nlt@grad17.cs.duke.edu (N. L. Tinkham) (08/21/90)
Cindy Smith, in her article describing the history of Anglicanism, blames nominalism for contributing to the decline of sacramental spirituality, but I can't fill in the implied argument. Clearly, nominalism makes the formal definition of "transubstantiation" meaningless: if there is no "substance", then substance cannot be transformed. But one does not need to accept Aquinas' metaphysical assumptions in order to perceive Christ as present in the consecrated Elements. Why would a nominalist necessarily be less sacramental in his or her spirituality than a Platonist? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- "For Christ plays in ten thousand places, Nancy Tinkham Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his nlt@lear.cs.duke.edu To the Father through the features of men's faces." rutgers!mcnc!duke!nlt
cdalzell@kean.ucs.mun.ca (08/25/90)
In article <Aug.20.22.50.54.1990.6850@athos.rutgers.edu>, nlt@grad17.cs.duke.edu > Cindy Smith, in her article describing the history of Anglicanism, > blames nominalism for contributing to the decline of sacramental > spirituality, but I can't fill in the implied argument. > > Clearly, nominalism makes the formal definition of "transubstantiation" > meaningless: if there is no "substance", then substance cannot be transformed > But one does not need to accept Aquinas' metaphysical assumptions in order > to perceive Christ as present in the consecrated Elements. Why would a > nominalist necessarily be less sacramental in his or her spirituality than > a Platonist? > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a fascinating question since it raises the whole problem of the apparent change of consciousness that took place at the end of the medieval period. Platonism and nominalism are more than just theories that you might study in a course. They reflected the way people experienced the world. Platonism was believed, considered plausible for nearly two thousand years because people experienced their world symbolically. We retain traces of this in childhood. Remember when you thought of the lion as the king of beasts, so the animal you saw in the zoo and the idea of majesty were combined. The majestic is greater than the lion, but the lion is unthinkable without the majestic. I think that to the medieval mind, there was no such thing as the merely biological, or the merely physical as we understand them. Things were symbolic by nature, and the meaning of a thing was part of the cause of its existence. (e.g. the lion is the majestic in animal form). At the end of the Middle Ages this way of looking at things seems to have died out, and nominalism is an expression of that death. The meanings of things are not felt to inhere in the things but in the observer. A name is a human convention; it does not speak the truth about the thing named. Nominalism, as I understand it, denies that things have natures and that we can know what these natures are. A nominalist who believes in God will tend to believe that the appearences we observe are produced directly by God. This is getting weid. I think that nominalism is more of a mood than a coherent theory. Certainly it has always been difficult to say exactly what nominalists thought without sounding silly. But the mood was significant. In this mood, a gap opens up between the mind of man and the objects he observes. Meaning and truth exist in the mind, and nature just sits there, without intrinsic meaning of its own. So what about the sacraments. What happens to a nominalist in church? What happens to the Platonists (or Aristotelian). The latter will find the idea of sacred signs easy to grasp since they already believe in a world of signs, but to the nominalists, sacraments will begin to feel arbitrary. Of course God can insists that to be saved from the consequences of sin somebody has to pour water over your head and utter the magic words, but why do this? Why does He not save you "directly"? To the Platonist, the sacramental way would probably feel like the direct way, since everything in nature, human nature particularly, works through symbols, but to the nominalist, working through the physical feels like taking the long road. It is easier to believe in baptism if you feel that there is something even in ordinary water that connotes purification and new life. We are still living in the mental space constructed by the critique of the nominalists. So what happens to sacraments? Either they become irrelevant, a memorial to something that you can grasp more readily by reading a book, or they seem mechanical. This latter is the host as vitamin C attitude of some Catholics. So then the question remains of whether to believe in sacraments it is necessary to be a Thomist. Probably not. But I think that if you take sacraments seriously, you have to revise a lot of the assumptions of what it means to be human that have circulated about the Western world for the past few hundred years. The ghost in the machine has got to go. You can't reach the inner man without working through and with the body. Conversely, nature as machine must also be discarded. There must be something in water, bread, wine, marriage, that make them apt to be means of grace, that is, bearers of divine life and meaning. It won't work to believe that God has instituted 7 sacred signs in a world otherwise void of meaning. At least, it does not work for me. Well, that's enough from me. Perhaps somebody else out there has some ideas of what we should think of nature given a belief in sacraments. Catherine Dalzell. MUN on the Rock.