13. A Genealogy of Presence: Elite Anxiety and the Excesses of the Popular Sacramental Imagination
Vincent J. Miller (p347)
Chauvet and Marion have used Heidegger's critique of metaphysics to warn us against 'controlling' God, away from the searing ambiguity of presence to idolatry; but how does this relate to the popular? Eagleton: idealist or "culturalist assumptions about the casual relationship between ideas and practice often lurk beneath postmodern theoretical perspectives that would disavow them to the end." The extreme example being Caputo's that belief systems inevitably lead to spilled blood. Foucault has argued that belief systems can distract from power (p347) A Foucaultian genealogy from early Germanic and Mediterranean syncretism to Bauman's observation that postmodernism's anxiety is for a culture whose production and consumption it cannot control (p348).
Loyola: God in all things; Congar: the monuments of tradition encompass liturgy, worship, gestures and lifestyle; form and content are united (p349). Tracy contrasts the analogical and dialectical which sees a fundamental continuity between human and divine without confusing them, characterised by comfort with ambiguity, corresponding with the concreteness of Catholicism (p350); further authors on the Catholic and Sacramental imagination, Aquinas and analogy; but how far did this extend outside the learned (p351)? Liturgy often cited but little on how it affects belief; elite arts production unhelpful; little in popular culture (p352). Evidence of symbols, bread, red wine, oil; sacramental narratives are descriptive not normative;
Foucault's genealogy (p353). The importance of being able to believe as well as believing, the difference between asigning 'God' to wine and finding God in daily activities (p354); Couteau, creation and consumption (Toffler's prosumer - KC) (p355); how Catholic ritual gave rise to voudou etc (p356); the exercise of power by academics over popular culture; ethnography is a violation of culture (p357).
Sacramental history full of clerical dominance and oppression. The romanticisation of Medieval rural Christianity by later de-Christianised eras but it was only nominally Christian and remained effectively pagan until the 16th Century; the Reformations were parallel movements to acculturate (p358), the elite imposing on the peasant but the elite appropriated the popular and the peasants collaborated; the effect was power channelling into orthodoxy (p359); image as active, hearing as passive (p360); Protestants destroyed images, Catholics transformed them (e.g., frontal replaced by profile); the puzzle of the baroque irruption and its subversion of rational Tridentine Catholicism; image as similitude not icon; from hypostatis to likeness (p361); Protestantism and Catholicism equably mistrusted popular belief and practice and sought orthodoxy; the miraculous claims for holy images challenged clerical authority (p362); the elite appropriation of cultural capital disempowers the masses.
Liturgical renewal (p363): the return to the simple after Vatican II whereby mystery is our experience of the transcendent God present in the communal gathering re-membering Jesus, from the mystification (an aesthetic experience of incomprehension, new guise, old control, paring down popular devotion (p364); the potential of the vernacular stunted by a narrowing of imaginative possibility; the priest facing and the revival of the homily both emphasised communications control.
The supposed aims of Vatican II back-fired (p365); conclusion (p366-7).