I And when they filled, He said to His disciples: Gather up fragments that remain, lest they be lost. JOHN 6:12 Man is unavoidably a sacramentalist and his works are sacramental in character. ... notion of sign implies sacred. DAVID JOHNS, Art and Sacrament All must be integrated, all are necessary to completion of whole as dictionary defines it, but what is that whole? DAVID JOHNS, Art in Relation to War THIS ARTICLE CONSIDERS THE RELATIONSHIP between unity and diversity in sacramental aesthetic of David Jones. In exploring difference between artistic and technocratic and ideological forms of as Jones represents them, it sets Jones's artistic quest for sacramental presence and analogical unity-in-diversity in conversation William F. Lynch's theory of analogical imagination, Catherine Pickstock's exploration of open mystery of Eucharist, and David Tracy's theology of analogy and fragment. fruits of conversation are then brought to a consideration of Jones's The Wall, The Tribune's Visitation, and The Tutelar of Place, to suggest that Jones's toward shape--consciously fragmented--struggles to participate analogically in what Pickstock calls the aporetic impossibility of liturgy, of signs that offers a perennial challenge to the will toward power and univocal orders (the totalisms) of empire and modernity. In second section of In Parenthesis, his shape in words set during First World War, David Jones brings us into enclosed barn where, on wet days, soldiers were given lectures. (1) barn with its great roof, sprung, upreaching, humane, and of a is suggestive--through a range of signification typical of Jones--of a church (upreaching in its architectural sweep) and of barn of Bethlehem; but homely, intimate space is thrown into ironic relief by Bombing Officer told them lightly of efficacy of his and who predicts an for new Mk. IV grenade, just on market. efficaciousness and important future of supremely invention of Mr. Mills are implicitly contrasted (and ironically evocative of) efficaciousness of absent Christ child and his supremely satisfactory and important future work of redemption (as well as, not insignificantly, his work as a carpenter). soldiers, meanwhile, are unwilling shepherds (or animals) come to worship at crib of modernity. internal rhyme of trade grenade amplifies irony of scene, and sharpens distinction, as Jones understood it, between works that marry and gratuitous (like barn itself, redolent of and sacramentally pointing to something other) and those dead works that are merely utile and whose utility, in case, destroys humane. (2) We are reminded in these lines that what Jones regarded as older sacramental reality belongs to a vanished order, dispersed by new unlovely (3) of modernity--the new leviathan (4)--that reaches its apotheosis (or nadir) in what Conor Cunningham has called the abstract indiscriminate logic of bombs. (5) Toward end of same section of poem, older order (represented by small, intimate details) is held in tension new (represented by a bomb), at very moment of symbolic transition from old to new dispensation, as imminent descending bomb evacuates contents of mess-tin (called the bloody thing in which soldiers carry this day's bread) (6) onto (altar) stones, where soldier stands alone as sacrificial offering: exact disposition of small things--the precise shapes of trees, tilt of a bucket, movement of a straw, disappearing right boot of Sergeant Snell--all minute noises, separate and distinct, in a stillness charged through some approaching violence--registered not by ear nor any single faculty--an on-rushing pervasion, saturating all existence; exactitude, logarithmic, dial-timed, millesimal--of calculated velocity, some mean chemist's contrivance, a stinking physicist's destroying toy. …