Per Caritatem

 

[Part I]

Turner acknowledges that surface level analyses of both the stylistic and temperamental contrasts between St. Thomas and Eckhart cannot be denied.  For example, it is certainly the case that Thomas’s theological discourses emphasize clarity,[1] understatement and sobriety in contrast with Eckhart’s “hyperactively paradoxical extravagance.”  Likewise, one might rightly conclude that these stylistic differences are related to temperamental differences between the two and   manifest themselves in, as it were, Thomas’s confidence in theological language given its subalteration to apophaticism, and the acknowledgment that our theological language always fails,[2] in contrast to Eckhart’s more “anxious” view of language.

One reason for these great differences in theological temperament and style is that Eckhart “wants to constrain all the paradoxical tensions of the theological project into each and every theological speech-act” (p. 103).  In other words, Eckhart wants the material rhetorical aspect of his language to match up with its formal significance.  Thus, “he must bend and twist and stretch theological language, because he wants theology as language ‘poetically’ to do what it says, and so, as it were, to speak its own failure as speech” (p. 104). 

Turner then addresses the ways that some postmodern thinkers have tried to employ Eckhart for various projects of deconstruction and claims that Eckhart would have had “little sympathy with the anti-metaphysical implications” of endeavors of this sort.  According to Turner, to attempt to remove Eckhart’s apophaticism from its metaphysical underpinnings would be to reduce his theology to “mere rhetoric.”   In spite of all the stylistic and temperamental differences, Turner believes that Eckhart’s theological purpose is in no way at odds with St. Thomas’s.  For both Thomas and Eckhart,

all theology must begin in, be mediated by, and end in the darkness of unknowing; and if, that being so, all creation in some way speaks God as irreducibly ‘other’ than it, why should not our language itself, being the natural expression of human rationality in its created materiality, speak God as unutterably other, not only in what we say in it, but also in the manner in which we say it, in its rhetorical forms themselves? [...] Thomas says:  all theological language fails.  Eckhart’s rhetoric gets theological language itself to fail, so that its failure says the same.  Thomas says:  all talk about God breaks down.  Eckhart gets the breakdown of language to say the same:  the rhetoric says what he and Thomas both say in it.  The material voice of the rhetoric speaks theologically at one with the formal significance which it utters” (pp. 105-106). 

Thus, in Eckhart’s theological discourse we find a strong emphasis on the materiality of language itself.  God is, as it were, found (and not found) in the materiality of the “foregrounded signifier.”  Moreover, since Eckhart’s language does what it signifies, it manifests something of a sacramental character.  For Eckhart, “reason, language, ‘at the end of its tether’ has the same shape it has for Thomas, the form of an openness to an unknowable otherness.  Thus does Eckhart’s rhetoric say for itself that which cannot be said in it” (p. 106). 

Notes

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[1] Turner’s description of Thomas’ discourse is helpful, viz., “Thomas is famous for his lucidity; as it were, the materiality of his theological signifiers disappears entirely into what is signified by them, and there is, in Thomas, an almost ruthless literary self-abnegation, a refusal of eloquence:  the language is made to absent itself in any role other than that of signifying.  Hence, for the most part, Thomas’ theology aims for a language of pure transparency; it has the transparency of the language of physics, or of any strictly technical discourse” (p. 102). [2] By Thomas’s “confidence” in theological language, Turner has in mind “a trust that our ordinary ways of talking about creation are fundamentally in order as ways of talking about God, needing only to be subordinated to a governing apophaticism, expressed as a second-order epistemological principle:  that all theological affirmation is both necessary and deficient.  We must say of God anything true of what he has created, because that is all there is to hand with which to say anything about God, because there is no special ‘hyperessential’ meaning available to the theologian, and because we therefore know that whatever we say is in any case inadequate.  Once we know that everything we say about God fails anyway, we can freely indulge the materiality of those metaphors, the carnality of that imagery, and calmly exploit all those possibilities of formal inference and logic, which appear to unnerve the anxious Eckhart” (pp. 102-103). 

 

In chapter 5, “Reason and Rhetoric,” of his book, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God, Turner engages in a fascinating discussion of Meister Eckhart’s theological rhetoric.  By the terms “rhetoric” and “rhetorical,” Turner has in mind, not some sophistic mode of communication, nor a derogatory label, but rather all the ways in which human speech-acts communicate qua performed in distinction from what is communicated merely by the words themselves regardless of how they are performed/uttered.  Summarizing his previous, more detailed discussion of “uttering performances,”[1] Turner writes, “[a]ctions ‘speak’, as gestures do.  Verbal utterances are actions too, and so ‘utter’ as all actions speak, and not just as words uttered.  Therefore, within verbal utterances we may distinguish between what is said in saying the words, and the meaning which the action of saying them bears” (p. 98).   To illustrate, Turner gives the example of Judas’ kiss-a kiss, which communicates irony because in the action of greeting Jesus with a kiss, Judas’ is actually betraying Jesus.  We are able to grasp two meanings in the one act of kissing because we perceive a distinction to be made between what is said by the action or utterance, and what is communicated in its being acted out or uttered.  This distinction is also seen in our willfully refraining from acting or uttering.  For example, consider what is communicated by silence when one spouse decides to engage the other in what is commonly called silent treatment.   As Turner explains, “these two ways in which a communicative act can ‘mean’ may stand in many different kinds of relationship with one another” (p. 98).  In the case of Judas, we have a relationship of contradictory meanings.  However, a complementary relationship may also exist, as in the case of a kiss between a bride and groom. 

With these material and formal distinctions of communicative meanings in mind, Turner embarks on his discussion of the differences in rhetorical “feel” between Eckhart and St. Thomas.  Though both men were Dominicans, educated in the same priory and perhaps both studied under Albert the Great, the Eckhart and Aquinas manifest stark, and one could even say, polar opposite rhetorical strategies.  According to Turner, these strategies are not simply due to differences in temperament and use of stylistic imagery, but instead flow from a more fundamental difference of “theological strategy.”[2]  

Oliver Davies, who is well-known for his work on Meister Eckhart, describes Eckhart’s theology as a kind of “poetic metaphysics,” in which there is a “foregrounding of the language itself, of the signifier.”[3]  To this description, Turner adds that Eckhart’s poetic theological discourse is itself rhetorically performative or exhibits, as it were, “a quasi-sacramental character” (p. 100).  That is, Eckhart’s language not only says something, but “it is intended to do something by means of saying,” which is, as Turner mentions in an earlier chapter, according to the classical medieval account, the nature of a sacrament-”a sacred sign which effects what it signifies” (p. 100).  With regard to Eckhart, it is commonly claimed that his abundant use of negative imagery and language is indicative to his strand of apophaticism. Turner, however, regards this surfeit of negative imagery as merely incidental because it doesn’t get to the heart of what apophaticism truly is.  Negative metaphors, after all, are still metaphors and hence still language;  “and if the ‘apophatic’ is to be understood as that which surpasses all language, then, as the pseudo-Denys says, it lies beyond both ‘affirmation’ and ‘denial’” (p. 101). In other words, the apophatic is not a particular kind of language, but is the failure of language.  Hence, the extreme negativity that marks Eckhart’s theological discourse

is not just something said by means of emphatically negative vocabularies, for it consists in his sense of the failure of all language as such, even of negative language.  Nonetheless, Eckhart the preacher wants theological language in some way to participate, as one might put it, in the event of its own failure.  Negativity, therefore, is not just a stylistic or decoratively metaphoric emphasis of Eckhart’s theology; it is a living, organizing, feature of the language itself and is intrinsic to its compositional style as theological writing (p. 101).

In one sense then, it is a language, but this language simultaneously says and unsays.  As Turner so aptly put it, Eckhart,

‘foregrounds’ the signifier only immediately to disrupt its signification, block it, divert it, postpone it.  Thereby the language performs rhetorically what it says technically:  the performance utters what the utterance performs.  And this rhetorical device, as it were of forcing the sensuous, material sign the character of its own self-subversion as signifier, is what accounts for that most characteristic feature of Eckhart’s language:  its rhetorical self-consciousness, its strained and strenuous, hyperactively paradoxical extravagance-its apophasis by excess.  The language, naturally, bursts at the seams under the pressure of the excessive forces it is being made to contain, the language as body bursts open under the pressure of it overloaded weight of significance
(p. 102). 

 Notes

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[1] Cf. chapter 3, pp. 68ff. 

[2] Turner notes that from the late thirteenth century onward, we find sharp turn towards “a more conscious cultivation of a distinctive theological rhetoric,” and that it is possible that these new rhetorical techniques in theology were connected with “the emergence of vernacularity as a major theological medium” (p. 99, 100).

 [3] Meister Eckhart:  Mystical Theologian, London:  SPCK, 1991, p. 180, as quoted in Turner, p. 100. 

[Part I can be accessed here]. 

For Zwingli, because Christ is now seated at the right hand of the Father, he therefore cannot be real-ly present in the Eucharist.  Zwingli’s starting point, in contrast with Thomas’s (and we all have starting points) is that “the presence of a thing in a sign excludes its being present as ‘real’ [i.e.  real for Zwingli seems to be synonymous with local bodily presence]” (p. 67).  As Zwingli himself states, “the very body of Christ is the body which is seated at the right hand of God, and the sacrament of his body is the bread and the sacrament of his blood is the wine … Now the sign and the thing signified cannot be one and the same.  Therefore the sacrament of the body of Christ cannot be the body itself” [On the Lord's Supper, in Zwingli and Bullinger, SCM Press, p. 188, as quoted in Turner, p. 67].  Put simply, according to Zwingli, the material absence of Christ’s body localiter necessarily excludes Christ’s real presence in the body.  Thomas, however, though agreeing with Zwingli that Christ’s bodily presence is not localiter, does not draw Zwingli’s conclusion. As Turner notes, “the presence of Christ in the Eucharist is the real presence of Christ’s body,” but this real presence requires “an absence which is eschatological” (p. 67).  Turner then ends this section with the passage below, which I quote in full because it was the section that I had the most difficulty understanding. 

 [W]hat the Eucharist ‘realises’ is a bodily presence which is not yet, a real absence, a body making really present that of which, as yet, we cannot take possession.  For Christ’s body is raised, and our bodies are not.  Hence, if we cannot, in the fallen condition of our bodiliness, enter fully into communication with the presence of the absent, because raised, person of Jesus, then neither can we enter fully into communication with that absence.  For just as we cannot yet know that kingdom which one day we shall see and fully enjoy, so neither can we have any grasp of how far we fall short of communicating with it.  We fail even in our calculation of the degree to which our Eucharistic communication fails.  Hence, if there is a problem about how Christ is present in the Eucharistic sign there must equally be a problem of accounting for how that absence is present within it; and that problem is not to be resolved on any account of the nature of signs, but only on some account of the relationship between the apophatic and the cataphatic, that relationship being itself defined only under the constraint of the eschatological.  If, therefore, we ask:  ‘How is Christ present in the Eucharist?’ Thomas’s answer is:  ‘Really, as bodies are present to one another.’ And if you ask:  ‘How is Christ’s body present?’ Thomas’s answer is:  ‘Sacramentally’, that is, ‘eschatologically’, as the raised body of Jesus can be present to us in our pre-mortem condition as unraised.  And that is a mode of ‘real absence’ as much as it is a mode of ‘real presence’.  For such is the nature of a sacrament (p. 67). 

If I understand Turner correctly, he seems to be saying that to be eschatologically, bodily present in the Eucharist is to be sacramentally present in the Eucharist.  Thus, the idea is that the real presence of Christ is a bodily presence that obtains under a sacramental sign (bread and wine).   Contra Zwingli, Thomas claims that sign-presence is both real-presence and bodily presence.  If sign- presence is real-presence, then we are necessarily involved in real-absence.  With regard to the Eucharist, what is really absent is the local presence of Christ’s body.  Given our un-glorified state in this life, we cannot grasp how a body can be genuinely (real-ly) present without simultaneously being locally present, we are unable to, as Turner says, fully “communicate” with the kind of bodily-presence-beyond-local-presence that constitutes Christ’s Eucharistic (bodily) presence.  Once we possess our glorified bodies, we will be able to partake fully of Christ’s glorified body; however, until then, our partaking is not a complete partaking but neither is its reality cancelled.  It is an already-not-yet partaking that involves a presence/absence dialectic, and consequently, necessitates a catophatic/apophatic dialectic.  This already-not-yet sacramental presence assures us of a more full presence and partaking of Christ that has been promised us in our glorified state.  This sacramental presence is as my friend and colleague, Derek, says, “a promise of the presence to come, signifying it and partially bringing it to pass in the present (i.e. it is an effectual sign, not merely signifying what it signs, but also effecting what it signifies”).[1]

Lastly, I found Turner’s summary of Zwingli’s position fair and accurate (in so far as my knowledge of Zwingli goes); however, his criticisms of course do not apply in toto to other Protestant Eucharistic theologies (e.g., real presence as understood by those within the Anglican tradition, Calvin, Luther, Peter Martyr Vermigli).   It seems to me that at the end of the day, Thomas is saying with regard to the how Christ is bodily present (and absent) that it is a mystery that cannot be explained (which is not a criticism of Thomas on my part-Calvin would heartily agree).[2]  Moreover, Calvin and Vermigli also emphasize the real presence of Christ, as well as a mysterious partaking of Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist.  For example, after speaking of our need for communion with Christ’s flesh and blood in order to “aspire to the heavenly life,”

Calvin then adds,

[t]his could not be, did not Christ truly form one with us, and refresh us by the eating of his flesh, and the drinking of his blood. But though it seems an incredible thing that the flesh of Christ, while at such a distance from us in respect of place, should be food to us, let us remember how far the secret virtue of the Holy Spirit surpasses all our conceptions, and how foolish it is to wish to measure its immensity by our feeble capacity. Therefore, what our mind does not comprehend let faith conceive, viz., that the Spirit truly unites things separated by space. That sacred communion of flesh and blood by which Christ transfuses his life into us, just as if it penetrated our bones and marrow, he testifies and seals in the Supper, and that not by presenting a vain or empty sign, but by there exerting an efficacy of the Spirit by which he fulfils what he promises (Instit. IV.17.10). 

Notes

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[1] A huge thanks to Derek for a helpful dialogue on this particular section of Turner’s presentation.

 [2] “I am not satisfied with the view of those who, while acknowledging that we have some kind of communion with Christ, only make us partakers of the Spirit, omitting all mention of flesh and blood. As if it were said to no purpose at all, that his flesh is meat indeed, and his blood is drink indeed; that we have no life unless we eat that flesh and drink that blood; and so forth. Therefore, if it is evident that full communion with Christ goes beyond their description, which is too confined, I will attempt briefly to show how far it extends, before proceeding to speak of the contrary vice of excess. [...] if, indeed, it be lawful to put this great mystery into words, a mystery which I feel, and therefore freely confess that I am unable to comprehend with my mind, so far am I from wishing any one to measure its sublimity by my feeble capacity. Nay, I rather exhort my readers not to confine their apprehension within those too narrow limits, but to attempt to rise much higher than I can guide them. For whenever this subject is considered, after I have done my utmost, I feel that I have spoken far beneath its dignity. And though the mind is more powerful in thought than the tongue in expression, it too is overcome and overwhelmed by the magnitude of the subject. All then that remains is to break forth in admiration of the mystery, which it is plain that the mind is inadequate to comprehends or the tongue to express. I will, however, give a summary of my view as I best can, not doubting its truth, and therefore trusting that it will not be disapproved by pious breasts” (Inst. IV.17.7). 

In chapter three of Denys Turner’s book, Faith, Reason, and the Existence of God, he has a short, yet dense section devoted to explicating St. Thomas’ Eucharistic theology of presence and absence vis-à-vis Zwingli’s teaching on the Eucharist.  As Turner explains, Roman Catholic theology distinguishes “between the material reality of the signifier and the formal character of the sign precisely as signifying” (p. 63).  The sign in its formal character “signifies the body and blood of Christ … in so far as they are ‘absent’, where ‘absence’ is defined by contrast with the material presence of the sign itself; and so, in so far as by signifying the body and blood of Christ the appearances of bread and wine make them present in one way, they do so only in so far as in another, that is, in the manner in which the sign itself is present, they are absent” (p. 63).  In other words, on this particular point, both Thomas and Zwingli agree, viz., Christ is not present locally in the Eucharist in the same way in which the bread and the wine are present in this place at this time.  For example, Thomas writes, “it is evident that Christ’s body does not begin to be present in this sacrament by local motion. First of all, because it would follow that it would cease to be in heaven” (ST 3a q75, a2, corp.).  Thomas of course, in contrast with Zwingli, also states that the bread and the wine are not mere signs signifying the body and blood of Christ. Rather, according to Thomas, Christ is present sacramentally.[1]  According to Turner, Zwingli’s account leans heavily toward a Eucharistic theology of absence, for in Zwingli’s view the very nature of a sign displaces the reality of which it signifies; hence, the sign (bread and wine) is really present, which means that the signified (Christ) is really absent.  Thomas, however, wants to stress both the real presence and absence of Christ.  As Turner explains, for Thomas

sacramental signs constitute a set of special cases, in which the conditions of absence follow not as such from the nature of signs but from the nature of a sacrament, and in the very special case of the Eucharist the necessity of Christ’s absence does not exclude the real presence of Christ, but rather lays down conditions for the description of that real presence.  For Thomas, therefore, if you are going to say that Christ is ‘really present’ in the Eucharist, your account of the word ‘real’ is going to have to begin from the fact that he cannot be there as in that place (localiter), because he is raised and ascended to the Father in heaven (p. 64). 

Turner goes on to add that three conditions for the word ‘real’ with regard to real Eucharistic presence follow from Thomas’ starting point: (1) Christ is not present in the Eucharist “as he was in his pre-mortem existence”; (2) “though it is the risen Christ, ascended into heaven, who is present in the Eucharist, Christ is not there as, in the kingdom, he will be seen by us at the right hand of the Father”; (3) the Christ who is present in the Eucharist must be numerically one and the same Christ who walked the shores of Galilee and who is now seated at the right hand of the Father (p. 64). 

Given the conditions laid down in (1)-(2), for Thomas, Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist must be a bodily presence; however, Christ’s bodily presence in the sacrament is “neither in the natural condition as known to Peter and James and John two thousand years ago, nor as they now know him in his and their condition as raised in the beatific vision of heaven” (p. 65).  Here Turner makes a fascinating connection between Thomas’s Eucharistic theology of presence and absence and negative theology:

the core problem for Thomas’s account of the Eucharist is the problem of how the future-the kingdom of our communication with the risen Christ, the resurrection-can be bodily present now to us, given our fallen and failing, as yet unraised, powers of bodily communication and given his raised and totally communicating body.  And that problem of how the raised person of Jesus is present in the body to us in our as yet unraised bodies just is the problem of how to do a ‘negative theology’ of the Eucharist.  The need for a negative theology arises out of Eucharistic exigencies (p. 65). 

Stay tuned for part II…

Notes

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[1] “Christ’s body is not in this sacrament in the same way as a body is in a place, which by its dimensions is commensurate with the place; but in a special manner which is proper to this sacrament. Hence we say that Christ’s body is upon many altars, not as in different places, but ‘sacramentally’: and thereby we do not understand that Christ is there only as in a sign, although a sacrament is a kind of sign; but that Christ’s body is here after a fashion proper to this sacrament, as stated above” (ST 3a q75 a1 ad3; emphasis added). 

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way.  When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.  Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.  But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’  All this took place to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:

‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,

and they shall name him Emmanuel’,

which means, ‘God is with us’ (Matt 1:18-23, NRSV)

Having discussed various attempts to incorporate Hegelian insights in order to explicate the Kenosis doctrine, Balthasar writes,

“these speculations lead nowhere; their only result is to bring to our attention in striking fashion how deep the mystery of the Kenosis lies. Just as the ancient ontic theology was impotent to render credible the idea that the Incarnation was a ‘complementary factor’ added to the immutable divine nature (for the Kenosis is not a harpagmos, a gain), so too the theology of consciousness—whether in speculative or empirical guise—did not succeed in finding a ‘third’ position from which the interplay of the divine and human consciousness might be surveyed. The paradox must be allowed to stand: in the undiminished humanity of Jesus, the whole power and glory of God are made present to us” (Mysterium Paschale, p. 33).

Balthasar then cites with affirmation the following passage by P. Althaus,

“Christology must be thought out from the vantage-point of the Cross. In the total powerlessness, the death anguish, of the Crucified—from which one cannot keep unscathed the ‘divine nature’ – the full undiminished divinity of God is at work. What Paul heard as a word of the Lord for his own life—‘My power is made perfect in weakness’ (II Corinthians 12, 9), we recognize through faith in Jesus Christ as a law of the divine life itself. With this recognition, it is true, the old conception of God’s immutability breaks into pieces. Christology must take seriously the fact that, in the Son, God himself really entered into suffering, and in that very entrance is and remains entirely God” [P. Althaus, “Kenosis,” RGG III. 1245ff.] (Ibid., p. 33).

Contrary to the common assertion that embracing mystery spells “death” to the intellect, I suggest that embracing the fact that “in the Son, God himself really entered into suffering, and in that very entrance is and remains entirely God” spells worship and a proper acceptance of our creaturely limitations.