Lenten Reading

[jsburbidge]

"In agreeing to submit oneself to the sacramental gesture of the Church, one no longer avails oneself of one's own theological ideas, as incisive as they might be, or of one's own religious feelings, as sincere as they might be, or of one's own ethical accomplishments, as generaous as they might be.  All this certainly causes us to act, but it is not what is at work in the sacramental rite.  Here the self is put at the disposal of the Other whom it can let act in the Church's mediation.  the self lets the Other act by performing a gesture which is not from itself, by saying words which are not its own, by receiving elements which it has not chosen." -- Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament.
 

It sounds as if Chauvet's model of the sacraments as mediating the Other has points of contact with the more traditional scholastic discussions of the problem of predication per analogiam as applied to God -- that no truth can be applied to God directly, but only by a closer or more distant analogy.  Even the category of being (primary for the Thomists) has to be distinguished between self-subsistent being and created/contingent being, a gap which is wider the more one thinks about it, eventually bringing into focus the massive otherness of God's being.

The mediation between uncreated being and created being which is put in place by the Incarnation and more particularly by the Hypostatic Union is continued via the sacraments.

It is unease about precisiely how valid any other forms of depiction of this ultimate Other are (beyond those explicitly symbolic ones provided by the sacraments and authorised by tradition) which led to the Iconoclast controversy in the East.  At another pole, the tension between the sense of usefulness (indeed, necessity) of predication per analogiam and the complete inability of it to capture what it expresses drives the tension between the Positive and Negative Ways of Christian mysticism.  (To cite Charles Williams, the see-sawing of "This also is Thou; neither is this Thou".)

This is enough to make me at least interested in Chauvert's sacramental theology from the small bits of it to which I've been exposed.  I'll try to get a copy of his basic introduction (The Sacraments: The Word of God at the Mercy of the Body) as Lenten reading. (I gather, from what I've been able to glean via the web, that there's some significant tension between his phenomenological approach and the more traditional Thomistic and generally scholastic sacramental theologies, which should be of interest as well -- where I see a touching point may be a more considerable gap).