Thinking Sacramental Presence in a Postmodern Context: a Playground for Theological Renewal
Most sacramental theology is pre-modern, the sacred occupying a realm of its own, transcending the mundane, in turn based on neo-Platonic cosmology "all creatures are ordered by the quality of their being, and can thus be located on a continuum flowing from God and returning to God ... the analogia entis" (6). Even Aquinas was neo-Platonic in this respect: we can justly attribute to God such 'simple perfections' as goodness, wisdom which are attributes borrowed from human experience and expression because these perfections, according to the analogia entis, exist pre-eminently in God already before creation: 'Whatever is said both of God and creatures is said in virtue of the order that creatures have to God as to their source and cause in which all the perfections of things pre-exist transcendentally." (p6). "The sacramental event can be understood in neo-Platonic terms as the illumination of the single hidden origin in the 'being, living and thinking' of contingent beings, an illumination through which these same beings become transparent to the primordial ground which shines through them" (De Schruijver). "Sacraments function as events which bring believers into harmony with this origin, and do so in a reality which possesses a general sacramental structure because of the driving force which extends from the God-origin to beings, and therefore the transparency of those beings towards the God-origin. In such a context, sacramental grace is defined according to a causality-scheme: sacraments institute harmony with the origin. Sacraments, as means of divine salvation for humankind, are not only the signs (signum) of grace but also what exercise or realise it (causa). It is in the sacrament itself, which 'causes/realises what it signifies' that grace comes to us" (Boeve). Aquinas: God creates grace "as fire warms by virtue of its own heat ... a shared similitude to the divine nature" (ST III 62.1) Aquinas: sacramental grace adds something over the grace of the virtues as it is a "special kind of divine assistance to help in attaining the end of the sacrament concerned" (ST III 62.2.) (p8).
Von Balthazar and Ratzinger both neo-Platonic (the latter on the verge of dualism - KC). But many contemporary theologians have rejected the "transcendence" of the holy, rejecting its "premodern, dualistic, static and a historical conceptions ..." (Boeve). Even Rahner writes: "... that in this self-communication, God in his absolute being is related to the created existent in the mode of formal causality (in contrast with the efficient causality in which something caused is distinguished from the cause), that is, that he does not originally cause and produce something different from himself in the creature, but rather that he communicates his own divine reality and makes it a constitutive element in the fulfilment of the creature" (Rahner, FCF) (p9). Where we open ourselves to it, God's self-communication comes to light. Theologians such as schilleebeeckx, in his later writings, stress the: "... this-worldliness, historicity and materiality of Christian salvation" (Boeve) (p10): "orthopractic human love becomes the sacrament of God's redemptive love" (schilleebeeckx); even in misery there are fragments of eschatological joy so that sacraments are: "... anticipatory, mediating signs of salvation ... healed and reconciled life", prophetic forms of protest against the unredeemed character of history and they call for a praxis of liberation" (Boeve synopsis of Schillebeeckx). Metz: "by means of their narrativity, sacraments enable people to participate in dangerous and subversive but at the same time liberating memories of the fact that there is hope and a future for all." (Boeve summary of Metz) (p11).
Characteristics of Sacramental modernity: historicity, this-worldliness, primacy of praxis, futurity, attention to suffering (p13).
Lyotard: The postmodern rejects modernist master narratives and anti-modernist conservatism (p14). Hegel's speculative principle that all that is rational is real, and vice versa, has been denied by Auschwitz; and the Marxist perception that every proletarian was a Communist and vice versa refuted by Berlin (1953), Budapest (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968) &c. (more tentatively - KC) 1968 struck a blow against liberal democracy and the economic crises of 1911, 1929, 1974-79 (and, I might add, more critically, 2008 onwards - KC) questions all liberal economic theories (Lyotard) (p14). Two master narrative paradigms: rationality and technology (Hegel) and Utopian (liberalism, communism, welfare capitalism); he also includes the "fault" redeemed by love (Christian) (p15). Postmodernism rests on the plurality of our condition, the particularity and context of individual narratives and the emerging irreducible heterogeneity of critical consciousness, each of equal legitimacy and worth. (p15). Narratives remain but only as contextually plausible which does not necessarily lead to relativism (Lyotard ends) (p16).
In modernist terms, Christian love has grafted itself onto emancipation, whereas the pre-modern grafting is ontological in ideas of absolute truth (p17).
Boeve: Transcendence and immanence are not bi-polar, two layers dividing the whole of reality: "... transcendence is clarified as an ineffable moment of disruption or interruption in the midst of the immanent reality (of language). ... what can prevent ... theology from becoming hegemonic. It dispossesses theological reflection of the possible pretence that it has made God comprehensible and given a place within the immanence of reality. God is revealed anew in every event of heterogeneity ... the event of grace ... but without implying a localisation of God. ... God becomes known as un-represented, hidden, ungraspable and incomprehensible, always other, at the same time opening up an expectation of a God who will come as the limit of, and break into, (worldly) time ... theology taking leave of 'homology'" (Boeve) (p20-21). The postmodern requires that we open ourselves in contemplation to transcendence and bear witness to it in a non-hegemonic way through fragmentary words, images, stories, symbols and rituals. (p21). So, postmodern sacramental time is not a pre-modern concept where "now" does not exist, nor is a modern concept of progress with "now" pointing to the future but is: "... the time of the interruptive, apocalyptic 'now-moment' (Kairos), the event which opens up the particular and contingent, placing it in the perspective of the transcendent God" (22).
Boeve's summaries of contributions:
- De Schrijver: Our asymmetrical relationship with God should prompt us to question our asymmetrical relationship with the dispossessed. (p24-25).
- Bingemer: The vulnerability of reason in theology, due to the inherent vulnerability of religious experience itself which means that everything is unfinished (p25).
- Merrigan: Is literal incarnation necessary for a Christianity of love and Jesus the unique mediator of salvation? (p25-6).
- Moyaert: Trent defined real presence and transubstantiation to limit the doctrine and to protect it from science (isn't that post hoc rationalisation? - KC) but to take it too literally can be counter productive (p26-7).
- Kerr: secular symbolic theory is inadequate (p27).
- Power: Postmodernism can de-construct totalising modernist theories; sacrament is an open sign, breaking open totalising narratives; an excess in which language pours itself out before the inexpressible god; and abundance of gift in overcoming the distance between giver and gifted (p27-8).
- Jeanrond: Warns against linguistic dominance in sacramental praxis, advocates a hermeneutics of suspicion; and warns against isolating the Cross from Christian memory (p28).
- Ward: Relating to radical orthodoxy which seeks to "reclaim the world theologically", he emphasises Eucharistic presence as "participation in a temporal plenitude", driven by an economy of excess, not lack (p28-9).
- Hart: Modernism too often conflated with nihilism, so they end up in their own Augustinian, neo-Platonic grand narrative (p29).
- Lacoste: Presence is advent never to be hypostatised, received in this world but not confined to it, a foretaste of what is to come (p29-30).
- Verhack: Questions the idea of the liturgical "non-place" (p30-1).
- Chauvet: Rejects sacramental causality; the bread and wine inscribe God's otherness; real presence always involves absence, advent. The broken creates a space of others (p31-2)j.
- Barron: In Aquinas there is no common framework between Creator and Created and therefore no competition (p32).
- Godzieba: Warns against radically deconstructive apophasis (p32-3).
- Hemming: The real issue of transubstantiation is not about the bread and wine but the person who knows what has taken place (p33).
- Ries: One way of understanding the Kierkergaardian locus of transcendence is "Sacramental Anxiety" (p33-4).
- van den Bossche: J.L. Marion: Jesus is "the historical paradigm of the phenomenon of revelation" (p35).
- Miller: Post Trent control of presence (p35).
- van den Hoogen: "What kind of longing is hidden in the rites I participate in?".