Boersma Outline Sacramental Tapestry

argument:  Until the late middle ages people looked at the world as a mystery (Boersma 21).  By mystery Boersma means a sacramental link between creation and God, that creation participates in God.  In other words, the connection, though not identical, is real.  Mystery, so Boersma reads the “Platonist-Christian synthesis” (hereafter PCs) refers to the “reality behind the appearances.”

Boersma structures his book around the (neo)Platonic movement of exitus and reditus (the departure from and return to), except exitus now refers to how the church lost the PCs and the reditus on possible steps for regaining it.

It is not Boersma’s goal to defend Platonism as such.  

Mystery

Created realities point beyond themselves (carry extra dimension to them)

Symbols just point to something else

Sacraments--the referents coinhere.

A Sacramental world not only points to God but participates in him.  

real connection, not just nominal.

The signum points to and participates in the res.

The end of created being lies beyond itself (30).

Creation and Goodness

Creation is hinged upon transcendence.

If unhooked, it loses its goodness (it has to rely on itself).

It must participate in a higher goodness.

The Platonic Heritage

• Rejecting Parts:  
• Creation is not automatic nor an emanation.
• argued for resurrection of body
• The Good

Weaving the tapestry

The Fathers’ Christological Anchor

Irenaeus

• God reveals himself publicly in Jesus Christ to all alike.
• The wisdom of the gospel pleads for a unity that doesn’t obliterate differences.

Athanasius:  Unity in the Incarnate Logos

• To be made in the image of God means to be rational--Christ must teach us.  The image is restored by means of teaching (Boersma 45).
• We are not disparate, fragmented individuals but participate in a common humanity.  
• The unity of humanity lies anchored in the Word.

Gregory of Nyssa: Universals and Particulars

• universals refer to what is common, particulars to what is individual.
• Universals anchor the particulars.
• The deity in which the Father/Son/Spirit share implies a common activity.  This is why the three men analogy--James, John, Peter--breaks down, for they all have different actions.

Theme:  Our particular humanity depends on the participation of humanity in Christ (51).

Unraveling the Tapestry: The Medieval Revolt Against Nature

• Juridicizing the Church
• Gregorian reform

• For earlier fathers, sacred actions are performed in the church, but everyone is subject to God. God was directly working in the sacred actions.
• earlier theology regarded sacramental power as within the life of the church.  Now it is causally top down.
• Discovery of Nature
• earlier sacramental thought held a link between heaven and earth. There was the unity of the church (res) and the sacrament to which it pointed.
• The Berengar Dialectic
• Berengar said we spiritually participate in the res.
• His opponents said we physically participate in the sacramentum.
• Both sides widened the gap between heaven and earth.
• Scripture, Church, Tradition
• The earlier fathers said church and Scripture coinhere. They are not two separate sources of authority.
• Dialectic of Wyclif: Catholics responded to him by pitting Church against Scripture.
• Nature and the Supernatural
• The Counter-Reformation introduced the notion of “pure nature,” which meant human nature before any prior movement of grace.  Human nature is walled-off.

Cutting the Tapestry: The Two Scissors of Modernity

Univocity of Being

• Scotus said being was used in a univocal way.   Being is now “unhooked” from God.  
• If being now applies to God and creatures in the same way, then it has become an overarching category in which both God and creation “share” (75).
• Sacramentum no longer receives res from God’s own being.  

Voluntas

• God no longer relates to creation by gift, but by will.
• The world can only relate in an “external” way.  
• The late medieval emphasis on divine decree cut the link between God’s will and God’s knowledge (79).

Younger Evangelicals

After Late Medievalism the Reformation struggled to reweave the tapestry.  This isn’t entirely its fault.  Most of the Reformers were philosophical realists, but it’s hard to keep together what has long since been sundered.  

The Great tradition had a Christological anchor: a vertical link between God and humanity where we receive our being by participation in the Logos (89).

REDITUS: RECONNECTING THE THREADS

Eucharist as Sacramental Meal

If our connection with God is an external or nominal one, then there is little room for sacramental participation.  

De Lubac and the Eucharist

There is a real transubstantiation, but it is when the congregation is changed into the body of Christ. This leads de Lubac to posit a threefold body: the bread, the congregation, Christ.

St Paul seems to operate off this as well.

“And is not this bread [Body¹] we break a participation in the body [Body..n..] of Christ?” (1 Cor. 10:16b).

“Because there is one loaf [Body¹], we, who are many, are one body [Body²], for we all partake of one loaf [Body¹]” (1 Cor. 10:17).  

The question is what does Body...n refer to in 1 Cor. 10:16b?   It could refer to Christ himself.  It could also refer to Body².  Or as de Lubac says, it is a three-fold body so there isn’t a hard and fast separation.  

sanctorum communio: can refer to either communion of saints or communion of holy things.  Communion of holy things was related to communion of saints (115).  

The Shifting Corpus

The word verum moved from the ecclesial body [Body²] to the eucharistic body [Body¹].   “Christ’s body in the Eucharist came to be seen as the true body” (de Lubac, quoted in Boersma 117).  

The Church began to focus more on the Eucharist and less on communion within the ecclesial body.  

Outline of Hegel and Modern Society

Analytical outline of Charles Taylor's Hegel and Modern Society.

Cambridge Press, 1979.

1. Freedom, Reason, and Nature
1. Expression and Freedom.  Hegel sought to synthesize the Romantic desire for freedom and expression with the Rationalist desire for Reason.  The Romantics saw Enlightenment science severing man’s unity.  
2. Man can only be self-conscious when he abstracts himself from the world.  But when he does that, he severs himself from the organic unity of life.  Reason and Life are thus opposites.  But they are opposites which can’t exist without the other.
3. The Embodied Subject
1. each term (subject/object; nature/freedom; God/man) is identical with its opposite.
2. Opposition arises out of circular identity.  
3. Hegel and the Subject
1. Followed Herder in seeing the subject as an expressive unity.
2. All of a subject’s functions are necessarily embodied.  On a human level this makes sense.  You usually can’t have a thought without a mind thinking it.  
3. Man is not an animal with rationality added, but a new kind of totality.  
4. There is a hierarchy of consciousness. The higher enfolds and negates the lower.
4. There is a hierarchy of forms of life and a hierarchy of modes of consciousness.  Each negates and gives rise to a new one.  This is why man progresses from art to religion to philosophy.  As his rational self-consciousness grows, so does his mode of that self-consciousness.
5. A rational subject must be embodied because their must be an opposite pole in which it may flourish
4. The Absolute as Subject
1. The universe is the embodiment of the totality of the life-functions of God (24).
2. Geist is understood teleologically.  
3. If Geist, then there are also finite spirits.  
4. There is a limit between Geist and not-itself.  
1. If Geist is somewhere, it is not somewhere else.
2. Thus, there must be many finite spirits.
5. With Kant and Fichte, Hegel agreed that consciousness is bi-polar within the individual.
1. The ego posits the non-ego.
2. The subject must be set against the object.
5. Rational Necessity
1. A conceptual necessity.  We are not speaking with causal im/possibilities, but with conceptual limits.  
2. Analytical necessity deals more with the meaning of terms.  Conceptual with the structure of things.
3. I think Hegel runs into a contradiction.  He says every subject must have an object, which means Geist must necessarily posit finite objects to inhabit.  So far, consistent.  He then says Geist is pure rationality (perhaps), but Geist is not determined.  Its rationality is pure rationality because….--I don’t follow.  
1. Perhaps we can try this way:  finite things are necessarily dependent on God/Geist.  So far, so good.
6. A Self-Positing God
1. Hegel rejects both Christian theism (God independent of the world) and naturalism (God as not absolute).
2. Self-positing:  God eternally creates the conditions of his existence.  Hegel is not so much arguing for an existent reality, but for the conditions that Geist be.
3. He isn’t identical to Plotinus, since everything else is a falling away from the One and not necessary to the One’s existence; whereas, for Hegel it is necessary.
7. Division
1. The cosmic Subject (Geist) is identical and not-identical to the world
1. identical: Geist cannot exist without the world.
2. not-identical: the world’s externality represents a dispersal which Geist must overcome.
3. Geist exists by overcoming its opposite.  By negating its own negation.
8. The oppositions overcome
1. Undoes Kant’s ding an sich because there is no gap between phenomena and noumena, since we are all vehicles of Geist.
2. Our knowledge of the world turns out to be Geist’s self-knowledge.
3. Aufhebung: dialectical transition in which a lower stage is both annulled and preserved in a higher stage
4. Versohnung: reconciliation; overcoming dualities.
9. Dialectical ways
1. we start with the most elementary notion of what consciousness is, “to show that this cannot stand up, that it is riven with inner contradiction and must give way to a higher one, which is also in turn shown to be contradictory” (55).
2. “dialectical” is not a method or approach, but a descriptive fact.
3. Being and Nothing: the concept of being without any determination, turns out to be empty, nothing.  Being thus reveals a contradiction.
10. A faulty proof
2. Politics and Alienation
1. The continuing conflict
1. Modern society has seen the proliferation of Romantic views of life along with the rationalization and bureaucratization of collective structures and an exploitive stance toward nature (71).
2. The New Left reaction: 1968 Paris was decloisonnement; an expressivist reaction against late capitalism.  
2. The demands of reason
1. The adequate form of Spirit (remember, Spirit must be embodied) is social.  Man has to be part of something larger than himself, since man cannot exist by himself.
2. the state is the real expression of this life.
3. The fully adequate State must be the rational one.
4. The problem with Kant’s ethics: he purchased radical autonomy at the price of emptiness.
5. The problem of politics is to limit negative freedom. Hegel’s problem with Rousseau and Kant is both defined freedom as human freedom, the will as human will.  If we define freedom as thought or reason, then the question of freedom doesn’t reduce to man alone, but to all of us.
6. Sittlichkeit:  the moral obligations I have to an ongoing community of which I am a part.
3. Ethical Substance
1. alienation: this happens whenever the public existence no longer has meaning for me.
1. e.g., the perceived futility of voting; nominal religious belief in Church-States.
2. Individuals then strike out on their own to define their individuality
4. The Goals of History
1. The march of history is the succession of rational communities, the earlier ones embodying imperfect expressions of the later ones.
5. Absolute History
1. The French Revolution was the attempt to remake society according to reason and negative freedom.
2. (Taylor is somewhat reticent about Hegel’s criticisms of the French Revolution).
3. How to move forward
1. everything in society (however that term is defined) must be the fruit of all.  
2. In other words, all must share in ruling (cf. John Wyclif, John Milbank, John Ruskin).
3. His society must be different from traditionalism because there cannot be structures insulated from the reach of decision.  On the other hand, it can’t be a liberal society, since the Form of Government will permeate everything.
4. Negative freedom would require that the whole outcome be decided by me.  Yet, the whole outcome is a social one, so it cannot be decided by me alone.  Thus, negative freedom is impossible.  
5. The society must be a homogenous one.  This might seem unfortunate, but it does have echoes in Augustine’s Book 19.  
6. Social Estates and Differentiation
1. the modern state aims at universal citizenship.
2. The practical problem is universal participation is impossible in a state of any real size.  This leads to representation.  
6. The Modern Dilemma
1. Taylor appears somewhat concerned that Hegel’s politics would reject modern democracy.  
2. However, it does raise the important question:  what kind of differentiation can modern society admit of (111)?  
1. Ancient man knew he could only be himself in light of some cosmic order.
2. the revolution of modern subjectivity justified society in what it achieved for man’s needs.   Utilitarianism.
1. Utilitarianism, ironically, leaves no place for myth, myth of the new beginning, and so cannot justify the vision of its society (112-113).
2. Absolute freedom, therefore, is seen to fill this “gap.”
3. Here is why modern liberal society is doomed: radical participation in civic structures is only possible if there is a ground of agreement, or underlying common purpose (Augustine’s common objects of love).  Democracy and participation cannot create this; they merely presuppose it.  The demand for absolute freedom by itself is empty.
4. Modern ideology and equality leads to homogenization of society.  It is an acid drip on traditional structures, yet it cannot replace them.
3. Hegel Today
1. Marx’s take on reconciliation is that it will come via social transformation.
2. Weakness in Marx’s synthesis
1. The Soviet view sees the proletarian party as “engineers of building in conformity with the laws of history…[combining] two opposed pictures of the human predicament.  It shows us man,  on one hand, imposing his will on the course of history...On the other hand dialectical materialism sets out the laws which govern man and history with an iron necessity” (151).  
2. “The laws of history cannot be the basis of social engineering and reveal the inevitable trend of events” (152).
3. Situating Freedom
4. Hegel Today