Sacramental language in the Immanent Frame
At the end of my last post, I raised some concerns with the possibility of the kind of resourcement advocated by Boersma in his very interesting book, Scripture as Real Presence. It wasn't until, today, while having coffee with one of Boersma's former students that I was able to grasp the problem more clearly.
According to Taylor, the zigzagging path Western civilization has taken to arrive at our current secular age has served to disenchant our world. What that means for our present discussion is that for most of us, sacramental logic falls outside of our plausibility structures. We no longer live in a world where the shared assumptions that make up our social reality under-gird the idea that material signs somehow participate in the very being of that which they signify. That's not to say that this participation does not, in fact, happen, it is merely to say that in our current secular age, we lack the linguistic resources to make that kind of claim.
To "lack the linguistic resources" to make this or that claim is to acknowledge that in our current society we have lost the shared practices that make certain manners of speaking intelligible. Words like sacrament, icon, saint, etc. still all 'do work' but they do not do the same kind of work that they once did; they do not resonate in our current social imaginary in the same they clearly did in the world of the writings of other periods of church thinkers. We've exorcised the ghosts from our machines, and though we may be haunted by the memory of their presence, it's difficult not to feel like mad-men when insisting that they are still truly there.
We cannot simply recover the language of sacrament in the immanent frame. It can be done, but not by insisting on a re-enchantment of the world. There is too much skepticism and cynicism in the air we breathe for that to be a winning solution. But all is not lost. I mentioned in passing that our immanent frame is haunted by the memory of various 'ghosts.' The construction of a new sacramentalism would do well to exploit these haunted memories. A post-modern reconstruction of sacramentalism might proceed along the lines of a recognition of the presence of absences. There are interesting gaps, silences, and liminal spaces that our contemporary artists and theorists are finding to be gateways into worlds of new meaning. In the immanent frame, relearning the language of sacramentalism might just be an ascetic discipline that brings us to the edge of words. It is at such an edge that we learn with Wittgenstein, "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Perhaps in this silence, the Word will be heard anew and we will begin to learn to speak of a world that is enchanted once more.
In my last post I wrote:
Is the recovery of the sort of sacramental, pre-modern exegesis possible today? If so, what would it look like? As a theologian, I appreciate the coup that this would be for a dogmatic account of Scripture, but can we actually reclaim the neo-platonic infrastructure necessary to support such an account? The genius of the Fathers was their ability to use the best philosophical tools at their disposal to fill out their theological claims about Scripture. In our post-modern context where we have witnessed the death of metaphysics proclaimed by Nietzsche et al, how do we go forward?Charles Taylor has expressed the point I was trying to make much more cogently with his concept of the 'immanent frame.' The phrase, 'immanent frame' names "a constructed social space that frames our lives entirely within a natural (rather than supernatural) order. It is the circumscribed space of the modern social imaginary that precludes transcendence" (Smith, 141). Life in the immanent frame makes sacramental thought hard to sustain, even for those (like myself) who strive to maintain a sort of "open" frame (open, that is, to the possibility of something transcendent; although it is important to note that even those who maintained a 'closed' immanent frame tend to be haunted by a memory of transcendence).
According to Taylor, the zigzagging path Western civilization has taken to arrive at our current secular age has served to disenchant our world. What that means for our present discussion is that for most of us, sacramental logic falls outside of our plausibility structures. We no longer live in a world where the shared assumptions that make up our social reality under-gird the idea that material signs somehow participate in the very being of that which they signify. That's not to say that this participation does not, in fact, happen, it is merely to say that in our current secular age, we lack the linguistic resources to make that kind of claim.
To "lack the linguistic resources" to make this or that claim is to acknowledge that in our current society we have lost the shared practices that make certain manners of speaking intelligible. Words like sacrament, icon, saint, etc. still all 'do work' but they do not do the same kind of work that they once did; they do not resonate in our current social imaginary in the same they clearly did in the world of the writings of other periods of church thinkers. We've exorcised the ghosts from our machines, and though we may be haunted by the memory of their presence, it's difficult not to feel like mad-men when insisting that they are still truly there.
We cannot simply recover the language of sacrament in the immanent frame. It can be done, but not by insisting on a re-enchantment of the world. There is too much skepticism and cynicism in the air we breathe for that to be a winning solution. But all is not lost. I mentioned in passing that our immanent frame is haunted by the memory of various 'ghosts.' The construction of a new sacramentalism would do well to exploit these haunted memories. A post-modern reconstruction of sacramentalism might proceed along the lines of a recognition of the presence of absences. There are interesting gaps, silences, and liminal spaces that our contemporary artists and theorists are finding to be gateways into worlds of new meaning. In the immanent frame, relearning the language of sacramentalism might just be an ascetic discipline that brings us to the edge of words. It is at such an edge that we learn with Wittgenstein, "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Perhaps in this silence, the Word will be heard anew and we will begin to learn to speak of a world that is enchanted once more.
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