Eucharistic Tabernacles: A Typology

by M. Francis Mannion, appearing in Volume 3

An examination of the art of Eucharistic tabernacles in Catholic liturgical history yields a considerable variety of operative meanings. In this brief essay, I want to suggest that tabernacle design may be categorized under a five-fold typology: ark, building, treasury, tower, and ambry. Typologies are, of course, abstractions, and for that reason they are rarely verified exclusively in any particular expression. The visual examples accompanying this essay are, accordingly, deliberately abstracted conceptions. In reality, a range of themes and motifs often coexisted historically even in the same work, sometimes with evident logic, sometimes merely conventionally.

The nature of the relationship between altar and tabernacle is immensely complex, and is beyond the scope of this essay. Any examination of tabernacles has, however, to be undergirded by some theologically crucial principles. First, the most important and central element of a Catholic church is the altar; all other elements (including the ambo, baptismal font, and tabernacle) derive their meaning and significance from the altar. Second, nothing may be appropriately said about the tabernacle that may not be said in one way or another about the altar; the tabernacle has no meaning that does not derive from the altar. Third, Eucharistic devotions (benediction, exposition, processions) serve as elaborations of the meaning and significance of the Mass; they arise from the Mass and lead back to it. For our purposes here, it is sufficient to state that the meanings inherent in Eucharistic tabernacles are elaborations of meanings primarily condensed in the altar.

Ark The first and probably most common tabernacle type draws on the Solomonic temple liturgy. In the Temple of Solomon, the Ark of the Covenant was the exalted dwelling place of God. Dwelling in thick darkness and adored by the motionless cherubim, a pervasive sense of divine presence was generated. The ark had about it the character of awe, reverence and holiness. It remained in darkness and silence, suggesting the impenetrable mystery of God.

The history of Christian Eucharistic reference to the Ark of the Covenant is complex and not without considerable difficulties, but such referencing did occur at a certain moment in liturgical history. Eucharistic tabernacles in the ark model are traditionally veiled or set behind screens suggesting the hiddenness of divine presence. A sanctuary lamp before the place of reservation indicates the permanence of Christ's presence in his church. The appearance of adoring angels around a Eucharistic tabernacle, evoking the Ark of the Covenant, is typical of this type. A canopy suggests God’s dwelling invisibly among his people, yet never departing from them. This element of tabernacle symbolism evokes reverence, awe, and silent devotion of the mystery of divine presence in the world.

Charles Journet captures in a simple, expressive way the powerful sense of pervading presence that radiates from the tabernacle in a Catholic church: A mystery, a presence, fills the poorest Catholic church. It is dwelt in. Its life does not primarily stem from the fact that there is movement within it of the crowds that come and go. Before this, it is itself a source of life and purity for those who cross its threshold. It houses the Real Presence, the presence of Christ’s Body; it is the "place" where Love supreme has touched our human nature in order to involve it in an eternal marriage; it is the radiant focal point empowered to illuminate the whole drama of time and our human adventure.

According to Journet, "the Real Presence is the underlying reason for the Church's permanent quality in space and time until the Parousia.”

The hymn Adoro Te Devote ascribed to Thomas Aquinas is suggestive of this hidden aspect of the Eucharist, hence of the tabernacle for reservation: "God-head here in hiding,/whom I do adore, Masked by these bare shadows,/shape and nothing more, See, Lord, at thy service/low lies here a heart/Lost, all lost in wonder/ at the God Thou art."

The dwelling of Christ in the tabernacle is not a containment of divine presence, however, but a signification of the process by which the whole material world is consecrated. In Teilhard de Chardin's Hymn of the Universe, the Eucharistic host kept in the tabernacle radiates outwards an energy that incorporates all of creation, signifying the consecration of the world of matter and the recreation of all natural reality. Accordingly, the world of animals, fruits, and flowers is often drawn into tabernacle design.

The reality to be contemplated and revered in the Eucharistic tabernacle as ark is the immanent presence of God in Christ among his people, taking the form of bread and thereby consecrating material creation. God who is utterly above and beyond us dwells yet among us splendor.

Building Historically, tabernacles often been formed in the shape of buildings, specifically church buildings, signifying the New Testament conviction that the people of God are spiritual stones of a holy temple of which Christ is the cornerstone and the Apostles the pillars. For Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, not only the Church corporately but Christians personally may themselves be regarded as tabernacles in whom Christ abides.

Tabernacles have taken the shape of great basilicas and churches, sometimes quite literally; more often the shape merely hints at the notion of a building. Some have been inspired by the exterior shapes of the particular buildings they inhabit. Typically, little doors, spires, columns, and gables suggest a place of worship in miniature. In the Eucharistic theology of Saint Augustine, the Eucharistic sacrament unifies the person of Christ and his living body, the Church:

If you wish then to grasp the body of Christ hear the words of the Apostle to the faithful: "You are the body of Christ and his members" (1 Cor. 12:27). If then you are the body of Christ and his members, it is your sacrament that reposes on the altar of the Lord. It is your sacrament which you receive. You answer "Amen" to what you yourself are and in answering you are enrolled. You answer "Amen" to the words "The body of Christ." Be, then, a member of the body of Christ to verify your "Amen."

You are strangers and aliens no longer. No, you are fellow citizens of the saints and members of the household of God. You form a building which rises on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the capstone. Through him the whole structure is fitted together and takes shape as a holy temple in the Lord; in him you are being built into this temple, to become a dwelling place for God in the Spirit (Eph. 2:19-22).

Treasury Tabernacles for Eucharistic reservation have taken the evident shape of ornate chests, boxes, and caskets of precious metal and stone, suggesting the presence within of valuable and precious treasures. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that, "In the blessed Eucharist is contained the whole spiritual good of the Church, namely Christ himself" (no. 1324) and it speaks of the "inexhaustible richness" of the Eucharistic sacrament (no. 1328). One might turn this around and say: In the Eucharistic presence of Christ is contained all the spiritual goods, all the inexhaustible riches of the Church.

In the Eucharist, Christian believers are brought into the living spiritual world of the Holy Trinity, archangels and angels, the saints, the wisdom of the Old and New Testaments, and the saving power of Christian history. Through Eucharistic communion, believers are accorded communion with the whole Church on earth, in heaven and in purgatory, with our own beloved friends and relatives (living and dead), and with all humankind. The richness of this treasury is expressed in calling the Eucharist the "bread of angels." The central Catholic reality of the "communion of saints" has an essentially Eucharistic structure.

In the communion of the Mystical Body, according to Paul Claudel,

The whole of creation, visible and invisible; all history; all the past, the present and the future; all the treasure of the saints, multiplied by grace—all that is at our disposal as an extension of ourselves, a mighty instrument. All the saints and the angels belong to us. The Christian can use the intelligence of St. Thomas, the right arm of St. Michael, the hearts of Joan of Arc and Catherine of Siena, and all the hidden resources which have only to be touched to be set in action. Everything of the good, the great, and the beautiful, from one end of the earth to the other—everything which begets sanctity (as a doctor says of a patient that he has got a fever)—it is as if all that were our work. The heroism of the missionary, the inspiration of the Doctors of the Church, the generosity of the martyrs, the genius of the artists, the burning prayer of the Poor Clares and Carmelites—it is as if all that were ourselves; it is ourselves. All that is one with us, from the North to the South, from the Alpha to the Omega, from the Orient to the Occident; we clothe ourselves in it, we set it in motion.

The reality to be contemplated and appropriated in this dimension of the reserved Eucharist is that in Christ is made present and available the vast spiritual treasury of divine creation and redemption from which we live and are built up as God's children. We are inspired to active openness to—and love for—the great treasures of Christian faith and the splendid and inexhaustible riches of grace.

Tower In religious symbolism the tower reaches up to heaven signifying the anticipated union of heaven and earth. The towers and spires of Christian churches signify the truth that the Church's final goal is to be lifted up to heavenly glory. Accordingly, the tabernacle tower suggests the glory of heaven, the New Jerusalem, the eternal tabernacle, and the gate of heaven. As a material artifact of beauty, it prefigures the final glory of all creation. At the end of time, all things will be gathered into the tabernacle of God.

The heaven-oriented character of the Eucharistic tabernacle is signified variously by the emblem of Christ, the Lamb of God in glory, a heavenly throne, images of fire soaring upwards (the Transfiguration), eight-sided shapes and patterns referring to the eternal day, and gates and steps leading up to the heavenly Jerusalem. (As suggested at the outset, these motifs can appear, of course, not only in this tabernacle type but in others.)

Without straining biblical hermeneutics, it is appropriate to refer to those strains of biblical tabernacle theology in which the earthly tabernacle was regarded as prefiguring the heavenly one. In the Acts of the Apostles, the wilderness tabernacle, made according to the one in Heaven, is placed in contrast with the Solomonic Temple made by human hands (Acts 7:44-50). The Letter to the Hebrews speaks of the “true” tabernacle of heaven (8:2-5; 9:19-25), while in the Book of Revelation, the only tabernacle is that of heaven itself (21:23-24).

The sense of distance that Catholics have traditionally kept from the Eucharistic tabernacle, often venerating it from afar, is not so much a pagan devotional remnant, but rather a statement that the earthly worshipers remain as yet some distance from the heavenly tabernacle. The Eucharist will only be received in all its fullness in the eternal banquet of heaven, while on earth the fullness of Eucharistic reality remains literally and spiritually “reserved” for the future. The Christian is at once close to Christ, yet knows that the plenitude of Eucharistic communion will be received only at the end of history. In the words of Thomas Aquinas, the Eucharist is "a pledge of future glory."

Teilhard de Chardin knew this when as a chaplain in World War II he was suddenly struck by the simultaneous experience of possession and incompleteness in relation to the Eucharist. He ascribes these words to a friend:

"I suddenly realized just how extraordinary and how disappointing it was to be thus holding so close to oneself the wealth of the world and the very source of life without being able to possess it inwardly, without being able either to penetrate it or to assimilate it. How could Christ be at once so close to my heart and so far from it, so closely united to my body and so remote from my soul?" The friend continues: '"I was separated [from Christ] by the full extent and the density of the years which still remained to me, to be lived and to be divinized."' It seemed, he states, "'that in the depths of my being, though the Bread I had just eaten had become flesh of my flesh, nevertheless it remained outside of me."' The Eucharistic gift "'was receding from me as it drew me on.”

The tabernacle tower reaching to heaven properly generates in those who venerate its mystery a deepening of hope in the glorious promises of God, partially received yet partially present as pledge and anticipation. Its inspiring quality opens up also a commitment to the ministry by which the glory and beauty of heaven are given expression in earthly things.

Ambry The original form of the Eucharistic tabernacle was also the humblest: the ambry, a cupboard or safe set in the wall of the church or sacristy. Here the Eucharist was reserved for its most practical purpose: to be brought to those who were sick or deterred in one way or another from being present at Mass.

At the end of Mass, Christians today are sent forth to serve the Lord in each other. This mission, carried on in the early times by the baptized and today by clergy and special ministers of the Eucharist, underscores the need to draw all—especially the poor, old, needy, and dying—into the communion of Christ. The Eucharist kept in the ambry and brought to the sick and the dying as "medicine of immortality" and as viaticum (food for the journey through death), signifies the aspect of charity and service that perdures through the whole life and time of the church. Significantly, the tabernacle was often known by the name used for the small container, the "pyx," used to bring the Eucharist to the sick and dying. Indeed, it is worth recalling here that the oil of the sick was also kept in an ambry before the Middle Ages, often in the same ambry as the Blessed Sacrament.

The reality to be brought to life in this aspect of Eucharistic veneration is the Christian obligation to the hungry, ill, suffering, and dying that arises from the very nature of Eucharistic life. Devotion to the reserved Eucharist has an intrinsic ministerial dimension. This point is set forth well (clearly following a High Church tradition) by Anglican Bishop Frank Weston of the former territory of Zanzibar earlier in the present century:

If you are prepared to fight for the right of adoring Jesus in his Blessed Sacrament, then you have got to come out from before your Tabernacle and walk, with Christ mystically present in you, out into the streets of this country, and find the same Jesus in the people of your cities and your villages. You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the Tabernacle, if you do not pity Jesus in the slum. . . . And it is folly—it is madness—to suppose that you can worship Jesus in the Sacraments and Jesus on the throne of glory, when you are sweating him in the souls and bodies of his children. It cannot be done. . . . Go out and look for Jesus in the ragged, in the naked, in the oppressed and sweated, and in those who have lost hope, in those who are struggling to make good. Look for Jesus. And when you see him, gird yourselves with his towel and try to wash their feet.