In this essay, I explore Catherine Pickstock's reading of the eucharistic words of Consecration, a reading that invokes Plato's view that ‘language exists primarily, and in the end only has meaning as, the praise of the divine’. Immediately, we need to be aware that Pickstock is articulating a relational theology, where community, the divine, language, symbolic practice and action are inter-related and interpenetrate. However, I argue that her account too literally interprets the alleged words of Jesus which traditionally have been construed as the very institution of the Eucharist, and that this is contrary to a relational theology based in ethics. Pickstock shares with Louis-Marie Chauvet a commitment to the importance of the socio-ethical context of Christian life. Whereas Chauvet situates Christian community within language and culture, however, Pickstock traces the emergence of civil society and secularity from the religious world of the Middle Ages. As I read her, Pickstock seems to hold the view that the theological is the semantic ground of the social.