Bonaventure’s reduction of the arts to divine wisdom, with special emphasis on the seven days of creation and Hugh of S. Victor’s triad of divine attributes.

©TLOU, 2011

So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.
Paul’s letter to the Philippians (2.1-2)

I recently read Philippians with my intro class, and promptly issued a quiz the following day. One of the questions went something like: “Paul exhorts the Philippians to be of the same _______.”

Many of the students answered religion, community, etc.. Many got it (MIND). But one answered “Be of the same body.”

I remain fascinated by this answer. Part of me simply believes that this is a well-catechized catholic who, while not knowing Philippians, of course, was actually thinking eucharistically. I know, I’m an idealist.

He could have been thinking politically. Be of the same body-politic. And I’m sympathetic to this reading, too. Again, idealistic, I know.

Without discussing with the student, I really have no idea what he was thinking. But for my own work, my own sacramental-politics, I love the idea of Paul exhorting the Philippians to be of the same body.

There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call — one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.
(4.4-5)

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of a reluctant spring

looking to force the issue.

I pass under at my usual speed

And breathe in their certain death

–Lacan

This is the dream she had on the evening when her parents brought home, for the first time, her baby brother. A large room, blank, without any walls. Nothing grew or thrived there; instead, a pervasive sense of some organism, maleficent. She sat down, turned around, waited. She got up and started to walk. A room without any walls, she thought, I must look for my totem. She came upon a river, flowing the wrong way, and devoid of fish. She passed it. She came upon a mountain. It had a bottom, but no top. Up she went. After lunch, she talked with the man who, ostensibly, was responsible for clearing up malfunctions. They wasted no time in getting down to the substance of her visit: the lack of any objects that could possibly function as totems, fetishes, charms, what have you. “We’re working on that,” he enunciated: “there has been a downturn in generativity which should have coalesced towards the end of the first quarter; nevertheless, the sequence has been realigned according to shifts in lunar availability.” She looked askance. “What about earlier models?” “Out of the question” he replied. She resisted a mighty impulse to chuck a stone. Praying for deliverance, she cleared her throat, declared her thirst, and asked to borrow a quarter. This she pocketed and failed to remember upon waking.

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This is the kind of impoliteness that Graham Ward calls for in The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Post-Material Citizens. The act of being a citizen does look crass next to the polished acquiescence to consumerism and endless materialism. But for the theologian, who is not a citizen of this world, Ward’s is a call to a radical kind of impoliteness, the scandal of the Christ.

Let the Christian remain in the world, not because of the good gifts of creation, nor because of his responsibility for the course of the world, but for the sake of the Body of the incarnate Christ and for the sake of the Church. Let him remain in the world to engage in frontal assault on it, and let him live the life of his secular calling in order toe show himself as a stranger in this world all the more. But that is only possible if we are visible members of the Church. The antithesis between the world and the Church must be borne out in the world. That was the purpose of the incarnation. That is why Christ died among his enemies. That is the reason and the only reason why the slave must remain a slave and the Christian remain subject to the powers that be.

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 264-5

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Religion will not go away; it will not be repressed; it will not succumb to instrumental reasoning. There will be no new Enlightenment. So let us herald the advent of the postsecular state.

- Graham Ward, The Politics of Discipleship, 301

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One’s identity within the body of Christ is worked out in Christian terms of practices of faith, hope and love that go beyond the naming and labeling of the churches, fellowships and denominations in this world. While remaining a Greek, a Jew, a male, a female, a slave, or a freeborn, one is also and more significantly a member of the body of Christ. It is a body that is “heavy with meaning” that is not possible to translate. One condition or identity is not necessarily effaced in the other, but it is transformed in ways beyond telling. one discovers one’s somatic nature in the tranquility of recollection; it is not self-evident. It is discovered not discretely but by continuing to work within the body of Christ, a new polity, with new relationships and new distributions of power that can never find their full realization in any political system in this world and that therefore resist accommodation with the politics of this world and offer possibilities for an alternative politics. The altar on which Paul asks the Roman Christians to present their bodies as a living sacrifice can never be identified with a particular throne. The body is continually being given, continually moving out and being enacted elsewhere, and so it continually transcends strict identifications that it imposes on itself or are imposed on it. The body is never there as such (as if a static object in a freeze-frame still photo); the body is there only because it moves, it circulates, it acts, it disseminates its knowledges, rejecting, absorbing, and adapting itself to new knowledges. It is in this way that it can be deemed apophatic.

-Graham Ward, The Politics of Discipleship, 255-56

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Psychoanalysis seems to say that we are fated to be enjoyed by our unconscious desire. That the desire “of the other” imprinted on us before we had the weapons of language sets in motion a kind of repetition compulsion that Freud thought bespoke of Thanatos, the death drive. This complex caused Lacan to doubt, at times, the possibility of “cure.” At his better moments, though, he comes forth with what I would call I kind of Christian view of language. It is a view that says, yes, we are determined by the language bestowed on us by our parents — even our first parents. Original sin, in this context, is the bad habits of perverted desires, forged into the manacles of language. We are born into a language, and it is a language that veers us away from loving God and neighbor, curving us inward to a love of self, and of things that prop up that self. Let us accept that our unconscious is determined in this manner by a language that existed before us, will outlast us, and is up to no good. God’s saving work can be viewed as a kind of divine pun, for as Lacan pointed out, while the signifiers are lodged in our unconscious, the signifieds are not necessarily fated in their linkages. The signifieds have a tendency to slide, due, in part, to the equivocity of language. May one not, like Samson, take the chains that one is given, and put them to a different purpose. “I am a slave doing jigs for the Philistines, but rest my hands on these pillars, and let out a call for the last dance. . . . . . ” I’m not sure how many puns we can attribute to Jesus, but one seems important, that of Peter as the rock. Anyone who has ever read the Gospels knows that Peter was anything but that. And yet, there could be no better man upon which to build this certain kind of community known as the church than one who’s name comes to signify, not what he was, but what God could make of him.

Originally published March 6, 2010.

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The contours of the kingdom that is already among us do not readily present themselves and they are not – following Augustine (and Metz) – identical with the institution of the church or, rather, the different ecclesial institutionalizations that call themselves churches or Christian denominations across the world… Yet, by faith, we believe that Christ is among us now as well as coming again, and the body of Christ also. By “a certain continuity,” I mean that we are already living within the future messianic return. Eschatological remainder alerts to a messianism operative now – a messianism that Agamben explores. Such continuity views eschatology not as what is lacking in all the secular ideologies of the future, but what is excessive and superabundant to them.

Ward, The Politics of Discipleship, 170

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