It is now fifty-five years since Fr Cornelius Ernst OP first introduced young English Dominicans to the Aristotelian-Thomistic teaching de Anima by an application of Wittgensteinian ‘philosophy as therapy’,Footnote 1 and there are few signs that the prejudices of the congenital Cartesianism against which he laboured are any less entrenched. Despite the truncation of his literary footprint by his early death in 1977, the prescience of Ernst's theological thought is evidenced by the acknowledged influence he has exerted over figures such as Herbert McCabe OP, Fergus Kerr OP, and Rowan Williams, and it is not difficult to isolate trends in twentieth century theology that would have been easily integrated into his quest for a linguistically reconstituted Thomism. It is clear, for example, that his portrayal of Christianity as a ‘language-event’ (Sprachereignis),Footnote 2 embedded in the Lebensform of the particular linguistic community that is the Church,Footnote 3 would find points of affinity with Lindbeck's influential theory of doctrine as grammar, the communally determined ‘rules’ governing the shared use of religious terms, rather than a mere accretion of cognitive propositions or experiential expressions.Footnote 4
Given the paucity of primary material, it is unsurprising that secondary literature exploring Ernst's legacy has been scarce: essays by Fergus Kerr OPFootnote 5 and Louis Roy OP,Footnote 6 which draw upon first-hand knowledge of Ernst, have done much to highlight his theological appropriation of Wittgenstein, and to trace the contours of his seminal theological ideas. A prominent feature of Ernst's literary legacy that remains broadly unexplored, however, is the explicitly ecclesiological coherence of his thought: Ernst's deployment of the Wittgensteinian disruption of the inner-outer picture is not merely a matter of rational psychology as a prolegomenon to theology proper, but is developed throughout his theological writings, and reflected in a distinctive ecclesiology. The prominence of the Church as a leitmotif of Ernst's writing, therefore, not only emerges as a consequence of the fact that he was tasked by the Order to teach ecclesiology to its ordinands,Footnote 7 but also from the shape of his theological project (aptly summarised as a quest for the ‘new ontology of meaning’), which is resolved around vital ecclesiological coordinates. Writing in the wake of the ecclesiological developments at Vatican II, and in critical dialogue with Küng and Schillebeeckx,Footnote 8 Ernst is concerned to articulate a fresh and cogent ecclesiology in continuity with the theological tradition, not only as an article of the faith, but as an integral facet and pre-condition of theological method.
Ernst's Theological Programme: A New Ontology of Meaning
Ernst's work is marked by the conviction that philosophy has moved into an era in which its central concerns are addressed to the problem of meaning, and not understood in the pre-modern terms of the metaphysics of being.Footnote 9 The theological synthesis of St Thomas Aquinas was governed by the unifying theme of esse,Footnote 10 cohering around the metaphysical axiom that all the various entities that populate the world are (however analogically) united in a hierarchy of being participative and dependent upon God as ipsum esse,Footnote 11 with the essence of created substances distinct from, and passive to, the existence that they receive from God.Footnote 12 Ernst was concerned that the foundational principle of ‘being’, once transposed from the scholastic metaphysical lexicon into modern idiom, could not support the burden of Thomas's pre-modern dogmatic edifice. ‘Being’, in its ordinary, everyday, pre-conceptual sense, no longer alludes easily to the totality of all that is, and in shifting away from common use to a technical and contested terminology defined in a polemic context, has lost its conceptual plasticity as a unifying principle for a dogmatic world-view.
As an alternative unifying theme, Ernst proposes ‘meaning’, a pervasive reality of our life and a term freely used, apparently without the need for a developed conceptual theory of meaning as a pre-requisite. Indeed, meaning is the theme that unifies the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein in both the diametrically opposed loci of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations: the insight of the latter was to undermine the former by highlighting the public and communal nature of meaning operative as a community's form of life (Lebensform),Footnote 13 and thus the wrong-headedness of conceiving of meaning as a mental event.Footnote 14 For all that the apparent pervasiveness of meaning lends itself to conceptual deployment as a unifying theological theme, it is not meaning in the commonly understood sense of the term that Ernst sought to appropriate: rather, it was meaning liberated from mentalistic prejudices by a dose of Wittgenstein's philosophical therapy. Indeed, Ernst observes that the theory of meaning implicit in scholastic theology presents meaningfulness as accessible only in ontic terms, via essentialist concepts coordinated with specific structures of the created world.Footnote 15 Whilst in reality St Thomas's ontological thought transcends the rigid limits theoretically determined by his ontic epistemology (the “archaic theory of meaning” that Ernst periodically laments),Footnote 16 the philosophical legacies of Wittgenstein and Heidegger demand a new ontology of meaning, which does not limit ‘meaning’ to the scientific manipulation of conceptual generalities abstracted from particulars, but allows historical meaning to be authentically realised.
Despite the prima facie explosivity of this proposal, Ernst's theological orientation is fundamentally Thomist, taking St Thomas principally as the source of Dominican theologising, but not as its absolute norm.Footnote 17 Conscious that – in the eyes of the world – the Church's right to speak authoritatively must be earned by plausibility, Ernst's effort to integrate this new ontology of meaning into an authentically Catholic hermeneutic is governed by a distinctively Dominican concern: that truth might be “re-identified in the new idiom of each successive era”,Footnote 18 and presented to the world with new clarity and intellectual plausibility, through a re-articulation of the Angelic Doctor's synthesis.
Indeed, the amenability of the Thomistic synthesis to re-articulation in terms of ‘meaning’ is grounded by Ernst's treatment of Aquinas as a thematic, rather than systematic, theologian. Clearly, Thomas's thought is systematic insofar as it is ordered in a recognisable argumentative structure and traces the contours of a synoptic world-view cohering around the unifying theme of esse.Footnote 19 Nonetheless, Ernst denies Aquinas systematicity at the deepest level, for his unifying theme (esse) admits the possibility of indefinite expansion of the scope of his metaphysical system, thus precluding systemic closure. The rejection of the univocity of being demands the denial of a community of genus between the divine esse and the existence of created substances:Footnote 20 the Thomistic world-view is not a univocal vision of a bounded set of substances within the genus of being, but establishes an analogical relationship between the divine esse and the infinite variety of created substances that participate (actually or potentially) within it. The boundaries of this community of analogy are, in principle, open to indefinite revision, as new substances are created or cease to be. The movable boundaries of the community whose limits are determined by the analogia entis corresponds, Ernst thinks, to the infinite array of Wittgensteinian ‘language games’ a native speaker can meaningfully instantiate within a linguistic community.Footnote 21 The scope of meaning is, therefore, not a hermetically sealed autarchic system of finite points, but a living and organically developing organism, tethered to, and supervening upon, a community of life (which is already a communion in being).
The shift from the language of ‘being’ to that of ‘meaning’ does not involve, therefore, a Harnackian repudiation of metaphysics. Far from seeking an abrogation of classical ontological categories, Ernst's quest for a hermeneutical theology of meaning is dominated, as Nicholas Lash observes in his review of Multiple Echo, by an “almost obsessional preoccupation with ontology”:Footnote 22 the claims of Christianity are irreducibly ontological claims, depending upon a communion in being which is coinherent with the order of meaning,Footnote 23 a reality that Ernst can interchangeably call an “ontology of meaning” and a “logic of being”. Confined by an inadequate theory of meaning, Ernst sees neo-Thomist theologies as having settled for answers on the ontic level of facts, excluding the ontological outworking of the mysteric content derived from the sole substantive answer to human questioning, provided in the event of Christ's incarnation and Paschal mystery.Footnote 24
Meaning as Process and Praxis
Such a theological ontology of meaning excludes the possibility of understanding meaning along either mentalistic and other-worldly ethereal lines:Footnote 25 the orders of being and meaning are united in Heideggerian geschichtliches Dasein, in the temporal and embodied historicity of human Seinsgeschichte. The ontological meaning of history is found in the event of the incarnation, which is the presence among us of ultimate meaning,Footnote 26 and thus the integrating principle through which human history ceases to be mere Historie and is transfigured into true Geschichte, which is most authentically understood as Heilsgeschichte. Thus the ontological, for Ernst, has a broader meaning than serving as a term of reference for Thomistic metaphysics:Footnote 27 it stands as something approximating a Heideggerian existential, arising out of our socially and temporally embedded existence, as the condition and ground of any authentic instance of meaning.
“The mistake is to say that there is anything that meaning something consists in”:Footnote 28 the force of Wittgenstein's argument against private language is to situate language – and therefore meaning – in the shared and public domain of the community.Footnote 29 As Wittgenstein observed, “nothing is more wrong-headed than calling meaning a mental activity”,Footnote 30 for it is “primarily a process and a praxis”.Footnote 31 Meaning is, moreover, the distinctive human praxis, irreducibly an event of personal communion-in-being: as a process and praxis “through which the world to which man belongs becomes the world which belongs to man”,Footnote 32 it is a metaphorical enactment of man's vocation to ‘till and subdue’ (Genesis 1:28). Even as a creature, confronted by finitude and givenness, through the process and praxis of meaning, man is able to unite and embody the world within himself, and to participate in the priesthood of all believers through the anaphora of creation to God. Meaning, then, has as its sine qua non a personal world prior to the individual: language is fundamentally communicative,Footnote 33 meaning borne by community.
Ernst notes the proximity of the so-called Augustinian picture of language as rooted in the mapping of terms onto reality by ostensive definitionFootnote 34– against which the Wittgenstein of the Investigations argued – to contemporary structuralist accounts of meaning.Footnote 35 Meaning, as a process and a praxis, cannot primarily be understood in terms of syntactical conglomerations that make non-meaningful elements meaningful by locating them within a structure, nor in semiotic terms as the particular concretisation of a symbol's primordial meaning (which nonetheless depends upon ‘structure’ within which its meaning is disclosed, even if this is often portrayed – in terms Ernst undoubtedly finds more congenial – as a ‘context’).Footnote 36 Rather, the process and praxis of meaning is marked by an essential holism, it is “as much social as individual, historical as natural, mythical as metaphysical”,Footnote 37 emerging as the constitution of a meaningful culture that is the context of life.Footnote 38 Here, Ernst's new ontology of meaning has a foot in both continental and analytical traditions: concerned to engage a new, and authentically Catholic, hermeneutic in dialogue with Ebeling and Fuchs,Footnote 39 it is the linguistic turn of Ludwig Wittgenstein that enables the theological ontology of meaning to be embedded in the Lebensform of the Church.Footnote 40 The Church is the doxastic culture that, in its irreducibly visible, institutional, form, is the sacramental sign of the revelation of divine meaning,Footnote 41 the community in which the history of man becomes Sacred History.
Ernst's Personalism: The Trinitarian Mediation of Meaning
Just as Aquinas grounded his metaphysical hierarchy of being by reference to the primordial divine esse, so Ernst must secure the unity of the world of meaning by reference to a privileged primordial instance of ‘meaning’: God, understood as the “meaning of meaning”,Footnote 42 the Triune community that is the source,Footnote 43 unificationFootnote 44 and possibilityFootnote 45 of meaning and thus the “nativity of the word”.Footnote 46 Ernst's recurring leitmotif of the ‘meaning of meaning’ emerges through his own critical appropriation of the phrase as used in a dialogue between Claude Lévi-Strauss and Paul Ricoeur,Footnote 47 which he integrates into his conception of meaning as praxis. Whilst Ricoeur seems to posit the ‘meaning of meaning’ as an unexpressed primordial meaning that makes possible any expression of meaning, Lévi-Strauss resists any suggestion that meaning might exist in an irreducible form, making the characteristically structuralist move of making semantics dependent upon syntax.Footnote 48 Ernst's Wittgensteinian theory of meaning as process and praxis leads him to reject the notion of a primordial capital meaning upon which all subsequent meaning draws, together with the suggestion that meaning is always reducible to primitive non-meaningful (even pre-meaningful) elements. For Ernst, the meaning of meaning is not so much a meaning behind meanings, but that which makes meaning possible by a creative event of meaning. Thus Ernst's Wittgensteinian shift leads him to reject both Ricoeur and Lévi-Strauss (although it is easy to sense greater sympathy with the former), instead appealing to the Chomskyan notion of ‘competence’, i.e. the native speaker's ability to generate an apparently infinite array of meaningful sentences, as a means of breaking out of both semiotics and syntactics. Thus ‘meaning’ for Ernst is neither generated through a symbolic re-presentation of a chronologically prior meaning of meaning, nor the architectonic result of a conjunction of otherwise non-meaningful elements, but emerges as a “non-structured competence, which is the ‘generating force’ of both structure and symbol”.Footnote 49
The ‘meaning of meaning’, however, is not related to the human praxis of meaning as a Deistic principle isolated from the world by an unpassable chorizmos that admits only contrastive transcendence, nor as a quasi-pantheistic presence immanent in all articulated meanings. In the incarnation, Jesus Christ is the ontological presence of ultimate meaning in the world,Footnote 50 and faith is the “awareness of the presence of [this] ultimate meaning amongst us”.Footnote 51 Ernst resolves the apparent antinomy between the contrastive transcendence and the radical immanence of the meaning of meaning, then, through a theology of mediation. Although the structure of this mediation of ultimate meaning is not treated in a discrete portion of Ernst's works (which are, after all, clusters of seminal essays rather than a complete and exhaustive systematics), it is nonetheless clear that this takes place on a Trinitarian leavening: appropriating the ‘meaning of meaning’ to Pateriology, this ultimate meaning is revealed in the Father's self-presentation in Jesus Christ, and re-presented by the Spirit in the gathered community of the Church.Footnote 52 As Ernst writes: “the Deus absconditus […] is revealed in history and made concrete in a personal revelation of the Father in the incarnate Son, and re-presented in the linguistic community of the Church.”Footnote 53
Indeed, it is crucial to Ernst's synthesis that he conceives of the presence of ultimate meaning in the world in personal terms: Christologically conceived, it is not merely an epistemological construct, but an ontological revelation that brings transfiguration.Footnote 54 In tones reminiscent of both Irenaeus's Adversus Haereses and Karl Barth's Second Römerbrief, Ernst presents Christ as himself the personal centre of divine revelation and the ultimate meaning of humanity,Footnote 55 personally inseparable from the revelation of ultimate meaning that he brings. The self-declaration of the meaning of meaning historically in the man Jesus of Nazareth is the disclosure of a world of meaning, accessible in faith. It is a “transcendental disclosure of meaning to and for men”,Footnote 56 a mapping of an absolute semantic beginning onto a human person, from which the “meanings entertained and exchanged in the community”Footnote 57 flow. The life of Christ, as the life of katallage through which the world of man becomes the world of God, is thus the ultimate praxis of meaning, for it is the authentic ontological metaphor, through which the world to which man belongs becomes the world which belongs to the man,Footnote 58 Jesus Christ, in whom all human meanings find their unification.
The incarnation, therefore, has the character of an ontological (and not merely epistemological) illuminating event (a Heideggerian Ereignis, or ‘coming into view’), through which humanity is imbued not merely with another meaning, nor with an array of new human possibilities for meaning, but with the radical and ultimate meaning that is the ‘meaning of meaning’. Christ, as Emmanuel, God with us, is the ‘genetic moment’ of the Christian confession: the freely expressed and bestowed love of God in Christ has a newness (Neuheitserlebnis)Footnote 59 that is both radical and creative in its scope. In Wittgensteinian terms, this ‘genetic moment’ is one of ontological Übersicht: a place of ultimate and synoptic vision that provides the context (Umgebung) for all authentic meaning.
The life of Christians is the ‘consecration’ of this ‘genetic moment’, which takes place in the Church as the linguistic community in which the Holy Spirit continually re-presents God's musterion as the condition for the constitution of a new humanity.Footnote 60 Notably, then, Ernst co-ordinates ecclesiology with pneumatology: the action of the Holy Spirit in the Church is the Sponsal presence of Christ (for the mission of the Spirit is conjoined with that of the Son).Footnote 61 The Church, therefore, exists enhypostatically in the Spirit, having no existence apart from that conferred upon it by the Sponsal presence of the Spirit of Christ. The Christ-event, as the ultimate ontological transfiguration of creation, is a unique historical happening, unrepeatable and complete, yet nonetheless made present in the Church, re-actualized and communicated in the life of Christians.Footnote 62
The Church is, therefore, the effectual sign of the continued presence of the meaning of meaning in the midst of humanity, a sacramental prolongation of the incarnation, and an extension into every successive era of the kairos that brings with it the possibility of the transformation and transfiguration of human life.Footnote 63 This consecration takes place in a doxological integration into the ultimate and perfected event of worship of God the FatherFootnote 64 – Christ's resurrection – which draws to itself all human religious possibilities.Footnote 65 This ontological participation in Christ's attitude of worship of the Father takes place by Sacramental initiation into the community of Christ's body, through the liturgical act of Baptism, which effects an ontological change in the recipient that amounts to a metaphysical de-individualisation, through which authentic personhood is realised by engrafting into Christ. The Trinitarian mediation of meaning, Christologically conceived and Pneumatically defined, is inherently personal, but never individualistic: personal being is, for Ernst, always a matter of communication, and is most perfectly realised in the subsistent perichoretic relations of the persons of the Blessed Trinity.Footnote 66
Church as Institution: Against Ecclesial Nestorianism
Ernst's formal doctrine of the Church could aptly be summarised as prophylaxis against ecclesiological Nestorianism, through a re-ontologised vision of the Church as integrated institution and communion, proceeding under the rubric of the Church as sacrament. The dissociation of ‘inner’ from ‘outer’, which has infected theological anthropology, has likewise exerted influence over ecclesiology. A growing awareness of the Church as a mystical communion (consequent on Pius XII's Mystici Corporis) has led to an often subconscious devaluing of the institutional nature of the Church, resulting in a popular presentation of the Church as essentially the spiritual reality of the mystical communion of the baptised, only incidentally expressed in institutional form as a condescension to human nature. Indeed, with a growing awareness of the moral shortcomings of the empirical human community of the Church, and particularly of the clergy, this dissociation offers a means of affirming the moral impeccability of the ‘true Church’ (i.e., the mystical body) without denial of the patently fallible character of its members. Clearly, however, orthodox Catholic ecclesiology is bound to affirm the coincidence without absolute identity of the Church as mystical communion and human institution:Footnote 67 a quasi-Nestorian dissociation of institution from communion is as unthinkable as a monophysite doctrine of the Church as theandric, or a docetization of the human structures of the Church that implies a denial of the obviously sinful character of her members. Nor can the theologian acquiesce without significant qualification to the co-ordination of institution with ‘humanity’ and communion with ‘divinity’: what is required is integration without confusion of the two, so as “to revalue the institution as to let it appear as the plausible organ of the Church as mystery”.Footnote 68 The theological resources for this integration Ernst draws primarily from Lumen Gentium's codification of the Church as sacramentum.
The role of the Church in the Trinitarian mediation of meaning depends upon precisely such an awareness of the Church as musterion: it is only as an authentically human linguistic community that the Church can be the organic Lebensform of the Christian faith, but it is by the Sponsal presence of Christ's Spirit that it becomes the community in which ultimate meaning, the meaning of meaning, is present. This, indeed, is unsurprising: as the place of the ongoing revelation of God's mystery,Footnote 69 in the divine communication that theologians call grace, the Church – like the Sacraments – fits our human constitution, for grace builds upon nature without vitiating it. However, as a mystery of the faith, the Church cannot – in its divinely ordained holism – be subject to the ordinary categories of sociology, except in accord with the doctrine of analogy.Footnote 70 The quality of reality that the Church possesses is not, Ernst contends in markedly Barthian tones, that of being measured by a standard of reality, but as a realness that possesses and ontologically modifies the standard of reality itself.Footnote 71
In a critical reading of Hans Küng's Council, Reform and Reunion,Footnote 72 Ernst critiques his presentation of Jesus Christ as the ‘norm’ of the life of the Church.Footnote 73 The appeal to the gospel and the person of Jesus Christ as a norm for the Church's faith and life is, for Ernst, unacceptably suggestive of an extrinsic relationship pertaining between Christ and the institutional Church. Rather the gospel of Jesus Christ, understood not reductively in terms of a discrete collection of writings but as “the whole life of the Church as a sign for faith” bestowed upon it by Christ in the Apostolic era,Footnote 74 is principally a source from which the Church's life of faith flows, continually made present in the Church by the animating action of the Spirit. The gospel becomes normative, in the strictest sense of that term, only when it is interpretatively concretised by the teaching authority of the Church and thus embodied in a dogmatic definition. In its primordial form the gospel is therefore only potentially normative, becoming a binding norm by way of a judgment made by the sole competent authority – the teaching ministry of the Church's living Magisterium. The Church is a living linguistic community of faith, in whom the gospel is variously manifested, expressed normatively in regulative terms in the magisterium. In Ratzinger's phrase, the apostolic succession is the form of tradition, whilst tradition is the content of the succession:Footnote 75 revelation may have closed but it has not ceased, for the Church is marked by the enduring presence of the revealing Spirit of God.Footnote 76 To appeal to Christ as to a norm is to de-personalise him, whom Ernst presents rather as the living judge than as an inert rule of faith.
Indeed, in his response to Charles Davis’ treatment of ecclesiology, Ernst suggests that criticism of the institutional character of the Church frequently misunderstands ‘institution’ as ‘constitution’, i.e. as “a social structure of authority and governance”.Footnote 77 For all that it is an authentic human community, an exposition of the ‘social structure’ of the Church is not exhausted within the competence of the empirical sciences (e.g., of political studies or social anthropology), but must primarily be understood in theological terms. This observation enables Ernst to distinguish conceptually between the essential, and therefore unalterable, pattern or structure bestowed on the Church by God (which includes its hierarchical ordering and constitution as a linguistic community, as well as the revealed Catholic dogma concerning the ordained ministry and ecclesial jurisdiction) from the particularities of the temporal embodiment of this structure in human history. Authentic reform of the Church consists in a living and organic evolution of the latter in accordance with the former: although Ernst does not cash this out by elucidating precisely those aspects of the Church's life that he understands as being ‘temporal embodiments’ worthy of reform, it is clear that he understands Vatican II as having articulated the essential structure of the Church more in terms of an extension of the Apostolic ministry of preaching than of ‘power’ understood in secular terms.Footnote 78
This recognition of the institutional Church as the organ of the divine musterion demands an account of the Church's ministry that penetrates beyond an ontic, functionalist, account to one in terms of a theological ontology of priesthood. The traditional distinction of sacramental power (sacra potestas) from institutional jurisdiction should not be understood as implying that the ontological significance of the priesthood resides solely with its sacramental power.Footnote 79 Rather, having been identified in a particular metaphysical way with Christ by his ordination, the priest (and most especially the Bishop) is a sacramental point of encounter with Christ for the people of God, not only in his cultic function, but in his person.Footnote 80 For Ernst, Vatican II's treatment of the priestly ministry in terms of a distinctive participation in the three-fold ministry of Christ as priest, prophet and king – that differs from the Baptismal priesthood in kind rather than degreeFootnote 81 – is precisely such a holistic ontology of ministry.Footnote 82 This ontological treatment conceives of priesthood in terms of a distinctive participation in the Church's whole apostolic mission as inaugurated by Christ (and in which all the Baptised participate, according to their status), rather than as the ontic performance of discrete liturgical or jurisdictional functions. As an essential feature of the Church's divine constitution, the Primacy of the Bishop of Rome must likewise be understood as an ontological primacy, an emerging awareness of which Ernst believes will enable a separation of an authentic theology of the Papacy from the human ideology of papal power, which has at times been the vehicle of theological treatments of the papacy.Footnote 83
Church as Eschatological Community: Apocalyptic Ecclesiology
An orthodox ecclesiology, therefore, involves both an empirical account of the Church's membership and a visionary account that grounds the ontological meaning of the Church beyond its visible manifestation.Footnote 84 Indeed, a non-reductive ecclesiology must account for the totality of the Church, in both its militant and triumphant modalities. If either visionary or empirical account is allowed to predominate to the exclusion of the other, the transcendent-immanent dialectic that governs the Church's mediation of ultimate meaning will be ruptured, and the account of the Church as sacrament lost. A visionary account is a necessary means of sustaining the faith of the empirical Church militant, but a purely visionary account constructed from outside an awareness of the real particularities of the empirical Church's historical experience will inevitably have little purchase beyond the realm of an artificial (and thus inauthentic) theological discourse.Footnote 85
Ecclesiology, then, must proceed ‘from below’, i.e. from the concrete experience of the particular Church, to an account of its transcendence as an ecclesia in ecclesiis, rather than from a quasi-‘Platonic form’ of the Church to its sacramental instantiation in local form.Footnote 86 This does not mean, however, that the Church's self-understanding always begins on the empirical level before proceeding to the ontological and visionary level. Rather it is an affirmation that the theologian's account of the Church is irreducibly bound up in the self-understanding of their own community of faith, and in proceeding from below is able to experience the phenomenology of salvation in diverse and inculturated ways, free from a hegemony of metaphysical absolutes enforced from above. As the Church is the linguistic community that makes possible faith, and therefore the self-critical praxis of theology, all theological treatments of the Church are always already bound up in both empirical and visionary accounts: treatises de Ecclesia do not fall from heaven, nor are they created ex nihilo.Footnote 87
There are clearly, however, fixed co-ordinates of ecclesial identity, provided for in the Church's essential structure, that are not simply ineffable expressions of religious sentiment, but inherent to the Church's self-understanding in the grammar of theology. These are the Sacraments, the particular concrete realisations of the divine musterion in which the Church's own identity is most transparent to itself, normative manifestations of the Church's being as the community of Christ.Footnote 88 Here, Ernst's indebtedness to Karl Rahner's notion of the sacraments as instances of Selbstvollzug (the Church's self-realisation) is apparent:Footnote 89 these ritual expressions of the Church's faith are not merely sacred dramaturgy that provide a kernel around which the people of God unite (a reductively empirical account), rather they have the character of anamnesis, a memorial of the primordial musterion, the ‘meaning of meaning’, which is made present within that sacramental memorial by the action of the Spirit. This is particularly evident in the paradigm case of the Eucharist, which is the normative gesture of Christian faith,Footnote 90 and the liturgical synaxis in which the Church most fully realises her identity on earth.
As the community of the continuing revelation of the divine musterion,Footnote 91 the Church's self-identity is always understood as eschatologically orientated:Footnote 92 the Church as a sacrament is an anticipatory sign of the eschatological ‘real-presence’Footnote 93 of the Kingdom of God, and the pledge of the transfiguration of the Christian community into glory.Footnote 94 Ernst understands the Church, therefore, as a basileiological community, the sacrament of the reign of God,Footnote 95 oriented toward an eschatology that is simultaneously political and transcendent. In terms that Ernst would likely find agreeable, Metropolitan John Zizioulas has spoken of the eschatologically iconic character of the Holy Eucharist:Footnote 96 the Eucharistic synaxis is not merely a symbol of the Kingdom of God, in which all believers are gathered to Christ, but is a sacrament of that eschatological fulfilment, really making present the risen Lord and thus, in a hypostatic and provisional form, the Kingdom of God.Footnote 97
The Church and the World: Consecration of the Genetic Moment in History
The conception of the Church as the sacrament of God's salvific purpose establishes an asymmetrical relationship between the Church and the world: as a linguistic community, the Church realises itself in the world, yet as the place of the ongoing revelation of the divine musterion, the Church realises the world authentically within herself.Footnote 98 In the re-presentation of the Christ-event to the world, in the forms of sacrament and tradition (and its content the gospel of Christian life), the Church establishes itself as a continuous process (the praxis of meaning) within the history of mankind. By assuming a world of meaning prior to itself, the Church transfigures the diverse plurality of human meanings, authentically realising the world in herself through the purification and sanctification of the world of human meanings through their integration into the Church's Sacred History of God, the meaning of meaning, pro nobis (Heilsgeschichte).
This realisation – by transference and transfiguration – of one world of meaning in another is what Ernst calls “ontological metaphor”,Footnote 99 and as a process and praxis through which the world to which man belongs becomes the world that belongs to man, it is irreducibly an event of meaning. Here, the co-inherence of a communion-in-being with the Lebensform of a particular linguistic community is essential: the ‘ontological metaphor’ is neither reductively a change in human behaviour, nor a shift simply in the mode of language, but a fundamental change in the mode of life. In short, the ultimate ontological metaphor – the resurrection of ChristFootnote 100 – is re-presented in the Church and its transfiguring power is appropriated and applied in the life of Christians.Footnote 101 The unique new meaning of life wrought in Christ's resurrection is made accessible in the life of faith, which is itself an ontological metaphor,Footnote 102 the sacrament of which (Holy Baptism) confers a personal participation in the ultimate ontological metaphor of the resurrection, as the perfect act of worship. The victory of Christ over the world in the resurrection is the distinctive ‘ontological novelty’ of the Christian confession. The Church exists as the sacrament of this dynamic transcendence, making possible the entry of the individual into the eschatological victory of Christ, by faith.Footnote 103
“The life of the Church is at least the life of an historical community, nourished by the Spirit”:Footnote 104 history and temporality are not regrettable accidents of the Church's earthly existence, but the essential form of its mission. Whilst some theological treatments of time have co-ordinated the fleetingness of temporality with a loss of unity through the de-centring consequences of sin, for Ernst time is not principally a category of hamartiology but of soteriology. Time is the vessel of God's saving activity in the person of Christ, and the vehicle through which that ultimate ontological transfiguration is personally appropriated in the ontological metaphor of our individual lives in the Church.Footnote 105 The Church, as a continual ‘happening’ of meaning under the animating direction of the Holy Spirit, takes the form of a conversatio between the Church and the world,Footnote 106 in which the Church assumes and purifies a prior world of meaning through the ontological metaphor of faith, and proclaims to the world afresh the saving meaning of Christ. This economy, marked by the incarnation, is one that takes place in the world, but nonetheless as a confrontation of the world:Footnote 107 the post-Constantinian Church is not involved in the sacralisation of civil institutions, but in the consecration of revolt.Footnote 108 The provocative language of revolt, perhaps reminiscent of the ‘revolt’ and ‘protest’ spoken of in the works of Donald MacKinnon,Footnote 109 is a recognition that the Church, as the presence of ultimate meaning in human history, stands against all structures of sin and false meaning. Rather than a call to violent uprising, it is a call to the Eucharist, the ultimate moment of uprising against the disorder of the world, and to the consecration of an authentically historical growth and transfiguration.Footnote 110 This consecration of change is nothing other than the ontological metaphor of faith, the consecration afresh of the genetic moment in each successive era, and the outworking of the nuclear complexes of ecclesial meaning, found in the Paschal mystery, in the idiom of a new age.
Conclusion: Church and Theology
In nuce, the Church is the Lebensform of faith, the human linguistic community in which a new world of meaning is made present and accessible by the Spirit. Faith, therefore, has an inevitable and irreducible ecclesial character,Footnote 111 and the Church can be described as the ontological a priori of faith.Footnote 112 As ontological a priori, the Church is not simply a noetic pre-theological condition to faith in terms of a general epistemology, but a theological pre-supposition in the order of ontology. The Church is thus the sine qua non of the ontological metaphor of faith, the community which is itself wrought in the ultimate ontological metaphor of Christ's resurrection, and which makes possible theological epistemology by its participation in the Trinitarian mediation of ultimate meaning. The inevitable activity of this linguistic community is theology, the activity of self-understanding in light of the presence of ultimate meaning.Footnote 113 Whilst there are those in the Church who are marked out by calling as ‘professional’ theologians (the didaskaloi of Acts 13:1), every Christian life – whether implicitly or explicitly – is a theology, a process and praxis of meaning in which the personal horizon of individual meaning is integrated into the Sacred History of the Church.
Authentic theology is therefore an encounter between the Church, as the enduring sacramental presence of ultimate meaning in human history, and the world of human meanings. The internal basis of theological epistemology inevitably meets the external, and authentic theology, as the life of faith, is always both a response to interrogation by the world of human meanings,Footnote 114 and a witness and testimony to the enduring presence of ultimate meaning.Footnote 115 Realising itself in the world but not structured or conditioned by it, the Church's liminality is its ‘border’ between two worlds of meaning: the horizon of encounter and transfiguration on which the human world of meaning is assumed and sanctified, being authentically realised within the Church. Theology, therefore, is not simply an ontic matter of proclamation in words or appeal to arguments, but the ontological integration of a culture that organically communicates a way of life.Footnote 116 In the ontological metaphor of faith, and its correlate the reflexive praxis of theology, there can be no definitive reification of ‘contemplation’ from ‘action’, for theology is a holistic and contemplative engagement with the world, an “entrance into the Christian meaning of time by way of the Christian meaning of our times”.Footnote 117 This ecclesial conception of theology as encounter and witness expresses an authentically Dominican understanding of preaching as a natural expression of Christian life, organically emerging from the whole historical tapestry of faith.
In conclusion, the reader of Ernst's work is left with an unavoidable sense of the breadth of his doctrinal and cultural mastery, and of the deep penetration of his theological vision. Nonetheless, any evaluation of his theological synthesis must concede a certain ambiguity with regard to its success. For all that his new ontology of meaning was intended to open theology to a renewed engagement with the world, the observation of the New Scientist magazine that his 1972 lecture on the ‘Limits of Human Nature’Footnote 118 “[p]ossibly makes sense to other theologians”Footnote 119 indicates that the resultant theological synthesis was largely confined to the “artificial world” that Ernst was trying to escape.Footnote 120 Even the theologically astute reader can comment on the almost impenetrable over-complexification of his work,Footnote 121 and wonder whether he says anything at all without “qualifying it out of existence”:Footnote 122 the condensed profundity of his aphorisms (e.g., ‘the meaning of meaning’, ‘the consecration of the genetic moment’, etc) does not always mitigate for lack of perspicuity. Nonetheless, Ernst's thought has, and will no doubt continue, to exercise considerable influence over English Dominican theology. Perhaps the greatest compliment is to apply to him, in all sincerity, the words with which he praised Ludwig Wittgenstein: to read his work is to “encounter [an] example of philosophical depth and integrity, a standard of seriousness, by which [we] could, and can now, measure [our] own deficiencies.”Footnote 123
