Abstract
Dillard applies Gelassenheit theology to specific antinomies in traditional Catholic thinking about the Eucharist and recent Catholic thinking about religious vocations. The paradoxical understanding of transubstantiation as grounded in autonomous substances both available and not available to our senses is eschewed in favor of a non-paradoxical understanding of the Eucharistic as a transition from the ordinary “thickness” of things made phenomenally salient through our mindful practices in daily life to a new sacred “density” communicated through participation in religious ritual. Additionally, an existential confusion that Sandra M. Schneiders ascribes to human beings threatens to undermine her initially attractive account of celibate religious life. Dillard disarms this threat by construing members of religious communities as “future ones” intimating the possibility of humans fully and non-confusedly sharing in the plurality of a divinity that is no multiplicity.
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Notes
- 1.
Alice Walker, “Everyday Use,” in The Signet Classic Book of Southern Short Stories, eds. Dorothy Abbott and Susan Koppelman (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 526.
- 2.
Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Alastair Hannay (New York: Liveright, 2014), 35.
- 3.
Ibid., 19.
- 4.
Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 152.
- 5.
For Heidegger’s description of the Aristotelian notion of substance, see, for example, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 186–188.
- 6.
Ibid., 15.
- 7.
Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 152.
- 8.
Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 174.
- 9.
To the extent that this phenomenology retains the notion of substance, is it still metaphysics? If so, then in line with the methodology of soft pragmatism it is a case where a metaphysical conception (“substance”) that fuels a skeptical challenge is reinterpreted in such a way as to disarm it.
- 10.
The focus text for the ensuing discussion is Sandra M. Schneiders, Buying the Field: Catholic Religious Life in Mission to the World (New York: Paulist Press, 2013). It is the third and final volume in Schneiders’ monumental Religious Life in the New Millennium series. The companion volumes in the series are Finding the Treasure: Locating Catholic Religious Life in a New Ecclesial and Cultural Context (New York: Paulist Press, 2000) and Selling All: Commitment, Consecrated Celibacy, and Community in Catholic Religious Life (New York: Paulist Press, 2001).
- 11.
See ibid., 23–49.
- 12.
When she speaks of “religious life,” Schneiders is thinking primarily of apostolic religious orders like the Sisters and Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM) or the Franciscans, whose members engage in “missions” or various forms of face-to-face ministry to non-members, rather than of enclosed religious orders like Carmelite nuns or Carthusian monks, whose members are sequestered from non-members and direct involvement in the affairs of the world. Later in the chapter, an insight from a member of an enclosed order will help to focus Schneiders’s vision of consecrated religious life in general.
- 13.
Ibid., 49.
- 14.
As such, consecrated religious life is decidedly different from other ways Christians participate in Jesus’s alternative reality construction without being superior to them: “But it [consecrated religious life] is also distinctive in relation to the ways other Christians, for example, married people, single people, or clerics organize their Christian lives to foster the Reign of God” (ibid., 229).
- 15.
Ibid., 130.
- 16.
Ibid., 312.
- 17.
Ibid., 304.
- 18.
See ibid., 309.
- 19.
In addition, world images are not static mental pictures but existentially powerful visions that constantly develop over time, call for ongoing interpretation and reinterpretation of the roles they assign and the tasks they demand, and are packed with affectivity that makes a real difference in how those who commit to them lead our their lives. See ibid., 37–43 for Schneiders’s full characterization.
- 20.
See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York, 1996) for the following passages indicating, respectively, that thrown Da-sein can never fully comprehend or fully control itself: “In being in a mood, Da-sein is always already disclosed in accordance with its mood as that being to which Da-sein was delivered over in its being the being which it, existing, has to be. Disclosed does not, as such, mean to be known” (127); “Existing, it [Da-sein] never gets back behind its thrownness so that it could release this ‘that-it-is-and-has-to-be’ from its being a self and lead it into the there” (262).
- 21.
See Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 188: “The leap (the thrown projection) is the carrying out of the projection of the truth of beyng, in the sense of an entering into the open realm such that the projector of the projection experiences himself as thrown, i.e., as appropriated by beyng.”
- 22.
Schneiders, Buying the Field, 41.
- 23.
Although the future ones are mentioned at various points throughout the text, they receive the most discussion in Part IV; see Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 311–318.
- 24.
See Daniela Vallega-Neu, Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy: an Introduction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 100–101 for a clear overview of these various stages.
- 25.
Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 314.
- 26.
Schneiders, Buying the Field, 346.
- 27.
Ibid., 347.
- 28.
Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 317.
- 29.
Schneiders, Buying the Field, 463.
- 30.
Ibid., 433–434. See also 446: “The community of interdependent equal persons is the human image of the triune God who is a community of equal persons sharing unity of life and love.”
- 31.
This communal focus is apparent from other terms Schneiders deploys in describing religious sisters and brothers: “In their love of Jesus and participation in his mission, the deepest desires of their heart will be satisfied” (ibid., 324). Notice that instead of many hearts, only one heart is mentioned here.
- 32.
Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, (6).
- 33.
Ibid., 192.
- 34.
Why only three? Why not two, or four, or indefinitely many “gods” within “the divinization of the god”? Gelassenheit theology takes Heidegger’s later philosophy as the model for thinking non-metaphysically about divinity. It is the best that “reason” freed of problematic metaphysics can do in this domain. Since Heidegger’s thinking does not even try to assign a definite cardinality to holy plurality, it is reasonable to suppose that any such task is foreign to non-metaphysical thinking as such. Instead, guided by the holy in their reading of scripture, engagement with tradition, and participation in prayer, Christians who accept a Gelassenheit theology acquiesce in the energized tranquility of proclaiming the cardinality of holy plurality as three.
- 35.
Hugh of Balma, The Roads to Zion Mourn, trans. Dennis D. Martin (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), 123, emphasis added. Commas have also been inserted to clarify the sense of the passage.
- 36.
Even if human confusion exculpates human choices made in the grip of it, any human confusion whatsoever is incompatible with divine lucidity. Hence, for human deification to occur, all human confusion must be removed: not the possibility that humans can become God, since this is no confusion at all, but the misconception that humans can seize this possibility for themselves through systems of total control, which is.
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Dillard, P.S. (2016). The Thickness of Things and the Godding of Gods: Eucharist, Discipleship, and Trinity. In: Non-Metaphysical Theology After Heidegger. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58480-9_10
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