Moses, Xenophanes, and the Altar of God

"Was Moses right, or Xenophanes?

Did God make man in his image, or did man make God in his?"

So asks Henri de Lubac in The Discovery of God.

Moses says we're shaped by a likeness we didn't invent; Xenophanes replies that we sculpt our gods with our own provincial chisel: horses would worship a horse-faced deity.

Both are right long enough to keep us honest and wrong long enough to keep us searching. The quarrel isn't academic. It starts every morning at the bathroom mirror, where a face asks whether it's an icon or a projector.

“Image of God” can mean two very different economies of the soul. In the first, resemblance arrives as gift—like light that makes the portrait possible before a single brushstroke. In the second, resemblance is a theft—we ransack the heavens for traits that flatter us, scaling the divine down until it fits behind the glass.

Modern piety prefers the second economy: God as a mood, a lifestyle accessory, the Infinite rebranded to suit the finite. Xenophanes warned us about the clay of our imaginations.

Moses warned us not to mistake wet clay for breath.

The test case is the Eucharist, where the abstractions stage a prison break into matter. Catholic tradition does something scandalously unfashionable: it stakes everything on a claim that can't be domesticated by metaphor.

Either the bread and wine become—truly, objectively, stubbornly—Body and Blood, or they don't.

If they do, then history has a gravitational center and we've been living near it unawares. If they don't, we've been training people—devoutly—to adore bread.

By our own Catholic self-understanding that's not a small error; it's the First Mistake; the golden calf rebaked.

It's the kind of choice that abolishes the safe middle. Many prefer the meadow of “symbol only,” as if symbol were a polite way to say “pretend.” But a symbol is either a bridge or a screen. If it's a bridge, we cross into the thing itself; if it's a screen, we're watching ourselves watch.

The Eucharistic claim announces a bridge with no handrails. Step, or don’t—there's no hovering.

Notice what happens to Moses and Xenophanes at the altar. If the Eucharist is true, then Moses wins by a paradox: not only were we made in God’s image, but God has chosen to be made small in ours—human flesh, human speech, human food—without becoming our fabrication. Our likeness is borrowed; His self-emptying is elective.

If the Eucharist is false, Xenophanes wins grimly: our holiest gesture reveals our most sophisticated projection, and piety turns out to be wishful digestion.

Bleh.

Someone will say the dilemma is crude, too binary for delicate consciences. But some questions aren't multiple-choice because reality isn't obligated to offer partial credit. “This is my body” is either the world’s most concentrated truth or a sentence that should make us nervous forever.

The choice is stark because love, if real, likes to be located.

Lovers don't say, “Behold, I am symbolically present, everywhere and nowhere.” They pick an address. So the claim is that God picked an address and dared us to ring the bell.

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We should also admit the counter-pressure: human beings do make gods. The market is full of them, priced to move. They come in therapeutic, nationalist, and technological flavors these days.

We project because projection is cheap and control is sweet. Here Xenophanes is our sober friend. He points to the factory of sacred substitutes and asks whether we recognize our own handwriting on the label. His warning stands: every religion, not least Christianity, carries a built-in forge for idols shaped like its Founder’s gentlest sayings.

Yet precisely here the Eucharistic wager becomes most dangerous.

If true, the Eucharist breaks our habit of making gods in our image. If false, it blesses that habit. The rite meant to end idolatry would become its most polished form.

Only a serious God would risk this much confusion to get this close; only a serious skeptic would insist the risk proves the whole thing imaginary.

What then?

Not a new proof, but a posture. Let me propose something simple: the ancient couple—Moses and Xenophanes—shouldn't divorce.

Let Moses teach us reverence for what we didn’t start; let Xenophanes keep our hands off the thermostat of the Absolute. Together they make a strange liturgy: kneel, and interrogate. We need both, lest belief curdle into gullibility and doubt into vanity—skepticism as a self-flattering pose that never risks being convinced.

# # #

On my desk there's a small clock that ticks whether I'm thinking noble thoughts or not. Turns out, time doesn't consult me.

If the Eucharist is what the Church says, then the world is like that clock: it keeps time to Someone else’s heartbeat, and we're invited to sync. If not, then our worship’s an eloquent pantomime, and we should have the courage to say so and stop the show.

Either way, the question refuses to leave quietly.

Perhaps that's the first sign we're dealing with something more than private taste: it calls to us in a voice we didn't choose, addressing our freedom with the impoliteness of love or the persistence of illusion.

Which is it?

The bread won't answer; it'll only be what it is—or what it isn’t.

The mirror waits. So does the altar.