Raoul Eshelman, observing in post-1990 art the deployment of artistic and narratival techniques which seem to break from postmodern stagnancy, has posited the arrival of a new epoch—“performatism” or “post-postmodernity”—marked by a new metaphysical optimism and confidence in the sign. While Eshelman’s description of the performatism paradigm at first appears open to a theological and even sacramental synthesis capable of informing a more robust religious response to postmodern critique, his fundamental recourse to a semiotics grounded on the theories of Eric Gans and René Girard ensures that the adversarial ontology underlying postmodernity also underlies performatism, thus making of performatism a non-identical repetition of the paradigm it wishes to escape. If performatism is to be recovered for theological purposes, an alternative theory of the sign, founded not on violence but on a metaphysics of union, is required. This thesis firstly proposes that the broad tradition of Christian Neoplatonism might offer the type of stable metaphysical-semiotic foundation to bolster performatism’s more positive instincts. Tracing a general metaphysics of union from Plato’s Phaedrus to the sacramental cosmos of Dionysius the Areopagite, the grounding of semiotics in an effusive divine source establishes the possibility of all subsequent signs, of language, and of transcendence. However, competing interpretations of Dionysian metaphysics necessarily affect the construal of the sign, and determine whether the link between created signs and their divine source is understood as extrinsically imposed or intrinsically and ontologically communicated.

As a case in point, these “dueling Dionysianisms” are assessed through a contrastive analysis of Franciscan and Thomistic poetics. Poems composed by Francis of Assisi, Bonaventure, and Iacopone, read in light of the early development of a Franciscan theological school,” exhibit features of a more affective Dionysianism which tends toward an extrinsic semiotics and a slight valorization of spirit over matter in mystical union, perhaps already presaging the bifurcation of the sign in postmodernity. Meanwhile, the Eucharistic poetry of Aquinas, especially the sequence Lauda Sion, presents an intrinsic semiotics and ontology of union which integrates bodily and spiritual principles in mysticism. It is this latter Thomist approach—here seen in Aquinas’s poetics but radically consistent with his broader philosophical and theological doctrine—which supplies a theory of the sign which would empower performatism to escape the strictures of postmodernity.