The Well At The World's End

Even More on Barth and Analogy: Option I

noreply@blogger.com (X-Cathedra) — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:31:00 +0000

From a Catholic point of view, it seems that Barth is mistaken in one of either of two ways. He is either 1) diagnostically mistaken about the incompatibility between his analogia relationis/fidei and the analogia entis, seeing a dichotomy where there is none; or 2) he is doctrinally mistaken: he correctly judges the incompatibility, but his mature version of analogy reflects a doctrinal position that Catholics are bound to find dissatisfying and even in tension with some of the more positive statements Barth makes about the goodness of created nature.

Johnson argues strongly that Barth was correct in his diagnosis of the incompatibility. The gist, I take it, is that Barth’s analogical thought does not represent a change in the substance of his earlier position, let alone a concession to his Catholic interlocutors. Rather, Barth’s analogia relationis/fidei confirms and even fulfills his earlier reasons for rejecting the Catholic analogia entis. As Johnson puts it:

He [Barth] does not adopt a version of the analogy that Przywara originally offered, but rather, he adopts the strongest possible rejection of such an analogy, because the structure of Przywara’s analogy is reversed in order to account for the problem that initially prompted Barth to reject Przywara’s analogy: the problem of human sin. Barth’s mature account of divine-human continuity thus stands as the fulfillment of his early rejection of Przywara’s analogia entis rather than a retreat from it. (Johnson, p.645)

Johnson’s argument poses a challenge to Balthasar’s interpretation, which understandably tries to emphasize points of compatibility between Barth and Catholic dogmatics. According to Balthasar, Barth was able to understand and speak to Catholic concerns about analogy. And some of the things he’s written certainly seem like the kinds of things Catholics are prone to write, including some lines that appear to chasten the more dialectical rhetoric of man’s alienation from God. As Balthasar puts it: “he finally admits that creation vis-à-vis God is thoroughly good and positive in itself, that is, in its very being as not-God.”

By the power of faith and its profession, the Word of God becomes a human thought and a human word, certainly in infinite dissimilarity and inadequacy, but not in total human strangeness with its model. The human copy is a real copy of its divine counterpart. (KD I, 254)(TKB, 108)

Such total dissimilarity would then mean that we could not in fact recognize God. For if we recognize God, this must mean that we see God using our prior views, concepts and words; thus we see God not as something totally Other. (KD 3, 253-54) (TKB, 109).

There can be a real world that is not threatened or extinguished by God’s absoluteness. On the contrary, the world has been established by virtue of his absoluteness. Far from being self-contradictory with the concept of God or shameful to it, the world is his confirmation, set up to give glory to his name. (KD 3, 347-48) (TKB, 111).

He can leave room and time for the existence of another. And he can exercise his will over this other in such a way that the other is not absorbed or destroyed but accompanied, borne and protected. (KD 3, 461) (TKB, 111).

Creator and creature both exist, and exist together; but this does not imply there is any parity between them but rather a strictest superordination and subordination. Even so, they do coexist. (Credo, 33) (TKB, 111).

In the Credo, when we profess that God is the Creator, we admit not only God’s transcendence but also the immanence of this so utterly transcending God. As counterpart to the world, God is present to this world he has created, not only far but also near, not only free in his relations to it but also closely tied to his creation. He sustains the creature in its relative self-subsistence and uniqueness, ruling it without suspending the freedom of the human will, either partially or totally. (Credo, 33-34) (TKB, 111).

God sustains his creature in a reality different from his own: relative and dependent. But in its relativity and dependency, creation is autonomous vis-à-vis God, truly there on its own, precisely because it owes its being-there to God alone…Because it has not emanated directly from God’s own essence but was freely created by God, the creature cannot dissolve back into God or abandon its own relational autonomy. (KD 7, 98-99) (TKB, 112).

God’s revelation presupposes that there exists a world distinct from him in which he can reveal himself and that there is someone to whom he can disclose himself…The fact of revelation already tells us that God and man exist together; it is the witness of the reality of God’s creation…The fact of revelation already says that there is a human person to whom God has turned in his revelation, affirming his existence and taking seriously his fate, addressed as God’s real partner and thus honored in his autonomy.(Gotteserkenntnis, 69) (TKB, 112-113).

In other words, “the existence of a reality distinct from God cannot be a source of embarrassment solely because of its distinctness from God” (TKB, 111). Balthasar argues that in the Church Dogmatics Barth is forced to take “the concept of the creature” seriously, in a way quite different from his approach in The Epistle to the Romans. Far from claiming that creation is alien to God, “Barth increasingly came to sing the praises of the goodness of creatureliness as such” (TKB, 112).

More specifically, Barth acknowledges that “Sin presupposes freedom and selfhood, but it is not to be equated with them. This clearly implies that the sinful creature does not plunge into nothingness or chaos, becoming a mere shadow of a shadow, as would be the case if creatureliness coincided with sin” (TKB, 111) (Note here Balthasar is expressing- more eloquently- the same concern I had in the first post about the tendency of dialectical theology to equate human nature with sin). Barth appears to speak of sin and its relation to human nature in ways that both account for traditional Catholic concerns and at the same time thoroughly qualify his earlier rhetoric of alienation:

Human relationships are all affected by sin, but they are not altered [Barth’s emphasis] in their basic structure. And the inner essence of these relations is the created nature of man. Thus it is quite correct to say that the contrasts of sin, reconciliation and redemption do not affect human being. (KD 6, 46) (TKB, 116).

And so we have not followed the usual practice in theology of first denigrating human nature as much as possible in order then to make God’s grace working in man all the more effective. (KD 6, 330-331) (TKB, 116).

[Speaking of humanitarianism and Christian love] “Indeed, what good would it be for Christians to have all knowledge of God’s forgiveness,…what benefit would they get from the holiness and justification of their new-found life or from their praise of God in worship or their zeal in his service if they lacked this basic humanity?” (KD 6, 339) (TKB, 117).

And perhaps most strikingly:

It is not by nature that man is hostile and opposed to God. He is of course in fact so opposed, but only by acts of rejection, by an abuse of nature. But all man’s perversity cannot make wrong what God has wrought as good by nature…Sin indeed wreaks inconceivable havoc, but precisely because human nature is so good…But sin never becomes, as it were, a second nature for which man need not be held accountable. Man has not become a stranger to God in his sin. His position vis-à-vis God remains what it was when God created him…To dispute this would be to deny the continuity of the human subject as a creature, sinner and redeemed sinner.” (KD 6, 330-31) (TKB, 117).

This last passage from the Church Dogmatics is particularly helpful because Barth makes exactly the kinds of distinctions I think are crucial to understanding the reality of sin. When I claimed in my first post that Catholics have traditionally held that sin does not go “all the way down” (a statement that worried Travis a bit), I meant nothing more than what Barth means here: sin cannot go so far down as to blur the distinction between man’s nature and the sin that wreaks havoc in it. This is not to define human nature apart from God’s revelation in Christ; it is only to uphold that in one very important sense, sin does not make humanity some other kind of thing. To deny such a distinction would be, as Barth realizes, to deny that a prelapsarian, fallen, and redeemed human being is, in each case, still a prelapsarian, fallen, or redeemed human being. That is why I claimed too close an identification of sin and human nature ultimately makes nonsense of the act of salvation: when that ontological continuity of humanity across its different states is rejected, there can only be the annihilation of human nature and a creation of something else in its place. No matter what language one uses to describe that, it no longer makes sense to call that an act of salvation.

Anyway, back on point. This collection of passages, drawn from different parts of different works, and largely separated from their contexts, gives the impression of proof texts. But my point is minimal and I think discernable in the passages regardless. It is only that Barth is entirely aware of some of the concerns that Catholic dogmaticians have had about creation, sin, and relation to God. And further, he seems to acknowledge that even a Protestant dogmatics needs to address these issues. The interesting thing is that what Barth seems to affirm in these passages is precisely what the analogia entis supplies for Catholic thought. There are at least two points here: 1) the claim that creation is not opposed to God in virtue of being other than God; or to rephrase it, creation is positively related to God qua created; 2) and that this positive relation to God is, in one important sense, unaffected by sin: it is the relation that sin presupposes in order to be sin at all. In other words, to acknowledge that creation bears a positive relation to God as created (as not-God), and to acknowledge that this relation subsists in spite of the warping effects of sin, is in principle to affirm the analogia entis.

Balthasar claims that “all of these statements” are “Catholic in the fullest sense of that word” only because Barth saw Jesus Christ as the “real ground of creation” (TKB, 118; cf. KD 6, 580). For Barth, Christ’s positive relation to the Father eternally foregrounds the act of creation, and it is only in virtue of this relation that creation is positively related to God:

Just as he is the guarantee of the Creator’s fidelity, so too is he the guarantee of the continuity of his creation, the guarantee of its being maintained and preserved. (KD 6, 627) (TKB, 118).

In view of his Son, who was to become man and bear the sin of the world, God loved the human race and with it his whole creation even before he created them…He created the world because he loved it in his own Son, who stood before him as an outcast and a dead man, all on account of our sins. (KD 5, 53-54).

Christ, as both God and man, is “the true prototype upon whom and in view of whom the world was created” (TKB, 118-19). This foregrounding is, as it were, the fundamental presupposition of any analogical relation between God and his creatures.Yet if Barth wants to hold both to the two points mentioned above (drawn from his statements about created goodness) and the Christological presupposition of analogy, it seems reasonable that, at least initially, an affirmation of the analogia entis and Christ’s prototypicality are entirely compatible. Indeed, for Catholics like Balthasar and Przywara, the formal priority of Christology and the analogia entis are not only compatible, but the former fulfills the latter. As Balthasar writes:

But Christ is not simply man, he is God. And so the idea of what it means to be human as such cannot be derived or deduced from the Incarnation of Christ but can only be presupposed in it. Because God has become one of us, there must already be the possibility for humanity at the start, not just theoretically but in a true sense, to be capable of God, a capability that does not adversely affect Christ’s prototypicality… (TKB, 119).

Following this option, therefore, leads one to conclude that there is no reason to reject the analogia entis in adopting an analogia relationis/fidei. This would mean that Barth is only incorrect in his judgment that such a dichotomy exists.

In fact, however, the evidence against this option is pretty substantial. As Johnson emphasizes, and even Balthasar admits, Barth’s understanding of analogy gives expression to a doctrine of justification that inflects his account of created goodness in a very particular way; a way that actually inverts the reasoning of the analogia entis. Everything turns on how Christ’s prototypicality is conceived. If this interpretation (option 2) is correct- and I find it convincing- then my suspicion is that Barth’s analogy ultimately fails to do justice to the affirmations of created goodness cited above. In short, without the analogia entis, he can’t have his analogical cake and eat it too. And this is precisely what we should expect Catholics to think if Johnson’s interpretation hits the mark. Whether or not my suspicion that a serious tension results in Barth will be convincing to Barthians is another question (I suspect it won’t). But I will have to show this in greater detail in another post.

Pax Christi,

Citations:

Keith L.Johnson,"Reconsidering Barth's Rejection of Przywara's Analogia Entis," Modern Theology 26:4, Oct. 2010, pp.632-650

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation (TKB), trans. Edward T. Oakes, S.J. (San Francisco: Communio Books/Ignatius Press, 1992).

Karl Barth, Credo (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1935). English trans.: Credo (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962).

Karl Barth, Gotteserkenntnis und Gottesdienst (Zurich: Evangelischer Verlag, 1938). English trans.: The Knowledge of God and the Service of God (London: Hodder and Stoughten, 1938).

Notes:

The references to the Church Dogmatics (Karl Barth, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik; KD) are taken from Balthasar, who was using the German editions and citing the volume number followed by page number. If anyone wants a corresponding citation in the English translation, let me know and I can hunt it down using the appendix Oakes provides in the TKB.

Bold indicates my emphases; italics indicates emphases original either to Barth or to Balthasar.

More on Barth and Analogy

noreply@blogger.com (X-Cathedra) — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 20:55:00 +0000

I will try not to qualify my last post out of existence. But in light of the concerns that Travis raises, I think some unpacking is in order.

First off: as stated, my knowledge of Johnson's project is restricted to his Modern Theology article, since I have yet to read the expanded argument of his book. Therefore, my comments are naturally restricted to his position in the article.

Second: my grasp of the analogia entis is something like a patch-work quilt of insights from Thomas and Przywara; and since everyone has a different take on what Thomas means, and almost no one has read Przywara, it should be clear that my thoughts don't by any means exhaust what the concept could mean. Given that much, however, I don't think there is much daylight between Thomas and Przywara concerning what is relevant to the Barth debate.

Third: my Barthian credentials. I don't really have any. My reading of him has been almost wholly restricted to his work on Romans and scattered pieces of the Church Dogmatics; and within the KD, almost all of what I've read is limited to I/1 and I/2. Thematically speaking, I've addressed Barth's understanding of kenosis and some of this thought on reconciliation in classes with Randall Zachman. Practically speaking, I rely almost entirely on the extensive knowledge of a close Barthian friend (unequivocally the "Barth guy" around Duke Divinity school). So suffice it to say that I am more than open to correction, and my criticisms should be taken more as "suspicions" than demonstrations since there is always the chance that Barth has resources to draw upon elsewhere. I'm currently embarking on a directed readings course on Przywara's Analogia Entis, so over the next few months my understanding of both Przywara and Barth will no doubt deepen.

All those nuances in place, I don't think Travis's concerns alter the plausibility of my overall point: namely, that on Johnson's reading, the disagreement between Barth and Przywara over the analogia entis is reducible (at least in large part) to more fundamental doctrinal differences separating Catholics and Reformed. Johnson's essay is pretty clear on that much. His major argument seems to be that Barth never changed his mind about the analogy of being even when he began to adopt a version of analogy. His earlier and seemingly more dialectical reasons for rejecting the analogia entis are actually upheld and fulfilled by his notion of an "extrinsic" analogia relationis. And this reflects his enduring fidelity to certain Reformed doctrinal principles:

Specifically, it points us to the fact that the distinctions that propelled both Barth’s initial rejection of the analogia entis as well as his mature alternative to it stem from his recognition that he and Przywara had very different interpretations of the doctrines of revelation, creation and justification, and that these differences were the same kind of differences that traditionally had divided Protestants from Roman Catholics. Barth’s rejection of the analogia entis was not the result of a misunderstanding, therefore, but the consequence of his recognition that Przywara stood on the other side of a doctrinal fault line that had existed for centuries. Despite developments in his thought in the years that followed his initial critique of Przywara, Barth always remained on the same side of that line...To dismiss Barth’s rejection of the analogia entis as if it were the result of a mere mistake is to fail to recognize why this debate, and these doctrines, matter at all." (Keith L. Johnson,"Reconsidering Barth's Rejection of Przywara's Analogia Entis," Modern Theology 26:4, Oct. 2010, pp.645-646)

The flip side of this, of course, is that to dismiss Przywara's affirmation of the analogia entis as if it were the result of a mere mistake is to fail on the same point. This has at least some power to explain why Barthian critiques of the analogy that try to challenge it on metaphysical terms have been decidedly unconvincing: not a one has been able to demonstrate that the inner logic of the analogy results in something like onto-theology without presupposing from the start what analogy itself guards against: either 1) univocal or generic predication; 2) a Kantian epistemology; 3) or some restrictively theological notion of "being." In other words, every such critique is already committed to denying that the analogia entis is what it claims to be. Responding to Archie Spencer's repetition of the charge that the analogy of being includes God and creatures within a single genus, Fr. Thomas Joseph White rightly notes that such a fundamental misunderstanding of "one of the most basic structures of classical metaphysics...renders a serious dialogue between Thomists and Barthians nearly impossible." (Thomas Joseph White, O.P., "How Barth Got Aquinas Wrong: A Reply to Archie J. Spencer on Causality and Christocentrism," Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol.7, no.1 (2009), p.252).

The controversial part of what I've written is my questioning whether or not Barth's appropriation of analogy sufficiently maintains continuity between God and creation. Though I think at least a good deal of the scandal in a negative answer should be removed if one accepts Johnson's point: if the debate, to a large extent, maps onto denominational differences, shouldn't we expect for Catholic's to find Barth's position insufficient, insofar as it reflects that deeper fault line? Here perhaps I should clarify: my claim is not that Barth lacks an account of the inherent goodness and continuity of the created order. I acknowledge fully that he has one; a point noted not only by Johnson, but also by Balthasar. My claim is the following: Barth's mature account of analogy will, from a Catholic perspective, fail to do justice to intrinsic goodness of nature, it's relation to God, and its relation to justification. If Johnson's argument is correct, and Barth's analogy upholds his reasons for rejecting the Catholic analogy, then Catholics should expect to be as dissatisfied with his version of analogy as they are with his pre-analogical idiom.

I don't intend for any of this to be un-ecumenical, no more than Johnson himself does. I'm not trying to draw a line in the sand; rather, just correctly note that the line was already drawn elsewhere and certain things understandably follow from this. I take Johnson seriously when he writes "Consequently, any attempt to deal with Barth’s rejection of the analogia entis must address these doctrines [creation, revelation, justification] and the question of why Barth thought the differences between Przywara’s interpretation of them and his own were so crucial" (p.646).

So I suppose to respond to Travis's worries: only in an indirect and unsurprising way have I failed to engage Barth, because (aside from the listed qualifications), well, I remain unconvinced by his position. But in a much more important and interesting way I've simply confirmed Johnson's point. My disagreement with Barth should be the greatest testament to my agreement with Johnson.

In another post, I'll go into more detail about the content of my enduring suspicions...

Pax Christi,

Barth, Sin, and Analogy

noreply@blogger.com (X-Cathedra) — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 20:21:00 +0000

Keith Johnson has a thorough and well-argued piece in Modern Theology ("Reconsidering Barth's Rejection of Przywara's Analogia Entis," Modern Theology 26:4, Oct. 2010, pp.632-650) attempting to clear up some of the confusion surrounding the Barth-analogy of being debate. I imagine this is a compact version of his book-length study, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2010), though I have yet to read the latter. I highly recommend the essay: as far as I can tell, Johnson has done all of the leg work needed to pin down what Barth did and did not grasp about Przywara's teaching. One of Johnson's main arguments is that Barth did in fact understand what Przywara was saying (contra John Betz) and his later adoption of a "kind" of analogy does not renege on his early criticisms. As I see it, however, the really interesting claim contained in Johnson's argument is this: the disagreement between Barth and Przywara (and conceivably Balthasar, Rahner, Gilson, Maritain, et al.) on the analogia entis is in principle reducible to Catholic and Reformed disagreements over the effects of sin. If this is in fact the case, for Catholics the discussion about Barth's views on the matter is, it seems, radically relativized: whatever version of the analogy Barth adopts in the more developed sections of the Dogmatics, it cannot actually satisfy Catholics and cannot succeed in grasping why Catholics think it important; just as for the Barthians, any reformulation of the analogy that continues to pay homage to Catholic teaching on sin remains an idol worthy of the hammer. Which is to say, from a Catholic perspective (somewhat vindicating Betz), Barth does misunderstand the analogia entis, not because of a failure to read the primary sources, but simply in virtue of being deeply mistaken about the effects of sin on human nature. Barth would in fact be correct to realize that the analogia entis is incompatible with his Reformed position on fallen humanity, but wrong to see this as a reason for rejecting the analogy rather than as a reason for rejecting his own teaching on sin. If then this former rejection is intimately tied to Protestantism (as Barth thought), for Catholics this would only solidify the point that (flipping Barth's famous maxim on its head) the analogy of being is the most compelling reason for not becoming a Protestant.

I'll let Johnson's words carry most of the weight here:

Barth’s argument on this point stems from his conviction that, in light of sin, humans have no ability to know anything about God or their relationship with God on the basis of God’s act of creation alone. Rather, for him, human existence must be “taken up, negated and transformed” by a new act distinct from the act of creation. This is why Barth cannot accept Przywara’s claim that “revelation does not destroy but supports and perfects reason”. For Barth, to talk about human reason at all is to talk about fallen human reason. That which we know on the basis of our reason, he argues, leaves us locked in a prison of “distance, alienation and hostility”, because our reason is governed at every moment by the fallenness and inwardness of sinful human nature. To know God, therefore, we need a completely new Word. The necessity of this second and distinct Word, because it is addressed to sinners, means that the doctrine central to the knowledge of God is not creation but justification. [p.640]

Note that here the concern for a "new act distinct from the act of creation" carries not only the connotation of novelty, but of opposition. I rather doubt that Barth thought the Catholic position was simply modernism is guise; that it actually denied the distinction between the orders of nature and grace. Rather, the concern is that Przywara's understanding of what's new in the act of justification is too continuous with nature.

This is the problem: Barth believes that God’s saving action is not merely supplemental to human action; it is opposed to human action. When God acts, he argues, he establishes “a barrier against all that is our own action”, and he does so because humans are utterly dead in their sins. Sin is not merely a “disturbance” that exists at one moment but then “can quite as easily be . . . removed again” by an infusion of grace. Rather, Barth says, God’s grace “cuts against the grain of our existence all through”. The sinful human and God exist in an “irreconcilable contradiction” with one another, and there can be no continuity between the actions of one and the actions of the other. [p.641]

If Johnson is descriptively accurate here (I defer to my Barthian friend), then I cannot begin to describe how deeply I disagree with Barth's position. Surely such a hyperbolic and totalizing vision of alienation bears the mark of the Antichrist more fittingly than any version of the analogy of being. A radical equivocity, it seems, is inscribed within this understanding (dare I say deification) of the power of sin, such that any "vindicated" concept of analogy that Barth adopts must in principle bend a knee before it. I cannot abide such worship.

Like his students, Barth believes that Przywara’s account of the analogia entis fails to account for the reality of human sin, because Przywara sees the human relationship with God as a constantly-available feature of human existence that occurs because humans have their created being by participation in God’s being. For Przywara, grace must be seen “doubly”—that is, it must be seen both in God’s act of creation and in God’s act of justification—and this is why he can speak of God’s revelation in creation as standing in continuity with the revelation in the Church that fulfills and perfects it. It is also the reason why he believes that what can be known of God by means of philosophical reflection upon created human existence stands in continuity with what is known through divine revelation in the Church. [p.641]

Here, it seems, Barth- and his students- gets Przywara right. But...

For Barth, however, this construal means that human action stands in continuity with God’s saving action, because what the human can know and do naturally is perfected and fulfilled by what God reveals and does in Jesus Christ. For him, grace cannot be seen “doubly”; it must be viewed strictly in terms of God’s reconciling act in Christ. God’s relationship with humanity, he says, is not a function of “an original endowment” given to the creature in creation, but a “second miracle in addition to the miracle of [the creature’s] own existence”. [p.641]

Again, note that for Catholic theology, God's relationship to humanity expressed in the order of grace is not simply "a function" of "an original endowment" given in the order of creation/nature. It is, as much as Barth's notion, a second miracle genuinely distinct from creation: God's self-revelation in history is not just a different way of reiterating the basic truths of natural theology. The difference implied here is that of an oppositional relationship between the first and second miracles.

In sum: Barth rejects Przywara’s analogia entis because he is unwilling to accept the notion that what we can know of God from God’s act of creation stands in continuity with what we know of God through God’s justifying act in Jesus Christ. This kind of continuity is unacceptable, he believes, because it overlooks the effect of sin. This conclusion stems from Barth’s and Przywara’s divergent views of the nature of divine revelation. For Przywara, God’s revelation in Christ presupposes his revelation in creation, and the former does not cancel out the latter. Conversely, for Barth, revelation is strictly God’s Word to sinners in Jesus Christ. Fallen humans do not retain any natural fitness for a relationship with God, nor do they have anything to contribute to it by virtue of their createdness. Rather, Barth says, they will be “made fit by God for God” as God relates to them in his specific, moment-by-moment, revelation in his Word, received by the power of the Holy Spirit. Any relationship humans have with God, therefore, stems from their justification in Christ alone—not the fact that they are creatures who have
their being by participation in God’s being. [p.642]

As late as Church Dogmatics II/1, Barth has yet to address this problem, because in this volume, he still rejects the notion of an intrinsic analogy between God and the human because he believes it opens the door to the existence of the kind of continuity between God and humanity that prompted him to reject Przywara’s analogia entis. He thus argues in CD II/1 that any analogy must be extrinsic to humans—that is, it does not occur on the basis of something in the human, but rather, it happens to the human in the event of revelation. [p.644].

Barth is right to note that Balthasar signals a kind of "Christological renaissance" (p.642) in Catholic theology (though Balthasar himself found precedents for Barth's Christocentrism among Catholic thinkers of his own generation). Yet if Johnson is right, then Catholics should remain suspect that Barth goes quiet in the face of later, more theological reformulations of the analogia entis (i.e. situating the analogy of being within a more foundational analogy of faith). This is because presumably Barth would only temper his critique if he thought that the reformulations of analogy actually committed their Catholic adherents to a much more totalizing conception of human sin. This is why I think Thomists in general have resisted the attempt to ground the analogia entis in an analogia fidei, and are far less worried about the consequences of the analogy's philosophical pedigree. Surely any version that does accommodate itself to Barth's oppositional view of God's grace and human nature contradicts itself from the get-go: it will ultimately remain a dialectical "No" to humanity masquerading as an analogy of being.

I think this can be seen in Barth's attempt, noted by Johnson, to let an extrinsic analogy (based on justification, or God's covenant election prior to creation) do the work that the analogy of being is meant to do. At the end of the day, it simply can't do that. By refusing to accept an enduring analogy in the very structure of human nature, ontologically speaking, Barth's position denies the very possibility of salvation. If continuity is only established in virtue of an extrinsic relation, something that happens to humanity, everything about man qua man (qua God's creation) remains fundamentally incompatible with God; sin has gone to man's very core and clings so tightly to his essence that corruption- depravity- becomes practically definitional of man. But once you make this move, you can't actually describe God's act of justification as something that happens "to" humanity: such a description would require some principle that remains structurally the same across the two conditions, in virtue of which "fallen man" and "justified man" can both be identified as human. But this is precisely the continuity that Barth's account of sin denies. If sin goes so deep as to destroy any capacity of man for God given in creation, then grace cannot transfigure nature but only destroy it and create something else in its stead. There would be absolutely no ontological continuity between fallen and re-created humanity (the word "re-creation" is even misleading, since it would not even result in the creation of the same thing). This is precisely to deny that God can redeem humanity: all he can do is repeat the gesture of the Flood and destroy my sinful soul, and afterward create an entirely different being in my place (since this time, there can be no ark). This is, however, the gesture God promised never to repeat.

Hence, the traditional Catholic concern to deny that sin goes "all the way down." If it becomes so totalizing as to blur important ontological distinctions, then you actually end up blurring the distinction between the cross of Christ and the waters of chaos. The analogy of being is precisely what allows one to keep those lines from being blurred.

Pax Christi,

Note on the Spirit's Groaning

noreply@blogger.com (X-Cathedra) — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 19:52:00 +0000

When the Spirit prays in us, "intercedes with inexpressible groanings" as we "groan within ourselves" (Rom 8:26, 23), that voice within us crying out "Abba, Father!," I wonder if these groanings are not the echoes of Christ's agony in the garden (Mark 14:36: "He said, 'Abba, Father, all things are possible to you. Take this cup away from me, but not what I will but what you will.'"), or even the echoes of His dereliction on the cross, the words of His abandonment reverberating through His Spirit who now resides in us. For is not this Spirit, who was upon Christ in His Passion before being poured out upon all flesh, the one who enables our dying and our rising with Christ; indeed, our co-crucifixion with Him (Gal 2:19-20)? I wonder if the hidden "depths of God," which only the Spirit searches (1 Cor 2:10) include the depths of the Son's abandonment to Godlessness at Golgotha; those depths that endured and swallowed up all the sins of the world- all Godlessness- once and for all.

Pax Christi,

"Let the dead bury the dead"

noreply@blogger.com (X-Cathedra) — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 18:43:00 +0000

When I was an undergraduate, studying philosophy at Notre Dame meant studying philosophy in the shadow of Plantinga. While there was (and still is) a strong atheist/agnostic presence in the department, Plantinga's reputation served to drown out the other voices for many of the students already sympathetic to his cause. The Philosophy of Religion classes filled up well in advance of others (not much of a shocker for a school with a roughly 80% Catholic student body and a philosophy requirement for all undergraduates). This meant, however, that I was receiving a steady dose of Analytic philosophy of religion; and ever since my first encounter with it, I've had the unsettling feeling that the game is rigged within the confines of this tradition.

Take philosopher Keith Parson's recent departure from the game and his revelation that "the case for theism" simply doesn't cut it as a respectable philosophical position: it is to philosophy what intelligent design is to biology. In other words, it represents frauduent theory. Richard Amesbury has a nice post on Julia Galef's report on Parson's change of heart (yes, this is a thoroughly recycled piece). Somehow I doubt that this is an altogether unusual occurrence. Indeed, in a tradition in which over 70% of thinkers identify as atheist (and God knows how many identify as agnostic), the serious philosophers of religion seem to me like a sleeper cell that we theists have managed to embed behind enemy lines. In general, I think this a good thing. Yet while I have a profound respect for Plantinga and his kin, and some Analytic philosophers of religion have even convinced me that my innate biases against the Analytic tradition are unfounded (see for instance the interesting work of Michael Rea and Oliver Crisp), I am still plagued with doubts. I still suspect that too many bad genes from "post-metaphysical" Positivism have somehow reproduced their way into the DNA of contemporary discourse and deformed it, if ever so subtly. I suspect that there is something profoundly important lost in translation when this tradition attempts to conform the treasures of the Christian past to its strictures. In short, I worry that what these thinkers most often talk about has at best an ambiguous resemblance to what the Catholic tradition calls "God"; and if in fact it produces what Desmond calls a "counterfeit double," then it is little wonder that Analytic philosophers stop taking God and religion seriously.

I recall a haunting impression that the "versions" of Anselm's and Aquinas's arguments presented to us in their "translated" forms simply missed the point. I read Anthony Kenny on Aquinas and wondered if he was not rather writing about someone entirely different and had simply confused the names. I recall being amazed that my first philosophy teacher (a student of Plantinga's) deemed the arguments for God's simplicity (a Scholastic staple in the West) to be little more than nonsense, no longer philosophically meaningful: God must not only be ontologically distinct from and co-eternal with all his ideas, but he must be bound by them. No voluntarist, I; but I couldn't help thinking the alternatives were the result of conceptual gerrymandering. Once I discovered that the fate of the ontological argument was being decided in a debate about a Great Pumpkin, the whole enterprise of philosophy seemed a banal shade of what it once was.

The small contingent of Thomist philosophers at Notre Dame actually reinforced my suspicions. They spent a great deal of time deciphering for us some of the ways in which contemporary Analytic appropriations were re-constructing a Thomas (and an Anselm) that Thomas himself wouldn't recognize. It became apparent that the Catholic philosophical tradition in general, and Thomism in particular, continued without bowing to the many of the presuppositions that structured contemporary Analytic discourse (the growing project of "Analytical Thomism" being a notable exception). Catholic thinkers seemed either to ignore many of the restrictions set by Analytic orthodoxy, or simply deny its dichotomies; the majority refuse to play by its rules. They have generally resisted the limitations of what counts as philosophy in the Anglo-American scene. Further, Catholic philosophers should (and I think often do) harbor some healthy suspicion of the major current of Analytic philosophy of religion because of its Protestant lineage: "Reformed epistemology" does pay homage to an understanding of faith and reason growing out of Calvin. Some of its foundational principles (like granting God's existence the status of "basic belief") stand in serious tension with the teachings of the most influential Catholic thinkers. Catholics should at least ask about the extent to which one must be committed to fundamentally non-Catholic conceptions of reason in order to fruitfully engage with this strand of Analytic thought.

Simply put, there is always the danger that what these philosophers are talking about is something radically foreign to what the Catholic philosophical tradition is talking about, precisely because the former presupposes judgments on a number of philosophical debates that, for Catholics, are either answered differently or remain open questions. The timeline of conceptual moves that leads to the contemporary Analytic scene is a loaded history, and it is certainly possible that a number of its commitments contribute to an account of God that Catholics would deem "a counterfeit double:" a "God" that inevitably gets confused with one being among beings, constrained by a fundamentally univocal gaze. So I find it difficult to give my blessing to the enterprise of Analytic philosophy of religion as a whole, without doing the painstaking work of genealogy, to determine what in its philosophical history does and does not contribute to a meager and conceptually idolatrous "God." Katherine Keller's comment is one with which, in its general contours, Catholics can certainly agree:

Parsons is making an honorable choice. I just want to whisper, for readers who may feel their hearts sink at the difficulty of persisting these days, so long after "the death of God," as non-atheist thinkers: don't get trapped in the drab premises of this debate! Any theist worth her salt should relinquish "God," if that overwrought monosyllable signifies nothing but the boiled down, literalized, formalized, dogmatically tight and dreary little notion presumed by both the philosophers of religion and by the philosophical atheists alluded to in the article. "All-knowing, all-powerful, all-good", "existing" like some thing among things. Or not. Take heart! Theology is replete with livelier options, all different from each other but all free of that deadening either/or: theopoetic, Tillichian, Whiteheadian, feminist, ecological, relational, deconstructive, postsecular, polydox--even biblical! Not just middle ground, but open terrain! Let the dead bury the dead.

Pax Christi,

Depoortere on the Death of God

noreply@blogger.com (X-Cathedra) — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 23:55:00 +0000

Is the death of God still relevant for theology in our so-called post-secular age, in which even philosophers, once the great adversaries of religion, are now turning to it? I allege that it is. For, have we not all, to some degree, taken on this Protestant way of thinking? Probably, only few Westerners still share the “strong and pervasive sense of the presence of the sacred in the world” of medieval Catholics and it is not very likely that many in the West still experience the world as “one vast organic entity that [is] ultimately grounded in God as its origin and source.” Therefore, even after the so-called end of the end of religion, it remains meaningful to speak about the death of God, namely as a powerful and appealing metaphor for the fate which transcendence suffered under the impact of secularization in the West. When God is said to have died, it means that daily life in the West is most often no longer in touch with the Living One who is, according to the Biblical testimony, the origin and ground of our existence. This makes clear that the death of God is still an important challenge to Christianity. This challenge, moreover, is not merely a matter of an opposition between Christianity and secular modernity. Given the role of Protestantism in bringing about the death of God, the relation between both is much more complex than that...

Frederiek Depoortere, "'God Himself Is Dead': Luther, Hegel, and the Death of God," Philosophy and Theology 19, 1-2; p.192

A Few Notes on Christian Atheism

noreply@blogger.com (X-Cathedra) — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 20:23:00 +0000

I must admit that recently I've developed a morbid fascination with the "death of God" theology. And I have yet to determine whether this makes me decidedly unfashionable or, on the contrary, in theological vogue; because I have yet to determine whether the "death of God" movement really burned out after it's short stint in the 1960s limelight, or, in the hands of folks like Žižek (who still holds the limelight), the "death of God" theology is becoming popular again. I'm inclined toward the latter. Hegel and Nietzsche would likely take offense at the suggestion that trying to come to terms theologically with the "death of God" is just the expression of an unsustainable 60s cultural dissidence. As countless "conservative" theologians in the wake of the movement's birth quipped that reports of God's death were greatly exaggerated, I suspect that reports of the death of God's death are equally exaggerated. Many of Altizer's original claims about our epochal condition have indeed proven to be drastically overstated, and the growth of Evangelical Christianity (especially in the third world), the "theological turn" in Continental philosophy, and the rise of analytic philosophy of religion have posed serious challenges to God's supposed bankruptcy in a modern/postmodern world. But Altizer and company have continued to write (prolifically) and hone the least sophisticated aspects of The Gospel of Christian Atheism. There is also the ongoing mini-renaissance in Hegel studies, particularly regarding the religious dimensions of his thought; as well as the explicit confrontation between Milbank's "radically orthodox" approach to analogy and Žižek's own version of the "death of God" theology in Creston Davis's The Monstrosity of Christ. All in all: it seems if we are going to take Boenhoffer seriously (which we clearly do), then we ought to take seriously those who stand, however radically postured, under his banner of "religionless Christianity."

As an ecclesially-minded Catholic, and easily on the analogy side of the dichotomy, there is little on the constructive end of Radical Christianity that I could possibly recommend as substantively true. To its adherents, I will continue to be at best, an anomaly; at worst, the very enemy of the true Christian message. Despite this parting of ways, I am still tempted to give Nietzsche the road. The "death of God" puts a face on a cultural trajectory the effects of which are undeniable. God may indeed have survived the tug-of-war between liberal Protestantism and post-liberalism (especially in Catholic thought, somewhat removed from the Protestant lineage of the "death of God"); but it is clear that atheism, agnosticism, and secularism are more culturally ingrained and conceptually viable than they have ever been in history. And how full the pews are does little to affect this. As Charles Taylor notes, what's distinctive about our secular age is that God is understood to be simply one among many competitors in the marketplace of ideas. And though he has currency in some areas, overall his stock in the west is clearly down. At the intellectual level, the various "theological turns" in contemporary philosophy still frame their works of appropriation and accommodation as so many folds in the fabric of immanence (see, for instance, Derrida's 'religion without religion' or Kearney's 'anatheism'), or as revivals of post-liberal fetishes of transcendence and the retreats into ecclesially exclusive language games (Marion and arguably Barth). Surely the fact that traditional transcendence no longer has a claim to extensive intelligibility is a mark in Nietzsche's favor (as descriptively sound).

I don't of course think this to be the logic of fate- either in Hegelian fashion or in the manner of the now popular narratives of a revived scientism (Dawkins, Hitchens, et al). But one thing I find incredibly important about the "death of God" theology, and for which it ought to be commended, is it's commitment to take the theological voice seriously. D.B. Hart and others have contrasted the fathers of atheist humanism, Nietzsche especially, with the so-called New Atheists. They have bemoaned the ignorance and the dismissiveness of the latter while praising the former as a nobler generation of atheists, deeply acquainted with the theology they opposed. Nietzsche knew how serious a task it was to engage the Christian framework of his time, and despite his hatred for traditional Christianity, the "death of God" nonetheless had the character of a immense crisis for him. Such praise, minimal though it may be, ought it seems to be extended to Nietzsche's theological heirs. The "death of God" theologians believe, even more so than their forefathers, that atheism and secularism can only be understood in terms of a Christian grammar. Nathan Schneider, in an article titled "Could God die again?" (Guardian, Oct.4, 2009), notes well the difference between the "death of God" thinkers and the latest wave of popular atheists:

Unlike some of the prominent atheists of today, these thinkers knew intimately the theology they were attacking. Life after God, they believed, could not move forward without understanding the debt it owed to the religious culture that had gone before. Consequently the movement went far beyond the simplistic, scientistic concept of God common to both contemporary atheists and many of their critics: a cartoonish hypothesis, some kind of all-powerful alien. Altizer spoke of the God of direct experience; van Buren, the God conjured in language; and Cox, the God that arises in the life of societies. These are incisive approaches that, lately, have too often been forgotten in exchange for the caricature.

At the very least, it is hoped that a greater attention to the themes of the "death of God" movement might aid in creating a richer, more sophisticated, more theologically knowledgeable culture of atheism.

Pax Christi,

Ecce Mater

noreply@blogger.com (X-Cathedra) — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 17:00:00 +0000

Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. Below is a piece that I wrote for this occasion a few years back. I'm reposting it mostly because I won't have time to write anything new and I don't want the feast to go unnoticed.

Mater Dolorosa, ora pro nobis

[Today] the Church celebrate[s] the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. It is under this title that Mary was designated patroness of the Congregation of the Holy Cross, so I was able to celebrate the feast consistently during my time at Notre Dame (the Holy Cross priests put on a very nice mass at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart). I came to identify more and more with this feast and decided that under this title I would have my own devotion to Mary. In short, this feast is particularly meaningful for my spirituality. The Mater Dolorosa has been the primary image I've had of Mary for some time now.

The image of the sorrowful Mary is drawn from passages such as Luke 2:35, wherein Simeon meets the mother and her child at the Temple, and prophesies that the boy would be a sign of opposition causing the rise and fall of many in Israel; and that even Mary's heart will be pierced by a sword. The one who was not to bring peace, but the sword (Matt 10:33-35) did not even spare his mother from its edge. The heart that treasured all of the things of Christ (Luke 2:51) would be split open. Simeon, guided by the Spirit (Luke 2:25) reveals to Mary her own share in Israel's Tribulation.

There is then, of course, John 19: which depicts Mary at the foot of the cross. Here the "beloved disciple" takes the place of Jesus Himself in the familial bond with his mother. Mary, unlike the Eleven (or Ten, if the "beloved" is identified as John), remains with her son as He hangs in agony from a tree, undergoing in Himself the climactic judgment of God upon Israel. The depths of this, I surely cannot fathom. Whereas Hagar exclaimed "Let me not see the child die!" as she turned from the starving Ishmael (Gen 21:16), Mary does not take her eyes off of her dying son, even when He gives up His spirit.

I believe it is here, at the Cross, that Mary shows her true colors. It is where she is at her "most Biblical," in my opinion. In a conversation with a Methodist friend a few weeks ago, I was reminded that the Gospels are not exactly brimming with explicit, dogmatic pronunciations about the Holy Mother of God. There are even passages that seem to cast Mary to the margins: for instance, Matt 12:48 depicts Jesus calling Mary's status as family into question. Who is my mother, he asks (fourth commandment, anyone?!). Yet in John's Gospel, it is at the foot of the cross that Christ confirms Mary as his true mother precisely when He presents her as the mother of His beloved disciple (John 19:25).

I recently read Jon Levenson's fantastic book The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son. In the last chapter, "The Revisioning of God in the Image of Abraham," Levenson describes beautifully how the Gospels pick up on the ancient Canaanite myths of gods sacrificing their sons and receving them back again; though filtered, as it were, through long-standing Jewish tradition and specifically the famous story of the "binding" of Isaac. John 3:16 recalls the Canaanite trope, but refashioned in the image of Abraham. For as with Abraham, the sacrifice of the beloved son is not a matter of military conquest or survival, but a matter of love:

Here, as in Rom 8:32, the underlying identification of Jesus as the son of God has brought about a refashioning of God in the image of the father who gives his son in sacrifice. The father's gift to God has been transformed into the gift of God the Father.[1]
This got me thinking: it seems that in many ways, the Gospel vision of Mary could be seen as fashioned in the image of Abraham as well. The parallels are by no means perfect, but they are intriguing. Both Abraham and Mary receive promises from God about the miraculous conception of their children in seemingly impossible circumstances. Mary is a virgin, Abraham is a geezer, and Sarah is aged and barren. Both promises speak of the future glory of their children: kings of people will come from Abraham by Sarah (Gen 17:6, 16) and the one born of Mary will be given the throne of David and rule over the house of Jacob with an unending kingdom (Luke 1:32-33). Abraham's reaction of utter disbelief ("Will a child be born to a man one hundred years old ? Andwill Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?"- Gen 17:17) is mirrored by Mary's more moderate response: "How can this be, for I am a virgin?" (Luke 1:34). In either case, the chosen figures are called to trust in the unimaginable power of God: "Is anything beyond YHWH?"(Gen 18:14); "Nothing will be impossible with God" (Luke 1:37). And both characters come to embody the response of total trust that God will fulfill His promises: Abraham's "Here I am" (Gen 22:1) and Mary's "Behold, the bondslave of the Lord..." (Luke 1:38).

If such parallels point to a common trope, then it follows that Mary's experience at the cross can be read in terms of Abraham's call to offer his "beloved son" as a sacrifice. In Genesis, God has attempted a new means of spreading His primal blessing to the world of His creation: election. Abraham was chosen as the vehicle of God's blessing to all of the nations. In a very real sense, God has taken a risk: the blessing of all of creation depends upon the faithfulness of Abraham to his God. In this context, the story of the aqedah or binding of Isaac becomes the supreme test of Abraham's covenant-fidelity (Gen 22:1). God is commanding Abraham to bleed and burn the "only" son whom God has promised as the future of Abraham's line and glory. To both slaughter his child and believe that the promise will come true nonetheless requires the boundless faith in nothing less than this: that nothing, absolutely nothing, is beyond the power of YHWH. Abraham thus proves his faith to God, proves that he is "in awe of God" (Gen 22:12), by raising his hand against his son and truly offering him as a sacrifice; and God is able to save the child's life, returning him to his father "resurrected," as it were. God then emphatically reaffirms that he has made the right choice with this man, and reestablishes him as the vessel of blessing and future glory (Gen 22:16-18).

What then of Mary's faithfulness to the promises given her? Much like in Abraham's case, the situation presented by God is practically unthinkable. God had assured Mary that her only, beloved son would reign on the throne of Israel and His Kingdom would never fall. Yet this same son hangs before her with flesh beatern and torn, dying the death of a criminal alongside criminals. It is almost a sick joke on God's part: the throne he promised turns out to be a cross and the crown that was to be Jesus' is laced with thorns. The INRI rests above his head in the ultimate irony. If Mary is then to watch her son die and still believe that God will make good on His promise, she can do nothing short of believing this: that nothing is impossible for God.

We might then see Mary's place at the crucifixion as a trial similar to that of the aqedah, in which she too is faced with the sacrifice of her only son and must not "withold"Him from God (Gen 22:12), but rather give Him up (as God Himself does). Granted, in contrast to the story of Abraham, Mary is not actually performing the sacrifice of her child. There was little Mary could have done about the crucifixion. And yet, the scene can still be described as a testing of Mary's faithfulness to God's promise and His plan for her. This, it seems, is what Simeon meant when he told her that her heart would be pierced: the passage speaks of the sword as an instrument of judgment or testing, something that reveals what is truly in the heart. In seeing her only son suffer and die, God is testing her heart as if dissecting it with a sword. Christ taught that He would not be ashamed of those who were not ashamed of Him when he came in His Glory (Luke 9:26); the Apostles were ashamed and abandoned him. Yet Mary was not ashamed. Christ taught that only those who do the will of God are His brothers and His mother; His so-called brothers hid themselves from His face like Adam and Eve hid from the face of God (Gen 3:8). Yet Mary remained face-to-face with Him and thereby enacted her trust that God was not mistaken about her son. Mary's presence signaled her trust that, against all appearances, the cross did not prove Jesus' kingship impossible. She thereby, like Abraham, enacted her faithfulness, fulfilling the pledge of trust she made when God's promise was proclaimed to her. In a very real sense, she does the will of God for her: and it is thus only at the cross that Mary proves herself to be the mother of Christ.

Yet Abraham was stopped short of killing his son. His faith only had to stretch so far. Mary's, on the other hand, was called to prove itself even in the face of her son's death! He not only suffered humiliation and defeat, but succumbed to death! How great her trust had to be! And miraculously, it is rewarded: just as Abraham received His son back and his vocation as the vehicle of blessing was reaffirmed, so too does Mary receive her son back to life anew. Resurrected, the promise of God is fulfilled when Christ ascends to the throne of God.

The sorrows of Mary's passion, I believe, are therefore of great import. I think it is in this sense that we are called to a Marian spirituality in the Church: a call that is at the same time the fulfillment of that covenant-faith, that reckless trust in God, that began with Abraham. Through Mary's faithfulness, the blessings of Christ extend to the whole world. We as members of the new covenant are called to enact the same radical fidelity to the promises God has given us. We are, in this sense, called to live our lives from the Cross. Even our theology is meant to be, in this sense, Marian in nature. Henri de Lubac describes all theology as Theologia a Cruce: theology from the cross: "For it is the Cross which disperses the cloud which until then is hiding the truth."[2] The space which we are called to occupy is that of Mary at the foot of the cross, in her sorrow. For that is simply to embody the kind of faithfulness that God the Father Himself lived out in sacrificing His Son for the love of the world. Here, Mary is transparent to God: she is the way to imitating Him. And if we can embody that nearly senseless trust in God, we will receive the Son back again, resurrected and fulfilling the promises that God has made to all Christians. As the "beloved disciple" can be seen as the ideal disciple of Christ, John is showing us precisely where we are to receive Mary as our mother.

Our Lady of Sorrows represents for me a Mariology that is truly Scriptural and, well, truly true.

May she pray for us all, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ...

Pax Christi,

[1] Jon Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993); p.225
[2] Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, trans. Lancelot C. Sheppard and Sr. Elizabeth Englund, OCD (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988); p.179

Empire Strikes Back

noreply@blogger.com (X-Cathedra) — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 02:55:00 +0000

It seems there's not a single uncontroversial bone in Milbank's body. His recent piece over on the ABC Religion and Ethics site ("Christianity, the Enlightenment, and Islam") has caused quite a stir in the blogosphere and, in a rare feat of ecumenism, he's managed to unite theologians of all stripes in a common outrage. Here Milbank's cultural prejudices are on full display and they all but beg for the critical lashing they've received on the blogs.

The entire piece strikes me as odd: Milbank aligning Christianity with the Enlightenment under any pretext? Parsing mystical Islam and political Islam in the puzzling way he does, when elsewhere he insists that to view any religion as less than a "social project" is to concede too much ground to modern liberalism? But of course the real beef concerns the optimistic view of western colonialism that seems to shine through. After chastising those who ignore the violent and repressive streak in political Islam, he concludes:

The proper response to our present, seemingly incommensurable tensions is not to gloss over or seek to rehabilitate the past in such a dishonest way, but to analyse why exactly Islam has largely taken such a dangerous, non-mystical and often political direction in recent times.
This surely has to do with the lamentably premature collapse of the Western colonial empires (as a consequence of the European wars) and the subsequent failure of Third World national development projects, with the connivance of neo-colonial, purely economic exploitation of poorer countries.

Political Islam offers itself as a new international, but non-colonial, vehicle for Third World identity. Unfortunately, it also perpetuates over-simplistic accounts of the imperial past and fosters a spirit of resentful rather than self-sustaining and creative response to the ravages of Western capitalism.

This surely has to do with the lamentably premature collapse of Milbank's prudence. The postmodern side of him has always stressed that there only are particular narratives and traditions. Yet he is surprisingly comfortable with overly-generalized concepts ("the East," "the West," etc.) that appear more at home in reductive sociological discourse than in theology; the kinds of concepts post-colonial scholars both have in their cross-hairs and, ironically, employ all of the time. These few paragraphs put the question in stark relief: to what extent does Milbank exhibit dangerous colonialist tendencies?

First the "good news." The majority of the essay is chock-full of the kinds of qualifications I'm not used to seeing in Milbank's work: he has at least tried to make his sweeping claims less sweeping, avoiding "monolithic" characterization and citing "significant minorities." And as Skholiast has noted, Milbank is not arguing that the Western colonial empires should never have fallen; but, if we are to read him with a dash of charity, he seems to think that things would have been better for everybody had the empires collapsed more gradually. And he does get some points for explicitly denouncing the economic exploitation of "neo-colonialism." It would be a leap indeed to claim that Milbank is calling for a new era of empire.

But here's the "bad news." Milbank's emphasis is troubling to say the least. Where he explicitly mentions imperialism elsewhere, he almost always adopts a suspiciously apologetic tone: he is far more worried about empire not getting its proper due from overzealous post-colonial types than he is about, say, denouncing the hell out of its manifest sins. The brand of colonialism associated with modern capitalism gets plenty of negative attention, but his rhetoric makes it sound as though he longs for the traditional colonial powers. Of course the history of empire is a complicated affair, but isn't all of this about as helpful as saying Stalin wasn't that bad compared to Hitler? Milbank also prefers the rather cavalier idiom of providence when describing "the West" and its cultural formations; an idiom that all Christians should find themselves hesitant to invoke when judging an institution or a history so burdened with its crimes.

Adam Kotsko's criticisms are on target, I think. Adam brings up three compelling counterpoints to challenge the wisdom of Milbank's judgments. Tim McGee's comments are also helpful. In particular Tim reminds us why we shouldn't be terribly surprised by this kind of thing: when one looks at some of his earlier political writings, things start to look bleak for Milbank. One can trace this attitude back to his 1990 essay, "The End of Dialogue," republished in the collection The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology (Eugene: Cascade, 2009). Tim was a classmate of mine in J. Kameron Carter's course on Radical Orthodoxy and post-colonialism, in which we were exposed to the scaffolding of Carter's critique of Milbank. I've expressed reservations about Carter's approach, mostly due to what I perceive to be an uncritical appropriation of genealogy (ala Foucault) in service of his deconstructive reading. The hermeneutical principles that Carter offered pose problems not only for basic Christian doctrinal commitments, but also for any privileged perspective of critique supposedly immune from the same kind of deconstruction (the will-to-power does not discriminate). This also brought with it an inadequate view of the relation between theory and praxis: such that Milbank could "say" everything right "up-here" while nonetheless reducing all of his correct dogma and metaphysics to tools of an independent will-to-power "down here" (as will-to-re-colonize). Long story short, I believe the class fostered an environment in which minds were already and too easily made-up. Students often felt safe to offer rather bold and dismissive claims, comfortably abstracted from close textual analysis. My first impression of the experience was not unlike watching a farcical witch hunt: "We did do the nose...but he is a witch!!!" However I am grateful to Carter for forcing me to reflect on Milbank's attitude toward empire. One of Carter's most illuminating points is that colonialism arose with and depended upon a particular theological discourse. One need only to look at the writings of John Major or Gines de Sepulveda to find a perverse theological justification for the enslavement of the Indies (a justification against which Montesino, las Casas, and the other Dominicans of Hispaniola had to fight so ardently). It is to Christianity's potential for such abuse, and its actual abuse in history, that Milbank seems so dangerously inattentive.

In "The End of Dialogue," Milbank stresses the essential nature of Christianity's "ecclesial project," uniquely understanding itself as an international society with "deterritorializing" effects for the men, women, and children that it accepts as equal members (286). However, he also claims that "all the major religions are associated in one way or another with the 'imperial,' nomadic ventures of the Indo-European peoples" (288). Imperialism is, like the kind of universalization associated with the Christian polis, a deterritorializing phenomenon. While Milbank notes that empires tend to enshrine power "in the natural order, or in principles" and thereby create a more effective and stable brand of tyranny, he nonetheless stresses that "most empires are ambiguous rather than sheerly deplorable" (288). He also includes an odd and manifestly reductive genealogy of the fundamental difference that makes "the West" and "the East" culturally incommensurable (all in three pages!). This of course translates into two different views of religio-political power and thus two different kinds of empire: because the East has an essentially arbitrary understanding of divine and regal power, it has no resources within itself to regulate or redeem its imperial strain; but for the West, justice and the Good "are themselves the vehicles of Western imperialism." And while the latter may occasionally don the mask of domination, at the very least the Western type can (theoretically) produce an internal cultural critique (295). Hence, the antidote to the Western abuse of power can only come from within Western culture itself. Further, because the idea of an "essential Christianity" free from all cultural attachments is a myth, a non-Western cultural expression of Christianity "is just nonsensical" (292). This seems to account for both why Milbank would be relatively disinclined to listen to voices outside of the West and why it seems unavoidable for him that conversion to the Gospel will necessitate conversion to a particularly Western cultural formation. In this piece, then, one can see the foundation of Milbank's "East-West" dichotomy in "Christianity, the Enlightenment, and Islam," which somehow takes precedent over the more conventional Milbankian dichotomy of "Christianity-Modernity"

Following Tim's insight, one can also trace some of Milbank's points back to his 2002 essay, "Sovereignty, Empire, Capital, and Terror" (also republished in The Future of Love). Here again he calls out the capitalistic neo-colonialism of Britain and the US, but he can't resist contrasting this to the relative virtues of the old empires. For some reason the problem with the new colonialism that demands our attention is the uniformity it imposes. At least the "older European imperialism held the other at a subordinated distance, permitting its otherness..." -thank God for that-"even while subordinating it for the sake of an exploitation of natural and human resources." He's also concerned to note the nuances overlooked by "pseudo-left-wing American 'postcolonial' discourses"(226). I have little doubt the pseudo-left-wingers miss all kinds of nuances, but is it really necessary to apologize for traditional imperialism in order to get the point across?

This same essay provides some clues to Milbank's take on Islam. In the course of just a few pages, Milbank manages to present the Cartesian turn to the subject, "the idea of knowledge as detached representation of spatialized objects," and Milbank's greatest enemy- the univocity of being- as Oriental ideas derived from Avicenna. Medieval Islam was the "crucible" in which "protomodern ideas concerning subjectivity were forged and then handed over to the West." A "common culture of mystical philosophy and theology, focused around analogy and ontological participation- which has also tended to favor social participation- was rendered impossible" (230). To put it bluntly, the central ideas of modernity and the downfall of analogy were conditions contracted from the East. As was, it turns out, the arbitrary conception of absolute power that Milbank identified as a characteristic feature of Eastern understanding in "The End of Dialogue"(linking the absolute will of the Caliph and the will of Allah in Sunni Islam). He contrasts this with a "shared mystical outlook" in Shi'ite and Sufistic alternatives; explaining why he judges that Islam needs to go in a mystical direction if it wants to avoid extremism. Apart from eventually adopting the germ of modernity from Oriental thought, the West gets away pretty unscathed in this story; contributing to the impression that Milbank has a stake in narrating a purified history of Western culture (even in its empires).

As I've mentioned, I think there are problems going the route initially suggested by Carter, because a critique based on will-to-power just opens a pandora's box of other problems while risking some pretty serious hermeneutical mistakes. One need not open that box to effectively critique this aspect of Milbank's thought. I find Oliver Davies' criticisms the most illuminating thus far ("Revelation and the Politics of Culture: A Critical Assessment of the Theology of John Milbank" in Radical Orthodoxy?-A Catholic Enquiry, ed. Laurence Paul Hemming (Burlington: Ashgate, 2000)). Davies challenges Milbank's internal consistency: in effect, Milbank leaves himself open to the kind of tendency I've been talking about by not being Radically Orthodox enough. Uncritically adopting too much from 20th century postmodernism, Milbank (to use his own characterizations) lets in too much paganism and too much heresy. Davies notes that in his early work Milbank actually champions certain postmodern dogmas as the delayed realizations of Christian Revelation; including the redefinition of truth as persuasive power and a deep commitment to narrative incommensurability (so deep that he finds himself incommensurable with MacIntyre towards the end of TST). Davies argues that these two commitments in particular conflict with the narration of Milbank's "ontology of peace." "Incommensurability licenses a polemical and oppositional view of narrativity, setting the Christian story over and against alternative narratives." In short, Milbank severely limits the ways in which any narrative can express itself peacefully as the space in which all narratives find their fulfillment. It seems any narrative claiming the kind of privilege that Christianity does would have to appear imperialistic. Further, when Christianity must subsist as an exercise of persuasiveness, it becomes difficult to distinguish between Gospel and ideology; that is, "if conversion is the sole or chief criterion." "And how are we to judge whether conversion is deeper than the rehearsal of a narrative which in some societies has been a near universal form of cultural practice?" Rhetoric and persuasion, even masquerading as peaceful, can serve as the consummate manifestations of privilege and power (116). Davies concludes the point nicely:

Although there are also important rhetorics of asceticism, liberation and detachment within our society, the uncritical alignment of Chrsitianity and ideology through the epistemology of bare-fisted rhetoric will inevitably pose the question of whether the uncritical alliance of Christianity and "radical incommensurability" might not result precisely from a failure to interrogate the philosophical underpinnings of Radical Orthodoxy in the light of the non-coercive and empowering dispositions of the Gospel (116-117).

I find this approach helpful because it does not grant that Milbank checks-out on the level of theory and only fails on the detached level of praxis. It has the benefit of linking practical consequences to apparent inconsistencies in his philosophical appropriation.

Just my two cents. Would love to hear what people think.

Pax Christi,

Prayer of the Spirit

noreply@blogger.com (X-Cathedra) — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 21:49:00 +0000

Because the Holy Spirit prays in me (Romans 8:16, 26), there will always be an infinite excess about my prayer. The limits of every utterance, the finite shape of every word, the very boundaries of time that bind as each thought or image comes before me and carries a fraction of my conscious prayer before passing away; all of these aspects (merely) reflect, at an analogical distance, the eternally perfect Prayer of the Spirit in me- that Prayer which is His very relation in the Trinity (His eternally joyous "Alleluia" to Father and Son). Every word or image that necessarily informs and yet limits my prayer is infused with an infinitely greater meaning than it could ever bear on its own as the product of creaturely expression. More is always uttered in the Spirit's groaning; because behind (or rather within) every utterance there is the already overdetermined, already overflowing, already perfected Prayer that the Spirit IS. His Prayer is a gushing well, never exhausted, never exhaustible- and thus always impelling and inspiring more varied and beautiful praises from my lips. It is as though my prayer is never simply my prayer; it is as though my own prayer is unnecessary, a completely excessive, ornamental furnishing; an addendum that is simply a new intonation, a new play on the Spirit's Prayer. And thus it can never really fail: no prayer of the heart can ever fall short due to finitude alone. Because, objectively speaking, it is pure garnish. At the same time it is an excessiveness that is somehow my own- it is my appropriation of the Spirit's eternal Triune merrymaking. In that sense, my very being demands it as destiny and as my highest act.

One can fail to pray only when one has emptied himself or herself of love; for the Holy Spirit is love, and without the Spirit, one's prayer to the Father will be haunted and ultimately crushed by the infinite discrepancy between His Glory and the creature's incapacity to praise it. Our prayer can only do justice to God if it is the prayer of God Himself; and it can only do justice to us if it is somehow our very own.

Pax Christi,

Schindler on Dramatic Form

noreply@blogger.com (X-Cathedra) — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 21:09:00 +0000

D.C. Schindler makes a profound connection that may be obvious to readers of Balthasar (as it makes clear the transition from the aesthetics of Herrlichkeit to the dramatics of the Theodramatik), but it certainly struck me in its simplicity: even in the first systematic considerations of vol. 1 of the aesthetics, the contours of a dramatics can be intimated.

Balthasar's later, "aesthetic" use of the term Gestalt includes but goes beyond the relationship to personality, since it determines the more general, fundamental phenomenon of the appearing of any being at all. Nevertheless, he retains to the end a dramatic sense of form, even if the term dramatic receives more analogous application. As Balthasar employs the term in the opening volume of his trilogy, first published in 1961, Gestalt designates not an inert thing in relation solely to itself, but essentially a movement that already possesses in itself a tension. Gestalt is the appearing of the depths of a thing's being and as such has a twofold nature. This polarity, moreover, finds expression in the classical articulation of the beautiful as the inseparable instance of species (or forma) and lumen (or splendor). On the one hand, we have the hidden depths that appear, and on the other, we have the appearance of those depths...As such, it is not a static entity that may then be set in motion or inserted into a larger movement, but it is rather the "structurality" of event.

...

Finally, the fact that a Gestalt appears means that the phenomenon necessarily includes a subject-object tension, since every appearing implies an appearing-to or -for. We can see that this aspect also sets in relief the essential "event" character of every Gestalt, insofar as it does not exist except in the encounter between a subject and an object. The "twofold," or polar, structure of Gestalt (as appearance [1] of depths [2]) is reflected in the twofold structure of the encounter: on the one hand, the object is seen (appearance); on the other, the seer is transported (toward the depths). The movement inherent in the object in its act of expressing its depths is, in other words, met by the movement of the beholding subject, and this interaction of movements gives rise to a situation that is clearly analogous to the encounter of figures in a drama.

...

For truth to "occur," then, the subject cannot merely take the object into the mind, but must come out ecstatically to meet the object within this greater whole: hence, the dramatic structure of consciousness...Likewise, if truth is to be an encounter with a positive other, and not merely the assimilation of a "lifeless" object, being itself must possess its own inherent mystery and spontaneity: hence, the dramatic structure of being...

D.C. Schindler, Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth: a Philosophical Investigation, (New York: Forham University Press, 2004), pp. 15, 16, 26.

Pax Christi,

It was Ockham, in the library, with the revolver

noreply@blogger.com (X-Cathedra) — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 17:16:00 +0000

Since seeing Christopher Nolan's Inception, I've had more consistent and elaborate dreams than I've had in years. Last night I dreamed that I was sitting in a hospital bed with a network of wires and tubes linking my veins to an enormous life support system, pumping and churning away at my bedside. As I explained to my faceless companion, this machine enabled me to read with superhuman speed and attention, abolishing the need to stop for food or sleep. In my lap was an enormous medieval tome over which my eyes were furiously racing. My mission was Dan Brown-esque: there was a "code" I had to break in order to unveil some great conspiracy and save civilization as we know it. All of the catastrophes of the modern age, I said, actually resulted from Ockham's metaphysical errors; so to understand the evils threatening us, I had to unravel the mysteries of his thought and articulate how and why he went so drastically wrong. The fate of the world depended on it (though there were no albino monks trying to kill me).

Apart from reflecting my subconscious desire to make the most abstract intellectual work seem at home in an action movie, this episode may have been influenced by the horde of genealogies in contemporary theology and philosophy that peg Ockham as the root of all conceptual evil. I'm no Freud, but I'll bet it had something to do with me recently reading Mark Taylor's take on Ockham in his latest work, After God (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Taylor's basic argument is, in many ways, a variation on a well-known theme: secularity is an intrinsically religious phenomenon; it has a theological heritage and is coterminous with certain modern forms of religious expression. But as modernity is intimately linked with the secular world, Taylor devotes most of his book to an analysis of the modern subject and the internal divisions it harbors. He does hold that the seeds of the secular lie in the most basic distinctions between natural and supernatural, and thus in some of the oldest theological affirmations; but he believes the real inventor of the modern self is the theological Luther, not the philosophical Descartes. Ockham, however, plays a pivotal role because he is the one who constructs the theological "schema," the network of beliefs about God, man, and the cosmos, in which Luther's invention finds meaning. Ockham's voluntarism, his affirmation of the groundlessness of existence, his opposition of faith to reason, his latent empiricism, etc. are all principles without which the Reformation, and the secularism that mirrors it, would be inconceivable. As time rolls on and the modern subject is compounded in an ever vaster array of forms and frames, it becomes possible to see in Ockham the groundwork of 19th century romanticism, Nietzsche's will to power, Freud's psychoanalysis, British analytic thought, Continental semiology, and postructuralism (After God, p.60). What's most interesting is Taylor's citation of the work of Pierre Alferi (Derrida's son), who draws a direct line from Ockham's "nominalism" to Derrida's deconstruction. Because language for Ockham is general and existents are singular, real entities can't be represented linguistically. The link between words and things breaks down and "in semiotic terms, signifiers, which appear to point to independent signifieds, actually refer to other signifiers" (p.58). Ockham's theory of language unfolds a critique of metaphysics, resulting in a vision of the world as "an ungrounded play of signs," "unanchored by knowable referents" (p.58-59). Hence, Ockham was postmodern before modernity even got going. Eat your heart out, Lyotard.

That is certainly a lot to put on Ockham's plate. I have reservations, but I have to say that I don't think this line of argument is entirely wrong. In fact, I'm more and more convinced that something like this has got to be right, if for no other reason than that so many highly intelligent people with whom I agree on so many other matters say just this sort of thing. Folks like Louis Dupre have at least earned the benefit of the doubt, even if they are still hovering around the most decisive and compelling kind of argument.

Now I haven't read nearly enough Ockham to vindicate or refute accounts like Taylor's (nor, for that matter, have I read enough romanticism, Nietzsche, Freud, Analytic, semiology, or poststructuralism). But what I suspect is necessary to vindicate these kinds of arguments is a very detailed and technical analysis of Ockham's thought in the terms of medieval metaphysics and in relation to the metaphysical alternatives of his contemporaries. This kind of supplement is often the most difficult to give because it is the kind native to specialists and not to the kind of scholars likely to trace shifting ideas across centuries and radically disparate frameworks. It seems you have to become so familiar with the technicalities that if you didn't set out to be a specialist, you'll probably become one in spite of yourself. But how else could one build a truly solid case? How else see exactly what in Ockham's account is common, what is novel, and what the immediate implications of that novelty are?

And so I direct you to James Chastek's recent post on Ockham and the via moderna. In this short piece one sees the kind of grappling with Ockham that gestures in the right direction. He addresses the original Thomist beef with Ockham on a metaphysical matter in all its technicality. James gets points right off the bat for noting how improperly framed Ockham narratives often are: Ockham never identified as a Nominalist and he did not deny universals. We often simply forget why Ockham was charged with denying the objectivity of thought: his denial of the reality of categorical relations. As I understand it, when one follows Ockham in affirming only the reality of relations secundum dici, all relations are reducible to non-relative categories: either a substance or an accident as the modification of that substance. Hence without a real relation, a "to another" in the order of being that the mind's concepts can be patterned on, our signs' ability to "get to" their objects is undermined. Check out James' post for more detailed explanations.

I will quote this short piece of it, though, to support my belief that such grappling certainly can terminate in the same kind of conclusions reached by folks like Taylor and Alferi:

Thus, while Ockham is not a Nominalist, nor does he deny that the mind has true universals, we Thomists still argue that his teaching on relations, if followed to its logical conclusion, leads directly (and almost immediately) to the celebrated modern problem of objectivity, and ultimately to the post-modern denial of the possibility of any non-arbitrary connection between signs and concepts on the one hand and reality on the other.
When we notice the significance of Ockham denying universals, we see more clearly why he is the father of the via moderna. After all, the soul of modern thought is not so much an explicit teaching on universals, but a struggling with the “problem of objectivity”. For we Thomists, this problem is not a pseudo-problem, or a “Cartesian turn” that caught everyone unaware with a deadly objection, or a mental illness that needs to get purged by backgammon, kicking a stone. Most of all, it’s not a problem that we explain away by saying that the objectivity of thought is just obvious or proved by some mysterious intuition of objectivity. Rather, the problem of objectivity is simply the inevitable consequence of the (usually tacit) belief that all that exists is either a subject, or something whose whole being is a modification of that subject. Sad anther [sic] way, it is a consequence of the (usually unproven) denial of the reality of categorical relations.

Even though Ockham-lovers might challenge that characterization, it's the kind of reasoning that makes me feel much more secure in my a priori suspicion of all things Ockham.

Pax Christi,

Carmelizing

noreply@blogger.com (X-Cathedra) — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 05:33:00 +0000

As today was the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, I thought it appropriate to write something about my experience with the Carmelite style of prayer. First off, it's important to understand that the kind of prayer the Carmelites have mastered involves a serious vocation; it is a very narrow path that God calls only particular souls to walk. Climbing Mount Carmel, groping through the dark night, and exploring the interior castle are some of the shortest paths we have in the Church, spiritual shortcuts to perfection; but paths that demand a great deal. These are some of the most beautiful forms that the Holy Spirit takes when He graciously allows the baptized soul to experience Christ's crucifixion in a "hidden way." But my dabbling in Carmelite prayer is decidedly different than the experience of those called in a unique way to take the habit and bear its crosses.

However, in general, I like the Carmelite mystics because they transfigure the boring. The desert, the stillness, the aridity of just sitting in the darkness of a "night"- it is so foreign to my mind. My mind is so restless, so used to pondering and tinkering; moving from this point to that. It is a very "Martha" mind, a Heracletian stream that slips through my fingers when I try to hold it in stillness. It is like struggling with a panicked, drowning man. After reading the mystics, I am ablaze with thoughts of contemplation and the paradoxical joy of its darkness- the ideas and the images that flood the mind inspire me. My mind runs and leaps. But flooding the mind with images is exactly what marks the insufficiency of one's contemplation. It is the opposite of the process of Carmelization. There is a nearly infinite gulf between thinking about such prayer and actually enduring in its stillness. It is boring, to put it frankly. To do it right, you can't do much of anything.

I've gotten better at comprehending this- of "getting it;" its shape is much clearer to me now. Which is paradoxical: getting its shape is like tracing the outlines of a shadow. But it seems important, because I've abandoned contemplative prayer time and time again. I simply wasn't clear on what I was doing (or rather, not doing). Drawing wrong conclusions from what I thought the prayer was supposed to be like left me frustrated again and again. Thinking about the prayer simply did not map onto the experience of it. But now I find myself catching those thoughts and correcting them. Slowly, ever so slowly, I am becoming accustomed to the stillness and the aridity. One can repeat over and over again at the level of theory what the darkness of night is in it's purity; but only when one touches that purity (by touching nothing) will it make any sense (by making rather little sense). The wisdom of the Carmelites is that they recognize and articulate how the aridity and deprivation are "signs" that contemplation is happening. This is a preparation for the supernatural; this is what it looks like when grace, the very love and life of the Triune, crucified God, reconfigures nature from the inside so that it has eyes only for God (while never seeing Him this side of the eschaton).

In the concept, it is absolutely gloriously to consider; in the experience, it is profoundly unexciting. One must simply keep at it, allow oneself to slowly cross that gap between thought about stillness and stillness itself. Which again is paradoxical: "keeping at" it is to active a description. But when one spends enough time in the dark, eventually one's eyes adjust.

Pax Christi,

Stylistic Finesse

noreply@blogger.com (X-Cathedra) — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 21:23:00 +0000

Beauty herself had taken possession of me as of late, and reading Balthasar and Hart has inspired me to reflect a bit on some of the elements of theological style that they share. Theirs is a certain style of categorical flexibility, of conceptual finesse, that many Thomists find discomforting or even downright irresponsible. Many have warned that such a style is extremely difficult to pass on. while the often despised seminary textbooks in the pre-Vatican II days were arid and lacked narrative color, one of their great virtues was their tradition-friendly quality: they could easily be "traditioned" and form a quasi-universal foundation for theologians (which in fact they did for all the giants of la nouvelle theologie). Balthasar's and certainly Hart's style is more elusive, more playful. But even Thomists- among whose number I am undoubtedly counted- cannot aford to be all analysis and no synthesis. The real passion and creative power in thought- its originality- lies with synthesis (as Thomas exemplified).

What's characteristic of much modern theology is the more adventurous attempt to wed foreign words and traverse remote categories. But what seems unique about thinkers like Balthasar and Hart is that they display a thorough understanding of those distinctions and, in a sense, of precisely what they are not doing (and should not do). They compose a kind of symphony of "voices" (a favorite image of Balthasar's), playing different formal aspects of revelation off of each other: they sing the ontological, the epistemological, the aesthetic, the psychic, the mystical, etc. Though they are not always correct and not always precise, they are nonetheless deeply aware of the hermeneutic precision required to play on all these different instruments at once. They are aware that each formality is to treat the being of their object as "being as__" rather than to drown out all others with a single voice (uni-vocal). And what music they make! By linking Christology (sub ratione dei) with the analogia entis (ontology, qua being), or by linking analogy with beauty (qua delectatione), etc., they attempt, in different ways, to plumb the depths of the analogical resonances across these lenses of reality, across the various "qua"s.

One need only read a bit of popular theology today (popular, that is, in academia) to see just how easy it is to do this badly. Such a style will always tend toward the confusion of categories and the collapsing of distinctions. Catholic and Protestant thinkers alike seem all too willing to engage in such cacophony, perhaps because the distinction-making art of the Scholastics is so often frowned upon and dismissed as extra-biblical; or because concern over "mediation" has tended to shift conceptual burdens to Christ and His categories in ways that don't even make categorical sense. I am reminded of a number of responses evoked in a class I took on late medieval and early modern theology: the kinds of quaestiones the Scholastics addressed, with a great deal of dialectic rigor, were answered with a few trite maxims designed to make Christ do all the argumentative work and thereby pay little respect to the way the mind functions. "Christ is the question and consequently the answer as well"; "Christ is the only freedom we have"; "Christ is the only revelation of God"; "Christology contains everything needed for a doctrine of God"; etc. Is that it? Can this be anything but an exercise in obscurantism, taking advantage of sermonically imprecise rhetoric to generate the illusion of profundity?

The point is not that these statements are incapable of redeeming interpretations. Indeed, there is a sense in which they are quite orthodox and rhetorically rich. But to act as though such statements are their own proper interpretations-or better yet, are the proper interpretations of more precise claims- is to creatively oppress clarity. To put it another way, it is to act as though one formal aspect of the object of faith (in this case, Christology) is the only legitimate one and all others are absorbed by it. It can then allegedly supply insight across a wide categorical range without having to address the complexity of mediation. It acts as though the how is addressed by the what. But how exactly can Christ be a question? Does he have three natures now: God, man, and interrogative expression? How is He an answer? What kind of thing would that make Him? How does Christ reveal God in such a way that nothing else can be said to reveal Him? How can one begin with Christology for a doctrine of God when one still has no idea what could even qualify as "God?" How am I to know that Christ is revealing divinity, what should I look for? How could the hypostatic union make sense if I have no clear sense of how divinity and humanity differ? In short, such rhetoric posing as adequate theology fails utterly to intimate as well as to respect the analogical import of the categories in their differences (in their respective "qua"s). It therefore does violence to human thought; and all theology is, after all, human thought.

Then again, the temptation at the other extreme is a kind of Scholastic caricature: to reduce all thought to categorical parsing, making distinctions into barriers by simply stopping at those distinctions. All the king's horses and all the king's men such thinkers are. They dare not even attempt the venture that the obfuscaters are bold enough to take up. In contrast to the latter, Balthasar and Hart seem to shine. They walk the thin line, cling to the golden mean. They seem to possess (no doubt imperfectly) the sense of precision and hermeneutical sensativity needed for truly creative synthetic thought: thought that blends and mixes but in ways that do not easily dismiss the arguments of tradition.

All this is to say that such a finesse is an appealing ideal to me. In particular the potential to bring beauty into closer proximity with all of the other "qua"s that I routinely think through. For instance, beauty for Thomas is (at first glance) relatively restricted in meaning (Brendan can correct me on this). It is, I believe, entirely relative: not a transcendental in itself but the relation of a transcendental (the Good) to vision (sensible primarily but, more perfectly, intellectual). For Balthasar and Hart, beauty is a transcendental and encompasses so much of what pertains to the Good for Thomas or more generally to basic ontological structures intrinsic to being (analogia or transcendence, and all of the basic harmonies they entail). Clearly, beauty's thematic range is much wider and its import much weightier for these thinkers. And yet when one makes the necessary translation across conceptual languages, to see how their use of beauty incorporates various formalities rather than one, the different approaches to beauty's range are rather paled by all the work that beauty does so conceived. It gives us an idiom, one might say to the Thomist, to think and speak the Good with a particular depth and emphasis, a new twist or intonation. It is to speak of the Good in its primary ontological sense and not simply within the confines of a strictly ethical science. It is the desirability of being , its glory, splendor, and depth; the joy of the primal "it is good." Here Desmond speaks volumes and I dare say his philosophical oeuvre will be the guiding light for the future of this way of interpreting beauty.

Given this stylistic approach to beauty, new and creative approaches to long-standing conceptual problems suddenly open themselves up for experiment. It becomes possible, for instance, (as both Balthasar and Hart do in different ways) to posit the aesthetic as the key to modernity's deepest ontological sins. For the disenchantment of the world, the denial of all transcendence, the "death of God," the myth of "metaphysical violence," and the all-around blindness to the sacramental cosmos are rooted in the forgetfulness not just of being but of beauty. They mark the failure to think being analogously but more so beautifully, with the intrinsic charge of goodness that analogy should entail. I can imagine convincing a modern of the certain basic facts about natural law, the arguments for God's existence, even the structure of reality as such. Still, he could find nihilism in its face. He could still fail to perceive being's primal value, to desire being or God or his fellow creatures; and see only vanity. What he must learn to see is the beauty of being, and we must consign all conceptual barriers to such seeing to the flames. For only this can show him the intrinsic goodness and weight (kabod) of the real. That would be to see being as worthy of desire and awe, with the eyes of "agapeic astonishment" (ala Desmond). In short, being must shine as well as be.

Pax Christi,

Depth

noreply@blogger.com (X-Cathedra) — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 03:50:00 +0000

As a thinker, I am comfortable with the First and with the Last; with the spirits that breathe men forth and draw them to their last with inevitable gravity. I think of God. My thoughts are at rest with the Sewer and the thread that spin the fabric of reality. I prefer eyes not naked but well dressed and trained to see those tiny tears where the veil is pierced in fleeting moments of ecstasy. It is as though these eyes lust for what cannot be seen and would find the most vibrant colors a drab and empty pallet. They can see the outlines of the shadow that, in reality, is a blazing sun in a world of shades. And they only cry "Beauty!" when there is a depth of this invisible in the seen.

What we see is never simple and never simply seen. What we see is always the invisible in the visible; the unseen in the seen. Some would have us think the world a shallow pond, so deprived of depth that there is in fact no water in which to wade. But in truth there is only a glossy surface because there are leagues of depth stretching down to where the anglers abide. Some would have a waveless world in which we all walk on our waters, all the bearers of such mediocre miracles. I would rather we float and sink and dare to drown.

I recall with fondness those moments when I first really began to think; when I would gaze at the trees outside my window and see something there I had not seen before. Such moments were Christmas mornings; I didn't see a tree but "a tree!" Each leaf was vibrant with an odd an unnamed vibrancy. All the matter was prosaically arranged, the data undisturbed, not a particle out of place. But now the tree appeared to me as gift; as though my eyes were tearing through wrapping paper. I had reached a point at which I could see these objects in all the fragility of their being, and in this alone is true beauty found. To see the poverty of each thing's appearance is to see the outlines of God in its bark or in its flesh. It is to hear an echo of a divine word uttered before the dawn first broke. And in this very poverty, a paradox: the tree becomes infinitely more than it ever would be were it "simply" seen. Truly, our eyes were meant to see in this shade: to see all things as if each moment were a Christmas morning.

Were this world devoid of origin, it would be deprived of depth. It would be the two-dimensional surface many say it is. But because it has an origin, it is deep. The surface is transfigured and its flatness is that of an icon.

Pax Christi,

Orthodoxy With a Hint of Radical

noreply@blogger.com (X-Cathedra) — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 05:40:00 +0000

Once upon a time, there was no secular. And once upon a time, that thought roused me from my dogmatic slumber of theological indifference. Years ago I was intoxicated by Radical Orthodoxy and considered myself an unwavering Milbankian. The sheer energy of the movement and the boldness of its claims imbued Christianity with an intellectual prestige I never imagined it had or could ever attain. I remember reading everything in the series I could get my hands on and not understanding a word of any of it. Many of my notes that are still in the margins testify to the utter paucity of my comprehension. But it all just seemed so beautiful.

Eventually the mystique began to fade as I was exposed to Milbank's critics. And man were they critical. Reading Milbank and kin with a bit more maturity and in light of their opponents has sobered me a great deal. Now that I have a better sense of the problems that characterize the movement, I strongly resist identification with Radical Orthodoxy. I've come to think that much of what it gets right is better said by figures in the Catholic tradition (the nouvelle theologie specifically). What it gets wrong has often more adequately resolved in a Thomist idiom. Honestly, I've found orthodoxy to be radical enough without the added qualifier.

On the other hand, I have to acknowledge the influence that Radical Orthodoxy continues to have on my intellectual development. I may no longer be on the band wagon, but I am still walking in the same general direction. While none of the radically orthodox answers have satisfied me, the radically orthodox questions continue to fascinate me and inspire a great deal of contemplation. A few years ago I tried to pin down in what sense I could still be considered "radically orthodox." I came up with the following list of things that I still find meaningful about RO theology:

Analyzing the origins of secular modernity at it's theological roots (Michael Gillespie offers similar narratives)
Chief among these developments: the sundering of faith from reason as a distinct and utterly autonomous subject matter. Emphasizing the conceptual problems with nominalism, voluntarism, univocal metaphysics, etc.
A theological understanding of nihilism (in a sense inverting Nietzsche): secularism of modernity, in its peculiar way of articulating distance from God, is ultimately nihilistic; any such "zone" apart from God can only be reduced to nothing
A conception of tradition and development of doctrine that allows us to articulate the inspired authors of Scripture, the Church Fathers, and the Medieval theologians as part of a coherent and ordered (though symphonic) enterprise of faith seeking understanding (a "Biblico-Patristic matrix")
Seeing oneself as a heir of the “la nouvelle theologie” in attempting to reclaim the Biblical,Patristic, and High Medieval voices as resources to overcome modern errors
Concern for the influence of modern theological decadence for philosophy and wider culture
The need to, in opposition to the divisions of modern secularism, redefine the theological value of ontology, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, economics, social sciences, politics, culture; that is, to articulate once more how each of these forms of inquiry (and every creature) is ultimately ordered to God (though I believe the best approach to this is Thomas's)
“Suspending” these aspects of life and thought by upholding their worth over and above the void (of meaninglessness) within a central theological framework of participation, posited as the only true alternative to modernity’s territory "independent" of God; the logic of participation and ordering to God necessarily implies that all meaning and value can only derive from being properly –and I mean properly- understood as oriented to and participating in God
Thus the material dimensions (bodies, sex, art, society) which modernity supposedly values, can only really be valued by identifying their participation in the divine (though this has to be done with proper attention to the precise way in which that participation and relation to transcendence is realized)
Sympathetic to Balthasar’s placing of transcendental of beauty at center of theological method, and as means to overcome modern divisions between subjective and objective
An eye for unsung figures in the theological traditions who began to articulate opposition to the major currents and trends leading to modern theological perversion (Hamann and Jacobi are big for Milbank, but others are far more helpful in showing how resistance and alternative to modern forms can be constructed now)
The attempt to analyze modernity in terms of the pagan and heretical categories: as theological perversion as well as the rearticulation of pre-Christian philosophical forms (atomism, atheism, materialism, etc.)
In general, the emphasis on Christian Neoplatonism as providing the resources to successfully overcome the perversions of secular modernity and modern theology; even possibly articulating the rise of modern thought in terms of deviation from the best of an essentially Christian Neoplatonic worldview (here Milbank, Hankey, Marion, Desmond, show similarities)

I also recorded a few of the reasons why I part ways with RO:

Over-reliance upon or sheer imprecision in historical declension narratives: leads to self-fulfilling accounts of figures in the tradition that often warp charitable and hermeneutically precise interpretation. Duns Scotus is an example; de Lubac; perhaps Nominalism; Thomas of course. Though the historical narratives are still indeed essential to any such project of genealogy, there must be far more attention to detail, to the utter complexity and messiness, to the qualifications and limits of what and how much such narratives can do to prove a point, etc. A much more rigorous historical hermeneutic needs to be in play
Theological epistemology: resurrection of the Augustinian illuminationism and thus the potential conflating of the orders of reason and revelation is a danger; fails to address the Thomist reception and criticism of this tradition in its integration of a more Aristotelian epistemology into the ontology. Perhaps a generally greater distinction between the dynamics of ontology and epistemology is needed. But the dependence upon illuminationism certainly places RO proponents beyond the careful distinctions of Thomas and his school, as well as beyond much Catholic theology
The imprecision with regard to the spheres of nature and grace: relies upon a somewhat exaggerated account of de Lubac in holding him to be a founding father. While de Lubac’s project is, in my opinion, salvageable, and his theological supremacy in the 20^th century demonstrable, Milbank radicalizes him at all of the places where he was mistaken. The denial of the distinction between nature and grace follows from a mistaken perception that all such distinction translates into the modern separation of subject matter. The theological and philosophical consequences are not hard to show, ironically undermining Milbank’s very own concerns
Over-reliance upon post-modern philosophy: failure to carefully draw the line between what is useful in the war against modernity and what is adopted as simply an extension of it, thus committing one to the same heretical and pagan notions that Milbank wants to overcome (most evident in The Word Made Strange and parts of Theology and Social Theory). Basically cf. Wayne Hankey and Frederick Bauerschmidt on this

Pax Christi,

Rock and Role

noreply@blogger.com (X-Cathedra) — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 03:53:00 +0000

Barth has that famous quote that the only non-trivial, non-short-sighted reason for refusing full communion with the Catholic Church is the analogia entis. Recently, I've had some fascinating discussions with my Anglican comrades, and for them the only non-trivial, non-short-sighted reason for refusing full communion is Vatican I. Petrine primacy is the stumbling block of stumbling blocks. Actually, the idea of papal primacy is not nearly as unpalatable to them as the idea of papal infallibility. That is a related ecclesiological and pneumatological issue, but not the same issue. Nonetheless, the question of papal primacy more generally has been on my mind of late. As per usual, I've found Balthasar's thoughts on the matter to be illuminating. Particularly interesting in the following passage from In The Fullness of Faith: On the Centrality of the Distinctively Catholic is Balthasar's claim that some sense of Petrine primacy is presupposed not only by the Evangelists and Fathers but also by all of the "differing views" that hold Rome's papal theology to be "unevangelical and intolerable" on any given point:

Notwithstanding all the problems connected with the papacy throughout the history of the Church, two things speak in favor of its recognition within the Communio Sanctorum and its apostolicity.

In the first place (and we have already touched upon this) the Petrine element is taken for granted, so to speak, right at the beginning, in the Petrine texts of the New Testament. And of these the most impressive is not the passage in Matthew but rather the overpowering apotheosis of Peter at the end of John's Gospel of love, which begins with the choosing of Peter in the first chapter and contains, at its center, the Apostle's great confession of faith in the Lord.

The Lukan text, in which Peter is commissioned to strengthen his brethren, is no less striking than the passage in Matthew. Then there are the very many other places in Gospels, letters, and in the Acts of the Apostles. How can anyone who claims to adhere to the Word-the Word alone-fail to be profoundly struck by these texts?

In addition there is the fact that, since the first and second centuries, an undisputed primacy of the Apostolic See has been attributed to the Bishop of the Roman community. Rome had no need to demand to be recognized; rather, it was unquestioningly acknowledged, as we can see from the Letter of Clement, the Letter of Ignatius, from Irenaeus, from the sober Admonition to Pope Victor, etc. The principle of primacy had long been established by the time Rome allegedly began to put forward exaggerated claims when starting to develop its own theology of primacy. There can be many differing views as to when these increasing claims began to be unevangelical and intolerable within the context of the Church–in the fourth or ninth or twelfth century–but the "unhappy fact" had already taken place.

One can only try to restore an internal balance within the Church, as the Second Vatican Council saw its task to be; it is impossible to abolish the principle without truncating the gospel itself.

One of the major points of difference with the Anglicans has been the role that of the Petrine office in the maintenance of Church unity. Here is Balthasar on that aspect of the teaching:

The second argument for the Petrine principle is the qualitative difference between the unity of life and doctrine within the "Roman" Catholic Church and the unity that exists within all other, Christian communions. For, if we begin with the Orthodox, no- ecumenical council has been able to unite them since their separation from Rome. And if we turn to the innumerable ecclesial communities that arose from the Reformation and subsequently, even though they are members of the World Council of Churches, they have scarcely managed to get any further than a "convergence" toward unity. And this unity, as we see ever more clearly, remains an eschatological ideal. Christ, however, wanted more for his Church than this.

If we look only from the outside, the Petrine principle is the sole or the decisive principle of unity in the Catholica. Above it is the principle of the pneumatic and eucharistic Christ and his everliving presence through the apostolic element, i.e., sacramental office, fully empowered to make Christ present, and tradition, actualizing what is testified to in Scripture.

Above it, too, is the Sanctorum Communio, the Ecclesia immaculata, concretely symbolized by the Lord's handmaid who utters her Fiat. But these deeper principles could not exercise their unity-creating power right to the end without the external reference of the Roman bishop. And the more worldwide the Church becomes the more threatened she is in the modern states with their fascism of the right and of the left, the more she is called upon to incarnate herself in the most diverse, non-Mediterranean cultures, and the wider theological and episcopal pluralism she contains, the more indispensable this reference-point becomes. Anyone who denies this is either a fanatic or an irrational sentimentalist.

Pax Christi,

Balthasar on Bonaventure

noreply@blogger.com (X-Cathedra) — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 20:58:00 +0000

This summer I'm taking another crack at reading through Balthasar's aesthetics (a truly Sisyphean task if there ever was one). I don't intend to leave more than a dent in it. However this time around I'm reading Aidan Nichol's The Word Has Been Abroad (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1998) in tandem, which makes the yoke easier and the burden ever so lighter. As anyone reading this likely knows, Balthasar wrote with such a combination of breadth and depth that it is frighteningly easy to lose oneself in a single paragraph of profundity; and at the same time his arguments stretch over hundreds of pages and texts from the tradition. My typical experience reading him is like walking a straight and narrow way, then being suddenly tempted to stray down all of the ever widening paths branching off from the main road. I will often go twenty pages before I turn back and realize I have followed a siren and completely lost sight of his argument. Fortunately, Nichols does a good job playing Virgil in this journey through Baltahsar's mind: he gives accurate synopses of all the tangential meditations and keeps you moving on the straight and narrow.

Anyhow, it was only when I read through Nichols' summary of Balthasar's chapter on St. Bonaventure in GOTL vol. II that I realized what a major source the Seraphic Doctor is for Balthasar's vision of theological aesthetics. One does not need to read the Centuries or Balthasar's own Cosmic Liturgy to see traces of St. Maximus all over his work; nor does one need to read the Church Dogmatics or his own The Theology of Karl Barth to see how Barth-haunted his Christology is. But I suppose I just never realized until now how important Balthasar's appropriation of Bonaventure seems.

Overall, Bonaventure's theology is aesthetic by emphasizing both the objective and the subjective aspects as Balthasar dissects them: the Trinity is where beauty truly subsists and it is by encountering this beauty in Revelation that the soul is transformed. The revelation of the form always corresponds to the ecstatic elevation of the soul, making an aesthetic dimension intrinsic to the economy of salvation. Here Balthasar is fleshing out, through Bonaventure, his conception of "Christian experience" as introduced in GOTL vol.I. It takes on a peculiarly Franciscan flavor in Bonventure's theological understanding of Francis' stigmata: "In seeing the seraphic Christ, Francis grasped that, since he was consumed by spiritual fire, he would be changed into the 'expressive image' of the Crucified" (p.86) Envisioning the form of Christ crucified enables the very particularity of Francis' worldly flesh to become the concrete form through which the Crucified God expresses Himself. In other words, Francis' experience of grace is understood as the encounter with and simultaneous transfiguration by the form of God's beauty revealed in the crucified body of Jesus. As Balthasar writes (and Nichols translates), "the stigmata were impressed on the soul's body precisely in the soul's ecstatic excessus: just as it was there that the divine beauty was glimpsed, so it was also there that the same divine beauty took on its 'worldly' form" (p.86; GOTL II, p.273). Here, Bonaventure is simply doing aesthetics in the sense that Paul is in 2 Cor 3:18: beholding His glory transforms us in glory.

Even more enticing: according to Balthasar, Bonaventure's entire understanding of the Trinity is aesthetically conceived. The expressive relationship between archetype and image subsists first and foremost in God's Triunity, as the relationship between Father and Son. The bonum diffusivum sui is, as it were, made a constitutive element of God's very Being. Thus, as Image and Beauty of the Father, the Son is the perfect expression of the Father. Balthasar writes: "If the Father has really given expression in the Son to his whole being and capacity, then in the Son everything that is possible through God has taken on reality: if anything else outside God is realised through God, it can have possibility and reality only through the Son and in the Son..." (p.88; GOTL II, pp.292-293). All finite expressions of beauty then are fundamentally copies and intimations of the beauty exhibited in the relation between Father and Son. Christ then is "both the condition of possibility and the means to full actuality for any and every created self-expression of God in the world" (p.87). We have then the "framework of an ontology of expression" grounding Bonaventure's understanding of beauty, just as Balthasar has (p.88; GOTL II, p.287). It is a rationale for explaining the structure of finite creatures in terms of the Trinitarian relations, tracing them back to their ultimate origins. All creation is in its nature an expression of God, but one that follows and presupposes a more perfect and timeless expression in God Himself. Every expression is therefore directed to the end of God's perfect self-expression in Christ. This is, as Balthasar notes, the highest degree of Christocentrism. (p.87; GOTL II, p.283).

These themes of "Christian experience" and Trinitarian aesthetic go hand in hand, the latter grounding the former. It is in Christ Crucified that the Son's supreme beauty is revealed to a fallen world, and it is in beholding the cross that this beauty draws every finite form into God's perfect self-expression. What we have here is a unique theological light shed on the relationship of imitatio intrinsic to creation (the analogia entis). According to Balthasar, for Bonaventure the analogia entis only finds its true destiny in this transfiguration. Because God is His own Beauty and perfect Image, the analogical relations instrinsic to being itself are dynamically ordered toward a Christological consummation.

More so than with Pascal, Hamann, Dante, or John of the Cross, Balthasar's treatment of Bonaventure seems to give him so many recognizably Balthasarian themes to work with. What I find fascinating is how close this picture of Bonaventure comes to Przywara and some of the other figures that Balthasar invokes to construct an authentically Catholic Chrisotcentrism in response to Barth. With Bonaventure we see that there can be no more comprehensive Christocentrism then that which upholds and transfigures the analogical relationships of created being: it subordinates those relations to Christ's Trinitarian expression, but it does not negate them. There is Maximus here, there is Barth here, there is Denys and Przywara. What value then might Balthasar's reading of Bonaventure have for understanding and legitimizing his attempts to combine the analogy with Barth's Christology?

Pax Christi,

New Blood at ND

noreply@blogger.com (X-Cathedra) — Mon, 24 May 2010 23:38:00 +0000

Hat tip to the folks over at Memoria Dei. Francesca Murphy and John Betz have officially accepted the offers to join systematic theology at Notre Dame. News that ND was in the process of strengthening their systematics faculty reached the Catholics here at Duke ages ago, and sifting through the rumors added to the typical madness of application season. Now that the rumors are confirmed, I can safely say that the strength of systematic theology at Notre Dame his improved dramatically overnight. It is particularly fortunate for me to have two scholars- specializing in areas that deeply interest me- arriving just as I begin my studies there.

Time will tell, but it looks as though ND will be a great place to study theological aesthetics. Murphy has written extensively on theological aesthetics, Communio theology, and contemporary Thomism (Gilson in particular); Betz is perhaps best known for his work on the analogy of being, with his forthcoming translation of Przywara's Analogia Entis (tag-teaming with David B. Hart) and his essay on the aesthetics of the analogy of being. Cyril O'Regan enters the mix by way of his expertise in Balthasar, though his current project supposedly focuses on Balthasar's relation to Hegel and Heidegger. In fact, all three scholars appear to have a solid grounding in the thought of Balthasar. Providential, considering Balthasar is becoming even more of a central figure in my own fledgling thought. Fortune smiles upon me.

I'd say things are looking up for Irish theologians . Now if only the football team would win a national championship this year, we would know beyond a doubt that it is truly God's favorite university.

Pax Christi,

Good Friday

noreply@blogger.com (X-Cathedra) — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 00:03:00 +0000

As the old joke goes, Nietzsche was right only one night a year. Here's a bit from von Balthasar to mark the occasion:

To the Galatians, he [Paul] will boast of nothing save the Cross (Galatians 6, 14). That Cross is the mid-point of saving history, all the promises are realised in it, every aspect of the Law, with its quality as curse, is dashed to pieces on the Cross. The Cross is the centre of the world's history, for it transcends the categories of 'elect' and 'non-elect' by reconciling all human beings in the crucified body which hangs there (Ephesians 2, 14ff). It is the mid-point, too, of all creation and predestination, inasmuch as we were predestined, in Christ's blood, to be the children of God 'before the foundation of the world' (Ephesians 1, 14ff). Paul himself simply intends to carry out the ministry of preaching, by way of service to the reconciliation of the world to God in the Cross of Jesus (II Corinthians 5, 18). What he takes it upon himself to announce thereby is not just one historical fact among others, but that complete upheaval, that re-creation of all things, which the Cross and Resurrection brought about. 'The old has passed away, behold, the new has come!' (II Corinthians 5, 17). Here, then, is the innermost truth of history...In the Cross, then, is manifested the entire 'power of God' (I Corinthians 1, 18, 24).

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter, trans. Aidan Nichols, O.P., (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), pp.16-17.

Pax Christi,

Memos to Sinai

noreply@blogger.com (X-Cathedra) — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 19:16:00 +0000

Following in the footsteps of George Carlin, Christopher Hitchens has decided to take a crack at revising the Ten Commandments in a recent Vanity Fair article. His line of argument is standard Hitchens: pitting the supposedly commonsense against the primitive religious nonsense. The Commandments, he tells us, are long overdue for a makeover. He therefore takes up the “revisionist chisel” not only to expose the insufficiencies of the current “top 10,” but also to replace them with a more coherent, comprehensive, and comprehensible list of ethical norms. And in doing so, he believes he is simply following the example of Moses himself (who goes through at least four “versions” of the Decalogue: cf. Exodus 20:19; 32:19; 34:1; 34:10-26).

I’ll refrain from addressing things point-by-point and stick to commenting on some of the strategies Hitchens employs. In general he is concerned to mark the distance between the ancient past and the enlightened present. His arguments presuppose, and sometimes explicitly stress, the “situational” aspects of the Decalogue: the historical, cultural, linguistic, even mythical particularities that shape the text it’s found in. The most obvious targets are those Christians (fundamentalist types) who feel far too comfortable sundering the Commandments from their context and imposing them, as if it were obvious that these are moral absolutes in format of universal applicability. Suffice it to say, it is not difficult for Hitchens to complicate such a picture of the Decalogue.

Hitchens emphasizes the Decalogue’s dependence upon its context by raising a number of interpretive quandaries. A particularly haunting one for Christians is that of divinely-sanctioned violence in the Old Testament. The Commandments were given to a group that was, at times, ordered to kill whole populations (he mentions the Amalekites and the Midianites by name). Immediately after giving Moses the Law, which includes the injunction against murder, YHWH orders Moses to form a makeshift death squad and put many of the Israelites to the sword. Clearly, this is the Law of a god who occasionally threatens to visit his vengeance upon succeeding generations yet unborn; a god at home in a culture constantly at war with surrounding tribes. Hitchens also points to numerous ambiguities in the text. He has a particular point here against those who try to universalize the Decalogue simplistically. What does taking the Lord’s name in vain mean? What standard can we use to determine this? In this case, it’s quite helpful to appeal to the situational aspects (the historical-linguistic context) to know what “taking names in vain” meant for the ancient Israelites.

More specifically, such ambiguities can only be enlightened by appealing to the history of encounter with God that preceded and frames the institution of the Decalogue at Sinai. God’s action during the Exodus, in freeing Israel from Egyptian slavery, is a thread that runs throughout the Ten Commandments. A reminder of this precedes the actual stipulations of the Decalogue. The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes it well (CCC, 2057): “The Decalogue must first be understood in the context of the Exodus, God's great liberating event at the center of the Old Covenant. Whether formulated as negative commandments, prohibitions, or as positive precepts such as: ‘Honor your father and mother,’ the ‘ten words’ point out the conditions of a life freed from the slavery of sin. The Decalogue is a path of life…” It is important to note that the commandments are actually the terms, the treaty as it were, of the covenant between God and Israel. It resembles in form ancient Near Eastern treatises between Suzerain and vassal. The commandments only take on their full meaning within the covenant. Analogously, a grasp of Jewish creation theology (the understanding of God’s action in creation) is necessary for understanding the dynamics of the Sabbath (Commandment 3).

And yet for Hitchens, pointing to the situational nature of the Commandments also exposes their irrelevance for us; or rather their evident failure as a contemporary ethical code. Because they only make sense in an ancient tribal context, they can no longer mean anything much for us. Trying to apply them as ethical norms not only makes for drastically insufficient and seemingly arbitrary morals, but also for a painfully unimpressive picture of God. The criticisms of God’s hypocrisy, arbitrariness, and downright cruelty seem to insist upon themselves. If Hitchens can uncover such a god in the Decalogue, then its moral precepts aren’t worth the stone they’re chiseled on.

Here the atheists gain a lot of ground against the fundamentalists. These are Christians who tend to flout the tradition of Scriptural interpretation and place the entire burden of authority upon the text itself. Fundamentalists have had the most trouble dealing with context and all that it implies. But by comparison the Christian theological tradition hasn’t. This is a tradition of reflection upon Revelation that despoils the "Egyptian gold" of reason; an approach that is (in all its diversity) profoundly un-fundamentalist. It has developed over time, and in the tempering fires of controversy, very different and subtle ways of guiding how sacred texts are to be read. It is also a tradition that has been wrestling with the kinds of troubling questions that Hitchens asks. Arguably Hitchens’ greatest flaw is his failure to engage this tradition of interpretation and the different possibilities it makes available. It is, we might say, an alternative way around the pitfalls of fundamentalism, and highlighting this distinction allows us to shift the discussion to what’s really at stake; allowing the more “fundamental” disagreements between Hitchens and the Christian tradition to come to light.

For instance, Hitchens thinks the “situational” aspects of the text reveal that the Decalogue is evidently “man-made.” This is a claim that Christians should have no problem with. They simply deny that it is only man-made. Here one sees the major beef between how Hitchens reads Scripture and how Christian theologians understand God’s act of self-revelation in the Scriptural texts. The meaning of a particular text in Scripture has always been understood to exceed the particularities informing the human authors, even though that meaning may be expressed in and through those particularities. God and the truths about Him are the kinds of "things" that transcend every finite dimension of time and space, though time and space always mediate our knowledge and encounter with Him/them. The fact that God is revealing Himself ensures that meaning will never be reducible to the "man-made" side of things. In fact, these represent principles (excess of meaning) analogous to those that many theorists believe apply to texts as such, whether inspired or not (Hans Georg Gadamer stands out). In this sense, Hitchens is on to something when he points to “revisionism,” and the fact that these teachings may not be “set in stone.” But the proper way to do this "revising" is one always guided by a history and tradition of interpretation: Hitchens should be dealing with the likes of John Henry Newman and his theory of the development of doctrine rather than fundamentalist straw-men. Such a development can be found within the Old Testament itself, particularly in the Isaiah tradition. The sacred authors known as Second and Third Isaiah took up the idiom and the theological themes of First Isaiah and applied them to the different contexts in which they found themselves. The meaning of the prophetic text was thought to possess an excess and a plasticity in its depth and application; it developed –was “revised”- but in a way guided by the history of interpretations deemed authoritative by the community of faith.

The differences come to the fore in a few claims Hitchens makes. For instance, he says (in his accompanying video) that Catholics have had problems with the First Commandment’s prohibition of graven images: because, after all, where would all of the statues and icons be if we took it seriously? However, Hitchens fails to address how the Catholic and Orthodox Churches have traditionally interpreted the teaching on graven images in relation to Christology, Mariology, and idolatry. Nor does he mention the images that God allowed the Israelites to make even within the Old Testament narrative. Nowhere does he address the distinction between adoration and veneration. Hitchens also seems to think it’s obvious that God must have implanted the desire for our neighbors’ “things” (including his wife) into us, the way humans program chess-playing robots. Therefore the Tenth Commandment reflects an inconsistency between God's creative act and His subsequent demands. Yet this claim doesn’t address Christian arguments about the origin of sin, or even the ethical differences between desiring goods and the order or disorder of those desires in the individual. Hitchens makes the same move (“why would God create us this way if…”) with questions surrounding homosexuality.

Despite the flaws in his analysis, Hitchens’ chisel work can be helpful for Christians. The commonsense approach that he thinks clearly exposes the mortal wounds in Christianity actually gives voice to the kinds of simple questions that many modern men and women (Christians among them) have about the Ten Commandments. Even questions about how God reveals Himself in and through the particularities of an ancient desert tribe, with all of its distance from us, are important questions for Christians to address. What about those particularities cannot be applied to our situation? What about them demands that we conform our concepts and standards to them? How do the Commandments amount for us to what Jesus thought them to be: “loving thy neighbor as thyself?” How can they fit into a development of doctrine that is at once faithful to their truth but expands upon their hermeneutical limitations? Further, how are contemporary Christians supposed to deal with divine violence in the Old Testament? Note that I don’t intend to offer specific answers to these questions, but they are important questions central to the theological tradition. Acting as though no one ever thought of these before; that Christians haven't been reflecting on them for centuries upon centuries; and that simply asking them amounts to a "gotcha!" moment in intellectual history, is just a way to expose one's own ignorance. Nonetheless, Hitchens highlights these questions, helps remind us that these need to be wrestled with and can’t be skipped over to simply “get at” the raw facts that the Ten Commandments display. The "Good enough for Moses, good enough for me!" approach is an even better way to expose one's ignorance.

Now Hitchens would likely question the legitimacy of a tradition of interpretation and its supposed authority when determining the meaning of Scripture. But this is something Hitchens simply does not address, even though it is what guides how orthodox Christians understand and appropriate the Ten Commandments. Fundamentalists also fail to address the role of tradition, and this explains why Hitchens’s deconstruction seems so eminently fitted to them. But he means it as a challenge to all who take the Decalogue seriously. So Christians (or at least theologians) should be able to articulate the truth and the advantage of four things: 1) an excess of meaning in Scripture; 2) what makes a particular history and tradition of interpretation legitimate and superior to others; 3) what makes a theory of the development of doctrine both faithful to the text while also expanding upon hermeneutical shortcomings; and finally, 4)- the one that may be most important- Christians should be able to articulate good reasons for believing that all texts- texts as such- possess meaning that goes beyond the intentions of the author. Addressing these issues is now part of the duty Christians have, expressed in 1 Peter 3:15: “always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence” (NAB).

As a gesture of good faith and that "gentleness and reverence" that Peter mentions, Christians could certainly think about adopting Hitchens’s eighth commandment as an amendment…

Pax Christi,

The Limits of Idealism for Christian Thought

noreply@blogger.com (Brendan Sammon) — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 15:17:00 +0000

Idealism is a rich term that signifies a varied approach to thought and being. In Plato, for example, it named that aspect of his system that posited a greater reality to the Ideas than to the things in the world. Plotinus and his posterity would amplify this so much so that matter was considered, in itself, evil.

Augustine's inward turn - a largely unprecedented move in Christian thought - was an heir to the idealist tradition that preceded him. If the Ideas are the most real phenomenon that confront the human mind, then it is a small second step to enter that mind and explore the divine presence within. This interiority would influence a whole lineage of thinkers from Anselm, to Albertus Magnus, to Aquinas, Cusanus, Ficino, and many others.

In Modernity, especially after Descartes and Kant, idealism is taken in a slightly different direction, at once embodying a return of sorts to ancient idealism - in its attempt to "free" itself from its Christian doctrinal fetters - as well as instituting a degree of novelty insofar as it saw reality as a subjective union of all things.

Idealism, we might say, emphasizes the priority of mind over being, thought over things, seeing in the human mind and thought a power to better the world. Looking around today, one can see so much of the good that has been brought about from this kind of thinking.

But Idealism harbors within itself a dangerous temptation that has lured even the greatest of its proponents. This danger is best understood when idealism is contrasted with its 'other,' which for lack of any working term, we will call 'extra-mental realism'. Simply put, extra-mental realism maintains that the world of things is the most advantageous starting point for thought. This is because, as prior to thought, the extra-mental world provides to the mind all its resources. Aristotle is perhaps the best known advocate of this approach, and his influence has been equally widespread.

The dangerous temptation in any idealism can be summed up in one word: absolutization. It is quite a common step for the idealist to absolutize an idea so much that the idea is judged to be real. Plato's world of forms is one example: he maintained that universal forms, which accounted for the unity of any number of similar entities, had a real existence somehow independent of the many entities through which that universal appeared. Another example is Plotinus's One. In this case, the idea of unity is absolutized into a first principle and used as the norm for measuring all other principles. Voluntarism, which absolutized the will emphasizing divine volition, is yet another example of this.

Now, for the extra-mental realist, there is no temptation to absolutize since in the world of things, nothing presents itself as absolute. The extra-mental realist does recognize that somehow there are absolutes, but he is cautious about circumscribing them in an idea. Since the idealist moves among the limitless character of his ideas, there is no restraint on the impulse to absolutize. And here is where we see its limits for Christianity.

All idealism in one way or another begins with the absolutizing of an idea, which cannot be done without implicating – knowingly or unknowingly – a positive conceptualization of that which is absolutized. Even in the case of Plotinus’s One, there is the absolutization of unity, which must first be conceived in a positive fashion before undergoing its absolutization. Christian thought in contrast adopts a position of agnosticism; there is no question that God is a unity beyond all unities, but it is for precisely this reason that we cannot absolutize our idea of unity – Divine Unity is the archetype of all unity, and this is not available for our conceptualization.

The most we can say with respect to the absoluteness of God's unity is that the meaning and nature of this unity can only be more and more illuminated inasmuch as God’s own self-disclosure provides glimpses. Thus, the impulse to absolutize our idea of God's unity is tempered by the patient contemplation of how this is revealed in and through extra-mental reality. There is an unknowing that will always move in concert with this contemplation when patience is involved - patience is required when dealing with the ambiguity, the unknown, the over-intelligible.

Idealism posits no such unknowing, even if, as in the case of Plotinus, unknowing, the way of negation - the apophatic method - is posited as a method for justifying the absolutization. Plotinus's One will always only be a projection of the human idea of unity through the lens of absolutism, generating a false god. In this case, the apophatic approach is enlisted not to establish the truth of the One but rather the contours of the projected idea. Why? Because the apophaticism is posterior to the already assumed idea of what exactly constitutes absolute unity. And so in the end, the apophatic move opens the door to a nihilism inasmuch as it must negate even itself as it slowly comes to realize that the One it is trying to illuminate is nothing but an idea projected from the human mind.

Christian thought, of course, also employs an apophatic method. But where this is found properly used (e.g., Dionysius, Aquinas, et al.) it is always done in light of an extra-mental realist reception of divine self-disclosure. This is one reason why the Plotinian One never became identified as the Christian God - it was not rooted in the real. And this is why idealism, for all its value, is limited in its adoption by Christian thought.

The God Who Is Beyond Predication Transcends Human Logic

noreply@blogger.com (Henry Karlson) — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 16:19:00 +0000

Cross Posted on Vox Nova (I thought this was good for both blogs).

Humanity is created in the image and likeness of God. This allows us to understand something about God by understanding ourselves. "The rational man who has prepared himself to be set free through the advent of Jesus, knows himself in his intellectual substance. For he who knows himself knows the dispensations of the Creator and all that He does among His creatures."[1] But we must not take what comes out of such self-understanding too far; being in the image and likeness of God allows us to understand God by analogy, and all analogies include a similarity and a distinction. The distinction between God and humanity is infinite in its depth, so that we must always understand that what we come to know about God through ourselves is at once like God and yet infinitely unlike God at once. We are bounded beings while God is unbounded and beyond all being. At best, what we see in humanity can only present to us a confused, imperfect representation of God while not actually demonstrating what God really is.

Now, it is well known in theology that traces of the Trinity can be found in many levels of the human condition. For example, St. Augustine shows us in his De Trinatate how the psychology of the human person is Trinitarian, while reflections on God as love, such as in the writings of Hans Urs von Balthasar, show us how familial relations reflect God's Trinitarian nature as well. St. Gregory Palamas, in his own psychological fashion, sees human reason, the human logos as analogous to the Divine Logos in the Trinity, but reminds us that we must not take this analogy too far -- we must not confuse the Divine Logos with the human logos and bind it by human reason:

Neither is the Divine Logos equivalent to the reasoning power in our mind, even though this is soundless and operates entirely according to impulses that are bodiless. For the reasoning logos, as a faculty dependant on us, requires for its functioning successive moments of time, since it emerges gradually, proceeding from an incomplete starting-point to its complete conclusion. Rather, the divine Logos is similar to the logos implanted by nature in our intellect, according to which we are made by the Creator in His own image and which constitutes the spiritual knowledge coexistent with the intellect.[2]

Human logic is limited and bound; it is a tool which has been established through several centuries of development and refinement, but yet, it is still a tool, and its limitations are easily discerned by those who examine its features. The fact that logic can take various given truths, and in each case, come to a conclusion which might not be in accord with the conclusions which come out of other truths which we also know indicates the frail nature of the tool. Both are logically correct, and we can "understand" both as being true, even if we discern in the "and" which connects the two an antinomial paradox which our reason cannot overcome. This is especially true with revealed truths about God, because, as we shall see, God is beyond all being and predication.

But we do not have to explore divine truths to discern a problem with logic. Pavel Floresnky in his work, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, shows us how the rules of logic themselves are beyond the realm of logic by pointing out what happens when we discern any given A. Any A gives to us a problem which logic cannot overcome because it shows us that we have to go beyond the dictates of reason to receive that A:

To explain A is to reduce it to 'something else,' to not-A, to that which is not A and which therefore is not not-A. It is to derive A from not-A, to generate A. And if A really satisfies the demand of rationality, if it is really rational, i.e., absolutely self-identical, it is then unexplainable, irreducible 'to something else' (to not-A), underivable 'from something.' Therefore, rational A is absolutely non-reasonable, blind A, unstransparent for reason. That which is rational is non-reasonable, non-comfortable to the measure of reason. Reason is opposed to rationality, just as rationality is opposed to reason, for them have opposite demands. [3]

Human reason allows us to explore many subjects, gain great insight into the world, but it does so practically. We see in the development of the empirical sciences what such practicality means: it is a never-ending search for perfection, which at once brings us into greater knowledge but yet, conversely, the more we come to know the more we realize we do not know. The intellect, a gift from God to us to be sure, is but human, and what it establishes is but human, and can never perfect us, nor lead us to discover the inner reality of anything which surrounds us. There is always something outside of our grasp for anything we explore, always something which cannot be reduced to the words we prescribe to it. And, we must realize, that our reasoning skill, however, good, has been hindered by sin, leading us to even further imperfections to our knowledge:

Mere skill in reasoning does not make a person's intelligence pure, for since the fall our intelligence has been corrupted by evil thoughts. The materialistic and wordy spirit of the wisdom of the world may lead us to speak about ever wider spheres of knowledge, but it renders out thoughts increasingly crude and uncouth. This combination of well-informed talk and crude thought falls far short of real wisdom and contemplation, as well as of undivided and unified knowledge.[4]

Since logic is itself a science developed by fallen humanity, it too has the imperfections of sin infecting its creation, and therefore, hampering its use and functionality in discerning the all-embracing truth behind all logic; our logic is, in effect, tainted by our egoism; it has little difficulty in dealing with individual entities cut up from each other, but it has difficulty in embracing the unitive pan-unity of creation. It is individualistic, not Sophiological.

Thus, human reason, both frail in its own limitations, is even worse off due to sin, and this provides us a double need for divine revelation. We need it to show us and lead us to the fullness of truth which transcends human logic:

It was necessary for man's salvation there should be a knowledge revealed by God besides philosophical science built up by human reason. Firstly, indeed, because man is directed to God, as to an end that surpasses the grasp of his reason: "The eye hath not seen, O God, besides Thee, what things Thou hast prepared for them that wait for Thee" (Isaiah 64:4). But the end must first be known by men who are to direct their thoughts and actions to the end. Hence it was necessary for the salvation of man that certain truths which exceed human reason should be made known to him by divine revelation. [5]

But of course, this does not mean we are not to explore it with our fallible ability; rather, what is given to us is thus given to human reason and is to be explored, leading us to a greater understanding of the truth. "Although arguments from human reason cannot avail to prove what must be received on faith, nevertheless, this doctrine argues from articles of faith to other truths."[6] But when we do this, we must understand some things about revelation: what God reveals is that which is capable of being understood in a human way:

Now these modes of generation being well known to men, the loving dispensation of the Holy Spirit, in delivering to us the Divine mysteries, conveys its instruction on those matters which transcend language by means of what is within our capacity, as it does also constantly elsewhere, when it portrays the Divinity in bodily terms, making mention, in speaking concerning God, of His eye, His eyelids, His ear, His fingers, His hand, His right hand, His arm, His feet, His shoes , and the like—none of which things is apprehended to belong in its primary sense to the Divine Nature,— but turning its teaching to what we can easily perceive, it describes by terms well worn in human use, facts that are beyond every name, while by each of the terms employed concerning God we are led analogically to some more exalted conception.[7]

The fullness of truth evades human comprehension, whether we talk about revelation, or revelation combined with human reason. Revelation itself is given to us in analogous terms. And since what we contemplate from revelation is derivative, and is expressed through human words and human logic, what we say will tend to reveal itself as being even more imperfect. At once it will lead us into a deeper appreciation of the truth, while at the same time, because of the imperfections of all analogy, it will lead us into greater and greater paradoxes which show the limitations of the analogies which are used -- we must in those situations understand that our theological understanding is pointing to something greater than the words we use. The literal understanding of what we speak will be riddled with paradoxes, antinomies which logically follow from revelation, and can cause the one who is incapable of following the spirit of what is said to turn around and reject what has been revealed. Only once we understand that truth transcends paradoxes of theological constructions do we move beyond the games of children which seek to prove faith is irrational: it is super-rational, and intellectual, and not limited to the tools of human creation. This, then, brings us to God, who is beyond all being, beyond all predication, beyond all affirmation and negation, and therefore, beyond human logic:

There is no speaking of it, nor name nor knowledge of it. Darkness and light, error and truth -- it is none of these. It is beyond assertion and denial. We make assertions and denials of what is next to it, but never of it, for it is both beyond every assertion, being the perfect and unique cause of all things, and by virtue of its preeminently simple and absolute nature, free of every limitation, beyond every limitation, it is also beyond every denial. [8]

This is in accord with our understanding of God as being perfectly simple, as St. Albert the Great brings out from his commentary on Dionysius:

Or we can say that even the reality of these names refer to does not justify their application to God. In any predication you have to have a subject and something of which it is the subject, something that is, that is in it and be taken with it in some sense, and also there has to be some sort of relationship between them that makes one of them a proper subject and the other a proper predicate; you cannot predicate absolutely anything of absolutely anything. But God is utterly simple, and so in him it is not true that one thing is in another or that one thing is the subject of another, therefore the actuality reality of God transcends any possibility of there being subjects and predicates. This means that no proposition can truly and properly be formed about God, as the commentator shows on Metaphysics XI; when we talk about God, we use borrowed words and both subjects and predicate refer to the same reality and the distinction between them is not a real one, but only one which we make in our understanding on the basis of God's relationship to things outside himself.[9]

We can talk about God on a human level, but we must not confuse our talk with being more than mere analogy, and we must always understand the limitations of our talk. We can describe God using what God has revealed to us, and describe what logically follows from such revelation, but yet -- we must in the end deny, in the absolute sense, what it is we predicate while affirming the activity which we have done is beneficial, because we cannot talk about God without such activity: "Whatever one can attribute to him in this manner is, in a sense, all incorrect, and its negation is true. Consequently one could call him an eternal nothing. And yet, if one is to speak of how unsurpassable or even above comprehension something is, one still has to create names for it."[10]

The paradoxes which develop have led many authors, like St Bonaventure and Nicholas of Cusa, to reflect upon the coincidence of opposites in God. Here we see opposites being united as one, showing us, of course, the limitation of human constructs such as the "law of non-contradiction." Again, this is not to say the law has no value and use, but that there is a time and place for it, and a time and place where it is shown to be transcended and no longer relevant. Since God transcends all predications, all affirmations and negations, it is quite clear that God transcends such a human construct and has, for human reason, all kinds of paradoxical contradictions. Indeed, these contradictios appear to lead us to ends which are far apart from each other. And yet, in the infinite God, they are found as one. "Our reason falls far short of this infinite power and is unable to connect contradictories, which are infinitely distant."[11]

The kinds of games which are played about omnipotence, omniscience, trying to show self-contradiction in such notions, are all reflections on the limitations of the human imagination. They are predicated on a false assumption of human reason and its abilities to know truth. Instead, we must appreciate that God is beyond all human logic, even if human logic can help us explore the truth about God. Nicholas of Cusa provides us a good analogy of the problem which lies before us:

For the intellect is to truth as [an inscribed] polygon is to [the inscribing] circle. The more angles the inscribed polygon has the more similar it is to the circle. However, even if the number of its angles is increased ad infinitum, the polygon never becomes equal [to the circle] unless it is resolved into an identity with the circle. Hence, regarding truth, it is evident that we do not know anything other than the following: viz., that we know truth not to be precisely comprehensible as it is.[12]

The truth of God is outside of our comprehension, though we understand something about God through analogy, and so we must not say we are incapable of talking about God. Rather, our talk is limited, and will show those limitations the more we explore God through human reason. We grasp after God. We experience him in our lives. Although we will truly see him in the beatific vision, what we understand will not be God but something less than God,[13] always drawing us further and further in to the transcendent glory of God as we rise up and become more and more like God in our eternal theosis. For this is the reason that God became man -- so that we can become God participate in the unbounded divine life.

Footnotes

[1] St Antony the Great, The Letters of Saint Antony the Great. Trans. Derwas J. Chitty (Fairacres, Oxford: SLG Press, 1991), 9. Or, as he says in another letter, "For he who knows himself, knows God: and he who knows God is worthy to worship Him as is right," ibid., 12.

[2] St Gregory Palamas, "Topics of Natural and Theological Science and on the Moral and Ascetic Life: One Hundred and Fifty Texts" in The Philokalia: The Complete Text. Volume IV. Trans. G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 360-1.

[3] Pavel Florensky, Pillar and Ground of the Truth. Trans. Boris Jakim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 24.

[4] St Gregory of Sinai, "On Commandments and Doctrines, Warnings and Promises; on Thoughts, Passions, and Virtues, and also on Stillness of Prayer: One Hundred and Thirty-Seven Texts" in The Philokalia: The Complete Text. Volume IV. Trans. G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 212.

[5] St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica. Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Bros. edition, 1947), I q.1 a1.

[6] ibid., I, q.1 a.8.

[7] St Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius in NPNF2(5), 204.

[8] Pseudo-Dionysius, "Mystical Theology" in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works. Trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 141.

[9] St. Albert the Great," Commentary on Dionysius' Mystical Theology" in Albert & Thomas: Selected Writings. Trans. Simon Tugwell, O.P. (New York: Paulist Press, 1988), 193.

[10] Bl. Henry Suso, "Little Book of Truth" in Henry Suso: The Exemplar, With Two German Sermans. Trans, Frank Tobin (New York: Paulist Press, 1989), 309.

[11] Nicholas of Cusa, On Learned Ignorance. Trans Jasper Hopkins (Minneapolis: The Arthur J. Banning Press, 1990), 54.

[12] ibid., 52.

[13] "Someone beholding God and understanding what he saw has not seen God himself but rather something of which has being and which is knowable. For he himself solidly transcends mind and being. He is completely unknown and non-existent. He exists

beyond being and he is known beyond the mind," Pseudo-Dionysius, "Letter 1" in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works. Trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 263.

A Contemplation on the Beauty of Ugliness

noreply@blogger.com (Henry Karlson) — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 11:48:00 +0000

The relationship which unites the three transcendentals as one (goodness, truth, and beauty) is fairly well known to one who has studied philosophy or theology in any depth. It is also true that beauty is the least understood and discussed transcendental. There are obvious reasons for this, and yet, its relationship with the goodness and truth should give us an ability to discuss aspects of beauty without touching the particular issues and questions which come out of aesthetics.

As an example, we know that falsehood and evil, at their root, use and employ truth and goodness as a means to convince people to follow their ways. Heresy, it is said, is just a slice of truth taken out of context and used to subjugate and ignore many other elements of truth. We desire to do some evil, it is said, out of an inordinate desire for some limited aspect of the good, as St. Augustine beautifully demonstrated in his On Free Choice of the Will. In other words, we do not desire the evil, but some good we see in that evil, however limited that good is, which we want. The evil is in taking the good out of its proper context and setting and trying to subvert the natural order to get it. This is not to say we might not understand there is evil involved in our actions; often, we know there is. But we think the good is worth the price, and there we see consequentialism is involved in our sin.

But this then leads us to the beautiful. Can we say something similar to what we have said about truth and goodness as about the beautiful? Is ugliness merely some distorted and misappropriated beauty? Yes. Oscar Wilde was on to a great truth with Dorian Gray. As he showed us, and as this reveals to us, that which is ugly can also be beautiful. Satan did not lose his beauty -- he was beautiful, and he still is beautiful. But now, in his fallen modality, that beauty is distorted when compared to what it should be. When he is seen in that light, his ugliness is quite apparent. However, for those whose vision is impaired, Satan can still appear in the glory he had at creation, a beauty which makes him appear as an angel of light.

Understanding how even what is ugly can also beautiful should help us understand even more the allure of sin. For the sinner, they see its beauty, and that is why they fall for its charms again and again. The more the muck of sin lies upon us, the more it appears to be the norm, and so the more our vision will be impaired and incapable of seeing the ugliness of sin. No wonder the habit of sin is difficult to overcome.

The Ordo Caritatis and Giving to the Poor: Yet Another Example of How Political Ideology Distorts the Gospel

noreply@blogger.com (Brendan Sammon) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:04:00 +0000

A panhandler approaches you asking for money. What is your duty as a Christian? Back on October 4, 2008 I along with my wife and one-and-a-half year old were at a mass, at St. Mary’s Church in Old Town, Alexandria where the celebrant, Fr. Robert Ruskin I believe, was preaching an anti-abortion message that I very much endorse. He also believed himself to be preaching a pro-life message. He wasn’t.

Instead, he was advocating a right wing, republican ideology disguised as authentic Catholic orthodoxy – a mistake (if not a heresy) that is happening more and more on both sides of the aisle. Apparently, this particular priest, tragically, had not yet been exposed to the idea that right wing and left wing ideologies do not exhaust the possibility of mediating the Gospel of Christ.

Now, normally, I harbor a high degree of toleration for those who wrongly believe that Catholic orthodoxy is somehow synonymous with right-wing, or left-wing, ideology. This priest pushed that toleration to the brink. He defended capital punishment, and even pursued justifying the Iraq war. But as much as I vehemently disagree with these positions, I am able to understand one who tries to defend them with Christian thinking.

However, he went further. In trying to distinguish between abortion and other acts that take life, he focused on the term ‘innocent’ even though he never actually justified his understanding of this term by proposing a definition. Instead, he simply gave examples of situations in which life was not innocent. The criminal who had taken a life; the assailant in a moment of assaulting another; the enemy combatant in a war…Again, all examples of instances where he believed taking a life was not violating the pro-life position. Fine.

But then he went on. What about the panhandler on the street begging for some money? Here is where he lost me, though that is putting it lightly. His explanation actually made me ill. Had there been even a shadow of a donatist in me, I would have marched my family right out in the middle of the homily. Thankfully, the beauty of the Catholic mass is independent of the quality of the homily. Nevertheless, here is how it went.

The basis of his position was an interpretation of the ordo caritatis, a teaching that intends to illuminate an order or hierarchy through which love becomes most efficacious – though I should hasten to add that, given the fact that he didn’t use the actual term and the fact that he completely disfigured the doctrine, I would assume he was unaware of what he was doing.

The ordo caritatis teaches that there is an order to charity, through which one may not only come to understand love's ever mysterious content, but through which one may engender better charitable practices within one’s own life. There is some complexity to this teaching, especially in its medieval formulation. But the point is pretty simple: there is an order one follows with respect to the three primary elements of any act of charity: 1) the recipients of our charity (God, self, family, friend, colleague, fellow citizen etc), 2) that which is given in charity (money, food, time, etc.), and 3) the degree of need surrounding a charitable act (extreme need, grave need, common need). Consequently, violation of this order inhibits or prevents the charity that is being sought or given.

Anyway, on this principle, this priest claimed that when confronted with a person begging for money, one has no obligation to help since in most instances the person is "lazy" and "could otherwise be working". Instead the beggar chooses to take the easy road of asking for money. This priest brazenly asserted that in almost every case, the panhandler is therefore not innocent and so loses any ‘defense of innocent life’ reasoning. Most shockingly and sickening of all, this priest even went so far as to say that it is our “Christian duty” to “scold” the panhandler (actual words). Where can one begin unmasking all the flaws in this sort of thinking?

Most fundamentally he was entirely wrong in his understanding of the order of charity. The order of charity is not a Christian teaching meant to limit charity, but to order it. As a hierarchy, the ordo caritatis is a system that intends the maximization of charity by ordering it properly, not to limit charity by providing an excuse to be uncharitable. Understanding this requires that we understand certain principles involved.

Principle 1] Love for one’s neighbor should not result in a detriment or danger to one’s family, or those closer to him. This is a very plastic principle, subject to the simplest of distortions, so it is important to be clear. Providing particular examples may be helpful, but they would not cover the universal foundation that is necessary. For instance, if one gives money to charities with the consequence that one’s family is unable to live comfortably as determined by Western society, is that a violation of this principle? If one sells his family’s television in order to feed the hungry, is this a violation of the ordo caritatis? Seemingly the answer would be 'no'; sacrificing luxuries that a particularly affluent society believes to be necessary to life is not a standard by which to measure the ordo caritatis because the standard of living in the West is not an accurate measure of comfort and need.

Now, clearly, when one puts the very health of one’s children and spouse in jeopardy in order to provide for the less fortunate, then one risks violating the ordo. If a father forces a life of poverty upon his family then this act risks violating the ordo. If a mother is so busy tending to the needy that she neglects the needs of her own children, then this risks violating the ordo. So, one would have to secure this first principle of the ordo caritatis by saying that it is only violated when one puts the health of one’s family or friends in jeopardy against their will in order to provide for others determined to be more in need (and even this ought to be a reluctantly stated principle).

Principle 2] Love for one’s neighbor should derive from love for oneself and those closest to him, not replace it. This is a psychological principle requiring a high degree of analysis, and its violation is difficult to demonstrate objectively. Still, it is worth mentioning in order to raise the conscious awareness of the one who would give ear to the command to love one’s neighbor. If one’s practice of charitable acts derives from a low-sense of self-worth with the belief that performing these acts will elevate his ‘state’ in the eyes of others or God, then one risks violating the ordo. Ultimately, though, it is a principle determined by a high degree of personal introspection, and can really only be accurately assessed by one’s judgment over oneself.

Principle 3] Love for one’s neighbor should never replace, or become a substitute for, love for God. This is violated anytime a political ideology tries to use the poor for political gain, or anytime improvement of impoverished conditions is reduced to material circumstances. This tends to be found mostly within a left-wing ideology. But there is an inversion of this found perhaps with equal if not more vehement vigor within the right wing ideology. This inversion tends to distance God so much from our fellow brothers and sisters that they recapitulate the very sin Christ railed against in the Temple leaders of his time. In this case, God becomes an excuse for not having to ‘get one’s hands dirty’ with the poor or with any others in our lives; one exploits the distinction between God and others in order to avoid God's presence in them - that is, to avoid having to deal with the poor in our midst. And if Christ’s words are any indication, this is a far worse route to take. In both cases, one can declare that the ordo caritatis is being violated.

In contrast, it is necessary for all Christians to heed the words of St. Francis: “give to all those who ask.” Now, it should be acknowledged that, in a society where a general concern for the poor prevails, there are those who will seek to exploit the generosity of others for their own personal gain. That is to say, there are those who might deceitfully present themselves as poor when in fact they are not. Or they may in fact realize that it is easier to take advantage of the generosity of others instead of pursuing hard work themselves. Fine, this will be an obvious condition in our postlapsarian ‘fallen’ state.

However, before using this as an excuse to ignore panhandlers, several important points should be considered:

1) First, one who panhandles does so either out of volition or out of circumstance (there is not third reason since volition is of ‘mind’ and circumstance is of ‘being’ and these two categories – mind and being – exhaust the whole of created reality). If one panhandles out of volition, that is, out of choice, then, so it is believed, one deceitfully seeks to acquire a gain by exploiting the work of others. This is an act defined as the sin of usury with the consequence that giving to a panhandler implicates the giver in this same sin of usury. BUT in our contemporary, Western, society, as a reason for refusing charity to a panhandler, this reason is easily unmasked as hypocritical and flimsy.

a. Usury is a sin that permeates the whole of the contemporary Western world. The banking system, the insurance system, the mortgage system, the credit system – all of these exploit the hard work of others in order to make a profit and so fit the category of usury. Why it is acceptable to be complicit in these forms of usury but not the pandhandler’s is a confusion based on self-interest. Thus:

b. There are a few differences between these systems and the panhandler: 1) these systems are accepted as legitimate forms of usury; 2) these systems provide a service to the consumer and so are not viewed as a ‘handout’; 3) these systems have come to constitute the foundation of our capitalist system and so exercise a degree of necessity over all individuals; 4) the panhandler gives nothing in return to the one who would give him money (at least not materially). But this being the case, these differences, based on Christian principles, would indicate that it is actually better to give one’s money to the panhandler rather than to these other systematic forms of usury.

c. In other words, as we already noted according to the argument against giving to panhandler one’s act of giving becomes complicit in the sin of usury. Now, to be consistent and honest this argument ought to also be applied to these other forms of usury. Moreover, out of these examples, giving to the volitional panhandler is the only “participation in usury” done without any self-interest. If it is true that giving to a panhandler amounts to complicity in usury, then clearly this complicity is better done when one makes no profit than when one gains something.

2) The argument against giving money to beggars based on the assertion that the beggar exploits the system assumes that money is the only legitimate way to give. Naturally, giving food and other items are equally charitable and should be considered. But what about those panhandlers who refuse these other items and continue to demand money? Does this not provide a problematic situation with respect to discernment? The short answer is that since one is never in a position of certainty to discern the extent of a beggar’s request, it is better to err in generosity and give. It is not our job to discern every minute detail of a would-be beggar’s life and situation. Giving is always a good, and so serves well as a default approach (as St. Francis well knew).

3) The argument against giving money to beggars based on the fact that they don’t want food or clothes can be addressed in this way. First, we must, as Christians, examine the judgment being used to assess this. Suppose one attempts to offer food in lieu of the money being requested, but the offer is rejected. One immediately assumes that since the offer for food is rejected, the person is somehow unworthy of our generosity; surely the money sought must be intended for non life-sustaining elements (drugs, alcohol, etc.). But is this judgment really valid on Christian principles? When the beggar refuses food, the would-be giver is faced with a choice: simply walk away providing nothing, or inquire as to why the beggar doesn’t want food. The first option seems in violation of St. Francis’s principle to ‘give to all who ask’, as well as several examples from the Gospels. So, let us focus on the second. Suppose one asks why that person only wants cash and refuses food. Whatever reason is given, it will either be convincing or unconvincing. But clearly, whether it is convincing or not cannot be a matter of what is said; the resulting judgment will be based solely upon whether the would-be giver trusts the reasoning of the beggar. Why? Because there is no practical way, in an encounter of only a few minutes, to verify any given reason. For example, if the beggar says he or she needs the money for a bus ticket or some other non-food item, there is simply no way to verify the reason’s veracity. So inquiring into the reason is superfluous since the decision to give or not will be determined by the degree of trust over the reason given. Furthermore, the amount of the offering in question is entirely up to the would-be giver, so it makes no sense to investigate such claims and reasons to the fullest possibility – one can give 25 cents, or a dollar, or ten dollars. Instead, it is clear that one’s refusal to give at this point is motivated by prejudice – a judgment made before any evidence is provided. One may use instinct as the excuse, but this can never be verified. So, it seems in all cases it is better to give something rather than nothing.

4) In most cases of panhandling, the dominant assumption is that the panhandler’s request yields something good only for the panhandler. But is this assumption a valid one, based on Christian principles? As many in the tradition have testified, the answer is 'no': the panhandler provides the would-be giver with an opportunity to ‘give without counting the cost,’ as St. Francis prays. For the provider to focus only on the material circumstances of the beggar is to reduce the act of faith to the material realm. But clearly, the act of faith goes beyond this. The panhandler offers an opportunity for all to be generous, to be giving, regardless of circumstance. Giving money to a panhandler is a good for the giver completely independent of what the panhandler does with the money or why he wants it.

So, as I sat listening to this priest continue to brow-beat the poor in our midst, fighting that donatist in me trying desperately to express himself, I realized once again just how powerful the two ideologies that dominate our political landscape are. Their dominance is so fierce that they even blind those consecrated to the holy priesthood, seducing them away from Christ into the chambers of the Temple Authorities.

The priest’s explanation as to why a panhandler is not innocent, and so merits being scolded rather than being given something, may make sense based on the principles of a right-wing, republican ideology. But based upon Christian principles, it amounts to a false, unChristian, teaching. The fact that this priest sought to justify his position by exploiting the ordo caritatis indicates either a high degree of malice and hard-heartedness, or simply ignorance motivated by a zealous loyalty to a political agenda. The second is far better than the first, though we are in no position to really judge. What can be judged is that St. Francis is a far better teacher than this particular priest as to how one ought to understand the poor and follow Christ.