So I just presented this at the Popular Culture/American Culture conference up in Niagara Falls. Dan is making me post it here, so if you don’t like you can gnaw his ear. Actually, I’m trying to work it into an article so I’d love to hear comments:
GK Chesterton has been staging something of a comeback in the last few years. While he has always been popular among Catholic thinkers who value his fresh formulations of their tradition, and also, over the past 20 years or so, with thinking Evangelicals, who have been turning to him as proof that one can keep one’s faith without losing ones mind; its only recently that his voice has been heard among the philosophers and the critical theorists, mainly through his influence on two of the most interesting representatives in these fields. One, Slavoj Zizek is a Marxist and strict Lacanian, who has annoyed his audiences by saying that he is a Christian atheist and by claiming that Lenin got it all right. The other, John Milbank, is British, a member of the Anglican church, who has become well known as the most articulate defender of a philosophical and theological movement that goes by the name Radical Orthodoxy, and emphasizes a rediscovery of patrisitic and medieval theologians while at the same time being well read in Jacque Lacan and Karl Marx. Zizek and Milbank have appeared at conferences together as well as edited volumes, and are even co-writing a book. Though they come from radically divergent points of view both Zizek and Milbank see the necessity of philosophy and theology being in close discussion with each other and both have seen Chesterton as a good way to do that.
So we’ll start with Zizek. Slavoj Zizek and GK Chesterton make strange bedfellows. The Slovenian born philosopher is most well known for his readings of Hegel and Lacan as well as his obsession with, and acute observations of, the banalities of popular culture. His atheism is of the school of Marx and Freud but with an insight into Christian and Jewish thought that is almost always arresting. To get right to the point, its seems that what Zizek really gets from Chesterton is the idea that, in the arsenal of human language and thought, paradox is the best weapon we have, the most effective way of getting at the truth of human existence. Chestertons description of christ’s cry from the cross is a good example of how he employs paradox:
“When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.”
Zizek quotes these words in a book of his entitled On Belief, and when he calls himself a “Christian atheist” as I heard him do once at a talk in Philadelphia he is agreeing with Chesterton that Xity, by revealing God to have been abandoned by God, places a certain value on the atheist, as when Chesterton notes that “The next best thing to really being inside Christendom is to be really outside of it.”
For Zizek, and I think for Cheseterton as well, this brutally honest cry given by the dying Christ, is an example not only of a unique kind of God, but also sets the groundwork for a certain type of thinking, for a certain type of philosophizing. In reading Zizek a quote from Chesterton is often followed by one from Hegel, for it was Hegel, according to Zizek, who gave philosophical voice to paradox, who even constructed his entire system around it. An all powerful God, for Hegel, is revealed most truly in the moment of greatest weakness and desolation, which is a necessary moment in the revelation of that God. For Hegel the all powerful God of the Jews, inasmuch as he communicates with his creation, does so most authentically not through a revelation of words, of sacred texts, but through a revelation of Word, that is, incarnation. For Hegel and Zizek after him, far from proving that Christianity is a kind of opposite of Judaism, the fact that one of the fundamental tenets of Judaism, that against making an image of the invisible God, is overturned in the person of Christ, reveals Christianity to be the inner truth of Judaism. Zizek is then quite happy to read the Christian tradition in the way that Chesterton does, via the lens of paradox: A God who first and foremost creates—but only out of nothing. A God who allows no imitation of himself, human or otherwise, and then promptly shows up in the flesh. A God who claims ascendancy over all other Gods, and is then overpowered and murdered by the feeble beings he made.
Zizek agrees with Chesterton, against all liberal bias and political correctness, that one must affirm that Christianity does something fundamentally different from any other religion. I quote from length the very beginning of his book On Belief:
In the Larry King debate between a rabbi, a Catholic priest and a Southern Baptist, broadcast in March 2000, both the rabbi and the priest expressed their hope that the unification of religions is feasible since, irrespective of his or her official creed, a thoroughly good person can count on divine grace and redemption. Only the Baptist—a young, well-tanned, slightly overweight and repulsively slick Southern yuppie—insisted that, according to the letter of the Gospel, only those who “live in Christ” by explicitly recognizing themselves in his address will be redeemed, which is why, as he concluded with a barely discernible contemptuous smile, “a lot of good and honest people will burn in hell.” Zizek’s comment is that it is this voice, of the fundamentalist, I think we could say, which we must follow because only it, in emphasizing the violent and exclusionary nature of redemption, maintains Christianity’s status as unique, as laying a path. . . . which for Zizek is key if we want to understand the uniqueness of the subjectivity that has developed in the West under the banner of Christianity, but also, and no less authentically, in its form as enlightened and secular. Zizek, following Lacan and also Descartes, maintains that we must accept a certain bifurcation when we are considering the subject, but it is not that the subject is split between two poles, say between the spirit and matter (as one might understand Descrates to be saying) or between conscious and unconscious (as one might understand Freud. . . ) or between the symbolic and imaginary (as one might understand Lacan); but rather, the subject is this split. So in Zizek’s reading of Lacan, the third important register, that of the Real, in a way embodies the subject, or as Zizek says, is the hard kernel at the core of the subject. Its not that the subject is divided, and must choose the path of good over the path of evil, but the subject is rather division itself, and at no point can claim to have “found the way” or seen the light. The cry from the cross shows that even God is marked absolutely by this division:
In Christianity, says Zizek, “we are not FIRST separated from God and THEN miraculously united with him; the point of Christianity is that the very separation unites us – it is in this separation that we are “like God,” like Christ on the cross, i.e., the separation of us from God is transposed into God himself. (http://www.lacan.com/zizhegche.htm)
Milbank, fictioning things
While Zizek is closest to Chesterton in their emphasizing paradox as what makes Christianity unique among world religions and thought. Milbank is closest to Chesterton at a point that is inaccessible to an atheist like Zizek, for it concerns the meaning of the resurrection. In a paper published online entitled Fictioning Things: on gift and narrative, Milbank examines the theology of Chesterton through his writings on fairy tales and especially his understanding of the prohibitions which mark so many of them. For Chesterton the point of the negative prohibition was always to emphasize a positive creative act, like when, arguing in support of monogamy, he says that “keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman.” For Milbank what Chesterton is doing is emphasizing the status of the world as gift—it might not have been this way, there might have been nothing at all—and the seemingly arbitrary and unnecessary prohibition–you can eat from any tree in the garden except this one–only serves to emphasize that this world was created by a personal force, it was not eternal or necessary, but it was spur of the moment, and it very well could be unique in all the universe (even the language that god uses in the bible “you may eat of any tree” couches the negative in a positive. And of course if we look at the first chapter of Genesis, all the commands there are explicitly positive. Be fruitful and multiply. Have dominion over the creation. enjoy every green plant for food.) The ban, then is not fundamentally negative, but it is the only way that the positive creation can be seen for what it is from the side of creation. In the garden of eden, the reason why this prohibited fruit is connected with knowledge is because this is the nature of the temptation that our first parents, and us, always face in regards to how we understand the world. Is it going to be seen with the eyes of a child, full of wonder and surprise and new things, or is it going to be understood through the lens of knowledge, as something that fits into a system, thereby robbing it of its contingency and capacity to amaze. In one of his matchless phrases Chesterton notes that “A childe of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. A child of three is excited by being told that someone opened a door.”(ortho 42) This is not to say that knowledge in itself is fundamentally negative, for we can’t forget that prior to falling Humanity did have knowledge, to multiply and to have dominion and even to converse with God. What they didn’t have was complete knowledge, which is what the tree represents, knowledge of good and evil, of the all represented by both sides of a duality. The apples hanging from it would have half fresh and half rotten, just like in the old Disney Sleeping Beauty.
Chesterton claimed that seeing Christianity as a fairy tale was a big step in his embracing of the Catholic faith, and for Milbank the link between those tales and the faith is that both speak of a positivity behind the world and infusing it, which goes beyond the dualities of adult knowledge and mortality: “the ineliminable positivity of things has to be read as a sign of promise despite of or beyond death, unless we deliberately refuse to receive things as gifts” (13)
Fairy tales are, of course, the stories that we tell children and for Chesterton, and Milbank after him, following Jesus’ command to become like little children means understanding what it is that fairy tales do. Part of Milbanks argument that I won’t go into here is how we must see the Christian story as a fairy tale and not as myth. Christainti is not, says Milbank primarily “something to be fully grasped by adults in absttrarct terms, and then presented to children in terms of image and story that they will find more readily comprehensible” (2) To really stick to the command of Christ we must see Adults as simply the “means of transmission . . . . . conveying what they have received and must continue to receive themselves as children.” (2)
To conclude, I would just like to briefly address the aspect of revolution which is included in the title of this paper. It seems to me that a weakness of much of the best thinking today is that there is no longer any hope for revolution but only for revolt. Thinkers like Agamben, Badiou and Zizek have a subltle vocabulary of the Event, of a momentary eclipse of empire. So much of this degenerates, I feel, into the bad kind of paganism, which looks at the world with a certain resignation, sighs and says, Life does not offer us all that it pretends to. Back away from your dreams and just get what little pleasure, what little jouissance, you’ve had the luck to rescue. In two words, carpe diem. But for all Zizek gets about Chesterton and for all his keen insight into what makes Christianity unique, it seems important to me that we must side with Milbank (and Chesterton) against Zizek here and we must demand that this revolt of the truth be turned into a revolution not through a rejection of traditional modes but precisely through a correct understanding of the stories we’ve now been listening to for two thousand years. As Chesterton notes Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and not tried.” In affirming the voice of the southern Baptist preacher, Zizek says we must reject him inasmuch as he is bigoted but that we must affirm a materialist version of his approach. But it seems that zizek is contradicting himself here. What he is really affirming about this guy is his abstract assent to the importance of that violent cut. The title of his chapter is From Christ to Lenin. . . and back. In other words we can accept the figure of Christ inasmuch as his actions, to bring a sword into the world, to found a new world by explicit separation from the old, can be abstracted from the material fact of his incarnation. But I would hold that the Christian view is much more materialistic than either this minister or Zizek can stomach. For the preacher, his contemptuous smile tells us that his understanding of redemption is that merely intellectual “accepting of Jesus into my heart.” which is to blame for so much of what has been bad in Christianity of the last century. For Zizek the desire to abstract a mode of reasoning from the event of the cross means that he is ultimately denied access to the materiality of the risen body, a materiality which is not simply that of the historical Jesus, that’s what his master Lacan would call a fantasy, but rather that of the second person of the Trinity who existed before the foundations of the world and whose body appears as a kind of fairy tale magical food in the sacrament of the mass.
Like
“Thinkers like Agamben, Badiou and Zizek have a subtle vocabulary of the Event, of a momentary eclipse of empire….”
Aron, you are really finding your voice. This is so helpful on all three figures you discuss. Zizek’s take on “revolution” is where, for me, he becomes shockingly irresponsible. (Would he argue for it if revolution were really imminent? Or is this just his way of pushing back against current political correctness and mindless relativism?) Kristeva’s “revolt,” on the other hand, is much closer to the revolution you are talking about, the chancy rebirths of human capacity to love and converse that are never completed or assured….
Genuine revolution that embraces that cut and relies anyhow on the deep magic of God — that’s Chestertonian religion! As you say.
Yes, actually a part I want to develop discusses Zizek’s view that we can revolt but can’t make a revolution. I would beg to differ. I think as far as his philosophy goes he’s probably right, which is why its only Christianity which offers a revolution that doesn’t depend on domination
Oh. Thanks. He just sounds so incendiary at times…but I take your point.
I especially like in your essay the part about how “we must demand that this revolt of the truth be turned into a revolution not through a rejection of traditional modes but precisely through a correct understanding of the stories we’ve now been listening to for two thousand years.”
A revolution NOT through REJECTION of traditional modes but through listening to them harder….
Does Bultmann figure in here too? Does listening to ‘traditional modes’ mean we can disagree with them, or re-interpret them in such a way that what was once distasteful or perhaps unclear gets re-described?
Your paper was excellent at the conference, Aaron. I think you nailed the connection between CHesterton, Milbank and Zizek well. I especially thought the part about Christian atheism to be a very good treatment of that less-quoted but incredible part of Orthodoxy. I also loved the conclusion: “But I would hold that the Christian view is much more materialistic than either this minister or Zizek can stomach. . .” Wonderful.
Scott, I think that listening calls for a re-interpretation that sometimes appears completely foreign, so much that its perhaps atheists like Zizek and Lacan who have the most enlightening things to say about Christianity. I have to admit, when I first started to read Freud, the best things I got from him were new ways to look at the Gospels!
Scott and Aron,
I think something that’s important to remember here, especially re: theological interpretation of scripture, is that the church has never “endorsed” one right interpretation, but has rather called interpreters to read in such a way that is compatible with Christianity qua global community. I’ve seen this most clearly in recent work on Irenaeus. He doesn’t advocate his reading as the “right” reading, but rather as a Christian reading, contra the Gnostics, who are not so much wrong as they are simply not theologically interpreting in anything like a Christian mode. As someone recently said to me, the problem with the Gnostic interpretation is that if it’s correct, Irenaeus and his contemporaries would have had to completely re-configure Christianity to the extent that it would have been unrecognizable. I think this is why Irenaeus keeps call interpreters back not to a didactically correct message, but rather to a narrative – Salvation History – as his regula fidei.
Point being, the church has always made room for many different interpretations, some of which do disagree with eachother on nearly everything. but to be Christian, they need to be able to fit – whether consciously or unconsciously – within something liek the regula or a credal framework.
Hey Dan,
Indeed. Here’s the thing: certain interpretations were ecumenically rejected. This means certain interpretations do not work, they deceive us, and we can say they are a ‘false teaching’.
Is there any way to delimit what a ‘christian mode’ is? I’m sure Arius thought of himself as interpreting Scripture in a ‘christian mode’; and, I’m sure Mormons think they read scripture in such a manner too.
Do you think Irenaeus’s rule of faith was the same as, e.g., Tertullian’s, or Augustine’s? Do you think these are regional sorts of things, or are they ecumenically recognized sorts of things?
I am not sure if I should weigh in and try to answer for Dan…so I will just speak for myself. Scott, in reply to your question if the regula is the same for Tertullian or Augustine, I have to say of course not. Working with Augustine’s De Doctrina it seems like the regula fidei is always the stop all. In other words the Fathers all want to keep a wide playing field for interpretation, but also want some measure of boundary. For Augustine (and I think for all the Fathers) this is the regula. But for Augustine the regula includes conciliar statements along with a clearer sense of canon. All of these were not even on Irenaeus’ or Tertullian’s radar.
Lets put this in Augustine’s terms. Clearly he and the Donatists claimed a regula fidei. But the regula often is simply a line of preference. It is invoked when the Other’s interpretation is at odds with a particular interpretive lens. Both the Donatists and Augustine invoke the regula at the exclusion of the other.
This raises two things for me: What is the regula fidei now? And second, it seems like saying certain interpretations are out of bounds without saying Why is a rhetorical move, not a theological one. Yes, Pelagius gets it wrong, but why? The Gnostics and other too. The current task is to say why such readings are out of the Christian Tradition.
Josh,
Sounds good to me. My response was coming from a concern that the phrase ‘regula fidei’ be taken in a way that obscures divergences among theological accounts or hides what the context(s) of such a thing is.
I also agree that we need to isolate theological reasons from rhetorical reasons, or philosophical reasons. Sometimes a difference of the (proposed) truth of a philosophical claim underlies a theological difference. For example, in certain Trinitarian theologian’s philosophical psychology explains why they have different theological accounts. I won’t bore you with details, suffice to say certain scholastic theologians all want to agree with church authorities, especially ecumenical counsels, and if possible Augustine. So, they generally aim for the same conclusion, but how they get there is very different. Sometimes how they get there even slightly changes the conclusion. And– what determines this difference are philosophical differences and not theological differences. Of course, there are many other ways things could go — there might be theological reasons that explain why there are philosophical differences between people. It is left to patient students to figure out what is going on in a given situation.
Scott, I can’t speak about the Medievals, but I would be hesitant to say that Irenaeus and Augustine (or any other patristic fathers) have different accounts of the regula b/c they have “philosophical” distinctions. Not b/c I think they have the same philosophy, but precisely b/c I don’t think you could establish such a claim with such broad generalizations. First, you’d have to establish what you mean by philosophy vs. theology, then you’d have to establish that you’re not being anachronistic with your claim, then demonstrate that this distinction is held by the fathers in question, then you’d have to demonstrate why this is significant and whether their philosophical commitments precede their commitments to Christian practices, etc….
I don’t think that Josh is saying that we ought to mark a hard and fast distinction between rhetorical, philosophical and theological. After all, the divisions between the Gnostics and Irenaeus were all of the above. And Irenaeus is not in the business of clearly demarcating the disciplinary lines. In fact, he seems to think that theology (or theological meaning) encompasses all of the above.
As you say above, some interpretations don’t work and are rejected in council. But we see this before there’s any councils at all. After all, that’s what Irenaeus is doing; arguing that the Gnostic Interpretation is not Christian, that it doesn’t work. But to do so, he develops a rule that is largely based in Christian practice, not in philosophy.
I’d agree w/ the line that Dan takes here, that the Regula does not, at root, point to a philosophy or ‘theology’. Of course it involves these, but moreso it points toward the reality of the inbreaking Kingdom of God, and of how that kingdom reforms and norms all of our theologizing and reading of scripture and prayer.
The Regula is what *makes* our theologizing important. For instance, debates on the Trinity had importance for Nyssa b/c these concerned the Name into which one was baptized. Getting the theology wrong meant being baptized into a false name, when “there only one Name under heaven whereby we might be saved” (he discusses this in his “Catechetical Oration”). But baptism is not theology, it is a mystery, an ontological event, a sacrament. Same with the Eucharist, which “makes” the Church (in that, by partaking of Christ’s Body and Blood, we become that Body).
It served as a way of pointing towards realities which we might otherwise miss, primarily in being wholly fixed on our discourse about God apart from moving the whole life toward God (cf. Nazianzen’s repeated insistence upon purification of life as integral to “doing theology”). It means to bear in mind that by faith we are saved, which is an act of the total creature; anything less is had by the demons anyway (who are expert in discursive knowledge of God).
Not sure if I’m adding any light for the heat . . .
Dan,
I was asking about the particular contents of the ‘regula fidei’; not the convention of having a rule by which to accept or reject some claims. I was just interested to learn what the particular contents of Irenaeus’s rule of faith was, and see how similar it is to, e.g., Augustine’s. If we notice differences of content, then we might ask, what is the basis for this difference? It could be all sorts of things, rhetorical, philosophical, theological, moral, etc. I suppose if I were to identify what this ‘comparison’ amounts to, it would be one of ‘overstanding’ consequent to ‘understanding’. But, given that I’ve not studied this in Irenaeus I asked the question about what I. takes the ‘regula fidei’ to be (namely, its content)?
But perhaps you may not accept such a procedure — perhaps one might hesitate b/c ‘content’ would be a technical term and not based in the historical documents. In which case, we are in the land of perspectivism and we can’t ask such comparative questions and expect any non-perspectival responses. Is that how you see it? If so, perhaps the phrase ‘regula fidei’ is a technical concept of medieval or modern origins; and given our technical concept we explain it as an item of rhetoric for some reason yet to be explained.
Scott,
You should read MacIntyre on practice here, as he addresses the charge to perspectivism. Regardless, the contents of the rule for Irenaeus are always changing because Salvation history is progressing, and God is revealing himself through the Word and Spirit in new ways. But, if you HAVE to have a content, then (risking being reductive) Irenaeus tends to equate the regula with the economy of salvation. That said, HOWEVER, the rule is characterized by its content, but rather by the practices, like Baptism, that it is situated in. It serves those practices and is created by those practices. For Irenaeus, you have to be in those practices to have the rule. And, no, it’s actually a concept that Irenaeus predecessors create. Irenaeus actually calls it the regula fidei. So, what Irenaeus takes the regula to be, as you asked, is precisely not its content, but is function as defined by the practices of the CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY.
…interpret scriptures so as to increase the kingdom of caritas. That’s Augustine’s rule, of course, and how do we do that if we do not give special reverence to the interpretations of the greatest lovers (of God and the Church) in our tradition? So content is always enshrined in persons, and persons are heeded vis-a-vis their capacity to love….
Knowing anything is an on-going journey of distinguishing the essentials of that kind of thing from the less essential…with openness to future insight and correction from the past, too. Persons are the doers of this kind of knowing. And this kind of knowing shapes the persons who engage in it. Aristotle said that a way of knowing is “a qualification of the human person WITH RESPECT TO THAT PERSON’S BEING (ousia).
Isn’t that a splendid and stupendous thing to have seen? All this empersoned growth is the crucial aspect of knowing that was dropped from the theoretical picture in modern “epistemology,” which has little to do with the episteme or communal discipline as previously understood in the liberal arts tradition of the West? This is why the questions of knowing became questions of “knowledge.”
Hey Dan,
Thanks for that; would you say that baptism could ever _not_ be part of the regula fidei, in this life, for Irenaeus?
I get the performative nature of this — you can even see this in the way that some medievals construed logic, e.g., Abelard, Anselm. You often find that when they analyze a ‘proposition’ that they are analyzing an ‘oratio’– that is, some performed statement. This view of performed sentences was somewhat in competition with another view — where words have naturally fixed meanings. Eventually the ‘naturally fixed meanings’ acct. dropped out, and the focus was on ‘orationes’.
So yeah- I do get the significance of the claim that ‘content’ is never not performed by someone, e.g., by the Christian community. Nevertheless, there has got to be something to the idea that even if there isn’t a baptism being performed right now somewhere in the world, that it remains –in this life– a ‘type’ of action to be done. In which case, we could consider baptism as a type of action in addition to being ‘tokened’ at various moments in time.
What do you think?
Aron, sorry for co-opting your thread. I’d be interested in how a Lacanian/Chestertonian Sophiologist is internalizing this conversation.
Scott,
that might be an interesting account from the perspective of a medieval philosopher. But, as far as I can tell, it’s just not on the radar for the 2nd century theologian/pastor like Irenaeus, but if you can find something there, please do share.
As for as my own interests go in modern theology, while you might be able to logically demonstrate the above view of yours, I don’t really see how you could then demonstrate what this “type” necessarily entails apart from a concrete account of what the practice “looked like” as practiced in actual communities: how does said practice fit into the life and beliefs of the community. After all, baptism means so much different things to Christians across the globe and throughout the centuries. Moreover, it has been practiced in radically different ways. What Irenaeus wants to assert however is that baptism and the vow made in baptism and in the community of the baptized REALLY does fit into the narrative of salvation history. The gnostics blow it here b/c they can’t even affirm that Jesus is the very same lord of both Salvation History and Creation. They can’t do this for any number of reasons, all of which originate in their fundamental inability to account for Christian practice the way that apostles and the churches across the globe do. So, yes, you can built a phenomenology of the “type” of baptism. But the following question is twofold: first, will the description be faithful to the church’s practice if you reduce practice in favor of a more “ideal” type, and second by emphasizing type over practice, do you risk limiting the practice in way that fathers like Irenaeus are hedging against precisely by avoiding such an idealized definition?
Dan,
The only thing I dispute in what you say is that if a person wished to give an account of baptism that it must be ‘idealized’. I think there are inductive ways to do this; so, there’s no synthetic a priori activity here. At bottom, I’d just like to see that we can, and do, give accounts of e.g., baptism, even if the account is satisfied by limited instances. If we couldn’t give one or more accounts of what baptism is, how would we even know that in fact there are different ‘meanings’ ["baptism means so much different things to Christians across the globe and throughout the centuries"]? Or again, why should baptism be a ‘meaning to someone’? ‘Meaning’ should probably extend both to existential realities and to cognitive content (i.e. beliefs), rather than just the latter.
Here’s a question for Aron.
I recall in Chesterton’s _Orthodoxy_ that he says that even the physical laws of this world are ‘made up’ but a designer. I’ve usually taken this to mean that there is no necessity that in a world such as our’s where there is a planet, gravity, and apples, that there is no binding necessary reason why an apple must fall to the ground if it disconnects from the apple tree. Since being a graduate student I’ve now wondered whether or not Chesterton was promoting a Cartesian claim about the radically contingency of all created things, e.g., God could have made it so that 2 + 2 = 5. This view we might describe as ‘extreme contingency’. One thing that fascinates me about this view is that it is not a scholastic one. Scholastics, at least, discussed ‘possible beings’ (divine ideas) and how they connect with each other. In a nutshell, they might say something like this: it is a contingent fact that the apple fell from the tree, but it is in the natural features of the apple (esp. its own weight/quantity) to do this in the right circumstances.
So, is Chesterton a Cartesian on the issue of the contingency of the world?
Scott, what I get from Chesterton’s discussion in orthodoxy is that we should be careful of claiming a simple “naturalness” about physical and mental phenomena. That is, it is only within a certain system of counting that 2+2=4. In other system (such as base 3 or whatever) it would not be the case. Now you could argue that the metatruth of addition is still the same, no matter what base you are in, but I think you’d be wrong. That is, the medium through which we gain access to phenomena determines, in part, that phenomena. This is fundamentally trinitarian. The way the Father loves the Son determines that love. In fact, the medium is personal itself. It is the Holy Spirit. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, seen in this life, supports Christian dogma.
The limitation of the scholastics is that they made a dinstinction between the speculations of possible beings and the facticity of this world, when in reality, our medium of perception in this world is always limited by at least a partial speculation. This is Lacan’s Imaginative register, which science tries to bypass through strict formalization (Lacan did too) but almost fails when it has to resort to human language to explain itself.
Hey Aron,
Yeah– if you take a Kantian turn, I see that what you may follow. But if one doesn’t go Kantian, what then?
What you say about the Trinity here escapes me. There are lots of problems to sticking with Augustinian gloss about the HS being the bond of love btwn. Father and Son; or at least, to just assert this without stating how one should interpret it. But maybe you take this as an non-explainable, or not able to be denied? Don’t get me wrong, I’m a sucker for the mutual love stuff in Trinitarian theology – but if you are happy with that articulation you are gonna have BIG problems. For example, this might entail a bad subordinationism of the Holy Spirit. Is the HS not able to be a lover, too? Isn’t each divine person a lover and beloved? If that is the case, then loving/being loved won’t meet the job description of a distinctive personal property. Perhaps such concerns are just my concerns? But, I hasten to add that Augustine too was worried about such misleading claims, like saying that the Son just is divine wisdom, etc. (De Trin.6-7).
In which case, I’m not sure how we get from some account of the Trinity to some account about human cognition in general? Is this a case of explaining the mysterious (human cognition) by the most mysterious (the Trinity)?
But even if we do go Kantian (of some variety), I don’t think one can appeal to some Trinitarian account to _justify_ our holding a Kantian account. Why would we use an account of the Trinity to justify some account we have about human cognition? What would motivate such an enterprise? Well, I suppose apologetics (see, if you believe in the Trinity, then all these problems about human cognition are explained)? One worry I have about this approach is that we just read our theory of human cognition back into the Trinity; this would be a version of Feuerbachian projection of an extreme kind. Karen Kilby has written about this in an article, published at the Nottingham (Milbank) website.
Yeah, I took Chesterton to make the meta-claim that there is no natural necessity/structure to anything b/c God willed creatures to be as they are, so all natural causal connections arise merely b/c God willed those causal connections to obtain in given circumstances. I hadn’t really thought of Chesterton as an extreme volunteerist before; this view is opposite of e.g., Aquinas and Duns Scotus.
Regarding the math example; yeah, I’d disagree. When I learned base six in college, I didn’t have any ‘cognitive dissonance’ when counting by base six, and I believe this was so because the meta-addition principles still held.
Chesterton was a highly trained visual artist. He knows that the choice of media and the way they interact during the creative process are parts of the “making it up” of the artist. To say a designer chose that things be this way is not to say there is no internal consistency or determinateness in operation.
When Chesterton said that for all we know, the sun comes up every morning because every day God says, “Encore, encore,” he was not intending a dismissal of natural causation. He is making a more radical claim that the entire ongoing work of art depends radically upon the divine love and enjoyment that set in motion and sustains it.
I think that primarily Chesterton was countering the emerging naturalism of his period. I.e. that things are “just the way they are” and that’s the end of the explanation. This is metaphysically and ratinally inadequate for Chesterton. There is supernatural causation within and behind (and in front of) natural causation.
Scott, you say: “At bottom, I’d just like to see that we can, and do, give accounts of e.g., baptism, even if the account is satisfied by limited instances. If we couldn’t give one or more accounts of what baptism is, how would we even know that in fact there are different ‘meanings’”
If you’re not advocating for some kind of ideal, then I can’t see that you’re saying anything more here than you want to make sure that we can talk about things like baptism, that it HAS to be intelligible. Well, of course we talk about it. We talk about everything. The point is that there are ineffable aspects of our faith. So, yes, we talk about practices, and we talk about Salvation History as well. but in neither case does our talking about the things precede them.
Janet,
If that is the context of what Chesterton said, then I’m glad to know that. If at root he’s upholding a Christian account of God’s ‘concurrence’/’sustaining action’, then that sounds good to me; especially b/c I do quite like Orthodoxy!
Dan,
Good question: must some christian practice be intelligible? Or, maybe I would reformulate the question, ‘must the christian practice in question be entirely intelligible?’ If we ask the latter question; then yeah, I could concede that there are non-intelligible features just so long as we don’t from the start suppose there is nothing intelligible about them. If that were the case, it’d be hard to see how any *infused* beliefs were involved. A nice Patristic argument for the practice being *not* wholly intelligible goes as follows. If we can understand x, without any act of trust (faith), then that takes away the merit of faith. So, if we aim to say that faith is required, then there must be some ways that acts of understanding are insufficient to the task. And, if this is the scheme we’re working with, then yeah, I’m happy with that. At minimum I’m wanting to affirm that there is *content* to the faith- and that this *content* is communicable from person to person. If it were incommunicable, then catechism goes out the window.
“just so long as we don’t from the start suppose there is nothing intelligible about them”
Yeah, of course. I don’t think that’s what I’m suggesting, as it would be pretty ridiculous to make an argument from the foundational supposition that I”m arguing about nothing.
“If it were incommunicable, then catechism goes out the window.”
Exactly, the question is, then, what exactly is catechesis? It’s formation in a very particular set of practices, to which is subordinated a Salvation history, to which is further subordinated a ratio cognoscibilis that flows from the practices that deliver to us that Salvation History.
This is a good discussion. I miss you all… (well, not you, AD, b/c we’ve never met, but still…) A few lesser thoughts on the discussion, for what they’re worth:
To say “if it were incommunicable, then catechism goes out the window” begs the question: why focus on communicability and intelligibility so much? Who thinks these things are incommunicable? Some more fundamentalist elements of Xn America?
To focus so much on intelligibility gives the impression of someone who, say, wants to talk about how the shooting of free-throws must be communicable, or else catechism in shooting freethrows is out the window.
OK, one wants to say, but the main point isn’t the communicability, right, but learning to shoot freethrows, which takes more than communicability (it takes practice, for starters!).
The early catechumenate was dominated by concern for “amending one’s life” moreso than doctrinal instruction, which came moreso (though not without exception) in post-baptismal mystagogy. So for instance, when Catholics developed the RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults), which sought to retrieve the early catechumenate, they incorporated this sensibility in various ways. Why? B/c it’s clear throughout the patristic era that heavy doctrinal lifting (intellectual engagement) required as a precursor the substantive formation and amendment of life–not least in prayer–such that, in having carved room in the life for the life-creating Spirit, the Christian might know that Spirit first-hand and incontrovertibly and in some fullness.
But lacking this sense of ordering, as Josef Jungmann (the great Catholic liturgical scholar) lamented some 70 yrs ago, we now find ourselves in a situation when the average Xn actually has much more factual information re their faith, and has encountered more factual information, than most any priest in the patristic or medieval era, though for lack of coherence between life and thought, the average Xn today gets remarkably little mileage from that information. It’s mostly in one ear out the other, or it settles in as a confused jumble of supposedly related propositions. For Jungmann, the solution to the intellectual dissaray in the current church is not better or more rigorous thinking, but, as w/ the catechumenate, of finding the integrating links between dogma and life throught the difficult practice of amending one’s life, of practicing humility, prayer, virtue in general, that is, of attaining purity of heart and thereby attracting the life-creating Spirit, whereby one’s “eyes” might truly “see”–even the eyes of the simple (cf. here the catechesis of Paul the Simple as an extreme case–or Aquinas’ last considerations upon his theologizing).
None of which is to deny the importance of doctrinal formulation or intelligibility (just the opposite, actually). But it is to say that deciding to spend one’s time mostly defending ‘intelligibility’, esp. under the name of ‘catechesis’ (or, for that matter, in the name of obviating lesser instances of evangelical enthusiasm) is, again, a bit akin to trying to learn to shoot free-throws in a classroom: it assumes that most of what is needed is intellectual.
Re the “Kantian” turn: the fathers were comfortable acknowledging various factors influencing cognition, even at what we might today call “pre-conscious” levels. In other words, Ricoeur’s post-Kantian “masters of suspicion” (Nietzsche, Freud, Marx) might be conflated in interesting ways with monastic writings on the various and subtle influences upon cognition arising from the passions–the remedy for which was not more time ironing things out in the study but more time in prayer, in vigil, and so forth–inasmuch as these tools were used to strengthen the Godward orientation of the heart.
But what do I know…
mtslckr,
thanks for those thoughts. I think scott is struggling with some other factor about the viability of theological discourse about these things, whereas you and I are presupposing it by trying to get at what is really going on in the practice itself, following folks like Hadot and Bourdieu. I’m hoping to throw something on with MacIntyre that I’ve been working with lately to get your all’s thoughts.
peace,
Dan