Sacramental Realism: An Exchange A Review

SACRAMENTAL REALISM: AN EXCHANGE* A REVIEW HE BOOK UNDER REVIEW, Colman O'Neill's secnd major work in sacramental theology, has been writen under a double handicap. In the first place, it is a number of a series intended for the general reader, and the format imposed by tha.t intention is simply incompatible with the author's declared ambition of providing a theory which may serv·e as the structuring or systematic principle of a general theology of the sacraments and so of theology across the board. Such a project is highly specialized, requiring a lengthy historical introduction and an extended synthetic development , responsive by anticipation to a criticism incapable of reduction to such conventional indictments as juridicalism and impersonalism. That O'Neill accepted these limitations and strove to work within them is understandable; few publishers would consider publishing a "theological book" today which was not thus circumscribed, and it may be thought better to publish something than nothing at all, the evident alternative . Nonetheless the burden he has accepted is an impossible one. The second element of handicap under which the author labors is self-imposed, that of a traditional Thomist philosophical metaphysics, which vainly attempts to match the monadic cosmological logic of Aristotelian metaphysics to the trinitarian , historical and covenantal truth of a good creation, and thinks to find in the esse-essence distinction of St. Thomas the device by which this radical incoherence may be overcome. *Colman O'Neill, O.P., Sacramental Realism: A General Theory of the Sacraments. Theology and Life Series 2. 'Vilmington, Del., Michael Glazier, Inc., 1983. 224 pp. 279 QSO DONALD J. KEEFE, S.J. For O'Neill, the ground for doing theology is provided by our creation in the divine image, which is of the Father, the One God alike of Judaism, Christianity and Islam who, it is supposed , may be known in principle apart from the Christ. This poses for O'Neill, although he does not recognize it, the impossible systematic problem of relating cosmos and covenantal history. It does no good to speak of the cosmic Christ until the primordial quality of that adjective is acknowledged, and with this, the fact of our creation in Christ, the Lord of history . This acknowledgement immediately rules the old metaphysics of the natural creation out of court, as Rousselot saw seventy years ago, and it is time that systematic theology took his insight to heart, for there is no other basis upon which a systematic theology may be founded. Short of this, the long futility of the dispute De auxiliis will continue to haunt any Thomist theologian, however much he devotes himself to more fashionable causes. O'Neill's abiding concern is the justification of the sacramental realism without which Catholic orthodoxy is undone, and he is alert to any dilution of this realism, whether by the reduction of Catholic sacramentaiism to subjectivity, or by its reduction to servility. On balance, it is to dangers of the latter that he is the more alert; taught by a. personalist Thomism, he is intent upon the autonomy of the worshiper, and under the tag of juridicalism poses to himself the perduring dilemma of Hegel: how to appropriate responsibly a salvation worked by another. His solution is supported by a weighty theological tradition: the union of Christ and the faithful is in that " one body " which assures both identity with the will of Christ and the personal autonomy of the individual. How this is done is not further set forth, although it is of course the heart of the systematic problem. O'Neill wishes to understand 'one body ' union of Christ and believers as meaning ' one person,' which is to urge a unity between Christ and Christian hardly supportive of the latter's autonomy. A closer attention to the covenantal interpretation of tha.t union, i.e., as of "one flesh" of Eph 5 rather than "one body" (for the " Body" which is SACRAMENTAL REALISM: AN EXCHANGE ~81 the bridal Church is so only in the " one flesh " of her union with her Head, the Christ-who is not a member of the "Body") would have provided the systematic base for developing the trinitarian structure...