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

8. Thomas Aquinas: Postmodern

Barron (p265)

Habermas: the two tyrannies, modernity and the supreme being; post modernity and the supreme ego; from Descartes (Feuerbach) to Sartre's aphorism that we cannot be fully free as long as God exists; the supreme ego in Descartes, Hegel's self-conscious subject; but the new  supreme being is hardly an improvement on the old one (p265); Aquinas is postmodern.

Thomas and the supreme being: Aquinas does not envisage a God in competition with 'his' creation: esse ipsum subsistens (p266); everything has a cause and the ultimate cause is God (p267);  the to-be is not a general cause but a personal one (p268); God cannot be contained in a genus; esse is analogical (p269); there is no common reference to no competition; Anselm: id  quomaius cogitari nequit; (p270). Duns Scotus: God and creation are in the same ontological and linguistic category: "God  is understood only in the category of being", so God and creatures "compete", the supreme being has replaced ipsum esse subsistens. Suarez: metaphysics is being as being, prior to the nature of God (p271). Descartes misconstrued Thomas's analogy; thus the succession: Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, Sartre and the more nuanced onto-theology of Heidegger; they miss that Aquinas was as suspicious of the "supreme being" as they.

Aquinas does not subscribe to  the postmodern view that the less we give to God the more we give to humanity: the non-being of God corresponds to the non-being of  the creature (p272). Aquinas special case of ex nihilo locates creation as totally non violent; that which receives being is the being that it receives; that into which the gift of being goes is itself a gift of being. He inverts Aristotle's view that substance is  fundamental and relationship incidental (p274-6). the Incarnation is the metaphysical paradigm of creation (p277).