Weil’s gesture toward a “true knowledge of social mechanics” suggested a politics of the sacramental imagination. “Sacramentality” is a key but somewhat amorphous and elusive concept in Christian theology, referring not only to the official roster of sacraments but to the character of created reality as well. Just as a sacrament is a visible, material sign and vessel of divine grace, so matter itself is similarly “trans-corporeal,” as theologian Graham Ward puts it. As Rowan Williams explains, sacramentality entails the belief that “material things carry their fullest meaning … when they are the medium of gift, not instruments of control or objects for accumulation.” In what I am calling the sacramental imagination, “the corporeal and the incorporeal do not comprise a dualism,” as Ward asserts; the visible, material realm “manifests the watermark of its creator.”
This sacramental critique of Marxist metaphysics would not be that it is “too materialist” but rather that it is not materialist enough—that is, that it does not provide an adequate account of matter itself, of its sacramental and revelatory character. Sacramentality has ontological and social implications, for the “gift” that Williams identifies is “God’s grace and the common life thus formed.”