Per Caritatem

The final installment of my transcription of Turner’s lecture.

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Step five, viz., that music as I put it is prototypically Eucharistic.  Maybe by now you’ve caught hold of the connective tissue of the thought … the formal similarity of thought structure.  For on Thomas’ account, in the Eucharist is brought the absolute limit possible before our resurrection that same conjunction of absolute bodiliness and absolute transparency of meaning.  For the Eucharist is a communication of the word that is all body, and it is body which has become all communication-all word, all sign-an identity of message and its meaning.  Or and this is just another way that Thomas has of putting it, in the Eucharist there is absolutely nothing left of the bread and wine’s materiality, but only their character as signs-all smile and no cat again-for the cat has become all smile.  As one might want to get Thomas inelegantly to say, the cat has thus been entirely transubstantiated into its expression.  For these are signs which now make real a presence of Christ’s body, but in such a way as to push to the very limits any force that we can lay hold on for the words “real” and “present,”  and then we have to add, and beyond such limits.  For this is a bodily presence which escapes from itself.  And we should note in this connection that the doctrine of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is in Thomas emphatically also a doctrine of the real absence.  We might say that it is in his teaching on the Eucharist that we find Thomas’ last word on ontology about what is most real.  That ontology tells us that his paradigm of the real is the presence of the Christ of the Eucharist, a bodily presence which is total communication-all word-but just for that, the more intensely bodily, not less.  So on the one hand, no body could be more present, nor bodily than Christ’s body as present in the Eucharist. But no body could be more purely language or purely word.  And if that it is so, then on the other hand, it is a word which is not only intensely animal, but is also a word which is ultimately beyond all understanding. Its intrinsic transparency of meaning must remain opaquely mysterious to us because our bodies are not themselves yet totally communicative.  For our bodies like formal speech retain a surplus of unmeaningful materiality over and above their capacities for meaning.  That is because, unlike Jesus’ body, ours are not yet raised.  Jesus’ body is wholly present to us because his is raised.  But it is also experienced in our bodies as absence because in our present historical contingency, ours are not.  Hence, what the Eucharist makes real is both the now of presence and the not yet of absence, and it is just that conjunction of presence and absence which is made real.  The Eucharistic presence is caught up in an eschatological and not merely a linear temporality.  Thomas’ ontology-his account of the real-is essentially sacramental because essentially eschatological.  The Eucharist is then an uncompleted eschatology realized as bodily exchange.  The bread and wine become that body-a body which is all communication, the flesh made most perfectly to be word-futuriae gloriae nobis pignus datur-as Thomas says in one of his Eucharistic antiphons-a pledge given to us of future glory.    It is in these respects then that music both shows us what is central to reason and in doing so shows how reason is prototypically Eucharistic.  At any rate, we could mean that much by reason if we simply did not abase ourselves between the altar of that recent intellectual history, which had reduced reason to ratiocination, [i.e.] to its minimal sense which is logic.  If music is a kind of spontaneous natural theology, just because it is a kind of spontaneous natural eschatology-which is why I think it is that all great music whether its mood is happy or sad matters not, is in a certain way which is characteristic of it as music always sad.  [Why?] because music always strikes chords-because music is the lacrim mirarum [sp?], the “world’s tears”-its recollection of what yet cannot be.  At any rate, whether it is that weird and terrible trio of the Schubert string quintet or that hushed moment of reconciliation in the finale of the Marriage of Figaro, whichever it is at one end or another of the emotional spectrum, or wherever in between, all music makes you cry.  And I think it does so because music is in a way a shadow cast onto human sensibility [of] that eschatological temporality of the Eucharist.  The sadness of music is a sort of sensual nostalgia for what one has caught some glimpse of but cannot yet possess.  This as it were, a premonition of a premonition.  It is a shadow of the Augustinian anamnesis-a depth dug into memory, scoring with a sort of hope made real, but also as lost and as absent.  Made present but as yet to be real; it is our homeland glimpse, but as yet from a distance. 

But if that is the sort of thing that is meant by reason, and if this is maximal, as also in its most fundamental sense, our animality as in itself being the quasi-sacramental bearer of that sole escaping significance, then we can take our final step to the conclusion, viz., that that too is the shape that must be possessed by that very particular exercise of reason which I have been [trying] so hard until now to get you not to reduce reason to-that minimal sense which consists in ratiocination, in inference, in argument and in proof.  Reason for Thomas is always bound to end up with God, so why not that minimal form of it which is ratiocination too.  For reason in that sense of reasoning gives names to things.  It names all that which music through its very indeterminacy-its refusal of constative character-can gesture towards, but does not and cannot name, because naming is precisely what music is the refusal to do.  But if reason in this form as reasoning names, it has to because that is just what it does.  It does so also in the shadow of music’s inarticulateness and indeterminacy-in the shadow of its apophaticism.  For if reason, as Thomas says, ever dares utter the name of God, it may do so only as that which finally defeats its powers of naming.  Naming God is reason’s supreme achievement, but only insofar if in doing so, it knows that what it names escapes from under the naming-dodges all the arrows of naming that reason can fire at it.  And that as Thomas says is thought omnes dicunt Deum.  When we name God, we have stretched naming out at the ends of its tether until that tether snaps.  Indeed it is the snapping of reason’s tether that is its primitive theological moment.  In God reason reaches the point of collapse because overweighted with significance.  Now when Thomas says this omnes of omnes dicunt Deum, I think that with greater confidence we can agree that all Christians, Muslims, Jews, but just as well, those atheists it would be worthwhile to have around to do their denying, engaging through their oppositio inter alia in scientiam [Latin?]. 

I have no intention of taking you through, still less of defending points of their soundness, those famous and much derided Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas.  I simply ask you to note that the argument structure [... at work?] for it has as music has the shape of the sacramental-the form of the body’s transparency and the mystery that we call God.  It is the same ontology at work.  It is only through our body’s intimacy to the world’s materiality-the way things move, to the way one thing depends on another, to the way things come into existence and pass out of it that we achieve that glimpse of the world’s ultimate significance, which is the unknowable mystery of God.  And herein is the paradox of our human rationality, which as I say, music is a sort of sign or anticipation.  When in the Prima Pars question 2, article 3 of the Summa Theologica, Thomas tells us that we can by these five points of inference prove the existence of God, he notes immediately afterward in question 3 that what proves God to exist also proves that [with regard to] that God, we have finally lost our grip upon the meaning of exist.  So that in proving God to exist, we prove reason to the point of its own exhaustion.  As to it is that by means of rational inquiries, we do in a merely speculative way what the Eucharist draws us into the very life of.  Reason gets you to where un-namable mystery begins, but stands on this side of it, gesturing towards what we cannot know.  And there [...] it is stunned in a sort of babble at the shock of its defeat-this reduction to babble is what is otherwise called theology.  But by the Eucharist we are drawn into that same mystery as into that very and oh so very carnal life.  So that we live by mystery-we eat it-though the mystery is no more comprehensible as Thomas says for being eaten than it is for being thought.  For he tells us that we do not resolve the mystery by faith, as if to reason it was some insoluble conundrum to which faith on the other hand holds the solution. For we do not know what God is even by the revelation of grace. By grace he says we are indeed made truly one with God so as to share the divine life, but as the one who is unknown to us.  [The recording cut out at 3:50 remaining and returns at 1:16].  Putting it simplest, his [Aquinas'] position is formally that of the Vatican decree, [viz.,] that there are grounds of faith for affirming reason’s capacity-for affirming that it can of its own resources know God. Reading Thomas alerts us not to confuse his faith being of reason with the far quarter of rationalism.  If un-alerted and you do confuse them, you will have all sorts of unnecessary and theologically damaging zero-sum problems, trading off faith and reason against one another.  At any rate that is what Thomas seems to say and so do I.  Well then I took the plunge into reason’s icy waters and you will have to admit bravely or perhaps rashly, and I found them not to be perhaps so chilly after all.  But now that I’ve done my bit, the question passes over to you.  Hopping about in those 13^th century waters as I have been the past 50 minutes or so, I will leave you to decide:  was I wading or was I drowning?