Thursday, February 22, 2007

Ding an Sich as Eucharist, infinitizing mater

I just finally put two and two together and realized that in Catholicism, the thing in itself is the Eucharist*, which is itself, infinitely deep, such that going into the eucharist takes us into the Logos spoken before time. Like Alice, travelling through a worm hole (or whatever she does), that is always already with us, the Eucharist comes in us from "outside" so that we are more fully part of Logos, Shalom, Love.

It is true though that a Christian goes into the body, while the body comes into her. There are some interesting border issues, or a-border issues, that have to do with spirit as infinitizing our mater.

Somehow though, this idea of the eternal pre-lapsarian body, which I in no way think ever existed other then as Christ, is in tension with this idea of a seed falling into the ground so that it might birth a plant. I know that by retaining the word body, we resist splitting the Christic body into spirit and body (we retain a unity), but sometimes, the idea of spirit as divorced from body (somewhat Cartesian, somewhat Gnostic), is canonical in Christianity. I was just reading about an interval between esse and essentia in Aquinas (around 250 in Pickstock's After Writing). Paul continually talks about putting to death flesh and living in spirit (but he also talks about putting on the body of Christ, or exhaling his self, that he might inhale Christ 1 Col...) God, the father 'exists' not as a body but as a spirit, as nothingness, yet what do we do with the body of Christ, which is itself spiritual. Do we just conflate spirit and body? It's like Hellenism and Hebraism have had a front on collision, and bodies and spirits are flying every which way. I don't know what to think.

* it is a misnomer to say that the Eucharist is a "thing" because it is a relation to the Trinity through the Son. Thus, the Eucharist as ideal ding an sich, redefines ding as Sein (being). Being as itself.
What bothers me about the discourse of being is that we have psychologized it so that being is only there for us if we attend to it. But being is not like that; it is aready there, whether we think it or not. We may have a heightened experience of being, but being is not just a state of consciousness. Ontology is regardless of psychological flux, not that we could do without psyche, but that psyche cannot erase being's persistence without dieing.
If, when we are in "the cloud of unknowing," "the dark night of the soul", the via negativa, we are close to the Father, it would seem that a psychological reading of this experience would side for non-being (perhaps this is true if the Father is nothingness). But God is the pure act of love, and action does not happen outside of a context. Understandably, God is the context for His act.
When we fold "context" and "act" together like that we open language to God. I guess this is how God is impossible.

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