Introduction

GIFTS GLITTERING AND POISONED is Chanon Ross’s well-written and forceful demonstration that for all that our contemporary world would like to believe it operates on principles of reason and autonomy, which require leaving behind the superstitions, demons, and transcendences of an older, less rational, more religious world, it has failed.

Ross demonstrates this failure by thinking through the concept of “spectacle” as it arises in Rome, then as it develops in America, all the while raising critiques of spectacle from early Christian sources, from the fifth-century bishop Augustine of Hippo, and by way of contemporary philosophy. All of these considerations lead to helpful thoughts on metaphysics (or, indeed, the way Americans presume to deny metaphysics).

Through his discussion, Ross shows that we still reside in a superstitious world. For example: we believe we have an infinite array of choices, wrought by our particular rational view of the world. We believe that the marketplace exists merely to give us those choices. We think that the demonic doesn’t exist, and that we are capable of achieving our own destinies. We think media spectacles are made for our own entertainment and don’t intimately affect our ability to see the world and interact with others.

His discussion is one toward which I have great sympathy, and yet, as I shall discuss below, I am concerned about so closely connecting ancient Roman spectacle to contemporary American consumer proclivities. First, however, I describe Ross’s argument in more detail.

“Spectacle, Empire, and Metaphysics”

Ross first shows that spectacle—the violent gladiator shows and the consumer spending that went along with those shows—played a significant role in Rome and its politics, shoring up emperor rule, class divisions, and Roman sensibilities about what was, and was not, good. Spectacle included public executions that “marginalizes the victim and displays him as an abomination” (31), reinforcing both the crowd’s and the government’s senses of superiority. Spectacle also conjured religious ritual and sacrifice to the point that “the unity of spectacle and religion provided a powerful mechanism for assimilating provincial peoples. It was an especially important means of socialization in the early empire when emperors and governors were establishing Roman authority” (30). Roman emperors and others would pay for exorbitant feasts for the crowds that flocked to the spectacles, conspicuous consumption that drew all socioeconomic classes together, united in desire for the feasts and the violence.

Ross argues (using Sam Wells’ improvisational language) that Jesus Christ “overaccepts” Rome’s spectacle. He, too, is publicly executed, mocked, and marginalized, yet he becomes the supreme spectacle who gives his very life for us. Jesus’ own Eucharistic meal that draws together people of all nations and socioeconomic classes, is a simple meal of love that stands in stark contrast to the Roman shows (41). Jesus turns the violent thrust of spectacle on its head, thereby creating a decisive turn against the politics and economics of his day, and showing us all that in fact, what we truly desire is God.

Augustine, who describes the spectacles of his own fifth-century Roman North Africa, readily sees how Jesus provides a contrast to the world’s blood-soaked desire for consumption, and power. Christians consume Christ’s body and blood, uniting themselves to the church and not the Roman Empire. Augustine also helps sort through Roman demonology; demons were linked to the passions of the soul and ruled by desires. Ross uses Augustine to suggest that spectacle-goers were indulging demons of desire at the ampitheatre.

Ross suggests that America has deliberately followed in Rome’s footsteps, developing a world of spectacle that shores up political and economic institutions. He mentions the 2010 exhibit at the United States National Constitution Center called “Ancient Rome and America” that asked its viewers to consider how the United States was “built in the image of Rome” (61). Ross takes the conclusions of that exhibit further to suggest how contemporary politics is built on media spectacles that are connected to the Roman spectacles. Of course, we readers might readily see that Donald Trump presents precisely that kind of celebrity-linked-to-politics in the present presidential race.

Ross offers several examples for how desire and spectacle function in American culture: Americans know very little about their own government, such as what the three branches are, but two-thirds can name the judges on American Idol (68). Ross also describes Coldplay and U2 concerts where the ecstasy of spectacle shapes and consumes us (132–34). We become conspicuous consumers of spectacle, seeking after our own demonic desires. These are the desires that marketing, media, and those with political and economic power cultivate in us.

Using philosophers like Kant and Nietzsche, Ross shows how our philosophical views lead toward seeing that our desires are merely competing in a power game that can only be won if we let each person seek his or her own desires insofar as those desires do not affect others’ abilities to seek their own desires. Americans forget that desire has an end—and that the predominating end in American culture is that our impulses to satisfy our consumer desires merely shore up the political and economic interests of people in power.

Americans likewise forget that there is an alternative story for our desires. As in ancient Rome, Jesus Christ offers a way for us to overaccept the contemporary rendition of spectacle, and to partake in the ecstasy of the Eucharist as a counter-witness and counter-politics. We can renounce the demons of desire that form and shape our world, and put on Christ instead (105–6).

The America ≈ Rome Trope

I’m highly sympathetic to Ross’s claims. He is exactly right to highlight our contemporary metaphysical troubles and expose them as features of American consumer culture, which are wrapped into our political and economic schematics.

However, I tend to be suspicious of America-is-Rome claims, or even simply America-is-similar-to-Rome claims, because I think there are some serious theological and ethical consequences in doing so. Ross, more than most, has done a good job of almost—almost—convincing me of the Rome-America connection. Since I don’t often get a chance to discuss my concerns, I’ll use this space here to raise questions for Ross, but also for anyone else wanting to describe late capitalist America as another Rome.

First, however, let me be clear on what my critique does not include. I think we can and should read histories and do historical work. I think we can learn from those histories, within some limits—where we have come from and how the past continues to shape and mold society. I think that learning history can help us become better people, or at least try. I think it is possible to argue that the past has analogues that we can use to think more about our own culture. I think we can also philosophically wonder about the weird nature of time and the question of whether past, present, and future exist, impinge on each other, and what those terms mean.

All of what I have suggested about how we can use history and think about time is present in Ross’s work, with great effect. Yet, where I think a line gets overstepped—by Ross, by the 2010 National Constitution exhibit he describes, by some of the philosophers he mentions—is to name America as the new Rome, to see the two as inseparably linked, perhaps even to the point of seeing America as simply an iteration of Rome.

Naming America as the New Rome happens in several ways. The most explicit example in Ross’s book is the chart he provides to show how modern marketing and Augustine’s description of the Roman coliseum make use of the same images and words to demonstrate how desire functions in both cultures: drink, thirst, gulp, pictures, eyes, gaze (82). Ross also uses thinking from others similarly disposed, such as Peter Sloterdijk, to say, “Sufficient account has yet to be given of the face that the strongest symbol and media of ancient mass culture—I am speaking of the Roman arena—actually only made a comeback in the twentieth century” (62). Ross continues Sloterdijk’s line of thought to suggest, “In some way, American democracy has actually surpassed Rome in uniting spectacle and politics” (63).

Moreover, it isn’t simply that we can learn from Rome’s mistakes, Rome appears to be patterned after us in some instances. For example, Ross suggests that when we too much take up liberal views of freedom, “we repeat the mistakes of Rome’s society of consumption and excess” (66), which suggests that somehow Rome also indulged in America’s particular version of liberal freedom. There are other places I could name—both in Ross’s own work, but also in similar kinds of stories elsewhere.

There are two main theological/ethical reasons why the America ≈ Rome trope concerns me.

The first is that the version of history that seems to be supported by the trope looks cyclical in nature. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus was famous for understanding history as cyclical, that we humans are set to repeat the shape of events over and over again. America becomes Rome in the cycle, simply another epic empire repeating the rise and fall of Rome.

Understanding history as cyclical works against Ross’s central argument, on my view. The endless consumer desire he seeks to critique operates in cyclic fashion too, with scarce attention to the ends of that desire. One of the points of seeing God as our end, our purpose, is that the nature of time gets reshaped; depending on the historian or theologian, history becomes a line, or it becomes cruciform. All time moves toward God, has its end in God. We are not fated to repeat a historical cycle any more than we are destined to seek fulfillment of an endless succession of desire; rather, we have the hope of salvation in Jesus Christ, which fact puts us on a path toward God rather than a hamster wheel of desire. Thus, my historiographical concern yields to theological concerns: thinking about Rome as analog can do some helpful work, but thinking of America as just another iteration of Rome is theologically harmful to our descriptions of God and the world.

Second, I wonder what is thereby being left overlooked, especially in a book such as this one that provides a hearty critique of contemporary consumer society. Now, this critique is admittedly not fair in one sense, because all writing necessarily leaves important points overlooked. We choose to focus on one or two aspects of a story in order to learn well from those aspects, and not because we expect to have told the whole story.

That said, when we are dealing with popular ways of examining society—such as the America ≈ Rome trope—I do think it is important to have extra care about what can get lost in the examination.

To illustrate the problem, let me turn first to a different popular trope in theological discourse: the Nazis. The America ≈ Rome trope functions a bit like the Nazis function in contemporary ethical thought. The Nazis become the shining example to trot out for all manner of concerns: patriotism, eugenics, genocide, violence, freedom, choice, and so on. The Nazis have become a shorthand in theological/ethical discussions for all that is evil; my students use the Nazis often, but so do my colleagues. Indeed, I suspect that much of theology in the late twentieth century is an attempt in some way to prevent us becoming like the Nazis again.

I hasten to say, I seek to avoid Naziism. My concern is not that we cease to investigate Naziism, nor that we name it as evil, but that while the ostensible war against the Nazis ended seventy-five years ago, many other unspeakable tragedies have occurred since. Rwanda, Syria, Bosnia, North Korea, Chile, and yes, the United States, are all places where evil has happened, genocide has occurred, eugenic thinking has held, violence has been done. But when we can use the Nazis, I worry we conveniently forget the evils directly present, and instead rest on the thought that because our contemporary eugenics program doesn’t look a bit like the Nazis’ eugenics program, we are “good.”

So what gets overlooked if we overstep and presume that if Rome has spectacle, then America, too, has spectacle? Do we perhaps allow ourselves to circumvent those things that do not look “glittering”—things like the boring drivel of corporate life, which most often shows on no stage. In corporate America, we have the decidedly un-glittering, unsexy, but no less concerning cubicle-confined workers who are supposed to be grateful for their jobs even as they have little vacation, sick pay, or parental leave; workers whose employers demean workers’ intelligence and free will by using pictures instead of words to communicate how an Americano is supposed to be made; part-timers who are given the maximum number of part-time hours so as to avoid paying benefits. Sex and social media glitter for us, precisely to keep us from seeing the non-spectacles at work elsewhere.

Conclusion

To sum up: I think that Chanon Ross’s work should be read and pondered, not least for his important discussion of contemporary metaphysics and for his description of how Jesus overaccepts the glittering poisons our society gives us, and enables us salvation from those poisons. I look forward to further conversation about historiography of Rome, theology, and ethics.

“OH NO!” I SAID to my husband as I read the back cover of Chanon Ross’s Gifts Glittering and Poisoned: Spectacle, Empire, and Metaphysics, “I think it’s one of those Eucharist-is-our-Arbor-Day books.” For there is a running joke among some of us who have maxed out on anti-Enlightenment theological swagger. Weary of the theological maneuver in which the Eucharist is held up as The Subverter of All Things Modern and Therefore Bad—employed by those who say things like, “The Eucharist is our Thanksgiving!” right as the turkey comes out of the oven, for instance—some of us have begun muttering things like, “The Eucharist is our Arbor Day!” or, “The Eucharist is our Final Four!” or, “The Eucharist is our pumpkin spice!” or, “The Eucharist is our Nickelback!”

(At the risk of stating the obvious, let me quickly add that I realize there are important criticisms to be leveled against the Final Four, pumpkin spice, Nickelback, and the Thanksgiving holiday. And possibly Arbor Day, though I confess they escape me at the moment.)

But I know Chanon Ross, and I know how thoughtful he is. So I ought to have known better. Does Gifts Glittering and Poisoned posit the Eucharist as both rejoinder and remedy? Yes. But Ross does not simply lay the Eucharistic elements on the table like a royal flush in a game of Texas Hold ’Em. For Ross, thank God, is not playing Texas Hold ’Em. He is not attempting to destroy opponents, score one for Team Jesus, forge a theological armor that modernity’s arrows cannot pierce, pant-hoot at rivals who would challenge his dominance, or make sure the other guy blinks first.

Ross is doing ministry. Gifts Glittering and Poisoned is a ministry book.

Granted, it doesn’t announce itself as such, at all. (For one thing, it has the word metaphysics in the title.) Indeed, one critique I have is that the book would make more sense, methodologically, if it divulged its specific pastoral concerns from the get-go. Despite this circumspection, there are certain tells: Ross’s choice of examples, the end-of-chapter summaries meant to help non-specialists along rather than weed them out, and most of all Ross’s own vast expertise in youth ministry. Ross directs the Institute of Youth Ministry at Princeton Theological Seminary, has served as a youth minister, and has written and presented extensively on ministry and youth culture.

So, Dear Reader, if you read Gifts Glittering and Poisoned—as I hope you do—please do not make the mistake of approaching it as a set of arguments that simply bubbled up from a fissure in the theological water table. The book is best appreciated as a gracious theological meditation written by a ferociously smart and well-read academic who is also a gifted and experienced youth minister, and who is a white man hailing from the late twentieth and early twenty-first century United States. Ross mostly draws upon those contexts to good effect. Still, they are not everyone’s contexts. If one forgets that, if one treats those contexts as universal, one will miss the pastoral and theological wisdom that Ross’s arguments display.

All of which brings me to his arguments. Ross begins with “spectacle,” a term he takes from the French Marxist Guy Debord. Debord’s 1967 work, Society of the Spectacle, denounced a society in which life has become nothing but constant titillation by images. In such a society, images of a pseudo-world entertain us and make us want to buy things, and they also make us want to be entertained by more images that will make us want to buy more things.

For Debord, the problem isn’t just that such a society is vapid. It’s that the spectacle has become an inescapably successful means of social control. Here is a famous example: Women in the 1920s longed for freedom from sexist strictures. One of those strictures was the expectation that cigarettes were a privilege reserved for men only. But it wasn’t injustice that bothered George Washington Hill, the president of the American Tobacco Company. It was the lost market share. Reversing the taboo against women smoking would be, he said, “like opening a gold mine in our front yard.” So Hill hired Edward Bernays, the founder of modern advertising, to appeal to female customers. Bernays did so by hiring some women to light up during the Easter Sunday Parade as part of a phony protest in which their cigarettes were hailed as “torches of freedom.” This worked out beautifully for the tobacco companies, who started seeing a steady rise in female customers. Whether it did anything to make life better for women is anyone’s guess.

Ross notes that, although many contemporary theorists draw on Debord’s work, none have named spectacle as something modern consumer society shares with the Roman Empire. If Ross is correct—if ancient Rome and modern consumer society have spectacle in common—then this will require some reworking of Debord. For Debord, spectacle has especially to do with modern modes of production, market theories of value, and the commodification of experience. Put differently, what horrifies Debord is that it is now possible to do the following:

(1) Stir a desire for something that approximates an authentic experience—Freedom! Authenticity! Dissent!—but isn’t.

(2) Produce a talisman of that experience—“freedom torches,” artisanal small-batch hipster beer, a Che Guevara T-shirt—and sell it, letting its value be dictated by market forces.

(3) Stand idly by as freedom, authenticity, and dissent become commodities like wheat or corn. The consumer probably doesn’t care whose corn went into her canola oil as long as she can acquire the canola oil she desires. Likewise, she probably doesn’t care who made her Che Guevara T-shirt as long as it lets her stomp around town like some kind of devil-may-care dissident.

(4) Over time, find oneself in a society of thoroughly conquered subjects who prefer these pseudo-experiences to real ones, much to the delight of the capitalists who own the T-shirt factory, beer distributorship, and tobacco company.

The economy of the Roman Empire, though, lacks many of these distinctive features. Ancient Romans did not, could not, sell pseudo-experience in the same way that Debord diagnosed. To do so would require a kind of modern selfhood that had yet to be invented. So Ross will need to do a bit of reading Debord against Debord. And so he does, in the process making two moves which are profoundly interesting and creative, and which also make me methodologically nervous.

One move is to tease out connections between late capitalist pseudo-experience—that thing I am buying when I fork over money for a Che Guevara t-shirt—and demons. Much like pseudo-experiences, demons are “composite beings,” first activating our longing for goodness but ultimately just stirring our disordered passions. If the words “disordered passions” made you look around to see if Augustine has just joined the party, your instincts are correct. Augustine’s understanding of demons is a real boon to Ross’s project. But with all due respect to Augustine, the serious excitement starts when Ross plays solos atop the steady pulse of Augustine’s rhythm section. Augustine sets the tempo by explaining the relationship between idols and demons: idols, he says, are just human artifacts, but their presence leaves people vulnerable to the very real activity of demons who possess immortal bodies and debased souls. Therein lies the power and appeal of the demonic. While promising us true fulfillment, demons arouse our most compulsive, insatiable, and self-serving desires.

Over this Augustinian beat, Ross performs his own solo. In the society of the spectacle, the consuming subject actually operates within a demonic metaphysical horizon—the very same metaphysical horizon that animated the Roman Empire’s public displays of violence-as-entertainment. This is an important distinction. Ross is not simply saying that we can understand Augustine better if we put him in dialogue with Debord. Rather, according to Ross, Augustine actually gives a better description than Debord. For whereas Debord can only describe spectacle it in its modern guise, Augustine correctly sees it as an age-old demonic work.

In light of that, what hope do we have? That question brings us to the second theological move I wish to draw attention to: Ross’s notion that, in the Eucharist, Christ offers himself as a consumable object. Ah, but there is a twist! The crucified and risen Christ is the true recipient of religious longing—the very longing so deftly exploited within demonic metaphysics. Thus, Christ’s presence in the Eucharist can, at last, close the slobbery maw of insatiable demonic desire. Here is how Ross puts it: “The recipient of the Eucharist ceases to be a Consumer Subject because the ‘True Spectacle’ has redeemed his desires, and through this redemption he has become part of a new political subjectivity” (71).

And here is where I get a little fretful. To his credit, Ross goes to a lot of trouble to give thick historical descriptions of Roman meals and Roman games. So I am unsure of why the Last Supper accounts are not treated in the same way. For example, when Ross argues that the Eucharist can be understood in contrast to elaborate Roman feasts, it isn’t exactly clear where and when it can be so understood. “Whereas Roman emperors and politicians spread lavish banquets, and offered up the bodies of gladiators and crucified noxii for the crowds,” Ross writes, “Jesus laid before his disciples a simple meal and offered up his own body.” That is an appealing juxtaposition, but I’m worried about the methodological shift that takes place halfway through the sentence. If we’re going to inquire into the history of Roman banquets, ought we not do the same with accounts of Christian Eucharistic practice? If so, then it must be asked: How do we know that the meal was simple? Which scriptural account are we going with? The Synoptics? John? Paul? Or is this about early Christian meal practices that seem to have predated those accounts? How have we gotten so quickly to the assertion, “Jesus laid before his disciples a simple meal and offered up his own body”?

Bringing the inquiry up to the present day: How does Ross contend with the fact that many, many recipients of the Eucharist seem not to have received any new political subjectivity, and do not cease to be Consumer Subjects? Do such people receive unworthily, in the Augustinian sense—committing sin and inviting physical affliction by partaking? Or are such apparent counterexamples not important? How do we get to the point where we can claim that this is what the Eucharist does?

I suppose the question I am asking the author is this. How does one know when one has done the theological and historical legwork necessary to be able to assert something? I can think of one answer, but I’m not sure how this answer would fit with the rest of Ross’s project. I mentioned earlier that I read this as a ministry book written within a particular context. By that, I mean that Gifts Glittering and Poisoned made most sense to me once I understood that it was written by someone deeply concerned for the spiritual well-being of first-world teenagers and young adults, probably white, and possessing some disposable income.

Understand: that is meant as a compliment. Please do not read it as a criticism. Gifted ministers know who they’re ministering to. They know when they are inspiring and when they are resorting to cheap persuasion. Ross is a gifted minister as well as a gifted theologian. When Ross references musical acts like Coldplay and U2—but not, say, Eddie Kenzo, Public Enemy, Gil Scott-Heron or Angel Haze—I can hear him working to inspire those beloved children of God to whom our world has bestowed a particular set of cultural markers. I could imagine that similar pastoral concerns inform some of Ross’s other choices. It may be the case that, within Ross’s context, these juxtapositions just work well. Rather like how a particular juxtaposition might work well in the lyrics to a song: it coheres with the rest of the musical work, helps to convey what the composer wants to convey, and works with style and genre conventions that the intended audience can recognize.

To be sure, I think that is a fine way to do theology, provided one owns up to it—naming the context in question, acknowledging that it might work differently for other people with different lives from mine, reminding oneself that one’s own perspective is not everyone’s perspective. (Oh, that reminds me! Dearest Chanon, I think the world of you, and I know you to be a trustworthy man who supports and values women as colleagues, theologians, and friends. So, respectfully, why did you repeatedly use “he” and “him” to mean “the generic human subject”? Was it a style guide issue? I’m going to tell myself it was a style guide issue.) I am not sure whether that sort of epistemic modesty would work here, though, given Ross’s ambitious metaphysical claims. So I am left needing a bit of help understanding how Gifts Glittering and Poisoned all hangs together. More than that, though, I am grateful for its creativity, freshness, ingenuity, pastoral sensitivity, boldness, and hospitality.

WHEN I WAS INVITED first to contribute to the discussion of this book I was initially attracted to the intriguing title, and also to the explanatory subtitle. A general description of the book secured my commitment to contribute. When a copy of the book eventually arrived, one of the first things that I saw on opening it was the fuller quotation from which the title was taken. To my surprise it originated in something I had said myself! I had forgotten that I had written something to that effect, but perhaps not absolutely forgotten, since something without a name echoed in my mind on reading the title of the book.

I will return to the quotation, but first I want to thank Chanon Ross for the fine book he has written. It is historically informative about the games in the Roman empire. It is philosophically and theologically astute about the Christian response to them, all the way to the witnessing of martyrdom. It is also philosophically and theologically in the zone with respect to the infinite restlessness of human desire, both its homing on God and its waywardness with respect to the counterfeit doubles of God. The book is of pressing contemporary significance, in so far as the exploitation of these counterfeit doubles is at work in our society of the spectacle. Chanon Ross offers much food for thought in drawing out the analogies of the ancient pagan spectacles and our own postmodern forms of the spectacle. Central is the taking possession of human desire by a variety of counterfeit doubles of God, or idols. The book is attuned to the deep down equivocity in all of this, given that the counterfeit double can look like the original it counterfeits, and hence the difficulty of discernment, both theoretical and practical, in telling the difference between the two. Part of the spell of the idolatrous spectacle is that it mimics the liturgical communication of the divine. But, of course, we do not know, or do not want to know, that we are possessed, or under a spell. Christ breaks the spell of the counterfeit(ing) powers.

One question here and I will turn then to the quotation. Chanon Ross speaks of the daimonic, and this is predominantly interpreted in terms of what I have just called the counterfeit(ing) powers. Of course, the daimon is an in-between being, a metaxu—a notion central to my own efforts to think about things. My question: what about the eu-daimon? I am thinking of eudaimonia in Greek ethics, which one could read, not just as simple “happiness,” or fulfillment in the immanent sense of self-actualization, but as naming the need for a good daimon (eu-daimon) to bring the human being to true fulfillment. In the older traditions the good daimon might have found form in the idea of the guardian angel, for instance, but what interests me is the need to refer to a companioning power to do justice to the human being’s search for fulfillment. The companioning power takes us outside the frame of any completely immanent account of desire’s fulfillment, outside also of any ethics of autonomous self-determination as claiming the ultimate word. The need of the companioning power names us as in the space between the human and the divine. The counterfeit(ing) powers deform that between space, and become daimonic in the ultimately destructive sense attacked by Augustine, and re-echoed here by Chanon Ross. Christ is the companion power: literally, if we think of the companion as the one who breaks bread with us (cum-panis), and sacramentally, if the bread broken and shared is divine. In place of panem et circenses we are offered panis angelicus (in the words of Aquinas’s sacred hymn).

I turn to the quotation now since it has to do with the monstrous manifestation of these counterfeit(ing) powers.

“What happens in the apparently empty ether of thought may come down to earth, and a masked metaphysics come to walk the streets—or stalk. For monsters too might float in the Empyrean, coming to earth with gifts glittering and poisoned.”1

It is a slightly dislocating experience to hear one’s own words come back to one through the surprising engagement of an other, not yet known to one. Come back to one in a context which throws light on crucially important issues, drawing on intelligent recourse to the history of Christianity and Western civilization, that sees with finesse the analogies between then and now, and that draws out the philosophical and theological significance of the spectacle. My own thoughts are made strange to me, and yet they come home to me with the enrichment of the other, and I am myself drawn into a between of communication that is not of oneself or of others but that has some promise of the universal about it—a kind of catholic between, so to say.

The point is not simply to assert a personal engagement with this book, but to draw attention to what seems to me to be major stresses in the book itself. Summarizing very crudely in a riff on the quotation: first, the difference between earth and heaven, the space between these two and how they might be mediated and separated. Second, how what goes up must also come down; hence, how a metaphysics that seems to speak of higher things will return to haunt things earthly, and moreover may be masked, and sometimes not fully honest with us. There may be an equivocity in the secret metaphysics that might perhaps harbor blessings, but might also conceal curses. Third, if the masked metaphysics walks the streets, the idea that we live in a post-metaphysical time seems questionable. Our supposedly being “post-metaphysical” masks the secret metaphysics that does not know itself, and pretends to be uncontaminated by metaphysical presuppositions. This is not so and it cannot be so. In all that we do, in all our efforts to make things intelligible, and in all our striving to come to some sense of the significance of life, we carry with us certain basic orientations toward being as given. We are all walking metaphysicians. Even the walking of the post-metaphysician secretly incarnate metaphysical presuppositions. What is important is to reflect metaphysically on what is at play in our situation. This book especially has significance for the relation between immanence and transcendence, for the attempt in our time to redefine transcendence in fully immanent terms, for the consequences of that redefinition with respect to the mutilation or counterfeiting of true transcendence. Fourth, a metaphysical, indeed theological orientation can also stalk the streets, where “stalk” here carries connotations of intent, intent sometimes presented as releasing us into a supposedly higher space of freedom, intent sometimes desirous to eviscerate what in previous epochs might have been thought of as the true conditions of transcendence. This last point particularly bears on the hindrance Christianity is sometimes felt to present in restraining a more unfettered release of our imminent autonomy. Stalk: also in the sense in which a possible assault may lurk in the wandering metaphysics, metaphysics that claims to be no metaphysics, but that secretly does not accept the given conditions of being, or is in revolt against them. Stalk: in the sense that a project to overcome the given conditions of being may lurk in the wandering metaphysics that is no metaphysics. Fifth: the monstrous—the monstrous may be outside of us, but more intimately, it is within us as the potentiality to mutilate the sacred, and thereby to transvalue it into something hitherto called evil. The monstrous thus is a promiscuous mingling of good and evil in which the good is recessed in the evil that disseminates itself as the good now kept from view. The intimacy of the monstrous, the idiocy of the monstrous, as I call it, is very important here. This intimacy is very important also in relation to the society of the spectacle whose manufactured ecstasies mimic and counterfeit true self-transcending. Sixth: the Empyrean: the heavens of pure light and fire, a sign of heaven beyond the heavens, a name for a transcendence that surpasses even the outermost limit of the finite cosmos as we know it. The monstrous floats there. Floats? Because even in the mutilation of the monstrous soul, there is still at work the energy of its self-transcending. The monstrous soul is still marked by a kind of eros for the absolute. In due course, going up will come down, and the eros turned back from heaven will turn its attentions to the things of the earth, turn its attentions in a manner which reflect the bent of its eros. Hence, seventh, the saturated sacral diversity of what it offers us, namely, gifts glittering and poisoned—a counterfeit Sabbath. Of course, in the word “gift” there is etymologically the suggestion also of a possible poison. The equivocity is also evident in the doubleness that attracts us, namely, the glitter, the glamour, and the counterfeiting of the genuine gift. The true gift is the gift of the good. Now the inner core of what gives itself is being voided, perhaps worse than voided, insofar as the voiding infects our eros. The voiding empties out our true desire, and in the resulting emptiness makes it infernally hospitable to the negation of true transcendence.

This is brought out very well by the book’s account of the many dimensions of the spectacle in Roman Imperial times. For the book is attuned to the secret, and not so secret, expressions of will to power, both in the individual sense in the figure of the Emperor, and in the social sense in the shaping of the masses and their easily swayed desires. In compact form, it lays out not only the format of the games in Rome but also the social imaginary of the time and the incitement to the surface of the darker sources of will to power, always opportunistic, almost always predatory. I liked the way it brought together ancient and contemporary, for instance, Augustine’s considered reflections and the recent discussion of someone like Guy Debord. In our own time we seem to abjure the exhilaration in violence of the ancient spectacles and find the bloodthirsty gruesomeness of the games repulsive. Chanon Ross steers us toward granting virtual versions of the bloodthirsty gruesomeness; we indulge in the virtual pleasures of these versions, in the games of death played on computers, or in the blood cinematically spurting in our face from mangled bodies in not a few Hollywood blockbusters, I almost said, bloodbusters. Ironically, our overt revulsion to gruesomeness is itself derived from the inheritance of the Judeo-Christian tradition and its admonition of peace, and this is even true when in more secular mood that inheritance is put aside or attacked. We are living off an inheritance that we are not renewing.

Where is the violence in our own time? All around us, it often seems. It is an interesting question to ask how the advanced cybernetic West is complicit in the exports of war and the instruments of war on a global scale. On the screens of our computers or tablets or iPhones or cinemas we see virtual simulations of the violence that seems not to touch us in the flesh, while out of range of the virtual image, flesh is being hacked, burst, exploded into tiny pieces by high precision instruments of death coming from high-flying drones. Monsters floating in the Empyrean of technological Imperium, showering death on those below, many of whom, even granting the equivocal nature of political or military engagements, are innocent. We watch death from a distance. We inflict death from a distance. Meanwhile, within the cocooned world of consumer capitalism, we distract ourselves with desire endlessly manufactured by the religion of shopping whose business is the manufacturing of endless desire.

Endless desire: desire without end, infinite desire, but for nothing. One sees here the point Chanon Ross makes, and it is very congruent with his own sympathies for the Augustinian understanding of human desire. There is an intimate infinitude to our desire, and if we desire what is not infinite, infinite desire becomes what Sartre calls a “useless passion,” or what Hobbes said of the human condition, namely, “a desire for power after power that ceaseth only in death.” If the infinity at work in human desire does not find its home in God, it will wander in a desert of distraction. Paradoxically that desert of distraction is now a place where desire can gorge itself on an endless array of finite satisfactions and pleasures. There is a systematic counterfeiting going on in the investiture of these finite satisfactions with the glitter of the false infinite. I liked Chanon Ross’s use of Aquinas’s discussion of man’s final end. Compared to “hot” Augustine, Aquinas is perhaps more sober and systematic in making his way through all of the finite goods that present themselves to human desire. They are good, but are not the final good. Astonishingly: anything at all we desire, we desire because we desire God. This is a transformation of the Aristotle’s analysis of our relation to the ultimate good as desired simply for itself alone. Aquinas sees that this alone can be God, this alone can answer the openness and infinite restlessness of human desire. Given the “in-your-face” provocation of the games, Augustine’s Confessions and its existentially engaged exploration of infinite desire reminds us deeply that the end sought can only be an intimate good. It is this sacred intimacy that the spectacle takes over, exploits and abuses.

How does this relate to our current situation? There are many fine things here. Chanon Ross is very right to pay special attention to festivals, especially musical festivals. The festival, of course, socially incarnates a liturgy of affirmation. To be festive as to affirm the goods of the world, the goods of human existence, and in often unnamed ways the ultimate good of God as the source from which all finite goods derive. Josef Pieper has a marvelous little book on this deep down source of all festivity in religious affirmation—a kind of celebrating amen to the goodness of all of given being, a raising of a gesture of gratitude to the divine source of all that good.2 Music festivals are communal happenings of ecstasy. Alas, like the Israelites impatient because Moses had not returned soon enough, we set up an idol and we dance and drink and sing. Chanon Ross is very resourceful in making use of Aquinas’s analysis of religious ecstasy (Aquinas is not “cold”). But there are counterfeit ecstasies, there are chemically induced ecstasies, there are socially produced ecstasies in which the contagion of the group which has lost hold of itself communicates to the dancing crowd. We lose ourselves, and we are happy to lose ourselves. There is then nothing to answer to the infinity of restless desire. Strangely, this is the “end” of desire masquerading as a kind of completion. We inevitably wake with a hangover, and if we are wise, with a more insistent dissatisfaction with the poverty of our fulfillment. The poison of the “party” turns the soul to ashes and we feel it in the flesh itself. This end of gifts glittering and poisoned awaits us.

IT WAS A DAMP drizzly November morning in Birmingham when I caught an early flight to sunny Chicago. The liftoff was bumpy, but in a few minutes we rose above the clouds and a voluptuous cloudscape spread out before us under a bright blue sky, the edges of distant clouds incarnadined by the morning sun. I admit I got a little teary, even more so when I considered how privileged we are to live in an age when human beings can see this spectacle. Millions have lived and died on this planet without ever having the option of looking down on the clouds. We moderns: We are the sky gods.

What I witnessed was a natural wonder, but I was a witness only because of highly advanced technology. One does get claustrophobic on airplanes, but they can feel less like iron cages than like a tubular set of windows onto transcendence itself.

One of the great virtues of Chanon Ross’s Gifts Glittering and Poisoned is his clear-sightedness about modern experiences such as this. It’s a hard-won clarity, because on all sides, secular and theological choristers (mea culpa) sing ours a secular age. John Milbank makes a great stride by historicizing the secular (“Once there was no secular”), and by insisting that the secular is a constructed space, not a natural sublevel of reality, always there awaiting discovery. Ross, though, recognizes that we need to turn transgression of the secular into an analytical strategy. (For what it’s worth, I think Milbank does this too.) Secularization theories assume the possibility of the secular, but Ross is having none of it. Human beings are created in the image of God, and cannot wholly suppress their desire transcendence. In short: Reports of the death of metaphysics are greatly exaggerated.

Instead of making a philosophical argument for the inescapability of transcendence, Ross examines concrete ancient and modern case studies. What philosophy Ross does cover isn’t always covered very well. His brief treatment of Kant (71–72) moves in gigantic leaps and bounds. He repeats standard, questionable claims about Scotus, but badly misrepresents Nicholas of Cusa who, he says, built on Scotan univocity by shifting attention from transcendence to an “immanent plane where human beings realized themselves as self-originating and self-sustaining” (96). He relies on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri at this point, who are far less reliable on the history of philosophy than they are on contemporary politics (and they aren’t wholly reliable on the latter either).

The philosophical work in the book also suffers from what appears to be Ross’s commitment to an idealist assumption that ideas are the driving force of history. That explains, I think, the awkward ways he uses “metaphysics” and “ontology,” terms that typically refer to philosophical systems rather than lived human experience. It’s more accurate to say that our practices, ideas, and habits manifest implicit and most inchoate, unsystematic metaphysical assumptions and beliefs. But it’s a rare bird who engages the world with something that can be dignified with the word “metaphysics.”

I’m not sure that Ross is an idealist, though, since through much of the book his analysis focuses concretely on ancient and modern rites of transcendence. “Spectacle” is central to this analysis—the spectacular displays of blood and violence in Roman coliseums and crucifixions, the spectacles of modern images on film and in video games, the omnisensorial spectacle of a rock concert. Without ignoring the differences between ancient Romans and modern Americans, Ross stresses the continuity. We moderns live off a diet of spectacle as if it would satisfy our hunger for transcendence. It doesn’t, but only whets our appetites for more. Marketers awaken desire, and have no interest in gratifying it it (82); we gulp down the Sprite commercial the way Alypius gulped down the games. Dazzled by the spectacle that promises but cannot deliver transcendence, we become Consumer Subjects, eagerly lusting for what William Desmond calls the “gifts glittering and poisoned” offered by monsters that “float in the Empyrean” (79). Ross knows that whatever is going on in the advertising industry, it’s not “secularization.”

That reference to “monsters” isn’t accidental. In place of a secularization thesis, Ross, following Augustine, offers a demonization thesis. Moderns still experience and aim for transcendence, but our desires are misdirected to what Ross (confusingly) calls a “demonic metaphysics,” what Augustine called, with more clarity, “fellowship with demons.” We subject ourselves to the power of demons by turning spectacles into idols to which we devote our hearts. Here I register another objection, perhaps a question. Ross’s roundabout ways of referring to demons make me suspicious. Perhaps it’s an unwitting accommodation to the jargon of academic theology, but it left me wondering whether Ross believes demons actually exist. Augustine certainly did, which is why he writes of fellowship with demons rather than demonic metaphysics. What, for Ross, is the metaphysical status of demons? Are the “demons” he talks about social forces? If so, then has he really escaped the secularization model? If they are conscious beings, why name them with distancing, impersonal terms and phrases? I don’t fault him for not writing a book on demonology, but the book could be clearer about the referent of “demon.”

Ross’s subtitle includes “spectacle” and “metaphysics”; also “empire.” Whether ancient or modern, demonic spectacle forges political order. Roman games reinforced Roman virtus and intimidated the provinces with displays of Roman grandeur and power. Gifts from the largesse of the emperor, games reinforced his status as the empire’s Benefactor in Chief, and the games had a quasi-sacramental effect of binding spectators into a crowd, imbued with fear of and/or zeal for Romanitas. Spectacle takes the spectator out of himself, ecstatically, to find himself in another, each to find himself in the other of empire. Modern spectacle incorporates us into the life of the market, or into the great myth of America. Ross agrees with James K. A. Smith’s observation that the political is a “repertoire of rites” rather than rights.

One of Ross’s more sobering insights is that the modern church has accommodated to the society of the spectacle: “Many evangelical churches and megachurches . . . have developed models of church life and worship that appeal to worshipers as Consumer Subjects. These churches have sought to evangelize by making church look and feel like entertainment venues; they have replaced traditional pews, stained glass, and steeples with theater seating and screens in order to look and feel more like theaters or sports arenas. They have abandoned the traditional liturgy in favor of worship services that appeal to the sensibilities of the Consumer Subject” (100–101). It’s possible, of course, to identify counter-trends, but what Ross laments is real, and lamentable. As he argues, the result may be numerical growth, but it comes at the cost of trivialization. Once church is incorporated into consumer society, it becomes another consumer item, to be desired, used, and discarded in favor of the new-new more desirable option. It’s hardly a wonder that the church cannot slow, much less reverse, the breakneck speed of our cultural degeneration. Too often the church helps to accelerate decadence rather than opposing it.

There’s a tragic missed opportunity here, because as Ross brilliantly explains, the gospel and the church’s worship offer a direct counter to the Consumer Subject and the spectacle society. The evangelical answer is, importantly, not a direct refutation. Jesus doesn’t renounce spectacle; He doesn’t overcome Roman spectacle with a “Stop that, now!” He overcomes demonic spectacle by becoming a spectacle. Borrowing from Sam Wells’s study of the improvisational character of Christian ethics, Ross says that Jesus “overaccepts” the spectacle forced upon him. As a spectacle, he becomes the subject of the consuming gaze, but he is the spectacle that actually does what other spectacles only promise: he satisfies all desire. He is no idol, no distracting demon, but God in flesh. The macabre spectacle of the cross is opening to genuine transcendence, the way to the Father.

To the Consumer Subject, Jesus offers himself for consumption, not only to the eyes of the spectator but to the hands and mouth of the worshiper. In place of the unsatisfying consumption of the society of spectacle, Jesus offers himself as the bread of God that satisfies eternally. To the false ecstasy of the rock concert or the football game, the Eucharist offers a true ecstasy, in which the consumer melts before and into what he consumes. At this table, the eater is translated into the food he eats.

If the church would but preach the gospel and do the Eucharist, keeping close to the classic practices of Word and Sacrament, she would have all she needs to resist the empire of spectacle and to form an alternative society free of demonic metaphysics. Or, in Ross’s view, nearly all. Several times, he advocates a recovery of the renunciations and exorcisms of the ancient baptismal liturgy (104–5). It’s a sensible suggestion; if we are in fact keeping company with demons, we must relearn how to identify and renounce them. I am less enthusiastic about Ross’s suggestion that there needs to be a long period of catechesis and renunciation before the Eucharist. No doubt there’s a place for exorcism at the baptismal gate, but exorcism is lifelong, and the Eucharist is not the end of this exorcism but one of its instruments. We refuse demonic metaphysics every time we sit with Jesus in his peaceable kingdom.

Ross also insists, rightly, that renunciation of demons and participation in the consumption of Jesus the spectacle is a life of witness, of martyrdom. Martyrs follow Jesus in His overacceptance of spectacle; they follow Jesus in giving their flesh and blood for the encouragement of their brothers and the life of the world.

Gifts Glittering and Poisoned deals with many of the buzz-themes of contemporary theology—gifts, theological metaphysics, ritual and liturgy, Eucharist, martyrdom, empire. His contribution is to display the interconnections of these themes, and to explain the ways they intersect with the lives of individuals in contemporary society. Though written at a very high level of sophistication, this is ultimately a book that should be in the hands of pastors, youth minsters, and lay Christians, as we strive to be faithful in an age of glittered but poisoned spectacle.

MY FEELING AFTER FINISHING Chanon Ross’s book is one of sublime frustration. Sublime, in that Ross has led me to deeper contemplation of the God who is the true reality that frees me from the hypnotic glare of spectacle. Frustration, in that I am not sure what Ross wants me to make of my everyday life in this earthly city before the heavenly city fully arrives.

Ross artfully exposes the spectacle of our violent, acquisitive, lust-drunk popular culture. His comparison of Augustine’s critique of the Roman spectacle of the arena with the “glittering and poisoned” (in a lovely phrase he borrows from William Desmond) gifts of modernity rings true. The Roman arena, as Augustine observed, is the apotheosis of how humanity’s natural desire for transcendence has become twisted by sin. We are made for God and rightly desire to be united with God, the transcendent source of goodness, justice, truth, love and beauty, but our desire is turned toward other dark experiences that ironically enslave our passions and finally deprive us of the real transcendence we seek. In St. Paul’s words, we have “exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Rom 1:25 NIV).

Ross is particularly adept at exposing how closely something we modern people assume is normal—a capitalist market economy buttressed by pervasive, intrusive, constant consumer advertising—has replaced the openly demonic spectacle of the Roman arena with a perhaps more subtle and insidious kind of idolatry. We fail to consider the warning of John the Seer, that this idolatry too will be judged, that “the merchants of the earth” one day will mourn for Babylon “since no one buys their cargo anymore, cargo of gold, silver, jewels, pearls, fine linen, purple cloth, silk, scarlet cloth, all kinds of scented wood, all kinds of articles of ivory, all kinds of articles of costly wood, bronze, iron and marble, cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, frankincense, wine, oil, fine flour, wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, and slaves, that is, human souls” (Rev 18:11–13 ESV). Ross reminds us that the spectacle of modern market transacts in human souls.

There, then, is the sublimity in Ross’s text: an artful and jarring reminder that our present addiction to violence and acquisition is an old trick, the oldest trick, of the demons, and that our only rest, the real end of our desires, is in the God who made us for himself.

And now the frustration: how, then, shall we live? While in some respects Ross’s book is a meditation on the temptations of modernity, in other respects it is a statement on the relation of “Christ and culture” that entails implications for theological ethics. I remain unsure about what Ross thinks about “Christ and culture.” In Richard Niebuhr’s familiar topology, is Ross advocating a stance of “Christ against culture?” With Ross’s emphasis on the baptismal rite of exorcism, this sometimes seems to be the case. Or, would Ross suggest that Niebuhr’s topology is overly formalistic and that a genuine Christian ontology subsumes every category: Christ against, of, above, in paradox with, and transforming culture? With Ross’s emphasis on the Eucharist and his reference to Radical Orthodoxy, this sometimes seems to be the case.

The ambiguity here leads to a problem of theological ethics. Ross uses the example of a U2 concert as a form of modern spectacle that—it seems, from what I understand of his text—inevitably leads us away from God. Does that mean Christians should not attend U2 concerts, just as Augustine said Christians in his day should not attend the Roman spectacles? When Christians participate in ecstatic experiences at U2 concerts, are they surrendering themselves to the demonic? What about Bono’s profession of faith as a Christian? What about Christians—and there are many, including this writer—who find that U2’s music and spirituality often draw them closer to the God revealed in Christ?

Ross never directly addresses such questions, but when he seems to approach them he reverts to the sanctum of the Eucharist. Along with Ross and others influenced by Radical Orthodoxy, post-liberalism, and various other forms of postmodern theologies, I am deeply sympathetic to the claim that the Eucharist is the central “location” in this earthly city at which the heavenly city begins to break in and proleptically incarnate God’s peaceable kingdom. But I don’t think this means that most ordinary Christians are called to become monastics who spend all their time in Eucharistic adoration. A small few may be given that calling, but most of us are called to take the Eucharistic blessing out into the world. I am fairly certain Ross would agree, but I’m not sure how Ross thinks that means I should relate to something like a U2 concert—or to how Bono, as a Christian musician, should enact his art.

This question about Bono as a musician surfaces another lacuna in Ross’s text. Does Ross think God is in any way present in culture, even when culture is corrupted? This is of course another old problem, that of the relation between faith and reason. Christian theology has utilized various categories for discussing it: Logos Christology, prevenient grace, common grace, natural law, the analogia entis, or, even more controversially in some of the Radical Orthodoxy thinkers Ross mentions, metaxu and Sophiology. Accounts of the relation between Christ and culture, and between faith and reason, and between the “sacred” and “secular,” are always embedded within each other.

On this axis, consistent with my sympathy for Ross’s Eucharistic emphasis, I likewise resonate with his channeling of Milbank’s critique of “the secular.” Milbank is right about this, I think: “the secular” is a myth and we are always already engaged in a “theological” context. But this doesn’t mean we eschew the so-called “secular” artistic and material culture. Exactly the contrary: when we recognize that everything is theological, we can begin to make often subtle and difficult distinctions between what is already becoming rightly oriented and what is twisted in culture. To employ the Reformed terminology those of us who attended evangelical liberal arts colleges learned in our youth, we can see that “all truth is God’s truth.” To revert to the language of Augustine and Radical Orthodoxy, our consumption of the Eucharist opens our eyes to the fundamental principle of being that really animates all that is true, good, and beautiful in creation, and also helps us understand that evil is not a thing in itself but a parasitical deprivation of being. So is a U2 concert irredeemably depraved, or might it also manifest the presence of Divine grace?

There is one passage in Ross’s text that perhaps suggests one kind of answer. Ross notes that “the way in which Romans acted during spectacle entertainments was often different from the way in which they acted in the everyday course of life” (122). There was at least some recognition even among Romans that the spectacles were a kind of release from the rigid demands of ordinary Roman propriety. The games enacted a kind of role reversal in which society’s elite were required to serve the populace. There is a sense here of the familiar contrast between “high” and “low” forms of culture, such as Plato’s argument against the use of base, immoral characters in Homer’s epic poetry, which might be imitated by the young. Is there an echo of Plato’s chiding request: “We will beg Homer and the other poets not to be angry if we cancel those and all similar passages, not that they are not poetic and pleasing to most hearers, but because the more poetic they are the less are they suited to the ears of boys and men who are destined to be free and to be more afraid of slavery than of death”? (Republic 3.387b).

So, I wonder if Ross would apply his critique of the U2 concert to “higher” forms of culture, like the performance of a Bach concerto. Fans of Bach can become no less ecstatically transfixed at a performance than fans of Bono. Are they too surrendering to the demonic? Or, is the sublime beauty of Bach’s complex counterpoint, which Bach himself (like Bono) always ascribed to God’s glory, opening the listener to an authentic experience of the contemplation of God? Will there be music in heaven? Will it be the music of Bach’s baroque high culture, the chiming tones of The Edge’s guitar, the familiar lilt of a traditional folk tune, the sound of a mother singing her baby to sleep?

My reference here to different forms of “high” and “low” (or to use the Roman/Latin term, profanus) culture, raises another concern. Though I am sympathetic to the claim that the Eucharist is the central locus of response to worldly spectacle, I wonder about the ecclesiology that must accompany any such claim. Ross refers often to how “the early Christians” (his terminology) eschewed the violence of the arena for the peace of the Eucharist through which Christ absorbs all violence. But we must then ask about two other basic sets of relationships: between church and state, and between clergy and laity. Concerning both of these sets of relationships we must consider disturbing trends from the early centuries of the church through the Reformation that threaten Ross’s thesis.

The question of the relation between church and state is of course fraught because of Constantinianism and Christendom. Some of the sources Ross cites—notably Milbank and Hauerwas—disagree on the basic question of whether Christendom was on balance a good thing. At the very least, it is fair to ask whether the translation of the spectacle of the arena into the spectacle of the Eucharistic celebration that accompanied the fall of Rome and the rise of Christendom really did much to mitigate imperialistic state violence. The sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204, among countless other ignominies, should give us pause here. The Eucharistic community has never really been fully at peace within itself, and often has literally been at war.

The issue of the relation between clergy and laity is no less perilous for Ross’s thesis. Many of the tensions that led to the Reformation had to do with the sense that the Eucharistic celebration had become so rarified and esoteric that the common person had become, at best, a spectator and not a participant. This reflected an ironic reversal of Augustine’s participatory ontology of the spectacle. For the common person, the church’s Eucharistic celebration did not replace the false spectacle of the arena with the authentic gift of Christ’s presence. The common person was deprived of the cathartic (if demonic) experience of the games, but also was excluded from the cathartic and authentic mediation of the Table by barriers of law, language, class, gender, and education. These conditions, at least as much as the late medieval scholastic intellectual trends towards univocity, nominalism, and voluntarism, informed the Reformation’s, and modernity’s, radical turn to the individual. A Eucharistic celebration that loses touch with common people is no longer a nourishing meal, but rather presents its own sort of perverse simulacrum of transcendence. If the Eucharist is the only answer to violent spectacle, a communion ecclesiology “from below,” which encompasses not only the visible assembly of the church but all of humanity, is the only answer to the crowd’s bloodthirsty roar as the emperor signals his “thumbs down.”

This ecclesiological problem leads to a final reflection on Ross’s critique of the market. In interventions such as Ross’s that identify “the market” as a chief font of idolatry, it is too often impossible to distinguish a good exchange of gifts from a debased deal with the devil. If every kind of market exchange is equally demonic, then there is no hope of a redeemed city. Human beings are created for productive work and exchange. Together we cultivate the garden, but we cannot each cultivate the entire garden. Perhaps I will grow grapes, and you will grow corn, and we will exchange some of our produce so that we each have a portion of good fruit and vegetables to eat. This kind of fair market exchange reflects our constitution as social creatures. Our consumption of the products of our labor is a joyful response to God’s provision of food for our nourishment and enjoyment.

Markets are not inherently soul-consuming, but rather are part of the “very good” of the human creature’s capacity for sociality—for soul-building. We can see in markets some analogy to the ecstatic exchange of gifts within the perichoretic relations of the Trinitarian persons. But markets lacking the internal bond of cultural exchange—the bond of love—become hateful spaces of violence. As always, the problem is not the affirmative presence of some created capacity, but the lack of love in the exercise of that capacity—a deprivation, not a thing in itself.

So, again, I want to ask Ross, how then should we live? Can I exchange my grapes and corn in the city market square, or must I refrain from all worldly commerce? Christians in antiquity redeemed the Roman spectacles not by participating as spectators, but as sacrificial victims. In the moving conclusion to Perpetua’s diary we see Perpetua herself steady the hand of her executioner, who in the face of her brave faith had lost his composure. The vast majority of Christians are not called to a monastic or clerical life and necessarily find themselves in the arena of the marketplace. (Even those of us blessed enough to enjoy academic careers soon realize, at least if we sit on the budget or admissions committees, that we are not really cloistered in our ivory towers.) What does it mean for us to refuse the hypnotic bloodlust of the crowd and to find ourselves instead on the bloodstained floor above the hypogeum, not brandishing a sword but offering ourselves? How do we as Christians who have eaten at the Eucharistic table rise up after the meal and participate faithfully in God’s redemptive mission within the arenas of popular culture and the market?