The Toad on the Host

That got your attention.

Apropos of absolutely nothing that is going on in the world, apropos of not a single traffic-generating SEO, I present to you the fruit of my return to digging through academic journals for odd or interesting things to share in this space.

Today:

Full version:

You can see from the caption what the image is.

I ran across it in a chapter from a book: Quid est sacramentum?: On the Visual Representation of Sacred Mysteries in Early Modern Europe and the Americas, 1400-1700. The chapter is by scholar Aden Kumler and is called Counterfeiting the Eucharist in Late Medieval Art and Life and much is available here.

What is going on in this image?

What is confusing, I think, is that Kumler discusses the image in an article about the question of counterfeit Eucharist during the period – the theological discussion of using unconsecrated hosts either accidentally or on purpose – either nefariously or for a purported spiritual purpose, but that’s not really the core of what this image is about.

But anyway:

Quick side note – why would unconsecrated hosts be distributed to the faithful? Sometimes accidentally, sometimes out of spite, I suppose, but two possible rationales that were seriously discussed by medieval theologians: to give comfort to a dying person who might vomit the viaticum – protecting against possible sacrilege on that score – or (and this is interesting) to not have to deny Communion to a person who was known by the minister to be in a state of mortal sin, had not confessed, but would become suspect in the community if he/she did not receive Communion. (Kumler 68-69)

Kumler is discussing the tension between appearance and reality in the reception of the Eucharist, and as depicted in art. But I am not sure the connections she makes here work, but I’m mostly here for the art. I’ll just briefly outline what she says about this piece.

She points out that the scene is very clearly taking place outside of the Mass. But then she suggests that what is going on here is an attempt to depict the impact of unworthy reception on the recipient. Notice the differences in the images on the hosts – moving from left to right – a Christ Child, bread and then a toad or a frog being given to the very creepy looking fellow, clearly in a state of sin.

So what is this depicting? Is it depicting counterfeit hosts or the impact of indifferent or unworthy reception? Kumler’s sense of the theology does not seem right to me but here’s what she says:

The circumstances pictorially described by the illuminator are precise, and precisely motivated. In this miniature, the Lehrbiichermeister has painted a limit case in which the circumstantial guarantees provided by witnessing the performance of the Mass are withheld. in a systematic fashion, the illumination thus alerts its beholder to the impossibility of sensually perceiving sacramental validity under ordinary circumstances.

But painting, the illumination mutely asserts, is — like the Eucharist itself —not subject to the dictates of ordinary circumstances and routine sense experience. With considerable artistic license, the Lehrbiichermeister virtuosically demonstrates how works of art can make visible and vivid truths that would otherwise be inaccessible to the eye. Through its simulative powers, the miniature allows us confidently to discern what would, ordinarily, be impossible to perceive: the first wafer is indeed Christ’s body, but the second and third wafers have been transformed further. Thanks to the inner states of their recipients, these hosts are no longer the Eucharist. The painting thus invests its beholders with a kind of moral-spiritual x-ray vision, allowing them to see the transformative effect of tepid piety upon the second communion wafer and the debasement worked by grievous sin, registered in the third communion wafer and in the repulsive appearance of its recipient. The three clerics standing at the altar remain placidly unaware of what the Lehrbfichermeister makes the beholder of the image see quite acutely: not only the hideous presence of a hidden sinner, but also how weak faith and unabsolved sin transform the transubstantiated bread of life into mere food, or else a poisonous morsel.

I don’t think that quite captures it, since the Real Presence of Christ doesn’t leave the Host – but there’s a tension that the artist is attempting to visually portray – the substance of the Host and the impact on the unworthy recipient.

She gives us another image, from a Venetian Book of Hours, this one more clearly tied to unworthy reception of the Eucharist.

Disposed in a pointedly chiasmic composition, these two-pan sacramental vignettes on the left and right sides of the image are a single artistic conceit that diagrams the very consequential differences between the good and the bad confession, the good and the bad communion.

On Christ’s favoured right side (the left side of the composition as the beholder sees it), the making of a valid, complete confession and the priest’s gesture of absolution has broken a dark cord that encircles the penitent’s neck and floats against the blue back-ground of the painting while a thwarted demon hovers above, holding a length of this broken bond in its hands. In the foreground, overlapping this scene of liberation, a kneeling communicant receives a host from a deacon. The minute form of a dove perched upon the wafer serves as a visible indication of the grace conveyed by the host. The ultimate consequences of these two acts of valid sacramental participation are figured above where two hovering angels hold in cloth-covered hands the decorous twinned forms of two naked souls in prayer, presumably the souls of the devotees.

On Christ’s ‘sinister’ side (the right side of the composition) the illuminator again depicts the sacramental acts of confession and communion, crowned by a psychopompic vignette, but here the variable of impiety animates the pictorial equation and the result is terrifying.

In the foreground depiction of confession, the kneeling man’s impenitence is made strikingly visible in the form of the long dark cord that passes through the scene of communion, as it is hauled diagonally upwards by a muscular demon. Penetrated by the dark cord of sin, the interaction of the deacon holding the host and communicant on the right side of the image completes the pictorial lesson in sham piety and its consequences.

Looking closely, we can discern that the minute wafer the deacon offers to the kneeling male figure conveys a poisonous presence: the tiny black form of a scorpion. That this unworthy communicant eats unto his own damnation is pictorially confirmed in the upper reaches of this half of the composition where the figures of two demons, hellish foils to the angels on the left side of the painting, hold aloft in their grasping arms the agitated damned souls of the unrepentant figures of false piety below.

So I found the article a little confusing – is the point fictive Eucharists or counterfeit/unworthy reception?

Nevertheless, it was interesting, and I’m sharing it with you not only because I thought you’d appreciate the art, but also to take a peek at what history reveals about the complexities and tensions related to the Eucharist and pastoral care. Nothing new there, really.

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