through two prominent theoretical perspectives: the cognitive science of religion and anthropologically informed conceptions of agential relationality and ritual entailments. Arguing this second body of thought superior, a move is then made to develop ritual relationality through consideration of ritual practice as one among many modes through which we do more than generate relations among people, objects, places and idea, but also to describe, encounter, articulate, and disclose truth (or, another possibility, misdescribe and obscure truth)—that is, the paper moves in the direction of developing a realist conception of ritual. There is a tradition in ritual theory (running from the thought of Fritz Staal to the more recent cognitive science of religion) that denies any inherent deep meaning, intentionality, goals or aims to ritual practice; rather, rites are considered to possibly generate useful side effects, or provide occasions in and through which deep meaning may be ascribed; but any such effects or meanings are taken to be the product of religious ideas, conceptions, stories, and values that are projected onto ritual action, not inherent in the rites themselves. The ‘school’ of ritual entailment (Houseman, Rappaport, and others) pushes beyond a model of ritual as linguistic communication to a proper analysis of the entailments of ritual enactment; according to Houseman, communication is a “poor model for understanding what is going on in ritual” because rites do not ‘say’ things, but rather ‘do’ things; ritual is “used less to convey information than to accomplish certain acts, to demonstrate the presence of non-human agents, to establish certain undeniable authorities, or to define... identity.” What I ask of this theory is whether it remains tacitly too constructivist, whether ritual ever ‘touches’ upon reality or whether it can only merely construct reality. The (rather bold, perhaps even polemical) argument is that communion is poorly understood through the ‘goal-demoted behavior’ model of cognitive science (which largely occludes consideration of any objective needs to the soul, as developed, say, in the thought of Simone Weil), while a more robust model of ritual relationality is waiting to be developed through a more explicit realist framework. Communion is an exemplary ritual practice for testing out and thinking through ritual theory.