Blood

It is no accident that wine is the symbolic vehicle for blood, as the language of intoxication with the blood of Christ runs throughout the writings of medieval saints and mystics, notably women. For these mystics, rooted in doctrine, blood is the gateway from the human to the divine; it gives "life" like mother’s milk, bringing humanity and God into the most intimate relations, as between a mother and child or, perhaps closer to the spirit of wine, between a lover and her beloved. For many medieval Christian saints and mystics, blood inspired ecstasy. Their poems and prose works often link the highly erotic language of Song of Solomon, centering on desire and the marriage bed, with drinking the blood of Christ. The image of drunkenness as mystical union is ancient, but the descriptions of ecstasy love-drunk with Christ’s blood are distinctly medieval. The aspect of fertility in blood sacrifice, which has an unavoidably sexual connotation (however sublimated), brings Christianity into contact with ancient Greek mystery cults of Dionysus, the god of wine. Both religions link the human body to divinity and immortality through the erotic symbolism of drinking wine/blood.

Iconic representations of Christ’s blood abound in the medieval period. Angels are painted holding golden chalices catching the blood of the crucified Christ that spurts as if from a fountain. Blood flows copiously from Christ’s five wounds in much medieval painting, emphasizing the full humanity of Christ, the depth of his suffering in a mortal body, as well as the connotations of atonement, purification, and eternal life. Artists condensed the complex theological concerns of the relation between divinity and humanity, the spiritual and the physical, into the symbol of Christ’s blood, so that all, the lettered and the unlettered, would understand that, in the words of the Church Fathers, "God became man so that man may become God."

Comparisons to Other Religions

Blood has universal connotations in the religious imagination of humanity: it symbolizes life, fertility, and the violence of sacrifice, whether as an offering, a punishment, or atonement. Like any highly symbolic— potentially "holy"—substance, blood has paradoxical meanings and functions; it both contaminates and purifies, convicts and redeems. Ritual sacrifice worldwide has been predominantly blood sacrifice; it is with blood that gods are bribed, appeased, or enlisted in human enterprises, as hunting or war. For the Inca of Peru and the Aztecs of Mexico, (human) blood sacrifice ensured cosmic regularity; for the Israelites, blood sacrifice established and maintained the covenant of God with his people. In each case, ritually spilled blood reinstates or ensures the continuation of order (fertility) and proper human relations with the gods or God.

The symbolism of the blood of Christ is consonant with this general scheme: Christ’s death on the cross (as interpreted by Paul) is a blood sacrifice to God the Father that atones for the sins of humanity, thus reestablishing the harmony between humanity and God that had been destroyed by sin. The central Christian ritual, the Eucharist, establishes participation in this redemptive sacrifice through the drinking of Christ’s holy blood (and the eating of his body). When Jesus inaugurates this ritual at Passover (the Last Supper) with the mysterious toast, "This is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many," his disciples are to understand that he is invoking God’s covenant with Moses, the "old" covenant. God said to Moses, "For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that makes atonement for the soul" (Leviticus 17:11). For Christians, God’s covenant with Moses is not abolished but is superceded by the "new" covenant, which is consecrated not by the blood of bulls and lambs, but by the Son of God.

Christ’s blood sacrifice is one of atonement and purification (hence the symbol of Jesus as Lamb of God), offered to God for the reestablishment of order and fertility (sinlessness and eternal life), but it differs from other notions of sacrifice insofar as Christ is considered to be both human and divine. Thus does God, through his Son, sacrifice himself to himself for the sake of humanity—this "economy" of salvation constitutes the Christian creed in its barest, most formulaic expression. Not human beings, but God himself is both the high priest and the victim whose blood atones for the sins of men.

According to Christians, this self-sacrifice of God is the act of love par excellence, the descent of God from his wholly spiritual bliss in eternity into mortal, suffering flesh and blood (the Incarnation). Thus blood comes to symbolize Christ’s love for humanity, and through this love (or blood), the promise of eternal life and the resurrection of the body. For Christians, when Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, became human and spilled his blood on the altar (the cross), blood became divine, it became spirit, and this transfiguration from the physical to the spiritual was the opening to eternal life in God. In the Catholic Eucharist, the doctrine of Transubstantiation expresses this idea clearly: the bread actually becomes Christ’s body and the wine actually becomes Christ’s blood through the mystery of Christ’s sacrifice, which breathed spirit and life into what had been merely physical and material. Human blood, a symbol of mortality, becomes divine, wholly spiritual, "transubstantiated" when cleansed from the stain of sin through the offering of Christ’s sinless blood.