In his essay "A Psychological Approach to the Trinity," Carl Jung contrasts Protestantism and Catholicism thus: "[Theology] proclaims doctrines which nobody understands, and demands a faith which no one can manufacture. This is how things stand in the Protestant camp. The situation in the Catholic camp is more subtle. Of especial importance here is the ritual with its sacral action, which dramatizes the living occurrence of archetypal meaning and thus makes a direct impact on the unconscious. Can anyone, for instance, deny the impression made upon him by the sacrament of the Mass, if he has followed it with even a minimum of understanding? … The faith of a Catholic is not better or stronger than the faith of a Protestant, but a person's unconscious is gripped by the Catholic form no matter how weak his faith may be" (88).
Jung offers a profound insight into the deep relationship between the archetypes of the unconscious mind and the rich symbolism of the Catholic liturgy. The altar with the golden chalices, the candles, the gold door of the tabernacle, the bowl that contains the wafers, and suspended above it all, the figure of Christ on the cross that exalts suffering humankind to the place of worship. The Catholic Mass is the working out of human dreams shaped and given form over many millennia.
What we forget, perhaps, is the transgressive aspect of nearly every element of the Mass, the inversion of all appearance and rationality into something new and radically different. What had been unholy becomes holy; what had seemed powerful is revealed to be impotent; and what had seemed impotent is capable of saving the world.
To begin, we recall that the entire ritual action takes place within the nave of the church. The "nave" takes its name from "navis," the Latin word for ship, and the association becomes clear when you look at the ceiling of a traditional sanctuary: The vaulted ceiling looks like the interior hull of an upside-down ship. And that means something. It means that we Catholics worship in a ship that's capsized, and what was up is down and what was down is up. The persistent theme of all Gospel inversions—"the last shall be first, the least shall be greatest, the meek will inherit the earth, etc."—is represented in our upside-down vessel.
But that's just the start. According to Jewish law and custom, a corpse is unclean and unholy, and yet Jesus on the cross, the focus of Catholic ritual, is both dead and holy. Not suffering. Dead. That fact is clear from the wound in his side, which was inflicted precisely to ensure that Jesus died. But the liturgy of the Mass reiterates the holiness of the slain Lamb: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lamb, the Lord God of Hosts."
Furthermore, the crucifixion of Jesus, the Passover of the new covenant, inverts the Passover sacrifice in Exodus. In the Exodus story, every Israelite home is marked by splashing the blood of a lamb on the lintel and jambs of their doors. The angel of death passes over the Israelites' doors marked with sacrificial blood and moves on to slay the first born of the Egyptians. In our upside down ship, however, the crucifix represents the inversion of the original Passover by presenting the sacrificed first born of God with His blood spilled at his head and hands—the lintel and jambs of the doors, so to speak. As such, the cross is also a door and represents the potential for all people—even Egyptians—to "pass over" into a relationship with God. In a Catholic Mass, the angel of death is transformed into the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of God himself who brings life not death.
The Eucharist is yet another inversion. In the Genesis story of Cain and Abel, Cain's agricultural sacrifice of grain is rejected in favor of Abel's blood sacrifice. In an envious rage, Cain then kills his Abel. On the Catholic altar, however, Cain's "unbloody" agricultural sacrifice is acceptable to God: "fruit of the earth and human hands, it will become our spiritual food." The murderer Cain, like the Egyptian oppressors, is invited into the new Kingdom. The mysterious mark placed on Cain to save him from death is revealed to be the cross.
But the Eucharist, as we know, is more complicated than that, for the mystery of the Real Presence "means" that the body and blood of Christ are present in the unbloody sacrifice. So at the center of the sacrament is the paradox of something that is and simultaneously isn't. The fundamental construct of human reasoning—the principle of non-contradiction—is violated, and believers are instructed to mistrust radically their own senses.
At the same time that our senses and intellect are "violated" by the doctrine of the Real Presence, we violate perhaps the most fundamental taboo, namely, the prohibition against cannibalism. In fact, early Christians were branded as cannibals because of the "unbloody" Eucharistic meal. In other words, in partaking of the Eucharist, we become something "other," a people outside the domain of good sense or the norms of civilized community, but we do so to become "holy." We participate in that same ambiguity of Christ himself, who is dead and alive, unclean and holy, present and absent.
Other inversions are more readily comprehensible. Jesus, who appears to have been utterly dominated by being nailed to the cross, is shown to be vaunting with his hands held slightly over his head. In his defeat, he is victorious. The cross itself appears to be an inverted sword with the tip pointing down. Violence appears to have "won," but the inverted sword implies a defeat of violence and the repudiation of force.
To be somewhat more controversial, were the cross pointed upward, it would resemble an erect phallus. Of course, Lacan developed the symbology of the phallus as symbolic of the transcendental signifier. The erect phallus is like the erect sword is like the power of domination is like the certainty of meaning. But the inverted phallus represents an undoing of all prior certainties as we contemplate God's Kingdom where "the last shall be first, the least shall be greatest, the meek will inherit the earth, etc."
All of which leads us back to the quote from Jung and the impression of the Mass on the unconscious. Even before the first syllable is sung or spoken, the ritual space of the altar has ushered the worshippers into a contemplation concerning the character of God and the kind of Kingdom He invites us to enter. We are asea in an inverted ark of salvation, a salvation that continues to open into new vistas about human and divine potentialities.