Writer of Fancy: The Playful Piety of Jane Austen

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Philosophy: Miracles

“Whatsoever comes to pass, comes to pass by the will and eternal decree of God.”

The Westminster Confession?  Nope; Spinoza.

Yet, the argument where this appears is incoherent.

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Philosophy: God and Nature

Spinoza summarizes the common opinion of his day: “They suppose, forsooth, that God is inactive so long as nature works in her accustomed order, and vice versa, that the power of nature and natural causes are idle so long as God is acting: thus they imagine two powers distinct from one another, the power of God and the power of nature, though the latter is in a sense determined by God, or (as most people believe now) created by Him.  What they mean by either, and what they understand by God and nature they do not know, except that they imagine the power of God to be like that of some royal potentate, and nature’s power to consist in force and energy.”

Faced with this notion, anyone might be tempted to turn Spinozist.

Philosophy: Memory, 2

Responding to my earlier post on memory, Wes Callihan writes:

“We can’t always go back to the physical surroundings; that’s the problem. We can, however, go back in our imaginations and it seems that that was what the classical art of memory (the ‘palace of memory’) was all about. A sort of retaining the connection between the senses and the thing we desire to remember. Or a sort of bringing the physical surroundings with us. Francis Yates (The Art of Memory) argues that since the visual sense is so strong, to fix in the memory a place full of rooms and then to place images of the things we want to remember in those rooms and then later to mentally walk through those rooms and seeing in our mind the objects we placed there — all this as the Ad Herennium describes and Quintilian elaborates upon — this is to ‘return to the physical surroundings in which our intention was formed.’

“In other words, in practicing the classical art of memory (using loci), Augustine (who, as a professor of rhetoric would have been intimately familiar with the Ad Herennium and Quintilian) is doing precisely what you say in your last paragraph: ‘I remember what I wanted to say when I’m back in the physical surroundings where I first formed my intention. I can remember things from the distant past when I visit the house I grew up in.’ He just does that in his mind.”

Philosophy: Nietzsche the Christian

Stephen Kern suggestively notes that Bergson, Proust, and Freud, who all “insisted that the past was an essential source of the full life,” had Jewish backgrounds, and he doesn’t think this an accident: “Both Judaism and Christianity share a reverence for the past and argue their validity partly from tradition.  The implicit ethic is that old is good.”  But Judaism is older, and if old is good older is better: “It is possible that the insistence of these men that the past alone is real, that only the recapture of the past can inspire art or cure neurosis, is linked to this feature of the Jewish experience.”

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Philosophy: Memory

I rush out of my library, resolutely intending to tell something to my wife in the next room.  When I get there, my intention is gone.  I go back to the library, and find the memory of what I wanted to say, undulating lightly in the air.

Augustine wanted to penetrate memory by searching through the dusty files of his mind, but that’s the wrong, or at least a very limited approach.  Memories are not “in there,” tucked away in the back of the brain.  Memories are in the body, and especially the senses.  The aroma of boxwoods sends me back to an otherwise forgotten childhood vacation on Williamsburg; Proust tastes his tea and toast, and digs back to the childhood memories that launched A la recherche du temps perdu.

And, memories exist in interaction with the world.  I remember what I wanted to say when I’m back in the physical surroundings where I first formed my intention.  I can remember things from the distant past when I visit the house I grew up in.

Philosophy: Rorty, the disappointed realist

Putnam writes, “I agree with Rorty that the metaphysical assumption that there is a fundamental dichotomy between ‘intrinsic’ properties of things and ‘relational’ properties of things makes no sense; but that does not lead me to view the thoughts and experiences of my friends as just the intentional objects of beliefs that help me ‘cope.’  If I did, what sense would it make to talk of ’solidarity’ [Rorty’s substitute for ‘objectivity’]?  The very notion of solidarity requires commonsense realism about the objective existence of the people one is in ’solidarity’ with.”  These examples show “that it is is important not to confuse one or another metaphysical interpretation of the notion of objectivity (for example, the idea that we can make sense of talk of things ‘as they are in themselves’) with the ordinary idea that our thoughts and beliefs refer to things in the world.”

Rorty, in short, “is so troubled by the lack of a guarantee that our words represent things outside themselves that, finding a guarantee of the only kind he envisions ‘impossible,’ he feels that he has no alternative but to reject the very idea of representation as a mistake.”  He is “right in saying that it makes no sense to think of standing outside of one’s thoughts and concepts and comparing ‘reality as it is in itself’ with those thoughts and concepts.  How could that idea make sense?”  But then Rorty concludes that since there is not “this sort of guarantee” that one must be skeptical “about the possibility of representation in a perfectly everyday sense.”  Rorty’s skepticism is “the flip side of the craving for an unintelligible kind of certainty.”  Philosophy should aim to “illuminate the ordinary notion of representation (and of a world of things to be represented), not to rest frozen in a gesture of repudiation that is as empty as what it repudiates.”

Philosophy: Fact/Value Dichotomy

Hilary Putnam has recently traced the “collapse of the fact/value dichotomy.”  He does not deny that there is a distinction to be made, useful in some contexts, between statements of fact and statements of value, especially of ethical value.  But he argues that a dichotomy between fact and value is indefensible, and that instead factual description and valuation are “entangled” with one another.  A few points of his argument follow.

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Philosophy: Dionysian causation

Milbank suggests that Thomas’s view on causation was more Dionysian than Aristotelian.  That is, it was not external and prior to its effects, but rather is an “attribution to the original source of the ‘gift’ of the effect in its whole entirety as effect.”

On this view, “a cause does not really ‘precede’ an effect, since it only becomes cause in realizing itself as the event of the giving of the effect . . . . Inversely, an effect does not really come after a cause, since only the effect realizes the causal operation and defines it.”

Hume was quite correct in his deconstruction of the metaphysical understanding of cause, but a Dionysian understanding of causation bypasses Hume: “there is always a Humean surplus of purely inexplicable ’succession,’ which is the apparenly random surplus of a new even over the event which precedes it, unless a cause is more than a cause, but rather the entire gift of the effect and the emanation of the effect, which itself defines the cause.”

Milbank sees the Trinity as the perfection of this conception of causation, and this perhaps helps to justify the Cappadocian use of “cause” in their Trinitarian theology.

Philosophy: Timeless epistemology

Can unbelievers know truth?  The whole question has been distorted by failing to ask, Which unbelievers? In what circumstances? In what stage of unbelief?  The New Testament shows the Jews who reject Jesus as blind, but also shows them being blinded, or blinding themselves.  To give a zero-sum answer to the question of the knowledge of unbelievers is to give a timeless answer.  But unbelievers aren’t timeless, so any zero-sum answer is pretty useless.

Philosophy: Self as other

Several of my students in a Shakespeare elective have pointed to the way Shakespeare’s use of disguise and deception in comedy plays into his evangelical “lose life to find it” theme.  Characters become more fully themselves by quite literally becoming other than themselves.  Viola becomes Cesario, but through that otherness fulfills herself as Orsino’s bride - she becomes her master’s mistress.  The transformations that take place in the wood of Midsummer first turn the lovers, and Bottom, into what they are not, but this is the means to self-realization.

Philosophy: Generating meaning

One of the most controversial claims of some postmodern thinkers is that language creates rather than simply reflects meaning.  Whatever the truth of that as a global statement about language’s generation of meaning, it is fairly obvious that language generates meaning at a lower level.

In his first encounter with the shrew Katharina, Petruchio parries all her insults and jibes into comments on marriage.  “Come sit on my lap,” he says, and she responds with “Asses were made to bear, and so are you.”  Petruchio is quick to retort: “Women were made to bear, and so are you.”  Petruchio and Kate are not describing things out there in the world; their language is part of an erotic combat, a rough wooing.  And the wooing proceeds as each statement provokes a response that generates new meanings and takes this unconventional courtship in new directions.

Philosophy: Tragic metaphysics

Henri de Lubac notes that the traditional Christian view that man has a nature inherently receptive to a supernatural gift and fulfillment is based on revelation, and was unknown in ancient philosophy: “For the ancient Greeks - and one may say almost the same of all thinkers, ancient and modern, other than those whose thinking flows from revelation - every nature must find in itself, or in the rest of the cosmos of which it is an integral part, all that it needs for its completion. Basically, everything has always been perfectly balanced. The apparent imbalance, whether progress or regression, is merely a phenomenon of flux and reflux within a totality that is already complete. The universe is like a snake coiled upon itself: its movement is necessarily eternal, and circular. . . . One will ultimately gain no more than one had - though perhaps in a different form - from the first, or rather, from all time. One can do no more than regain possession of what one has momentarily - and of course only apparently - lost.”

Aristotle put one of the implications succinctly: “Whatever has a beginning must have an end.”  Anything that starts as not-being must end not-being. The soul’s immortality depends on being eternal, that is, strictly divine.  Christianity taught created immortality.

Put it geometrically: For ancient thought, there are only lines and line-segments; Christianity introduced vectors.

Philosophy: Analytical and Analytical

Peter van Inwagen distinguishes nicely between analytical philosophy as a “particular” form of philosophy and as a “universal” philosophical mode, and gives a tidily potted history: “As a particular, it is a confluence of streams of thought whose springs were in Britain, Austria, Poland and the United States.  It has an early classical, or ‘Cambridge,’ period (the period of Russell, Moore Wittgenstein); a middle classical, or ‘Viennese,’ period (Carnap and the logical positivists); a late classical, or ‘Oxford,’ period (Austen and the ‘philosophers of ordinary language’); and a post-classical or ‘American’ period (Quine, Kripke and David Lewis).  Thought of as a universal, analytical philosophy is something that recurs periodically in the history of philosophy.  Aristotle was an analytical philosopher by any reasonable definition of ‘analytical,’ as were most medieval philosophers (both Christian and Muslim), and the so-called British Empiricists and Continental Rationalists. . . . When I, a fairly typical post-classical analytical philosopher, read texts from any of these sources, I know that their authors and I are ‘up to the same sort of thing’ - something I cannot say of the work of Hegel, or Heidegger, or even Kant.  They are philosophers of other times and other cultures, but I nevertheless recognize them as colleagues, ‘fellows of another college,’ as Littlewood said of the Greek mathematicians.”

Philosophy: Old Hat

John Joseph writes in the TLS that Saussure’s insight that language is “purely differential and negative in nature” was a commonplace of late nineteenth-century philosophy and “was a defining feature of British psychology.”  And Saussure’s claim that meaning is arbitrary and conventional also has a long pedigree.  Saussure’s “novel contribution was to imagine the sound side of language on the one hand, and the conceptual side on the other, as perfectly alike in their nature and mental operations.  This is the ‘double essence’: two orders of difference, held together by a force that is essentially social, which he called the immutability of linguistic signs.  It makes it impossible for an individual to introduce a change into the sign system, and it means that any communal change creates a wholly new system of values, which is to say a new language.”

Joseph also reveals that Saussure was a synaesthete, for whom (for instance) the French sound “a” felt “off-white, approaching yellow; in its consistency, it is something solid, but thin, that cracks easily if struck, for example a sheet of paper (yellowed with age) drawn tight in a frame, a flimsy door (in unvarnished wood left white) that you feel would shatter at the slightest blow, an already broken eggehsll that you can keep cracking by pressing on it with your fingers.  Better still: the shell of a raw egg is a (whether in colour or consistency of the object), but the shall of a hard-boiled egg is not a, because of the feeling you have that the object is compact and resistant” (all this from Saussure).

Philosophy: Self as Another

Augustine is charged with being proto-Cartesian when he locates the imago Dei in the mind or soul. Maybe, but we need to ask what he says about that imago. Among other things, he sees the soul’s capacity to beget an inner word that is both different from and yet consubstantial with the soul as the image. That is, the soul is not an image of God in its pure self-presence, but in its self-differentiation. The mind is image in that it is other to itself. Whatever problems there might be here, this, it need hardly be said, is not Cartesian.

Philosophy: Marion and the gift

In his discussions of gifts, Marion takes both Heidegger and Derrida as interlocutor. In dialogue with Heidegger, he wants to show that the reduction that Heidegger performs does not necessarily reveal Being as the final horizon; he wants to argue that the reduction reveals givenness as the ultimate horizon instead. In response to Derrida, he wants to show that there is a gift that escapes from exchange, a gift that fulfills something of Derrida’s hope for a pure gift. He believes that it is possible, operating within the strict limits of phenomenology and not entering on the terrain of metaphysics or theology, to think the gift according to the mode of givenness rather than according to the mode of exchange. He accepts the challenge of Derrida’s bracketing of the triple transcendence of the giver, the gift, and the recipient and still arrive at an identifiable gift that does not “collapse into a vague cloud, the last breath of a collapsed concept.” The conditions of the im/possibility of the gift that Derrida lays out can yield a gift understood in the mode of givenness. The following summarizes some portions of Marion’s “Sketch of a Phenonenological Concept of Gift,” published in Merold Westphal, ed., Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought.

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Philosophy: Heidegger and the gift

Marion works from both Husserl and Heidegger, and we’ll focus on the latter, as he is slightly easier to grasp. (I am summarizing Robyn Horner’s discussion.) Heidegger begins from Husserl, but seeks to go beyond him. Husserl’s phenomenology was an effort, Heidegger says, to “let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.” But that leaves the question open, what is it that phenomenology wants to “let us see”? The answer is that phenomenology does not direct attention to beings, but to being itself, the being that accompanies objects and beings. Phenomenology, Heidegger says shows “something that proximally and for the most part does not show itself at all: it is something that lies hidden, in contrast to that which proximally and for the most part does show itself; but at the same time it is something that belongs to what shows itself, and it belongs to it so essentially as to constitute its meaning and ground.” Beyond Husserl, Heidegger wants phenomenology to move from the ontic realm (the realm of beings) to the ontological realm (the realm of being itself).

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Philosophy: Immanentism and dualism

In the same article, Milbank argues that “dualism and hierarchy are . . . the secret heart of all immanentisms.”

The argument is: In 18th and 19th century design arguments, God is “half-immanent” and interacts “on the same plane with what he influences.” This is a dualism between “the creative and designing on the one hand and the inert and the designed on the other.” This is not the result of transcendence, but rather “the result of dividing up the finite world into spheres of influence between a quasi-transcendent principle on the one hand and sheerly finite causal process, on the other.”

Vitalism tries to eliminate dualism by eliminating transcendence. It doesn’t, but makes the dualism “aporetically virulent.” For the vitalist, what seems fixed is only the “phenomenal guise for the dynamic and virtual” but this dynamic and virtual only “‘is’ at all through its phenomenal self-occlusion.” Invoking Carlyle’s description of German Idealism, Milbank says that for vitalism the cosmic clothing - the world we inhabit and know - conceals a “null energy which is merely the power to clothe and so disguise itself.” Immanentisms of all kinds tends to “succumb to this model of double disguise, of the real by appearance, but more fundamentally of appearance by the supposedly real.” In any immanentism, there is always “the whole” that is truly real, which functions as a kind of immanent absolute, against which the particulars are set in dualistic fashion.

Only transcendence rescues from dualism.

Philosophy: Milbank on Metaphysics, etc

Radical Orthodox theologians interacted with Process Theologians at an AAR session. Milbank gave an off the cuff response to the process theologians, starting with common interests among them, which he said were greater than he expected. Among them was their common resistance to the anti-metaphysical trends of modern philosophy, particularly after Wittgenstein. Milbank suggested that Whitehead might in the end turn out to be a more important philosopher than Wittgenstein.

He summarized the anti-anti-metaphysical case by saying that those opposed to metaphysics still operate in the space of what he called “metaphysics in the bad sense,” that is, metaphysics that excludes transcendence and theology from the get-go. It still works within a scheme of univocity, which is the very definition of onto-theology (even Heidegger does, Milbank asserted). RO and Process Theology are united in their realism, their sense that the mind is conditioned by what is outside the mind, their common sense that since mind is in reality is must have access to reality and matter, and their common conclusion that philosophy cannot be reduced to language (analytic) or appearances (phenomenology).

Against Process Theology, though, Milbank argued that the process theologians cannot secure the values they want to secure - life, the event, an assault on dualism - without positing God as a transcendent, infinitely realized event. He provocatively suggested that since God is infinite, God’s being is not bounded and finished like finite beings or events, but is beyond the duality of becoming and finishing. If “the unfinished” is hypostatized, however, as Milbank sees Process theology doing, there is no way to value some shapes of change over another. There needs to be an absolute event, a Cusan coincidence of potentiality and actuality in God, if the created processes are to be truly valued. Otherwise, the process itself becomes ultimate, and the event gets lost in the flow. There must be the continual gift of being from an infinite source if we are going to account for finite being at all. In Trinitarian theology, God is reciprocity; if, as process theology suggests (to Milbank), reciprocity between God and creation is ultimate, then the process is ultimate, and reciprocity gets swallowed up in process.

During questioning, Milbank affirmed his adherence to a traditional notion of impassibility, arguing that suffering and passivity are never good in themselves, and therefore they can have no place in the life of a God who is wholly good. Tony Baker added that impassibility is necessary to account for holiness: A God who is a co-sufferer may sympathize, but Baker said such a God is incapable of transforming.

Philosophy: Gift of the Text

Robyn Horner helpfully expounds on Derrida’s deconstruction of the gift by considering whether the text can be construed as a gift.

In a section of Given Time, Derrida discusses a text by Baudelaire, noting that it is a given “not only because we are first of all in a receptive position with regard to it but because it has been given to us.” But is it a gift? Horner has already explained that for Derrida the conditions of the “possibility and impossibility” of the gift are “that it can have no decidable origin, cannot exist as such, and can have no decidable destination.” By these standards, the text doesn’t seem to be a gift. But Derrida wants to say it is.

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