“I say theological and political (or theopolitical) to signal that my claim calls for analyses of the problem of race (and, relatedly, of the Jewish question) that explore the senses in which such a discourse is bound to the nature and practice of modern politics and thereby indelibly tied to what is religious about modernity and the way it parodies theology at the same time that it cloaks this fact. The discourse of race is critical to the cloaking process and thus functions as a vital cog within modernity’s own religious and quasi-theological machinery, a machinery intent, as the quotation by Étienne Balibar that opens this chapter alerts us, on producing bodies and people, but bodies and people of a particular sort. It produces bodies and people that can populate an enlightened, global, and cosmopolitan social order, the domain of civil society. The people produced is the modern citizenry; the body, that of the modern citizen; and the social order enacted and perpetuated, that of the modern (nation-)state. Given this, the politics of race and the politics of the modern state are of a piece, for both are religious or pseudotheological in character. Failing to reckon with this fact not only leaves the problem of modern racial reasoning inadequately understood but also can yield responses that risk–unwittingly, no doubt–reinhabiting, at the politically unconscious, theopolitical level, the very problem that needs overcoming.”- J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account, 40.
Archive for January, 2009
LikeThese posts are portions of an, as yet, unpublished paper I did recently for a doctoral class on “spiritual practices.” This will the first of a multi-post installment. The project ventures drawing from the well of the cosmic theological vision of St. Maximus the Confessor as a vital resource for the articulation of a theological rationale undergirding the practice of Christian hospitality. I hope that it may also be a fruitful addition for the recent “retrieval” theme on TLOU in which figures like Bulgakov and Chesterton have been explored…
St. Maximus Confessor and Christian Hospitality
Introduction
St. Maximus the Confessor (580-662 A.D.) understands the cosmos through a theological ontology of Love. All creatures in creation are unified through participation in the ecstatic Love that is the life of the Trinity. Participation in this Love unifies the difference of creatures into a harmony. As such this love is the “reason” or “logos” of creatures. With the fall of humanity this love is disrupted cosmically. The fall of humanity is key in this “cosmic tragedy” for humanity is the microcosm (micros-kosmos or “little cosmos”), which participates in the sensuous, creaturely dimension of being and the rational-spiritual dimension of the hierarchy of being. Humanity, the microcosm, is the center or crux of the hierarchy of being as it co-inheres in the second person of the Trinity, the Logos. It is the crossing of the divine and the sensuous dimensions of the hierarchy of being. Consequently, when humanity falls the harmony of creation is disrupted. This disruption or discord is healed or re-harmonized in the Incarnation of the Second person of the Trinity. In the Incarnation of the Logos in Christ the Love which orders the cosmos is shown or made concrete and the healing of humanity, the ‘microcosmic mediator,’ is accomplished; thus the goal (telos) of Creation, which the Triune God has desired from the beginning, is realized and made possible. Continue reading ‘St. Maximus Confessor and Christian Hospitality’
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