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A Crisis of Particularity - Part 3

Posted Feb 11, 09:30 AM | 4 comments | by Editor | Link

By Nic Paton, taken from Sound and Silence:

continued from part two ...

In his book Spaces for the sacred, Phillip Sheldrake observes,

“The problem with the western culture of ‘modernity’ which has dominated our thinking for the last couple of hundred years, is that its impulse is to stress the universal rather than the particular or vernacular, the anonymous or disengaged rather than the personal.” [p 22]

Sheldrake looks to the medieval intellectual John Duns Scotus (1266–1308) for insight. Scotus was a member of the Franciscan order, so it was under the influence of St Francis’ creation-centric spirituality that he operated. This influence is key; for Francis’ vision of the sanctity of all creation was in many ways diametrically opposed to that of the mother church. And in his memory, Gerard Manley Hopkins fittingly observes, “this air I gather and release he lived on: these weeds and waters, these walls are what He haunted.” [“Duns Scotus’s Oxford”]

Sheldrake explains how Scotus rejected Thomas Aquinas’s neo-platonic distinction between a things essence and it’s existance. In Scotus’s view, a things essence and its existence were not separate. He coined the term “Haecceity” to describe how things have value as particular things, not merely as instances of an ideal form.

Haecceity (from the Latin haecceitas, which translates as “thisness”) is a term from medieval philosophy first coined by Duns Scotus which denotes the discrete qualities, properties or characteristics of a thing which make it a particular thing. Haecceity is a person or object’s “thisness”. [wikipedia]

Our crisis, I believe, is a crisis of thisness. We have lost our anchor to history and the now, the here, as the place where we can engage the sacred. Sheldrake shocks us out of our blithe contentedness with postmodern “space” – the disembodied and the generic over concrete “place”:

Ultimate truth must paradoxically be sought through contingent times and places. These have the capacity to speak sacramentally, beyond themselves, of God’s presence and promise. What we sometimes refer to as the ’scandal of particularity’, that God in Christ incarnated within what is bounded and limited, is a guarantee that every particular place is a point of access to the place of God. [Spaces for the sacred, p 66]

One way to remedy this state of affairs, then, is a re-engagement with Ritual and Liturgy. I am aware that my perspectives here are largely those of the protestant, for other forms of faith — the Catholic and Orthodox — might not have quite such an issue, rooted as they are in calendars, sacred places, and specific cultures. (Interestingly though, in a paradox of orthodoxy and orthopraxy, the word “Catholic” comes from the Greek ‘καθολικός’ / ‘katholikos’, meaning “in general”, implying the very universalism I am arguing against.)

As protestants are aware, Ritual has not been overtly fostered after the Reformation. Of course, being creatures of habit, we all create, engage, and reinforce them despite our theoretical statements to the contrary.

So to begin to imaginatively create a new approach to the sacred, to worship and to life, is one of the tasks before this emergent generation. There are many traditions from which we can learn, both from within and outside of what Christianity has to offer.

I believe the challenge for us is a challenge of Incarnation, in which we take seriously what God takes seriously — time, space, and matter.

It is a challenge of sacrelization, in which we boldly declare all of life to be sacred. But at the same time, that certain times, places, objects, and practices, can be imbued with this universal sanctity in a special way.

And it is a challenge of thisness: where the objective, the universal, the general, the ubiquitous, the ideal, the generic, the global, the virtual, and the standard, are brought into check by a re-engagement with particularity.

Phillips Sheldrake’s hope bears repeating: that “every particular place is a point of access to the place of God”.

This is part three of a three-part article:
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

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Nic Paton—Postmodern Liturgist, multi-instrumentalist, VJ, and scullery theologian—lives in Cape Town, South Africa, and contributes to Emerging Africa.

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