Toward a Sacramental Poetics

By Regina M. Schwartz and Patrick J. McGrath

Distinguished theologians and literary scholars explore the workings of the sacred and the sacramental in language and literature.

What does a sacramental poetics offer that secular cultural theory, for all of its advances, may have missed? How does a sacred understanding of the world differ from a strictly secular one? This volume develops the theory of “sacramental poetics” advanced by Regina Schwartz in her 2008 book on English Reformation writers, taking the theory in new directions while demonstrating how enduring and widespread this poetics is.

Toward a Sacramental Poetics addresses two urgent questions we have inherited from a half century of secular critical thought. First, how do we understand the relationship between word and thing, sign and signified, other than as some naive direct representation or as a completely arbitrary language game? And, second, how can the subject experience the world beyond instrumentalizing it? The contributors conclude that a sacramental poetics responds to both questions, offering an understanding of the sign that, by pointing beyond itself, suggests wonder. The contributors explore a variety of topics in relation to sacramental poetics, including political theology, miracles, modernity, translation and transformation, and the metaphysics of love. They draw from diverse resources, from Dante to Hopkins, from Richard Hooker to Stoker's Dracula, from the King James Bible to Wallace Stevens. Toward a Sacramental Poetics is an important contribution to studies of religion and literature, the sacred and the secular, literary theory, and theologies of aesthetics.

Contributors: Regina M. Schwartz, Patrick J. McGrath, Rowan Williams, Subha Mukherji, Stephen Little, Kevin Hart, John Milbank, Hent de Vries, Jean-Luc Marion, Ingolf U. Dalferth, Lori Branch, and Paul Mariani.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9780268201517

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Introduction

REGINA M. SCHWARTZ AND PATRICK J. McGRATH

Man is unavoidably a sacramentalist and his works are sacramental in character.

—David Jones, Art and Sacrament, in Epoch and Artist

A rather odd disjunction is occurring in scholarship today. While the return to the religious is a familiar phenomenon in philosophy,¹ in much of cultural studies—whether grounded in linguistics; the many varieties of postmodernism; postcolonial theories; class, race, or gender theory; or theories of globalization—an opposite drive to argue for decidedly secular approaches persists.² It’s high time to rethink that. Ironically, because the idea of secular itself has come under scrutiny—understood not as a subtraction of religion, as what is left when religion is removed, but as a robust ideology in its own right with its own agenda and attendant consequences—we can now profit from this critical distancing and can rethink religion, not just as the construct of the secular.³ We can surely dismiss fruitless distinctions between reason and superstition (who is more rational than Aquinas?), knowledge and belief (how could science function without core beliefs?), and avoid reducing religious impulses only to confessional allegiances and identity politics. As Vincent Pecora explains, For many, the Enlightenment’s triumph of reason over nature has become a historically impoverished narrative unless it is seen in relation to the religious heritage with and against which it was dialectically defined.⁴

Let us, then, begin by raising the core question: How does a sacred understanding of the world differ from a strictly secular one? What does a sacramental poetics offer that secular cultural theory, for all of its advances, may have missed? The secular vision largely gives us a world of dead objects. They can be assessed, measured, categorized, used, instrumentalized as sites of power or of play, but these dead objects are not redolent of meaning. They are acted upon, perhaps, but they do not interact with us. The sun is a burning sphere that planets move around; it is not the source of warmth and life, of renewal and rebirth. In contrast, a sacramental poetics may see the world as given—even as a gift—or as constructed by human consciousness, but either way, that world is very much alive, answering, interacting, enjoining not just our use but also our appreciation, even gratitude. A sacramental poetics is not afflicted by the poverty of signs, the inept ways in which language falls short of conveying meaning. Instead, signs are understood to be effective, empowered, if not to confer grace, then to change the apprehension of their viewers; if not to grant them eternity, then to manifest a living world.

Sacramental signs open onto another dimension, transcendence. A sacramental poetry, Sacramental Poetics (2008) argued, is a poetry that says more than it shows, that creates more than it signs, yet does so through a celebration of language, images, sounds, and time that takes the hearer beyond each of those elements, much like liturgy. Indeed, Paul Valéry has written about poetry in ways that sound remarkably like a description of liturgy:

It is necessary . . . for the simple arrangement of words . . . to compel our voice, even the inner voice, to leave the tone and rhythm of ordinary speech and to enter a quite different key and, as it were, a quite different time. This inner coercion to a pulse and a rhythmical action profoundly transforms all the values of the text that imposes it. All at once this text is no longer one of those intended to teach us something and to vanish as soon as that something is understood; its effect is to make us live a different life, breathe according to this second life; and it implies a state or a world in which the objects and beings found there, or rather their images, have other freedoms and other ties than those in the practical world.⁵

A sacramental poetics is not any sign-making, then, for it entails a radical understanding of signifying, one that points beyond the life and presence of the artist, to manifest a new world, a second life. Lori Branch has described two urgent questions we have inherited from a half century of secular critical thought: (1) How are we to understand the relationship between word and thing, sign and signified, other than direct representation and certainty in propositional truths or as completely arbitrary language games? And (2) are there other ways of experiencing the world than as subject[s] of mastery and certainty—that is, can we approach our world without instrumentalizing it?⁶ Hopefully, a sacramental poetics responds to both questions, with an understanding of signs pointing beyond themselves and a response to the world that includes wonder.

As far as the persistence of the secular, we should note that God or the gods have left the world, not once and for all, but repeatedly. In ancient Greece, with the rise of democracy, Plato dismissed tradition to insist that the new order had to be justified in Reason. The gods left again with the decline of the ancient pagan world and the rise of Judeo-Christian civilization. Milton depicts this hauntingly:

The Oracles are dumm,

No voice or hideous hum

Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.

Apollo from his shrine

Can no more divine,

With hollow shreik the steep of Delphos leaving.

No nightly trance, or breathed spell,

Inspires the pale-ey’d Priest from the prophetic cell.

The lonely mountains o’re,

And the resounding shore,

A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;

From haunted spring, and dale

Edg’d with poplar pale,

The parting Genius is with sighing sent,

With flowre-inwov’n tresses torn

The Nimphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.

(On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, lines 173–88)⁷

The standard reading of this shift is that the organic totality of the ancient universe, in which religion was an immediate element in people’s lives, was lost, and religion came to refer to a transcendent power—no longer the pre-Christian gods, but the one transcendent God, the supreme Being. Again, the gods departed with the rise of modernity: here, a medieval universe full of sacramental meanings gave way to the notion of the infinite mechanistic universe. They left again with the rise of modern industrial civilization and the secular political order. Again, they departed at the end of the nineteenth century, in the epoch of nihilism signaled by Nietzsche’s God is dead. And again, when postmodernity claimed the end of big narratives. It seems that God is abandoning the world, or dying, all the time.

To those who feel some longing for a mythical past, for a time when a transcendent presence would have governed their creation, the dying of the gods is mournful. To those who feel constrained by the notion of transcendence, the departing gods are a sign of hope. For the first temperament, culture seems to be on a downward spiral away from the essence of the religious toward an empty logic; for the second, secularization is an upward spiral away from superstition toward the light of reason. Of course, neither is a complete picture and neither is free of distortions. Undoubtedly, the departure of the gods brings both gains and losses.

In one sense, Sacramental Poetics asked what happened when God left the world yet once more, at the very dawn of secularism, when the Mass no longer turned a wafer into the mystical body of God through a miracle, but instead communicants saw it as a symbol; when divine cosmology no longer revealed divine providence, but offered mechanized matter; when language no longer effected miraculous transformations—like turning a wafer into God’s body—but merely signified something; when bodies joining in physical love became not a glimpse of transcendence, but mere sex; when tragedy became not a challenge to divine justice, but mere crime; and when the visible referred not beyond itself, to an invisible mystery, but to possession.⁸ In another sense, the book questioned the tidiness of these assumptions, critiquing the dominant myth of secularization that has marked the modern period. Pecora aptly describes what served as the grounding of the project: There is renewed interest in one account of secularization, which claims that the emotional and psychological energies formerly exercised in religious activity simply migrated elsewhere.⁹ Sacramental Poetics contended that instead of God leaving the world without a trace, the very sacramental character of religion lent itself copiously to developing the so-called secular forms of culture, often thinly disguised—or not even disguised—sacramental cultural forms.

Sometimes this process was not so easy, for when these cultural expressions tried to fall back on a sacred metaphysics, it was not always there. And without it, they were more difficult to sustain. For instance, if the church is not the mystical body of Christ, it is not surprising that it could become a legalistic institution. If matter cannot turn into the body of Christ, it is not surprising that it could become just pure extension.

Without a sacramental system of sociality, the community once joined by mystical union with the body of God could give way to mere spectacles of state power. And yet we know that cultural forms persist stubbornly, especially religious ones, and the persistence of the mystery of the central Christian rite, the Eucharist, was no exception. Poetry grasped for the mystery of that transformation through language, national consciousness inherited its understanding of community, love longed for it through expressions of mutual devotion, even theories of materialism clung to it through vitalism. Even if God comes and goes, sacramentality persists. Why and how?

Let us begin with the articulation of the sacramental that sparked this creative dialogue.¹⁰ In his Epoch and Artist of 1959, David Jones astutely noted: The term ‘sacrament’ and ‘sacramental’ are apt to give off overtones and under-tones that for a number of disparate reasons have a kind of narrowing effect. Thus, for Christians and especially for the Catholic Christian, those terms carry a specialized meaning and a special aura surrounds them. On the other hand, for secularized man in general, and especially for post-Christians or anti-Christians such terms are suspect or uncongenial. So that in various opposing ways the wide significance and primary meaning is obscured.¹¹ Jones continues, suggesting that the primary meaning is sign-making. Not only are the arts characterized by the activity of sign-making; ultimately, the very work of the sign implies the sacred.¹² Why does a sign inevitably evoke the sacred? Because it works by evoking something beyond itself, something that transcends the sign and thereby participates in transcendence. Transcendence—whether vertical or horizontal, above or beyond—is the sphere of the sacred, of what is beyond our comprehension, control, and use. We can point to it, sign it, and by doing so evoke it. But it is more than we can say, hear, touch, taste, or understand. If that sounds like mystical language, it is meant to, for the link between the sacramental and the mystical is deep. The sacrament has always been considered the purview of mystery, both in Catholic and Reformed contexts: "In early Christian language sacramentum and the synonymous μυστήριον [mystērion] were applied indiscriminately to any ritual observance of the Church, or to any spiritually symbolic act or object; but they were also often applied in an eminent sense to the two most important observances, baptism and the Lord’s Supper or Eucharist."¹³ On a broad level, the mystery is an affirmation of the goodness of creation: an emphatic declaration of what that matter was originally created to be.

Beyond the transcendence of sign-making, there is another component of sacramentality: efficacy. The catechism of the Council of Trent addressed this aspect clearly: A sacrament is a thing subjected to the senses, which has the power not only of signifying but also of effecting grace.¹⁴ Rites make something happen. While many arguments took place about what made sacraments effective—the agency of Christ, the faith of the believer, the signs themselves, signs empowered by Christ—the question of the efficacy of the sacraments itself was never in doubt. They conferred grace, created a world. And while philosophers and poets have debated the nature of the efficacy of art—its source in inspiration, in the artist, or inhering in the work itself—they also agree on the fundamental efficacy of art: to manifest a world. This is the basis of the otherwise audacious comparison of the artist to the Creator and the metaphor of the Creator as supreme Artist. In the Augustinian tradition as it is elaborated by Eriugena and Bonaventure, the human artist imitates the supreme Artist, God. Here, art is not in the thing or the work of making; it dwells beyond the life and presence of the artist himself, in divine art.¹⁵

But the analogy can take us farther. A sacramental poetics is one in which the artist becomes indistinguishable from his art in that the expression and the subject that produce it are joined inseparably: we see the artist in his work. The sacramental understanding of participation also enfolds the reader or viewer in this process. No mere spectator of the work, the viewer is changed during his encounter with it. Entering the world of the poem, he participates in its discoveries, seeing what it sees, hearing what it says, feeling what it feels.

To further illuminate this sacramental poetics, it is helpful to turn to the quintessential sacrament in Christianity, the Eucharist, and to chart its movement from ritual to poetry. Obviously, by movement, no one means that the Eucharist has left the church; it certainly has not. But a striking and, in many ways, counterintuitive phenomenon took place during the Reformation, when the doctrine of transubstantiation was rejected by many Reformers. Aspects of the Eucharist began showing up in the poetry of the Reformation, albeit in completely unorthodox ways. The world manifest by the ritual was now manifest in poetry: a universe infused with divinity, a dialogue between God and man, physical union, a realm of justice. Sacramental poetics does not only begin with these Reformation poets, and while they were perhaps preoccupied with the Eucharist, this is not what makes their poetry sacramental, for this is not a poetics of theme. Rather, as surely as sign-making characterizes the sacrament of the Eucharist, so it also does poetry, which is similarly engaged in making present what is absent—not just in select figures of speech, like the apostrophe, but in the very poetic enterprise.

This movement into art in early modernity was not a deliberate effort to reinstitute transubstantiation, nor even to deliver a wholesale transfer from one cultural formation, the institutional church, to another, ars poetica. All of these early moderns were, in different ways, participants in a critique—a radical critique—of the Mass. While their complaints varied from doctrine to hermeneutics, from ritual acts to ritual setting, one common ground was their fear of idolatry. Throughout their rhetoric, Reformers ranging from high Anglicans to radical Puritans accused the Roman church of idolatry and the Roman Mass of being an exercise in idol worship. John Knox compares the idolatry of the Mass to ancient pagan idolatry of wood and stone, adding the qualification that the poor God of bread is the most miserable of all other idols.¹⁶ Cranmer did not mince words: What Man, having any judgment or learning, joyned with a true zeal unto God, doth not see and lament to have entered into Christes Religion, suche false Doctrine, supersticion, idolatry, hipocrisie. And the very worst of all idolatries was the worship of the host: the cake idol, the god of bread, the idol of the altar.¹⁷

Such zeal underscores that the Eucharist was the central religious controversy of the Reformation. Indeed, over the question of the Mass, heads rolled and ink spilled; religious institutions convulsed at the birth of new theologies and rituals and the defamation and deformation of old ones. Moreover, debates about the Eucharist became the occasion for the worldview we regard as modern to begin to be articulated, and this fledgling modernism swept into its purview a vast array of concerns and disciplines—from the linguistic to the political, from the anthropological to the cosmological, from the private sanctuary of belief to the public forum of state ceremony. In the course of questioning the Eucharist, justice and sacrifice, images and language, community and love, and cosmos and creation were all implicated. When the dust settled after the Reformers had redefined the Eucharist, understandings of the material and immaterial, the visible and invisible, and immanence and transcendence were revised. Theology, metaphysics, aesthetics, and politics were reimagined. In short, the Eucharist was a lightning rod, a focus where tremendous energy gathered, or, better, a lightning bolt—for it jolted sensibilities into a new world order.

Hence, the Eucharist became the appropriate site of an investigation about sacramentality and its infusion into the secular world. How could one not be struck by the paradox that John Milton inveighed vociferously against transubstantiation in his prose—with all of the conventional reformist rhetoric of the idolatry and cannibalism of eating and digesting god—but nevertheless, in his great epic, he depicts the entire cosmos as in the very act of ceaselessly transubstantiating. Given that the Eucharist commemorates the redemption of man by Christ, it is indeed remarkable to place the communion, which recalls Christ’s death, in paradise with the unfallen Adam—even more remarkable in the context of Reformation controversies. The Reformers had already changed the allusion to sacrifice: it was to be remembered at the communion, not repeated. The altar became a table. Calvary was to be called to mind, not reenacted. But Milton’s Eucharist does not even call it to mind: the body and blood of Christ are not a bleeding body, but a breathing body—indeed, a giant living pulsing universe, one whose breath joins the very breath of angels to become the spirit of God. In his remarkable imaginative feat, Milton has depicted a sinless man in the garden, with no need for the redemption signaled by the communion, engaging in communion. We are challenged to imagine a wondrous thing: a sinless Eucharist. In Milton’s paradisal sinless Eucharist, the emphasis falls on longing and its frustration—on desire, and perhaps on hope, but not on an achieved redemption. For him, the doctrine of Real Presence leaves one with Real Hunger.

John Donne is more hopeful that we can achieve communion here and now in common love. Donne has a similar attachment to the sacrament—even though as dean of St. Paul’s, he dare not endorse the heresy (even, or especially, because he was an ex-Catholic). And another Anglican, George Herbert, concluded his architectural anthology of lyrics, The Temple, with his version of transubstantiation. The point is certainly not that many Reformed poets were closeted Catholics (that relation may or may not be argued), nor that the Reformation was top down instead of bottom up (historians endlessly debate this), nor that we need to reevaluate the religious identity of these and other writers to nuance them more finely (we need not recapitulate identity conflicts).

Clearly, the meanings that the Eucharist has accrued are stunning: the means of achieving communal justice and peace, for cleansing human fault, and for overcoming death. Entering the new, sacramental body, the communicant is no longer an exile from God; he can enjoy a share of God’s divinity; no longer an exile from community, he can help to constitute the body of the church, and no longer in exile from creation, he is joined to it materially. The sacrifice satisfies justice, the participation assures love, the words of institution even overcome the failure of fallen language. In short, paradise is restored.

And yet, to so many early modern Reformers, this sacrament of mystery had been instrumentalized: it came to signify the rule of the church instead of the body of God. In fact the phrase corpus mysticum, which had once referred to the host, was transferred by the Lateran Council to the church; and corpus Christi, which had referred to the body of the church, was now used to refer to the host. By the Tudor period, the sacrament had become so entangled with politics that corpus mysticum was even used in legal discourse to signify the body of the monarch and the nation. The original sense of the mystical body, of participation in a community governed by consent rather than rule, seemed threatened.

Nonetheless, the tradition always harbored not only corpus understood as a polity but also mysticum, the mystery, and the longing for that mystery surfaces again and again in the discourse of the period. This longing, for a mystical participation in God, is not lost during the Reformation any more than the hunger for justice, love, and a world alive and redolent with meaning is lost in modern secularism. If anything, it is strengthened during the relentless advance of scientific rationalism. In early modernity, this longing begins to be transfigured into the cultural life of ars poetica. While their world was shaken by challenges to the medieval system of sacramentality, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers who lived at the dawn of modernity responded with inventive solutions for holding fast to the sacred even while modern sciences challenged its presuppositions.

This volume grew out of responses given at the American Academy of Religion to Sacramental Poetics shortly after its publication. It was immediately apparent that these so-called responses were far more: each scholar had taken up the challenge of rethinking what sacramental poetics might mean in very different contexts, and the resultant broadening and deepening of the concept struck many of us as far too valuable to allow to be occasional. Subsequently, we editors discovered, with gratitude, that many other distinguished thinkers wanted to join the project. And so here, in essays ranging from the King James Bible to Dracula, from Dante to Hopkins, the contributors demonstrate the endurance of sacramental poetics. Necessarily drawing upon two discourses, theological and literary, to illuminate the phrase sacramental poetics, these essays prove that the broad range of sacramental significance can never be exhausted.

SACRAMENTAL TRANSLATION

The relationship between meaning and sacramentality is taken up in a pair of essays on the sacramental nature of translation. In Cloven Tongues: Theology and the Translation of the Scriptures, Rowan Williams finds that the translator participates in the ongoing effect of the self-revealing of God through the incarnate life and redeeming death of Jesus (24); hence, translation is a sacramental act whose effect is the effect of the incarnation and the cross (22). In the course of translating, something always remains outside the grasp of the translator: the act of translation requires accepting that some things are untranslatable. In this sense, the translation is provisional, has a shadow text, marginal alternatives. Haunting the shadowy margins of sacramental translation is the divinity of Christ: If the focus of sacramental translation is the specific saving humanity of Jesus, the hinterland into which it leads is the inexhaustible ‘meaning’ of his divinity (27). This observation prompts Williams to a profound meditation on plurality and univocity; plural languages point to one truth rather than a pluralism of meaning issuing in arbitrary meaning and inconsistency: The diversity of speech in the world is the sign not of an irremediable fragmentation of meaning but of the persistence of Word and Spirit in what is undoubtedly a context of persisting difference between cultures and languages (28). Translation does not produce a substantial body but a body of interaction, the creation of community.

Subha Mukherji also examines the sacramental meaning of translation in ‘Those Are Pearls’: Transformation, Translation, and Exchange. She broadens a focus on translation to other moments of transformation and metamorphosis, such as Hermione’s resurrection in The Winter’s Tale and Bottom’s translation in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. These moments broadly collate with sacramentality in the following respect: Yet the contrary pressures of the central idea of change seek, and—in particular texts and moments—find, a middle ground in a deep aesthetic that is curiously resonant of the sacramental imagination (40). For Williams, translation can never exhaust the meaning of the text it translates; for Mukherji, transformation always leaves something unchanged, as a vestigial remainder defies the neat reciprocity of exchange and equation: The transaction at the heart of the event is unequal (43). Transformations that do not wholly consume that which they transform enable Mukherji to articulate a new poetics of sacramentality, to turn loss and inadequacy into a quickening aesthetic: This is a poetic of transformation that premises the inward reality of metamorphosis neither by disowning a gap between change and exchange nor by sublimating the asymmetries of conversion, but by acknowledging and mobilizing precisely such disjunctions. And in that uncertain, dynamic space, the mystery at the heart of representation finds its habitus (44).

SACRAMENTAL AESTHETICS

In addition to the translational nature of sacramental poetics, two essays in this volume address its aesthetic—by which they mean stylistic and linguistic—applicability. In How to Write Like God: Dante and Sacramental Poetics, Stephen Little explores two related problems: the absence of direct references to sacramentality in Dante’s Comedy and the attendant (perhaps sensible) absence of critical inquiry into this topic. And yet, as Little shows, the sacramental vision of the Comedy is so pervasive as to be almost inconspicuous. In Little’s analysis, "the medieval sacramental imagination is present in the Comedy as an influence on its poetics" (72). Little situates Dante in the context of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and its introduction of a novel theological concept: transubstantiation. More specifically, Little contends that the Comedy reveals the progression of Dante-Pilgrim into Dante-Poet, capable of divinely signifying in his poetry (93). Dante-Poet effects a divine method of signification by achieving a transubstantial union between the signifier and the signified: "Dante can write—can signify—with God, uniting sacramentum and res in his poem and in himself" (94). That union accounts for the sacramental meaning of signification in the Comedy, and its observance redresses a tendency to interpret the epic apart from medieval theologies of the Eucharist.

Kevin Hart also probes the meaning of sacramental signification in Sacramental Poetics and Quasi-Sacramentals. By examining the relation between sacramentality and poetic practice, Hart explores a theory of composition according to a theology of sacrament (106). This entails asking whether there is a sense in which we might plausibly say that a poem contains its own meaning (110), as a sacrament such as the Eucharist is both signifier and signified. Hart’s essay develops a distinction between poetry as sacrament and poetry as a quasi-sacramental, since poems can help someone to deepen his or her spiritual life (111). By offering an account of how poems mean, Hart’s essay works out a practical theology of sacramentality for poetic practice.

SACRAMENTAL POLITICS

Essays by John Milbank and Hent de Vries probe the political implications of sacramental poetics. In The Sacramental Dilation of Richard Hooker, John Milbank shows how in the thought of Richard Hooker the sacramental was diverted not only into the literary poetic but also into that ‘making’ which was a drastic new and semideliberate building of the political-ecclesial community, required in the wake of the Reformation rupture (120). Milbank explores the diversion of the sacramental as a ‘political’ instance of that paradoxical emergence among Anglicans (and even many Puritans) of a ‘pan sacramentalism’ (130–31). For Milbank, the source for the diversion and dispersion of sacramental energies, for sacramental politics, lies in Hooker’s Christology: His English constitutionalism is therefore of one seamless piece with an integralist theology of nature and grace and an integralist Christology of the human and divine natures (136). The human and divine nature of Christ becomes a metaphor for the relation between the political and ecclesial, for how they divert into each other: In both cases the formally Protestant conceals a substantive Catholicity, newly extended into a general verbal, emblematic, and natural mystical symbolics, where everything is as much natural as supernatural, as much political as ecclesial, as much insular as imperial, as much cosmic as eternal (152). The particular relation between these dyads (natural and supernatural, insular and imperial, political and ecclesial) is sacramental insofar as they disclose and mediate the divine beauty (152), insofar as they integrate Hooker’s Christology. The ecclesial and political combine in a sacramental way because their combination models the relation between Christ’s two natures, and in so doing more generally conceals and discloses Christ’s divine beauty.

Hent de Vries also considers how the state might participate in the logic of sacramentality in The Miracle of the Eucharist and the Mysticism of the Political Body. To theorize a sacramental politics, de Vries asks: "First, can a meditation upon sovereignty, of the individual or of collective selves—more precisely, can what Lefort, in the footsteps of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, calls a ‘thinking politics’—ultimately do without the assumption or postulation, perhaps illusion, of ‘real presence,’ even or especially in a world that is, clearly, ‘not yet redeemed’? (166). And yet de Vries wonders whether a politics modeled upon the Eucharist is the best example (historically and conceptually, theologically and poetically, speaking) of ‘a particular that honors other particulars, one that opens out toward a potential universal without coercion’ (172). In the place of a sacramental politics, de Vries offers a miraculous politics: Miracles, the tradition of miracle beliefs, by contrast, I would claim, are more eminently substitutable, translatable, than the Eucharist itself (172). Politics modeled on miracles could produce a radically open community in and of this world" (172).

THE METAPHYSICS OF SACRAMENTAL POETICS

Two essays on metaphysics lay vital groundwork for the theological and philosophical understanding of sacramental poetics. In Going around Metaphysics,Jean-Luc Marion assesses the relationship between Christianity and metaphysics. Engaging sacramental poetics as love, Marion’s essay provides a rich framework for the conversation—among Christianity, theology, philosophy, and metaphysics—in which nearly all of the essays participate. Throughout the essay, Marion deploys love to offer a novel solution to an inveterate and intractable problem: that the relationship between Christian thought and what is called ‘metaphysics’ remains problematic (177). Metaphysics describes what is, and God most certainly is not in the way that most things are. As a solution to this impasse, Marion proposes love: "In order to reach the point from which one could go around the cape of the impossible (thus, also that of objectivity), it is necessary to go around the logic of metaphysica by the logic of agapē (186–87). Instead of knowing something before loving it, Marion suggests loving something as a way of knowing it. This epistemological shift allows for the distinction between the possible and impossible—a distinction that imperils amity between Christianity and metaphysics—to fade: Thus, the dichotomy between the possible and the impossible fades before a decision ‘infinitely more infinite,’ whether to love or not to love. Controllable logical necessity is substituted with the uncontrollable convention of grace. And philosophical grammar—with the grammar of charity" (188).

Ingolf U. Dalferth also draws on this grammar of charity to explain just what is meant by the term real presence, one that readers will encounter throughout this book. In fact, the precise sense in which God was present in the Eucharist fueled Reformation controversies about communion. In "Verbum Efficax: The Theopoetics of Real Presence," Dalferth examines what it means for God to be really present, and, perhaps more significantly, he considers what happens to those for whom God is really