5. The Church as the Erotic Community
Graham Ward (p167)
The liturgical Fraction: 1. participation follows fragmentation; each fragment is the whole body; the interchange between priest and people; the interchange between Christ and believers. 2. The establishment of the community of the faithful in "we break this bread" and "we are one" (p168); the receiving of the bread "finds its ultimate figuration in erotic consummation, becoming one flesh; the church as a kind of erotic community. 3. The community affirms its location in Christ, "participating in the displacement of the body of Christ announced in the breaking of the bread", the third aspect of the fracture. 4. the continuous present tense (p169).
"It is on the basis of an exploration of the present tense of this liturgical interchange that the erotic nature of the ecclesial community can best be approached." The relationship of the present and presence (p170); discussion of the options (p171). The author's standpoint: 1. Aquinas: Christ is nourishment; Christ is really present. 2. Calvin: Christ's flesh and blood are "truly exhibited to us as if Christ himself were presented to our eyes, and touched by our hands". 3. Zizek: the problem with cyberspace is not its emptiness but its fullness. The idea of present/presence is contextually dependent in the three examples.
A genealogy of presence: Other than the use of the copula "is" the NT does not speak of presence (p172); Augustine emphasises appearance, we become what we eat, there is not a dualism between visible and invisible, the visible and corporeal cannot fully realise themselves in the present (p173), the creaturely realm( Gregory of Nyssa) is always subject to time. Aquinas: present and presence refer only to the corporeal and the temporal and must be understood analogically and, in line with Medieval theology's suspicion of taking Christ's presence in the world too literally, there is a studied avoidance of using this language in his discussion of the Eucharist; he affirms that God exists in the Eucharist, and how Christ is really there (p174). He does not do so because Augustine's contrast of the imperfect present with perfect eternity; for Aquinas the Eucharist is a viaticum. Only God has access to the present and human access is illusory. Augustine said that the present is only conceivable to creatures enclosed by the future and the past; there is no pure present or presence (which may explain why Anselm's ontological proof was ignored in the Medieval period). And for Aquinas the Eucharist is Anamnesis and projection to the beatific celebration to come (p175). To Augustine and Aquinas present/presence is idolatry; the Sacraments draw attention to what is not present. To understand the differences of 'presence' we should consider Barth's "modes of being" of 'persons' of the Godhead. The language of "Real Presence" does not occur in the Fourth Lateran discussion of transubstantiation (1215) but it occurs in the 13th Session of Trent (1551): "Our Lord Jesus Christ, true God and true man, is truly (vere), really (realiter) and substantially contained (contineri) in the august Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist under the appearance (subspecies) of those sensible things (rerum sensibilium) He is sacramentally present (sacramentaliter praesens). (p176). Ockham shifts 'presence" to the definite location of things, to rigorous spatiality and temporality, towards space as location (p177). Ripas "real presence" in creation; Biel's "real presence" in Eucharist the presence therefore becomes commodified as a property. Trent probably did not wish "praesens" and "species" to be yoked as this implies the presence veiled, a Calvinist proposition (later taken up by Roman Catholics - KC).
Calvin: The reification and literalisation of presence prepares the ground for the secular and scientific (p179) and the erastian; we are entering the society of spectacle (p180); Calvin's Eucharistic text (p181-3); Christ is to the soul what bread is to the body; there was a tension throughout the middle ages between a minimal, mysterious presence and a maximal, literal presence (p184); Christ offers but our faith receives; the Spirit makes the offering effective; but our faith makes reception possible (p185); discussion on Calvin and presence (p186); an economy of desire based on lack, where presence is the consummation of desire, the annihilation of difference (p187).
Zizek: Summarised (p188-90).
The relationship between present tense and presence: Augustine's presence is timeless; modernism has time as a series of instants; "orgasm becomes the measure of the moment which devalues Eros. Getting the most out of what is becomes one of the metaphysical bases of consumer greed and one of the rationales for the erotification of consumer culture. And the endless deferment of the consummating now, articulated by many poststructuralist thinkers, only fetishes that now even more ... the prolongation of desire endlessly produces it ... part of the seduction ... the final ecstasy of oblivion." Tradition does not understand present this way; as the Last supper is both Passover and Calvary (p191), Eucharist is Last Supper, Calvary and a foretaste of the heavenly banquet (p192).
Our desire for God is constituted by God's desire for us, so redemption is an economy of desire (Hegel); desire issues from difference; the kenosis of incarnation entails that otherness is always in relation. Modern desire is lack and lust (p193); in the Christian economy of desire the object cannot be the terminus, enjoyed as gifted not acquired, attaining not consuming (p195). Sin is isolating oneself (Hegel); the privatisation of self reverts to chaos (p196). The logic of the Eucharist rejects the I as single; God is the correlative of desire and the good (p197). Couteach on space (p198-200.). Couteau's four suppositions of the rational utopia (p201-2).
"God cannot be housed. That would be the greatest commodification of them all, the danger of which is present in the 'reali presaenhtia' of the Council of Trent. The institutional churches are necessary, but they are not ends in themselves; they are constantly transgressed by a community of desire, an erotic community, a spiritual activity. Within these places, organised by them, desire for God and God's desire for us opens a liturgical space which distends over all the other bodies which participate in and produce it. The body of Christ desiring its consummation opens itself to what is outside the institutional church; offers itself to perform in activity far from chancels and the cloisters." (p203). Structures are enabling and constraining (p204).
Kevin Hart: Response to Ward (p205): definitions of deconstruction (p206); real presence and true presence (p207); Millbank on modernism (p208); Ward’s shortcomings (p209); "I do not find the doctrine of participation, as Ward presents it, to speak sufficiently astringently of the surprise of God and the astonishment that the story of Jesus produces. ... we participate in the church ... but we belong in the kingdom" (p210). "An erotic community seems rather thin in the light of a community forever open to agape.