FREDERICK (FRITZ) BAUERSCHMIDT  is a Professor of Theology at Loyola College in Maryland and a permanent deacon of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, assigned to Corpus Christi parish.

 The Threefold Body: Theology After Suspicion

1. Versions of Postmodernity

Readings of the postmodern are legion, and these legions are locked in perpetual combat. In this essay I will attempt to distinguish two among the many versions of the closure of modernity-postmodernity as the end of "metanarratives"and postmodernity as the end of "suspicion"- and sketch a theological version of the latter as a genuine path forward. Postmodernity is too easily identified with nihilistic accounts of truth, for such an association presumes an identification of modernity with truth and reason. In this essay I will gesture toward a theological account of truth, an account that belongs neither to modernity, nor premodernity, nor postmodernity, but which can begin to aquire new force as the end of the reign of modern "clear and distinct ideas"comes into view. In this sense, postmodernity can be a propitious moment for theology. Still, postmodernity in no way constitutes the condition for the possibility for theology; the possibility of speech about God can be founded on nothing less than God's own speaking.

In perhaps its most common usage, associated with Jean-François Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition, the "postmodern"marks the end of the master narratives of modernity, indeed the end of all grand narratives. This, at its extreme, is the idea of postmodernity as the death of meaning and the triumph of wild and unregulated interpretation. In this reading postmodernity is a time in which strong poets assert their will to power without regard to such eternal values as truth, goodness, unity or beauty, in which the decontruction of signs negates all stable meanings from within, in which the modernity's universal narrative of humanity is shattered into micro-narratives of race, class and gender through which the previously suppressed Other is presented to us with a new force. A correlary of all this is the end of the modern subject, conceived as gnoseologically stable and morally self-possessed. Lyotard writes: "A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before"(15). The self becomes a pastiche of fragments collected around nothing more than the remote control that connects it to the cable television with its 57 channels (and nothin' on).

But before we get too excited or worried, I would note that this seemingly apocalyptic version of postmodernity is in fact in substantial continuity with the modernity that preceded it. The modern turn to the subject has been intensified as the subject turns on itself, so that what we have in this purported death of grand narratives is actually the triumph of the modern narrative of emancipation. Submission to a master narrative, as Augustine knew so well, means the surrender of our free will (our capacity to choose) so as to possess a freed will (our capacity to do the good). Part of the modern project -and perhaps its defining feature -has been the valorization of the contentless freedom of the will, the sheer capacity of human self-assertion. Postmodernity, as the end of master narratives, then becomes simply the intensification of modernity's quest for autonomy -freedom without terminus or telos. For the ultimate in contentless freedom is the negation of any stable, narratively given, identity. This may be the apocalypse, or it may be more of the same.

In a later essay entitled "Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?"Lyotard gives us a second, somewhat different account of the postmodern. In this account, postmodernity is marked by a particular mode of figuring the sublime. Following Kant, Lyotard understands the aesthetics of the sublime to be grounded in "the incommensurability of reality to concept"that occurs when "the imagination fails to present an object which might, if only in principle, come to match the concept"(78-79). In other words, the sentiment of the sublime arises from the gap between our ability to conceive of, for example, totality and our inability to imagine -to present ourselves or others with an image of -that totality. Thus the imagination presents to itself not the unpresentable idea, but the very unpresentability of the idea. Kant notes, "it can never be anything more than a negative presentation -but still it expands the soul. Or, as Gilles Deleuze puts it, "The feeling of the sublime is experienced when faced with the formless or the deformed (immensity or power). It is as if the imagination were confronted with its own limit, forced to strain to its utmost, experiencing a violence which stretches it to the extremity of its power.

According to Lyotard, the modern aesthetic of the sublime is a "nostalgic"one, in which a unified form is used to present the missing content (Proust is his example). The postmodern aesthetic, on the other hand, is one that "denies itself the solace of good forms"and presents the unpresentable in the deformation of the signifier itself (Joyce is his example). In other words, immensity and power are registered not simply as that which is absent from representation, but as the very twisting and bending of beautiful forms into what are, by previous standards, hideous and grotesque forms. One might say that the modern and the postmodern mark two distinct modes of negation of form. And in postmodernity, this deformation of forms has no terminus, but is an ongoing process driven by the ceaseless and insatiable desire to convey a sense of the unpresentable.

What is of particular interest for my purposes is Lyotard's way of distinguishing the modern from the postmodern and how this relates to what is perhaps the preeminent modern virtue: suspicion. Lyotard notes that modernity carried with it the destruction of belief and the discovery of the "lack of reality"of all representations of reality (77). The Kantian problematic of the sublime is indicative not only of a suspicion of all received representations (and thus in continuity with Kant's reading of enlightenment), but also of a profound pessimism about our ability to produce any adequate image or account. Reality is the unpresentable, which can be put forth only as the "missing contents"of the form from which all superfluous ornamentation has been stripped away. Yet this aesthetic is still "nostalgic"for the real, and thus seeks a kind of clarity and distinctness of form -one might think of the functionalism of the so-called "international style"of architecture or, for that matter, of Descartes' Meditations.

The postmodern shares with the modern a sense of the lack of reality of all representation, but it is no longer suspicious of received representations, for it realizes that a lack of reality only warrents suspicion if one presumes that there is a "real"to which one has some sort of (at least negative) access. Rather the postmodern "puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself"by a proliferation of forms created out of those received representations (81). The spareness and functionality engendered by modernist suspicion is replaced in postmodernity by a baroque superficiality. In modernism the corrosion of suspicion strips away all exterior decoration -whether in art or philosophy -to reveal the sublime as what cannot be indicated by the bare form, while in postmodernity the sublime is the ever-shifting figuration of the surface. This flux creates a fantastic space in which the unpresentability of the sublime may be presented.

In some ways Lyotard's second account of postmodernity is, like his first, still fundamentally grounded in a hyper-modern master narrative of emancipation. The relationship of this second account to the first can be seen in its concluding clarion call: "Let us wage war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable. . . "(82). There is the same questioning of any unified discourse or presentation of such sublime concepts at totality or simplicity. Having finally thrown off the dead hand of the past, the self need not fear nor be suspicious of that past; the self is freed to use whatever fragmented forms of the past that it wishes. Rather than being suspicious of those forms, the postmodern self is ironic about them, and thus no longer so threatened. Forms no longer possess us, but rather we them. A classical column here, a snatch of Gregorian chant there, and image Elvis thrown in for a smile -all are assembled by the ironic subject into a pastiche. Thus in his ironic path beyond modern suspicion, Lyotard seems to retain at least enough of a centered subject to provide a locus for the ironic gaze, to act as a bricoleur. Suddenly, ironic pastiche does not seem so "postmodern,"for while it renounces suspicion, it partakes of an essentially modern view of the subject as a contentless freedom that constructs the world, a freedom into which the powerful tonic of irony has been infused, so that it is no longer threatened by (and therefore suspicious of) the forms of the past.

While Lyotard does not himself fully distinguish them, he still presents us with at least two distinguishable ways in which we might think about "postmodernity."On the one hand, we have the end of metanarratives, the end of all totalizing schemes, the decentering of meaning and the self. On the other hand, we have the end of suspicion through a refiguring of the sublime, so that metaphors of depth are replaced with those of superficiality, so that unpresentability becomes a quality of figuration rather than something lurking behind figuration. The first, as I have argued, seems more an intensification of the modern project of emancipation than a surpassing of it. The second, particularly when tied to the first, can also be understood as a consequence of the emancipatory project but it need not be.

The claim that all metanarratives have become incredible is of course simply an assertion, and one about which we might have well-founded suspicions, particularly given the way in which the emancipatory metanarrative of modernity seems to be smuggled back in. We might well turn suspicion and even irony back upon themselves and ask, "Incredible to whom?"Whose interests are served by the disembedding of the subject from any and all metadiscourses so as to bounce through cyberspace? If one questions both modern suspicion and the postmodern assertion of the end of master narratives, then one is presented with the possibility of a true (or real) metanarrative presentation (or presence) of the sublime. The self is decentered -not in the sense of being fragmented, but of being unlocked from its Cartesean isolation -so as to discovery truth in the concrete objects of the world.

The two versions of postmodernity that we find in Lyotard have their theological analogues. On the one hand, some theologians (or a/theologians), such as Mark Taylor, have taken up the idea that we are living at the end of all metanarratives and argued that in such a situation the very notion of God must be jettisoned. Others, who also conceive of the postmodern as the end of metanarratives, are not willing to go quite so far, arguing instead for a postmodern Christian theology that rejects the the universal and totalizing pretensions of much traditional Christian theology in favor of some more modest version. The Christian story can no longer be understood or presented as the world's true story; it is at best simply the story that Christians tell about the world, and which they cannot impose upon the world or even preach to the world in the hope that the world might turn and be converted. Such theologians point to the contemporary awareness and tacit acceptance of religious pluralism as creating a new situation in which such notions as the necessity of Christ for salvation or the Church as the locus of salvation are simply incredible and should be abandoned. Indeed, they must be abandoned, for they inevitably wage war against the Other. Instead, we are given a Christianity that understands its mission as one of "service"to a world that has become increasingly secular, emancipated and autonomous. Thus in this version of postmodern theology the Church's task is to bring the Reign of God, now glossed as the modern project of emancipation, to its completion.

On the other hand, there is a way of conceiving a theological closure of modernity that corresponds to the understanding of postmodernity as the end of suspicion. In this understanding, modernity is characterized by the "ugly broad ditch"that Lessing saw stretched between the "accidental truths of history"and the "necessary truths of reason."In modernity these necessary truths could never be represented in historically contingent facts. With the closure of modernity and the jettisoning of the modern account of "necessary truths of reason"understood as Cartesian "clear and distinct ideas,"however, it once again becomes possible to put forward the notion of the sublime presented through the contingent and historical. It is to such an understanding of the task of theology after modernity and beyond suspicion that I will now turn.

2. Beyond Suspicion

Christianity of course has its own form of suspicion -a suspicion of representation inherited from Israel's strictures against idolatry. As is clear from the charges of "atheism"lodged against the early Christians by their pagan opponents, Christianity antedates modernity in its destruction of belief and the discovery of the "lack of reality"of all representations. And just as postmodernity moves beyond the suspicion characteristic of modernity in its ironic appropriation of representations through pastiche and bricolage, so too Christianity moves beyond suspicion in its proclamation of faith in Jesus Christ as God incarnate, the image of the invisible God (Col 1:15).

In recent theology it is Hans Urs von Balthasar's theological aesthetics that is best known for stressing the importance of the "form"(Gestalt) of revelation. Less well known is the historiographic scheme in which Balthasar locates his theological project. According to Balthasar, the gospel first took root in a world that was viewed by its inhabitants as fundamentally sacred. The approach of the early apologists (e. g. Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria) was not to preach God's Word to a godless world, but to gather together into unity the fragmentary manifestations of the Word in the world (the logoi spermatikoi) through the proclamation of the personal incarnation of that Word in Jesus Christ. This provides an organizing and form-imparting center to the sacred cosmos of antiquity. As Balthasar writes:

All the unifying principles of the ancient world -such as the Logos of the stoics, the Neo-platonic hierarchy of being rising from matter to the supraessential One, the abstract majesty of the unifying power of Rome -all these were regarded as baptizable anticipations of the God-Logos in person who entered Israelite history, filled the whole world, in whom were the Ideas which were the pattern by which the world was made, and in relation to whom the world could be understood (12-13).

In such a scheme the line between philosophy and theology, between faith and reason, could be extremely blurry, or indeed non-existent. This situation, and therefore this form of Christian theology, persists throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance in such writings as Thomas More's Utopia, in which the "natural"religion of the inhabitants of Utopia is "a reduction of Christianity to its simplest, most luminious truths"(18).

Yet in Renaissance humanism the seeds are sown for a new worldview, and therefore a new fundamental approach for theology. As Balthasar writes:

In place of the world-immanent Logos of the ancient world there slipped in unnoticed "natural"religion, ethics and philosophy, corresponding to the nature common to all races, peoples and ages; one part of revelation was regarded as belonging to this natural religion. . . , while the other part was regarded as belonging to the "positive"religions (Christian and others), so that these positive religions were more and more insistently called upon to justify themselves before the judgement-seat of the religion of mankind (20).

In other words, in a world disenchanted by human reason, it is the human being rather than the cosmos who becomes the backdrop against which revelation takes place. Thus, as Balthasar writes, "the attempt was made to transfer the locus of verification from a cosmos becoming more and more godless (and so having less and less in common with Christianity) to man as the epitome of the world"(25). Such a shift is implicit in the sixteenth century -e. g. in Luther's question "how can I find a gracious God?"-but comes fully into view with the post-Kantian theology of Schleiermacher. Balthasar notes that in Schleiermacher's theology Christology is subsumed under the consciousness of salvation as its precondition, so that "[o]nly in relation to the pious consciousness are dogmatic propositions in general to be called scientific"(31). Theological propositions no longer find their intelligibility in the context of the cosmos, but become descriptions of human self-consciousness. Consequently their "reality"becomes questionable: is the source of the feeling of absolute dependence -the absolute subjectivity which stands in tension with our finite subjectivity -simply, à la Fichte, the formal and transcendental structure of the human person? Is it not the case, as Feuerbach argued, that talk about God is a fundamentally alienated and deceptive mode of speaking about human beings? What compelling reason can one give to move beyond the anthropological referent to some purported divine referent? Thus, even apart from any postmodern critique of the notion "man"as, in Foucault's famous words, "an invention of recent date"that is perhaps destined to "be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea,"there are strong theological grounds for being wary of the attempt to ground theology in anthropology.

After the desacralization of the cosmos coincident with the modern turn to the subject, and after the modern subject's theological collapse upon itself, what is left? It is at this point that Balthasar puts forward what he calls "the third way of love,"which can be approached from two different paths. The first is the path of "personalism"-the confrontation of the "I"with the irreducible otherness of a "thou"(38) -and the second is the path of aesthetics -the confrontation of the perceiver with the "inner, unfathomable necessity"of the beautiful object (44). Both of these modes of encounter indicate a kind of thinking, a logos, which neither simply reads truth off of the surface of the cosmos, nor discovers it in the depths of the self, but which dwells in a space of interlocution between self and other. Still, these modes of encounter are insufficient in themselves, for they "can at most provide us with a pointer, a signpost suggesting the direction in which to look for the specifically Christian"(45). And that toward which they point us is the Word that God speaks to humanity, "the Son interpreting the Father through the Holy Spirit as divine love"(47).

Thus the third alternative that Balthasar presents us with is a theological aesthetics in which the sublime unrepresentability of God is taken up with full seriousness. Though ancient and medieval writers are mined for insights that have been lost in modernity, no appeal is made to the premodern sacred cosmos that transparently radiates divine wisdom. Balthasar accepts, at least on a certain level, the brute opacity of modernity's mechanized and quantified universe, in which "all the evidence. . . seems to point to a world devoid of love"(115). Balthasar seeks not a path backward, prior to suspicion, but a path forward, beyond suspicion, to a kind of Kierkegaardian "immediacy after reflection."It is simply facile to consign him, as David Tracy does, to the dustbin of "antimodernity."The modern destruction of the ancient sacred cosmos is a fait accompli of intellectual history, and one that should be accepted on Christian grounds as giving a clarity previously lacking to the distinction between creator and creation.

It is true, however, that the path forward that he seeks is not one that accepts as enduring achievements the speculative and emancipatory master narratives of modernity, for to proceed with these as baggage is to continue the self-defeating project of modern theology. One might say that just as modern aesthetics sought to register the sublime by stripping away superfluous ornamentation in the pursuit of pure functionality, so too the modern theological project has been to seek the "essence"of "religion"by clearing the ground of dogmatic, ritual, and narrative accretions. And when this essence is found, it is found as a certain kind of experience, just as for Kant the sublime is registered as a certain expansion of the soul. Once this essential experience is distilled, it may be left bare or the "ornaments"of doctrine, ritual and narrative may be brought back in, but the basic impulse with which one starts is still the same as in modern aesthetics: a reduction to that which is essential. And granted that basic impulse, it is difficult not to treat doctrine, ritual, and narrative as "mere"ornamentation. This can be seen in the theology of Karl Rahner. He clearly stresses the importance of categorical experience of God associated with doctrines, rituals and narratives as "the necessary but historical and objectifying self-interpretation of the transcendental experience which constitutes the realization of man's essence."However, when it comes to the "reductio in mysterium"of the Christian life, he writes that while "a Christian does indeed live a tangible and ecclesial life, . . . the ultimately Christian thing about this life is identical with the mystery of human existence. . . . And to this extent to be a Christian is simply to be a human being, and one who also knows that this life which he is living, and which he is consciously living, can also be lived even by a person who is not a Christian explicitly and does not know in a reflexive way that he is a Christian."It is difficult to see how one could avoid a certain ironic stance toward the contingent particularities of Christian story and practice once one has glimpsed the truth that the Christian life is ultimately the same thing as authentic human existence. At best, one could maintain a merely sentimental attachment to those particularities.

Balthasar's theological aesthetic is fundamentally different, for he seeks the unrepresentable mystery of God not through abstraction from particular, categorically apprehended forms, but precisely in those forms, viewed in light of the glory revealed in the Christ-form. He writes, "The distinctive Christian factor is that here we not only 'start from' the corporeal and the sensory as from some religious material on which we can then perform the necessary abstractions; rather, we abide in the seeing, hearing, touching, the savouring and eating of this flesh and blood, which has borne and taken away the sins of the world."One does not move beyond the particularities of the presentation to their essence. In this sense, a true theological aesthetic, like Lyotard's postmodern aesthetic, "puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself"because it proclaims Christ as the filial image of the paternal archè -an image that is "equal"to that which it images. As Balthasar writes, "the form of revelation does not present itself as an independent image of God, standing over against what is imaged, but as a unique hypostatic union between archetype and image"(432). The sublime archetype is in the form; one might say that the form is the "real presence"of the archetype.

Further, one might say that for Balthasar, as for Lyotard, the sublime is put forward through the shattering of aesthetic form: "it is only through being fragmented that the beautiful really reveals the meaning of the eschatological promise it contains"(460). But before we effect a rapprochment between Balthasar and Lyotard, it is important to mark a crucial difference, one that in fact makes any reconciliation between the two impossible. As I said earlier, Lyotard's aesthetic remains one that is bound to an emancipatory narrative and therefore, I would argue, fundamentally a modern one. The sublime that is presented in presentation itself is in fact the rapturous tremors of the strong poet's will to power as it shatters and reassembles previous forms. For Balthasar, on the other hand, it is one particular fragmented form that reveals the eschatological promise of the beautiful: what he calls the Christ-form. One might put this in Lyotard's terms by saying that for Balthasar there is in fact a master narrative which speaks the truth of the world. This is a fragmented, crucified narrative, but it is still one narrative, which presents the glory of the triune God's differentiated unity.

Balthasar notes that "Christ's mediating form is multiple. . . in its very exercise, and yet this multiplicity can ever give expression only to the one form"(529). In explaining this multiplicity Balthasar appeals to the ancient notion of the corpus triforme, or the three-fold body of Christ: his "natural"body that was born of the Virgin Mary and ascended into heaven, his ecclesial body, and his eucharistic body (in which Balthasar also includes Christ's scriptural "body"). In what follows I will not follow Balthasar's specific discussion of the three-fold body of Christ. Rather, I will take it as a pattern that can help us understand Jesus Christ as the sacrament of God, the Church as the sacrament of Christ, and the eucharist as the sacrament that, in Henri de Lubac's phrase, "makes the Church."In presenting this threefold body I will attempt to sound themes that I have alluded to earlier, which are sometimes thought of as distinctively "postmodern"-negation, bricolage, and alterity. The theological reading of these themes, however, can perhaps move us beyond suspicion toward a theological realism.

3. The Threefold Corpus Christi

a) Negation: The Body of Jesus

The primary referent of the phrase Corpus Christi is the human flesh of Jesus, his natural body, and by extension his human nature as a whole. This human nature is the "primordial sacrament"because it is the sign and instrumental cause of human salvation. One might note that Aquinas says that it is the "flesh [caro]"of Christ "and the mysteries accomplished therein [et mysteria in ea perpetrata]"that is both instrumental and exemplary cause of grace (ST III. 62.5. ad 1). In what Jesus does and suffers in his human history -the intention-laden events of his flesh -we are presented with nothing less than the life of God, and through the instrumentality of the action and passion of that history, divine life is communicated to us.

This notion of Christ as the sacrament of God is the foundation of any Christian theological aesthetic that seeks to move beyond the modern aporia of the sublime. Jesus is the "effective"or "causal"sign of the saving presence of God. His death and resurrection are the "sign of Jonah,"the only sign that is given (Mt 12:38-40), and they present us with the reality of God as triune love, and not simply a representation of that reality. This is not to collapse the distinction between visible sign and fundamentally invisible referent, for to do so would be to obliterate the gracious distance between God and creation (thus the distinction between the immanent and economic Trinity remains a relevant one). But it is to claim that the sign (the human nature of Christ) is "assumed"by the reality (the Word of God) into a personal union in which there is, in the words of Chalcedon, difference without division or separation. This distinction or "distance"between sign and referent is not a division only if it is, to borrow a phrase from Jean-Luc Marion, "saturated"by the referent, and this is what the Christian tradition has meant by "hypostatic union."

As befits a visible presentation of that which is fundamentally beyond presentation, Christ is a sign of contradiction (Lk 2:34) -the form (µ?? f?) of God become the form of a slave (Phil 2). Jesus is a sign sous rature; his whole life is one of negation of himself so as to be a sign that is transparent to the will of the Father (Jn 4:34; 14:7). Thus it is the cross and resurrection that have been the focal points for understanding the saving work of Jesus. It is in the fragmentation of his crucified body, and the unrecognizableness, apart from his self-revelation, of his resurrected body, that, from a human point of view, Jesus' human nature attains its perfection as the sacrament of the God who is beyond human representation. The Cross, the Tomb, the way to Emmaus: all places of negation, of vanishing. At the same time, the transparency of the sign does not make it, in all of its contngent particularities, nugatory. For it is this particular negation (cross and resurrection) or this particular sign (Jesus of Nazareth) that moves us beyond mere negation of meaning to an excess of meaning.

Of course how we read this sign depends on the larger narrative in which we locate it. When placed within a master narrative of emancipation, even the shattering of the Christ-form could appear -as it did for Nietzsche -as a manifestation of the will to power. But when we start from the narrative of the Cross -the narrative of power as the kenotic donation of being on those things that are not (Rom 4:17) -and we let this narrative shape our perception of the sign, then its negation is not will to power but love unto death. Balthasar writes:

God's incomprehensibility is now no longer a mere deficiency in knowledge, but the positive manner in which God determines the knowledge of faith: this is the overwhelming inconceivability of the fact that God has loved us so much that he surrendered his only Son for us, the fact that the God of plenitude has poured himself out, not only into creation, but emptied himself into the modalities of an existence determined by sin, corrupted by death and alienated from God. This is the concealment that appears in his self-revelation; this is the ungraspability of God, which becomes graspable because it is grasped.

The sublime is not the will to power, but the outpouring in love of God's plenitude, even to the ultimate point of human sin and alienation.

One might, of course, posit a different "postmodern"reading of Christ, one that takes its clue from the proclaimed end of metanarratives. In this reading the "decentering"of postmodernity makes the Christocentric account of God that I have sketched highly problematic. Jesus can be at best one of the plurality of manifestations of the divine; his self-negation includes his negation as a sign. As Paul Lakeland puts it, "the particularity lies in the messenger, not the message."From this perspective, claiming the identity of message and messenger, the hypostatic union of referent and sign, makes the human history of Jesus into a master narrative. Yet the similarity of this putatively postmodern Christology to the liberal theology of Harnack and others -the Gospel of Jesus, not the Gospel about Jesus -might lead us to ask whether such an approach really take us beyond the master narratives of modernity. In particular, it retains the modern suspicion of representation, the sense that there is some obscured message lurking behind its various messengers, and that there is some standpoint from which we can discern the fact of such a message, if not its content.

But the event of the Cross presents us with path beyond suspicion. It is not the path of the strong poet's Nietzschean confidence in his ability to master any and all master narratives through irony. Rather it is the hope that is given paradoxical voice in Christ's cry of dereliction, the hope given birth to by the Cross seen as a Trinitarian event in which God's very being is extended to encompass even the ultimate alienation of hell and damnation, the hope beyond death that is awakened by Christ as he breaks bread with the disciples at Emmaus. We are no longer citizens of the ancient cosmos imbued with the divine; our experience of the world is an experience of godlessness. But in the cross we are presented with a God who is present even in godlessness, and in the resurrection we are promised that godlessness shall not have the last word.

This provides a ground of critique by which we might distinguish false representations of God from true or, perhaps more precisely, by which we might distinguish "idols"

(our representations of the divine) from "icons"(God's self-presentation in revelation). The "cruciform"life of Jesus -and his life is cruciform in that it is lived in its entirety "toward"the cross -serves as the norm of holiness, and all other claims to righteousness must fall under its critique. The cross and resurrection, in their very negativity and obscurity, become the icon by which God presents to us God's own unpresentable Trinitarian life, and we are called not to irony, but to adoration and participation.

b) Bricolage: The Ecclesial Body

Yet we must take a further step. For the presentation of God in the fragmented sign of Jesus on the Cross and in the Resurrection -the shattering of the Christ-form by which it "reveals the meaning of the eschatological promise it contains"-is an event that cannot be confined to a single moment in time, but is eucharistically extended through history in the Church. In John's Gospel Christ's side is pierced to bring forth sacramental water and blood (Jn 19:34), a healing river flowing from the Lamb who reigns from the throne of the cross down through the middle of God's new city (Rev 22:1-2). Just as the postmodern sublime is figured through both the fragmentation of form and the regathering of that form through pastiche or bricolage, so too the Christian sublime involves both the shattering of the Christ-form upon the Cross, and a regathering of that form through the Resurrection, a regathering that has as an intrinsic element the regathering of the scattered disciples into an ekklesia, which is fused by Pentecostal fire to become part of the form. Balthasar writes, "the Christ-form attains to its plastic fullness only through the dimension of the Holy Spirit -and this means also through the Church."Or, as Gregory of Nyssa put even more boldly, "he who sees the Church looks directly at Christ -Christ building and increasing by the addition of the elect."

Said differently, the Church is "the universal sacrament of salvation."Though this notion of the Church as a sacrament has patristic roots, it owes its modern articulation not least to Henri de Lubac, who wrote in his 1938 book Catholicism: "If Christ is the sacrament of God, the Church is for us the sacrament of Christ; she represents him, in the full and ancient meaning of the term; she really makes him present."The Church is the sacrament of Christ, according to the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, in that it is "a sign and instrument"of salvation understood as both "union with God and. . .the unity of the whole human race."Otto Semmelroth notes that "a sacrament is something eschatological in the sense that the 'eschaton,' the heavenly salvation we are yet to reach, has already invaded this world in the sacramental sign."It is an effective sign -not simply representing salvation but effecting it, bringing it about. Again, the gap between sign and referent is saturated through the self-giving of the referent. Not, in this case, a hypostatic or personal union of two natures, but a union in love between head and members to form one communion in love. This union that fills the gap that might call into question the veracity of the sign, so that, as John Zizioulas puts it, "Christ Himself becomes revealed as truth not in a community, but as a community."It is the quality of life of those who are in Christ that manifests -or fails to manifest -the truth of Christ.

We might also put this in terms of the totus Christus of which Augustine wrote in his Homilies on 1 John. Because of the union of love between Christ and the Church, to speak of the whole Christ is to speak of both head and body. Reflecting on the statements in 1 John that "God is love"(1 Jn 4:8) and that "no one has even seen God"(1 Jn

4:12), Augustine notes that the fundamentally invisible reality of God manifests itself not simply in Christ, the Word made flesh, laying down his life for us, but also through the manifold concrete acts of caritas enacted within the Body of Christ -gifts of alms and instruction, acts of adoration and attentiveness. And acts of charity are not simply a way of showing forth the reality of God, but they are themselves acts of seeing God: "Love your brother; in loving your brother whom you see, you will see God at the same time. For you will see charity itself, and there within is God dwelling."

In the Church that is one yet spread over all the earth, the invisible God becomes visible in a multitude of acts of charity, not as some original that is imitated -even for those who do them there is no way of seeing the original apart from these acts -but as the sublime that is presented in that multitude. To live in ecclesial charity is, as Lewis Ayres' puts it, to "see"the Trinity; moreover, it is to become a mirror of the self-transcending caritas of Father, Son and Spirit. And this charity remains "christomorphic,"judged and determined by Christ as the primal sacrament of God (and here one might speak properly of imitation). Thus preeminent among those actions that manifest the invisible reality of God are acts of forgiveness, particularly forgiveness extended to our enemies, by which we see tham as the brothers and sisters for whom Christ died. This, for Augustine, is perfect love, for it enacts and manifests the charity shown by Christ on the Cross.

Again, if one takes the end of master narratives as the key feature of postmodernity, then one might argue for a different account of the Church. The myth of the totus Christus is simply one more example of a totalizing master narrative that, of its very nature, eradicates difference. It makes the Church, if not the sole locus of salvation, at least the point out of which salvation flows into the world. And if one accepts a "polycentric"view of the world, then this is clearly unacceptable. A more truly postmodern role for the Church, on this reading, would be as the servant of the world. Rather than imposing its story on the world -or even proclaiming it to the world as the world's true story -the servant Church places itself at the world's disposal. Not, of course, uncritically. The Church must retain its prophetic role, but that prophetic role cannot be the preaching of Christ crucified or any other such particularistic story. For the story by which the Church lives is, at its very core, a partial one, and thus not in itself the source of the Church's critical judgements with regard to the world. What then can be the source of those judgements? It seems it would have to be some constellation of "thin"human values, such as autonomy and self-determination. Again, as Paul Lakeland puts it, "Prophecy today. . . is not a matter of presenting a substantive message to an uncomprehending multitude, but rather of demanding -through acting out -an uncompromising openness to the future revealed through unconstrained discourse."And thus it seems that we have returned to the emancipatory master narrative of modernity.

In what I am proposing, in contrast, the Christian community is called to be "light to the world,"to speak and enact the story of Christ so as to give back to the world the story it has lost through sin. One might go so far to say that because of the unity of the totus Christus the Church simply is that (eucharistically) enacted story. And this story is at the same time complete, because perfectly enacted in the life of Christ, and yet to be fulfilled, as the sinful and repentant Church of tears journeys toward its eschatological wedding with the Lamb. It is thus in one sense a "master narrative,"yet it is one which is pneumatologically constituted (or "edified") by the sheer variety of the gifts of the Spirit (1 Corinthians 12) and which is fragmented into a multitude of eucharistic enactments -the Church in its fullness being present in each eucharistic community. Similarly, the closure of the narrative awaits its eschatological consummation; final knowledge of who has in fact enacted that story and who will constitute the multitude gathered around the throne of the Lamb is deferred (Mt 25:31-46; Rev 7:9-17). It is for this reason that Henri de Lubac says of the Church that it is "one living being"that is "vivified by the one Spirit,"yet "its scope remains God's secret."

Thus rather than having recourse to facile (and fundamentally deceptive) claims about the "end of master narratives,"we may look to the narrative of the totus Christus, the narrative of the particular historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth raised in power to God's right hand, and of the body that claims that same Jesus as its head, the body animated by the Spirit with the diversity of gifts. This is the Spirit who, as Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, "delights in multitude,"yet who is always the Spirit of Christ, and thus conforms that multitude to him. Hopkins writes:

as the breath is drawn from the boundless air into the lungs and from the lungs again is breathed out and melts into the boundless air so the Spirit of God was poured out from the infinite God upon Christ's human nature and by Christ, who said: Receive the Holy Ghost: as my Father sent me so I send you, was breathed into his Apostles and by degrees into the millions of his Church, till the new heavens and new earth will at last be filled with it.

The Spirit is the ecclesial bricoleur, that blows where it will, along whose errant path the ekklesia is gathered from the world into Christ's body, only to be impelled forth again by that same Spirit, to dwell in peace among the nations.

c) Alterity: The Eucharistic Body

We must take one final step. If Jesus is the sacrament of God, and the Church is the sacrament of Christ, then the eucharist is the sacrament of the Church, since it is the "sign and cause"by which the Church is constituted in union with Christ its head. Again to quote Henri de Lubac, "the Eucharist makes the Church."A certain "eucharistic realism"is a corollary of an "ecclesial realism"that sees the Church as the corpus verum, the true Body of Christ.

The Eucharist is thus not simply a reproduction, whether psychological or metaphysical, of a past reality, but it is a genuine production -an "edification"or building up -of the present and future reality of the Church. Here again we have a complex play of depth and surface or, in scholastic language, of res and sacramentum. The reality (res) which is to be signified is the unity in love of the totus Christus -the unity of the members among themselves and with Christ as their head. But this reality is not, as it were, self-subsisting, but is produced through the instrumentality of the sign (sacramentum) of bread and wine, through which the power of Christ's eucharistic body, which is both reality and sign (res et sacramentum), is exercised. This odd category of that which is both reality-and-sign seeks to articulate the coinhabitation of depth and surface: it is through the Church's visible ritual action with bread and wine that the Church herself is produced as Body of Christ; the agent is produced as it "exteriorizes"itself in action. But this is only the case because something quite other than either simply sign or reality intervenes -the reality-and-sign of the eucharistic Christ. Only if Christ is present in the eucharist as res et sacramentum can the skeptical gap between reality and signs be bridged. Again, the gap between sign and referent is "saturated"by that which is both sign and referent.

A similar point has been argued by Jean-Luc Marion in his defense of the traditional doctrine of transubstantiation in the face of various attempts to reformulate it in "nonmetaphysical"terms, such as transignification. His fear is that attempts to articulate the eucharistic event in terms of meaning will end up reducing the eucharistic presence to a matter of the consciousness of the celebrating community. Though he does not put it this way, one might say that he fears that transignification in the end capitulates to Feuerbach: the Eucharist is finally a matter of humanity's coming to consciousness of itself. In contrast, for Marion the doctrine of transubstantiation means is that "the consecrated host imposes, or rather permits,...the irreducible exteriority of the present that Christ makes of himself in this thing that to him becomes sacramental body."The irreducible exteriority of the doctrine of transubstantiation makes it possible to understand the eucharist according to a "christic temporality,"in which real presence is the present, understood not (metaphysically) as the stable given of the here-and-now, but as the gift of the present, as memorial (or, perhaps better, anamnesis) of the covenant pledged in the past and as stretching out toward the eschatological future.

Whether one agrees or not with Marion's argument that only the doctrine of transubstantiation secures the irreducible exteriority of the eucharistic Other, he makes a compelling case for the claim that only if the Other who is encountered in the eucharist is not determined by human consciousness, but rather determines human consciousness -saturates human consciousness -can the eucharist be anything other than idolatry and the eucharistic community anything other than one more human community. Of course, for those who would see postmodernity as the end of metanarrative, all that the Church should claim to be is, at best, one human response in faith to the experience of the divine or, at worst, a human mystification of the workings of power. Similarly, to claim that eucharistic worship is more than simply one human language game among others, to claim that it is in fact an act of divine speech, through the priest acting in persona Christi, that brings about a "substantial"change, seems thoroughly "metaphysical."But if Marion is correct, only a divine discourse that breaks into and breaks apart human speech can in fact rupture the totalizing discourse of metaphysics; it is only such a claim that can in fact confront us with a God who is truly other, without delivering that Other to us as an effect of our consciousness.

Thus, perhaps oddly, eucharistic discourse as master narrative does not obliterate otherness but in fact instantiates it as "irreducible exteriority."It recalls to us that the Church is not simply the body of Christ, but also the Bride who receives as gift the body of her divine Spouse. Apart from "eucharistic realism,"an "ecclesial realism"can domesticate the relationship between Christ and the Church into a kind of auto-eroticism which makes the self-donation of one to the other impossible. The gap between Bride and Spouse must be saturated by the Spirit who only intensifies the Bride's longing for the return of her Bridegroom: "The Spirit and the bride say, 'Come.' And let everyone who hears say, 'Come.'"(Rev 22:17).

But the story does not end here. The union of Bride and Spouse is not simply an ecclesial romance, but the occasion for a banquet to which countless particular human "others"are invited. The mutual hospitality of Bride and Spouse toward each other opens out to become coextensive with hospitality toward all who hunger or thirst or are naked or imprisoned (Mt 25:34-40). Thus it is that the Bride's invitation to her Spouse overflows immediately into an invitation all: "And let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift"(Rev 22:17).

Conclusion

If the claim to be living at the end of modernity means that modern confidence in human reason's capacity to tell the world's true story has come to an end, and that we are thus at the end of all master narratives, all attempts to articulate the one true story of the world, or even the attempt to construe the world as having a single story, then theology must say "yes"and "no"at the same time. Inasmuch as modernity has been the attempt to ground human reason in itself and has sundered "necessary truth of reason"from "accidental truths of history,"theology may welcome claims to its demise as opening a path beyond suspicion. And such characteristically postmodern notions as fragmentation, bricolage, and alterity may prove tactically useful in preaching and understanding the Gospel. But theology cannot tie its fate to postmodernity, for modernity has also been an exercise in human self-assertion and in this sense much of so-called postmodernity is simply a nihilistic intensification of the modern project. The claim to be at the end of all master narratives may simply be a covert way of liberating the self from any claims upon it. Theology, however, is the language given to a community, the ekklesia which exists only insofar as it is called and claimed by God. It is this call and claim that beckons the Bride on her pilgrimage to the banquet of the Lamb, passing from premodernity through modernity to postmodernity. . . to whatever lies beyond.

Notes

My thanks to James Buckley, Bettina Bergo, and William Cavanaugh for their comments on this essay.