Prayer and Sacrament: A Role in Foundational Theology

PRAYER AND SACRAMENT: A ROLE IN FOUNDATIONAL THEOLOGY PARTIALLY FOR methodological reasons which I hope will become evident in the course of this essay and partially because autobiographical issues may provide context for the conceptual positions which follow, I should like to describe two formative personal influences upon the theological issues addressed in this paper. They concern cultural unity and criticism: the experience of monasticism and the process of doctoral dissertations. The narrowness of the loci may also excuse some of the occasional naivete in the succeeding remarks made about theological method. My undergraduate career was taken as part of a monastic environment. I am not and was not a monk, but a diocesan seminarian. Monks taught me, heard my confessions, commiserated in my failures and rejoiced in my successes. Friends entered the monastic community to which we were so proximate , and friends left that same community for occasionally mysterious reasons. Monastic spirituality and quotidian existence permeated the walk-ways, the folk-art of the surroundings, and the experience of the classroom. Over the years, as I have reflected upon that time, I find that my personal integration into that environment produced a certain vision: a unity of life in which upon occasion prayer, thought, and action (both internal catechesis and external evangelization) achieved integration . Not that there were not mistakes or disasters (or that there still are not), but that the ambiance engendered a vision of the whole. Indeed, I suspect that is precisely what cenobitic communities were meant to accomplish during their earliest days~to provide a vision of a societal whole in which praxis informed thought, and thought grew from religious and secu243 244 STEPHEN HAPPEL Iar praxis. Religion (whether thought or action) was not divorced from experience, but informed the whole. It may not be an experience which the urban world of ' modernity' recognizes , indeed that world may think it slightly retrograde; but it was nonetheless a unified experience. In its best moments it occasioned a personal epiphany of how culture and religion interact to form a meaningful whole. In time, I spent a number of years working on a dissertation which outlines the theological development of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge never lost the belief that a cultural unity could become available in the post-Enlightenment and postrevolutionary period. A product of both the 18th century German and British Enlightenment and of the French revolution , Coleridge spent an entire life trying to organize his insights into epistemology, aesthetics, metaphysics, ethics, religion , and theology. He was deeply aware that religion operates within a culture, and that it could not be a purely private affair. Indeed, his final published work, On the Constitution of the Church and St.ate according to the Idea of Each (1880) synthesized just this public level of religion and culture. From a period in 1795 when he lectured on religion as a critic of political life until his final days, Coleridge was not interested in resurrecting Christendom, but in recognizing that the formation of the new society should require religion to play an integral role. Although Coleridge himself occupied only a fragmented present instead of his envisioned whole (yet achieving far more than he permitted his auditors to see) , he offered at least this reader a reaffirmation of the vision of cultural unity in which emotion and thought, prayer and action, religious symbols and criticism could remain public and significant for the cultural whole. Religious groups would become a social minority, but they could contribute an important element in the formation or transformation of culture. The problems Coleridge articulated perdure. We still wish a community of critical believers, those who can accept the PRAYER AND SACRAMENT: FOUNDATIONAL THEOLOGY ~45 religious symbols of a particular tradition and yet can thoughtfully reformulate that tradition in such a way that the symbols are not volatilized. The symbols must have an authority which is not simply human agreement, and yet are available to human criticism. So the Words of the Scriptures must be at once the Word of God addressing society, and yet the product of social forces; the personal presence of the authoritative divine Speaker and yet a text to be read like any other. Sacrament...