The Eucharist as a societal paradigm (1)

"In this period of the disintegration and attempted reconstruction of thought about our secular society [1943], the individual's relation to society and his need for and securing of material things are the haunting problems of the age. There is a christian pattern of a solution which is expressed for us and by us at the eucharist. There the individual is perfectly integrated in society, for there the individual christian only exists as a christian individual inasmuch as he is fully exercising his own function in the christian society. There his need of and utter dependence upon material things even for 'the good life' in this world is not denied or even ascetically repressed, but emphasised and met. Yet his needs are met from the resources of the whole society, not by his own self-regarding provision. But there the resources of the society are nothing else but the total substance freely offered by each of its members for all. There, too, is displayed a true hierarchy of functions within a society organically adapted to a single end, together with a complete equality of recompense."

Dom Gregory Dix's words may remind others of my generation of the trajectory explored, under titles like "The Eucharist as a paradigm of a Socialist Society", by Terry Eagleton and his associates back in the 1960s in the Catholic-Marxist periodical Slant.

Dix, however, began his next paragraph with the word BUT. I will print it tomorrow.