the new blog, dear friends

The address for the new blog is http://dustandink.wordpress.com. This one will be going offline soon.

the end is nigh

Well, I think the time has finally come to shut this thing down. I haven't written on this blog since January, and it doesn't seem likely that I will pick it back up any time soon. This site has been a great place for me to share my disparate and meandering thoughts since 2004, but I think the time has come to move on. I will be starting another blog soon, and I will post a link to the new site once I figure out where to host it and what to call it. For now, though, thanks to those who have read my thoughts here, and au revoir!

Francesca Murphy on How not to Do Apologetics

"The world's 'contingency' is artificial within the 'why proof' of God's existence because the proof hangs on the premise that the world is rational, or answers to the question 'why'. A story collects all the material it contains into a rationally rounded unity: everything in it is to the point. This is why shaggy dog stories are jokes about the nature of stories: they upset our assumptions about what stories should do by never coming to the point. Both grammatical Thomists and scientific naturalists assume that the world is a story, answerable to endless questions. So far as the agnostic naturalist, like Russell, is concerned, the universe is a rational story: it needs no God, for its internal rationality is 'telling its own story'. One way to go wrong in a debate with the agnostic is to agree that the universe is a meaningful unit or story, but argue that one must therefore concede that it has an author--not author, no rationally rounded story. For it is open to the agnostic to insist that the story itself is generating or igniting its own rationality. If rationality or narrativity is the shared ground of debating theist and agnostic, the latter can opt for an internal, self-generating narrativity. All one achieves here is to deify the story of the universe (Which in effect the agnostic has already done), not to move her beyond it to the supernatural God" (Francesca Murphy, God Is not a Story: Realism Revisited, p. 102).

Murphy's argument here reminds me of Matt's reflections on Rowan Williams' debate with Richard Dawkins, in which Williams agrees with Dawkins that there are laws of nature that are independently, rationally verifiable. This give Dawkins the ability to dismiss Williams' defense of miracles as mere 'poetic language'. I'm surely willing to believe that such relatively fixed 'laws' do, in fact, exist, though perhaps not to accept the way in which these laws are articulated or are put to use by modern atheists. The universe is radically contingent and therefore the laws that operate within it are also contingent. Thus I like the sentiment behind Chesterton's dictum that the sun rises each day because God commands that it do so. Nonetheless, something more robust than this merely 'poetic language' (that does not reduce to the evidence of the rationality of the universe suggested by modern ID creationists or the internal coherence appealed to by post-liberals) for sustained engagement with agnostics. Murphy's solution, I believe (though I have not yet finished the book), will be the personalism demanded by the experience of love. I'll let you know what I find out.

McCulloch on Cranmer

I've finished about 450 pgs. of Diarmaid McCulloch's 600+ pg. biography of Thomas Cranmer, the architect of the sixteenth century English Reformation. It's a fantastic, beautifully written, moving, measured biography. I have literally nothing bad to say about it. It is a masterful, magisterial piece, and anyone interested in Anglican history should read it. McCulloch's work is structured around a successive series of 'crises' in Cranmer's career as Archbishop. Since the most significant period of his development occurs during Henry VIIIs reign, the bulk of the book is devoted to that period of Cranmer's life. McCulloch's deftly recasts the paradigms through which historians have understood Cranmer throughout the book, the first strand of which sees Cranmer as a pusillanimous, craven yes-man, and the other of which sees him as the paradigmatic Anglican churchman, supremely moderate, restrained, and judicious. McCulloch suggests instead that we should Cranmer primarily as a learned humanist, extremely bookish and unsuited to realpolitik, but who nonetheless was politically successful as a result of felicitous friendships with more ruthless men like Wolsey and Cromwell. McCulloch notes that "all through his life, Cranmer was either blessed or curse with the ability to see his opponents’ point of view: an attribute rare enough in any age, but in particularly short supply during the Reformation" (54) and "he had repeatedly shown himelf devoid of the killer instinct if there was no one to back him up" (316). Cranmer's reticence was more than made up for by his decade-long partnership with Thomas Cromwell, however. As a fellow evangelical and the King's Vice-Regent, Cromwell succeeded in pushing through many of the reforms the Cranmer wanted to see--for instance, the vernacular translation of the Bible (the so-called 'Great Bible') in 1536, the publication of the 'Bishop's Book' which limited the number of sacraments to three rather than seven, and the abolition of the Observant friaries in 1537. Cranmer was deferential to Cromwell, and they constituted a sort of early modern 'good cop, bad cop' team. Their concerted action in the interrogation of the so-called 'Maid of Kent' in 1533 is instructive in this regard, in which Cromwell took the offensive and Cranmer was a passive observer. After Cromwell's downfall and execution in 1540, Cranmer proved less capable of negotiating politics and was almost destroyed by the 'Prebendaries Plot' in 1543. Perhaps, however, Cranmer was a better politician than anyone gives him credit for--after all, most of Henry's closest advisers were executed during one or the other of Henry's murderous changes of mind during the 1530s and 40s. It is remarkable that the two advisors that survived Henry's reign were Cranmer and Stephen Gardiner, who ultimately had a hand in burning Cranmer during Mary's reign in 1556.

Perhaps McCulloch's greatest contribution in this book, however, is his careful attention to the theological shifts occuring in Cranmer's mentalite during the 1530s and 40s. At the beginning of Henry's reign, Cranmer was clearly an Erasmian humanist, a loyal Catholic though to be sure a critical one. McCulloch's notes that in early annotation in Cranmer's copy of Luther's De Servo Arbitrio, he adduced proofs in favor of the papacy, whereas a mere few years later, he would adopt the Reformation standard epithet 'antichrist' for the papacy. The Erasmian sensibility would stay with Cranmer throughout his career, even as his Reformist stance becomes more prominent, something McCulloch brilliantly approaches by using portraits of Cranmer and his predecessor, Archbishop Warham. In Warham's portrait, he does not face the viewer; rather, his head is off to the side in a comtemplative mode. His hands are free, and he appears to be focused upon a vision of the saints in heaven, which are portrayed off to the side of the portrait. By contrast, Cranmer stares straight ahead resolutely at the viewer. His hands hold the word of God, opened to the Pauline letters. At his side are two books, one of which are Augustine's anti-Pelagian writings, the other which has been to marred to discern. The clear message of Cranmer's portrait is that 'Cranmer's calling is therefore to expound Scripture with the aid of the best of Patristic scholarship’ (341). Another theological telos in Cranmer's writing progression from standard Catholic to Zwinglian views of the Eucharist from 1530-1548, with a lengthy Lutheran sub specie interlude between the two. It is striking that by 1549, in contrast to Bucer (who was in England at the time), Cranmer was making the Zwinglian argument that Christ's bodily presence in heaven meant that his body could not at the same time by locally present in the Eucharist. Bucer preferred Calvin's language of the congregation being caught up to heaven--this approach still required treatment of the dicey issue of improper consumption of the sacrament--but Cranmer's approach led him to affirm that there was 'no sacrament without use' and thus that the impious ate only bread and wine. Finally, McCulloch offers a decided rebuttal of the traditional Anglo-Catholic position that Cranmer affirmed apostolic succession. In fact, Cranmer was decidedly Erastian in polity. Thus, he was neither traditionally Catholic, nor primitivist, but rather Constantinian. For Cranmer affirmed that the church Catholic was actually incomplete in terms of its authority structure until the advent of Christian kings: 'Cranmer saw the first Christians casting about for makeshift structures of authority' (279).

All in all, Cranmer comes off as a remarkably sympathetic though deeply flawed character in this biography. My impressions of Cranmer have been largely shaped prior to this book by the broad strokes painted in survey courses and texts on the English Reformation, which primarily focus on Cranmer's recantations and subsequent revocation of his recantations before his death. Here the goal is to paint Cranmer as Petrine in character and as the prime example of Luther's simul iustus et peccator. In reality, Cranmer's life was a good deal more unsavory and political than these accounts indicate, but at the same, McCulloch offers a challenge to reductionists on the other side--Cranmer was, in fact, deeply heartfelt about his belief in justification by faith alone and in his belief that Henry was the rightful ruler of the English church. Again, this is an excellent biography, and I heartily commend to everyone.

Milbank, ch. 1

In Milbank’s first chapter, he constructs a genealogy of the secular by narrating the course of its development from the thirteenth century, in which the thomistic-augustinian paradigm of participation posited a theological canopy which covered all of the other disciplines, to the invention of a separate ideological realm for the ‘secular’, aligned with the construction a new anthropology which posited the autonomous power and the priority of the independent will of the individual, and new construction of community, governed by contractual relationships. The secular in medieval thought was originally not a space but a time, “the interval between fall and eschaton where coercive justice, private property and impaired natural reason must make shift to cope with the unredeemed effects of sinful humanity” (9). According to Milbank, theologians are not able to negotiate or dialogue with the artifice of the secular, but must either accept or reject the construction.
In order for the secular to be actualized as an independent realm, the society had be reconstituted as a human construction rather than a divine gift. This materialistic emphasis had to be coupled with a redefinition of the dominium given to Adam. Rather than a ‘usufruct’, a duty of stewardship given to Adam by God, Adam’s dominium was conceived as “power, property, active right, and absolute sovereignty,” in other words, as mastery over that which is within his control (13). Thus property rights are transmuted to include the right to exchange as much as the right to use, leading to an extremely individualistic and instrumental relationship between the human person and his or her property. This highly individualistic anthropology undermined the notion of the freedom of the community to limit the individual, and Hobbes saw better than the ‘liberals’ that came after him like Locke that that the peace secured by this arrangement required the arbitration of an absolutely powerful sovereign.
Much of the shift in anthropology came through a refashioning of the shape of divine power:
‘The later Middle Ages retrieved in a new and more drastic guise the antique connection between monotheism and monarchic unity which was affirmed in Christian tradition by the semi-Arian Eusebius and then became part of both imperial and papal ideology. For this tradition, political substance is grounded in the unity and self-identity of the rational subject, whereas the orthodox Cappadocian father, Gregory of Nazianzus, had pointed out that it is possible for a single person to be at variance with himself and affirmed that the ‘monarchy’ implied by the Christian Trinity was more ‘a union of mind, and an identity of motion, and convergence of the elements to unity.’ (15)
The trinity ceased to be the organizing principle for the discussion of God’s will and his relation to the world in theologians after Scotus, and emphasis was laid on the expanse between God’s ordained power, which is revealed and is the basis for the covenants with humanity, and his absolute power, which is unknowable except formally for the purposes of logic. Milbank suggests that this dichotomy was mapped onto the human subject. Those who used their autonomous power to dispose of property most closely imitated the image of God, whereas personal relationships were controlled through contractual relationships. Thus, space had to be created (the free market?) in which individuals could dispose of their property in whatever way they saw fit. Milbank stresses the connection between this nominalizing theology/anthropology the basis for the privatization of religion:
‘in retrospect, it appears that the simplex usus facti was itself also the start of a spiritualizing retreat whereby the need to disassociate the church from formal coercive power turns into a wish also to depublicize it and separate it from any kind of rule whatsoever. The sort of poverty which is not “a way of owning” but rather a simple “not owning,” is bound to become, in time, just “poverty of heart.”’ (17).
The reconstruction of the political and property rights along the lines of the individual conatus and the equation of the secular with the factum was accompanied by a shift in biblical interpretation. The church was removed from the task of ruling and relegated to the task of persuasion but protected by an increasingly powerful state. The authoritative text of scripture was still preserved, but the most important task of the church, to give ‘interpretive authority to a tradition of reading’ (19) was no longer available to it. Milbank tantalizingly suggests that ‘it is the destiny of sola scriptura to be so deconstructed as to come to mean that we must believe the scriptures because they are politically authorized’ (21). In the new biblical hermeneutic, allegory was ruthlessly excised in favor of a ‘positivistic’ mode of interpretation, and a new relation between reason and revelation conceived. Reason is self-sufficient, and revelation therefore ‘is usually “private” and its authority is entirely incommunicable unless mediated through the contractual artifice of human power…or else it is public and “miraculous”—but miracles are at an end” (21-22).
A general note on Milbank’s historiography. I can see the sense in attributing some of the aporias of modernity to the legacy of the nominalists. But like all intellectual genealogies, RO’s is incredibly bloodless. Despite the lip service they pay to MacIntyre’s dictum that “there ought not be two histories, one of political and moral action and one of political and moral theorizing, because there were not two pasts, one populated only by actions, the other only by theories. Every action is the bearer and expression of more or less theory-laden beliefs and concepts; every piece of theorizing and every expression of belief is a political and moral action” (After Virtue, 61), no attention is paid to the concrete social and cultural factors that leant plausibility to the ideas articulated by Scotus, Ockham, Gerson, et al. Thus their ideas can be vilified as ‘declensions’ from a superior Thomistic-Augustinian synthesis that came before, and the author can then make the simplistic claim that we simply need to recover this prior synthesis. The reality is, however, that developments in society often make certain constructions of the relations between beliefs nearly impossible to assent to. For instance, Carter Lindberg makes the claim that developments in military technology led to widespread fragmentation of the corpus christianum and created intellectual and emotional space for the Reformation: ‘The development of stable gunpowder and reliable cannons contributed the destabilization of late medieval society. Indiscriminate death and destruction were now possible beyond the medieval’s wildest dreams. When this technology was coupled with national and religious fanaticism the dreams became a devastating reality….One of the social side effects was to make an entire class—the knights—obsolete. Now anyone with a gun could bring down a knight” (European Reformations, 39). Lindberg does not make the reductionistic case that the social is all there is, but he attempts to offer a corrective for an undue focus among intellectual historians and theologians on texts as the primary vehicles for history.

goodness.

I am so busy. I will reemerge in two weeks. That is all.

Theology and Social Theory, Preface to the 2d. Ed.

I’ve agreed to do some readings on Radical Orthodoxy (RO) with Nathan, and we’re starting with the keynote of that theological movement, John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory (TST). Because of the extremely turgid prose that RO elects to use (it remains unclear to me why cultural studies/social theory and the theological reflection that employs these disciplines insist upon neologism and opacity), we thought the dialogical structure of dueling blog posts would best serve comprehension. Thus, I will start here by posting a summary of the Preface to the 2d. ed., to which I hope Nathan will respond with corrections/insights, then he will post on the introduction on his blog, and so forth. Anyone else interested in following us in the reading/discussion is welcome to comment as well.

In the preface to the 2d. ed., Milbank addresses his critics, which are many, refining his critique of secular reason and his reflections on certain seminal Catholic figures, e.g. Scotus, Cusa, de Lubac, Balthasar, and so forth. He makes note that the text of the 1st ed. suffered a bit from ambiguity, and that the text of the 2d ed has been altered to reflect his original intention. His revised views, esp. of the Catholic figures mentioned above, have not necessarily been inserted, as he regards TST as a period piece of sorts, a snapshot of his views at this time.
Milbank positions his critics as emerging from several distinctive camps. First, there are the sociologists, who were outraged that he challenged the social construction of religion. Their critic, however, misses the mark, because Milbank’s critique of sociology is more fundamental. He objects to implicit secular bias of the “social”, which is itself “an unreal, unhistorical, and quasi theological category.” Secondly, there are the dialecticians, who are still committed to some sort of amorphous Marxism--no longer the dialectical materialism of orthodox Marxism that expected a “’final’ crisis of capitalism”, but those who operate within the Hegelian structure of history that expect a “gradual unleashing of the anarchically positive.” Related to the second category of critics is the third, the left-Nietzscheans who protested against Milbank’s critique of Nietzsche as supporting an “ontology of violence.” They claim instead that totalized otherness creates space for “variegated coexistence with others.” Milbank positions both these groups within the tension between liberalism and positivism. Liberalism maintains a formal openness to the other, a tolerance of diversity, as it were, but positivism, a dynamic internal to liberalism, threatens to undermine the “mere suspended hostility” of liberalism by imposing an arbitrary set of meanings upon the traditions operant within a liberal polity, whether “scientific” or “religious.” There is no clear way within either of these traditions to move beyond liberalism and positivism in their secular varieties.

After responding briefly to his critics, Milbank attempts to clarify and sharpen his critique against them. First, he notes that the clear trend of historical scholarship on seminal modern western theorists, Heidegger and Nietzsche among them, tends to accentuate their conservative and fascist tendencies. The left-Nietzscheans, then, appear paradoxically as anti-Nietzschean, or at least massively revisionist, because “the most radical thinker of difference never pretended anything other than that it was grounded in an ‘ontology of violence.’” Secondly, Milbank notes that his critique of secular reason is not absolute, because the metaphysic of Catholic Christianity never refuses otherness but, in a sense, colonizes it with a counter-narrative. What Milbank does is position secular reason as a recrudescent form of paganism, and set up Catholic Christianity as an alternative which superabundantly fulfills “the best pagan impulses.” Thirdly, as a consequence, Catholicism offers a genuine liberalism and a genuine positivism. Pariticipation, gift, and consensus as central features of Christianity operate to create a genuine peace that moves beyond the merely “contractual” peace offered by liberalism, and the conception of evil as privation opens up the possibility of conceiving that which is positively different as instances of the Good which must “analogically concur in a fashion that exceeds the liberal agreement to disagree.” This leads to a counter-Nietzschean genealogy—not a tale of successive instances of the will to power, but a tale of successive analogical irruptions of the Good into the finite. Fourthly, and again relatedly, Milbank argues that secular reason, rooted as it is in a univocal rather than an analogical worldview, leads inevitably to nihilism. Pure reason is impossible because univocity of being is impossible.

Milbank is then constrained to clarify what he means by an “analogical ontology of peace” (a question which I have been asking of Milbank’s interlocutors, notably Balthasar, and some other participants of RO, esp. Ward—per an email from Nathan critiquing dialectics and the “infinite qualitative distinction” in Kierkegaard and Barth), and here he clarifies and corrects his thinking about the Scotist legacy in several seminal Catholic figures: (1) Milbank asserts that in the church fathers theology and philosophy were integrated rather than divided, and that for Augustine, faith does not seek understanding, but “knowledge, by faith, seeks wisdom.” Thus, theology is already a “third term” that links ontology and historical interpretation. A worldview is in place here that sees an analogy between human and divine operations, and the creativity expressed in “craft” and “art” is especially ripe for such comparison. Augustine’s legacy is an enmeshed theology and philosophy which dovetail with an analogical interpretation of history and creativity. (2) The “conservative” readings of Post-Aquinas Medieval theology offered by Gilson and Balthasar are basically flawed in that they too simply correlate post-Scotist theologians with a progressive reduction of the analogical into the univocal understanding of being. An alternative to this genealogy is produced by de Lubac, who Milbank argues is not driven by a neo-scholastic division between nature and supernature and therefore is not seeking an explanation for this state of affairs. The superiority of de Lubac’s starting point is that there a tense balance between philosophy and theology, a “suspended middle”, an intermeshing or interweaving of the two terms, that refuses the autonomy of either: “Even though I see philosophy, in its very nature as philosophy, as only completed by theology, I also see the latter, short of the final intuition of God, as always inevitably blending its intuitions of the advents of presence with a philosophical and abstracting discursiveness (which a narrative mode already implicitly assumes), as well as an empirical appeal to lived history and geographical situatedness.” Scotus, for Milbank, remains the root of all evil, but Ockham and Eckhart are now reconceived not as followers of Scotus, but as defenders of the analogical worldview who are each responding to Scotus.

Here are my questions at the outset of this study of RO. Is the problem with modernity really a deficient ontology or metaphysics? In other words, if the problem as such is theoretical, then the answer is greater consistency within our theory. But what if, as Vincent Miller has ingeniously argued, our central problem in modernity is not incoherence, but abstraction? In other words, what if no matter how consistent our liturgics and doctrine are, those symbols can be abstracted from their institutional and communal contexts and deployed in alternative ways, namely, in ways that subvert the original political intent of those symbols? I wonder if RO has a response to this critique. Secondly, I’m still unclear, even with Milbank’s clarification, of the ontological status of the analogia entis, and therefore I’m not sure how it represents a decisive improvement on the dialectic logic of Barth and Kierkegaard. Nathan?

Conversation between Alister McGrath and Richard Dawkins

There is a very fascinating 15 part conversation, the first part of which is found here, between Alister McGrath and Richard Dawkins about the intellectual coherence of belief in God.

Why wasn't Philip Schaff Roman Catholic? Because he was a Hegelian!

I love this quote:
"...whoever despises the judgment of history, robs himself at the same time of all foundation and basis. If the fifteen centuries prior to the Reformation are deserving of no confidence, neither are the last three centuries entitled to any respect....In proportion as we undermine and reject the testimony of church history, in theological and religious questions, do we also open the door to skepticism and nihilism. Herein precisely lies the great ecclesiastical and religious importance of modern church-historical research, even if this should not yet be duly acknowledged by many german theologians....But some will at once ask, of what concern is the testimony of history to me, if I have the word of God in my favor, which is, after all, the only certain rule of faith and life, whilst the greatest schoolmen and church fathers, according to their own confession, were themselves sinful men, and liable to err? Very true! But who has made you an infallible interpreter of this word? Has not this word already existed in the church before the sixteenth century, and as such been highly honored, read, transcribed, translated and commented upon whence then have you the canon, save directly from the faithful collection and transmission of the catholic church? Who furnishes you the proof of the genuineness and integrity of the apostolical writings, except the testimonies of the ancient ecclesiastical authors? If already the immediate disciples of the apostles, if Ignatius, Clement and Polycarp, if the fathers and martyrs of the second and third centuries, have radically misunderstood the New Testament, what guaranty have we then that you, in the nineteenth century, understand it properly throughout, wherever you may differ from them? Are you then made of better stuff than the confessors and martyrs of the blooming period of the church? Have done and suffered more for christ? You say: the clear letter of Paul and John condemns the Catholic Church as Antichrist, as the man of sin, the beast from the abyss, as the Babylon destined to be destroyed. But whence do you know that this interpretation is correct? Since you totally reject the infallibility of the Pope, and perhaps also of the church in general, you will certainly not be so inconsistent and ridiculously presumptuous, as to claim it for yourself or any other Protestant interpreter? Moreover, such an application of the passages in question was wholly unheard of until within the later period of the middle ages, when it was invented by certain fanatical sects, to suit their polemical ends. The church fathers without exception, even Irenaeus, who through Polycarp stood in close relation to the apostle John himself, have referred them to gnosticism and to the world-empire of heathen rome..."

This is strong stuff for a 19th Reformed protestant living in the most rabidly anti-Catholic period of American history.