Thinking Sacramental Presence in a Postmodern Context

Article Sections

Contents

  1. Opening Address
  2. Thinking Sacramental Presence in a Postmodern Context: a Playground for Theological Renewal
  3. 1. Postmodernity and the Withdrawal of the Divine: a Challenge for Theology
  4. 2. Postmodernity and Sacramentality: Two Challenges to Speaking about God
  5. 3. Incarnation of Meaning and the Sense for Symbols: Phenomenological Remarks on a Theological Debate
  6. 4. The Language of Sacramental Memorial: Rupture, Excess and Abundance
  7. 5. The Church as the Erotic Community
  8. 6. Presence et Affection
  9. 7. The Broken Bread as Theological Figure of Eucharistic Presence
  10. 8. Thomas Aquinas: Postmodern
  11. 9. Incarnation and Imagination: Catholic Theology of God between Heidegger and Postmodernity
  12. 10. After Heidegger Transubstantiation
  13. 11. The Concept of "Sacramental Anxiety": a Kierkegaardian Locus of Transcendence
  14. 12. God Does Appear in Immanence after all: Jean-Luc Marion's Phenomenology as a new First Philosophy of Theology
  15. 13. A Genealogy of Presence: Elite Anxiety and the Excesses of the Popular Sacramental Imagination
  16. 14. ("untitled":) On Denoting Sacramental Presence

11. The Concept of "Sacramental Anxiety": a Kierkegaardian Locus of Transcendence

John C. Ries (p310) 

Although Soren Kierkegaard (SK) is neither a postmodern nor a sacramentalist, he may be  helpful (p310). As we recognise feeling through existence and not theory, transcendence may break in to what we feel as absence, so that we are touched by the divine. SK The Concept of Anxiety and Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions; (p311).

 

Anxiety  over hereditary sin (p312); freedom is making a self history, generating anxiety. Freedom's no-thing-ness: anxiety is bound to time; and is present, both springing from freedom's groundlessness (p313). The time of freedom is not the eternal or metaphysical time but a groundless origin where eternal time comes to be, where time and eternity touch (p314); the present absence of freedom's possibility  stands as an inward journey that must be taken in the right way: "whoever learns to be anxious in the right way has achieved the ultimate", here there is a place for faith.

 

The imagined occasions point to a pervading absent presence (p316): in the Confession there is a reaching for the unknown which is the ultimate absent present (p317); in the wedding a promise imposes a duty to engage time and history (p318), love in freedom conquers everything (p319), sacramental because it is a Godly invitation which opens one so that the flower of love can blossom eternal; the Graveside, death is the schoolmaster of earnestness (p320) which is a life force (p321); further reflections on death (p322).

 

Sacramental anxiety: fruitful tension between: "... the present absence of anxiety and the absent present of an 'imagined' sacramental occasion", the latter a locus of transcendence without falling into idolatry; the adventure of anxiety (p324-5).