After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy

After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy. By Catherine Pickstock. Challenges in Contemporary Theology Series. Oxford, UK and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers,1998. xv + 292 pp. $68.95 (cloth); $31.95 (paper). Catherine Pickstock puts forth one of the most daring theses asserted by a theologian in the modern era. She asserts her central thesis in the preface to After Writing--the event of transubstantiation in the Eucharist is the condition of possibility for all human meaning" (p. xv). The thesis is daring because of the adjectival force of the "all," It will immediately be met with resistance and outright disbelief. In an age of diversity, religious pluralism and the celebration of difference, how can a specifically Christian event be the privileged transcendental source "for all human meaning"? Is this a new form of Christian imperialism? Readers fed a steady diet of contemporary theology may not have the stomach to venture beyond this asserted conclusion to get caught up in the compelling argument she presents. But if readers can venture beyond their all-too-modern theological resistances, they will discover that a true difference emerges. Once this true difference comes to light, then the "choreographed" diversity of the modern era is revealed for what it is-an immanentist city fabricated by sophists, cyberphiles and technicians who reduce the world to predictability in terms of market values. Her argument begins with a depiction of the "immanentist city." This is the modern unliturgical world that eschews any uncontained doxological presence by privileging writing. Yet to show us that only a doxological presence can provide the possibility for human meaning, Pickstock does not offer an alternative positivist rendering of the Eucharist. Instead, she marshals a defense of Plato against Derrida's charge that his critique of writing in the Phaedrus advocates a pernicious metaphysics of presence. Derrida all too easily finds this metaphysics of presence in every corner of western philosophy. But Pickstock suggests that Plato's critique of writing cannot be caught by Derrida's deferring grasp. Instead, Plato preserves a "doxological distance" between a subject and object such that the latter cannot be rendered immanent on a scale of "infinite variations of an equivalent measure" (p. 7), which falsely goes under the name of difference. Infinite deferral is meaninglessness, is death. Part one of After Writing, "The Polity of Death," argues that the unliturgical life of the immanentist city defines both a modern and postmodern politics where "fact" or "contract" (writing) secures the body politic. Part one points in the direction of part two, "The Sacred Polis." This liturgical body politic never considers that the logos can be secured through writing. This politics is not developed as a straightforward contrast to the "Polity of Death." Instead, between the necrophilic body politic and the liturgical body politic comes an intriguing section, "Transitions." This section prevents any easy distinction between the two politics, for the polity of death was not an explicit renunciation of liturgical life in the sacred polis. The unliturgical life emerged from a thirteenth century transition in the relationship between theology and philosophy. Pickstock traces the transition from a liturgical life to an unliturgical life to the late Middle Ages. Duns Scotus is the villain in the story, whose doctrine of the univocity of being, the formal distinction of essence and existence, and his intellectualizing of the real (privileging essence over existence), produced a non-doxological distance between subjects and objects based on a pure formality. …