ABSTRACT
One of the implications of the last two chapters is that the theological or analogical account of the body safeguards bodies as such – stops them disappearing. It does this by safeguarding the significance of materiality; viewing the material as suspended within a divine economy of love. Other accounts – biological, physical and philosophical – itemise and reduce the body and materiality Not that the theological account is purely theological. This book is not an attempt to distil a purely theologically account of things from the pabulum of creation. The theological pertains to all things in an account of creation; it draws upon all discourses to substantiate its own corpus and to bespeak that which has been and is being revealed – as Aquinas informs us in the opening question of his Summa theologiae. In the last two chapters theology is also offering an anthropology and a metaphysics – albeit a Christian anthropology and a Christian metaphysics. As will become apparent in the chapters to follow, the theological is also implicated in a social and political account of being human. The claim I wish to pursue in these next chapters is that only a theological or analogical account of bodies safeguards the concreteness of community. To be bold: God founds society as those who are called to be in this time, with this particularity, for this purpose. Those called to be constitute the ecclesia. What we find, as increasingly secular parodies of ecclesial accounts of the social emerge (Cavanaugh: 1998), is not only the disappearance of community, but the establishment, in that disappearance, of virtual or imaginary communities. The telecities and
communities of cyberspace – explored more fully in Chapter 9 – are only a final outworking of a secular logic. The analogical account, on the other hand, specifies a certain being in communion (Zizoulas: 1985) – an ontology constituted in and by loving, erotic exchange. As the analogical account loses its credibility (and a geneaological account of this occurrence must form the basis of further study), as the construal of participation in a divine economy declines, so communities in which the desire for the good cultivates the virtues of theological citizenship, become libidinal communities – communities in which eros is read as a purely human drive. These communities foster ‘the personal aesthetic and the relationship to the body … linked to the culture of individualism and narcissism’ (Castells: 1996, 452) characterising contemporary Western, North American and Japanese society (Lasch: 1980).
