This is the kind of impoliteness that Graham Ward calls for in The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Post-Material Citizens. The act of being a citizen does look crass next to the polished acquiescence to consumerism and endless materialism. But for the theologian, who is not a citizen of this world, Ward’s is a call to a radical kind of impoliteness, the scandal of the Christ.

The true politico-economic nature of Globalism

What is evident is that globalization is not at the vanguard of of democratization. Indeed, it cannot be because no one controls the unbounded market and therefore no one is accountable to it, whereas democracy’s requirements for checks and balances demands means whereby a public governance can be made. Globalization is transforming democracy, undermining what makes democracy flourish – a vigorous civil society. As mentioned in the last chapter, one of the key characteristics of the postdemocratic condition is the increasing government of state policy by economic matters. Does, then, the correlation between aggressive democratic states and aggressive multinational corporations come about because of copycat managerial strategies or because, where power is increasingly understood in terms of economic and military strength, negotiations have to be made between international leaders of commerce and key national governments implicated in empire?

Admirable as it may be, man’s capacity to manufacture and produce useful objects even of the highest quality, such as the machines of our modern technological civilization, is not to be directly associated with human personhood. Perhaps on this point the contrast we have been making here between man as a person, on the one hand, and man as an individual thinking or acting agent, on the other hand, becomes more evident. The ‘creation’ of a machine requires man’s individualization both in terms of his seizing, controlling and dominating reality, that is, turning beings into things, and also in terms of combination of human individuals in a collective effort, that is, of turning himself into a thing, an instrument and a means to an end. Hence, it is only natural that the more collectivistic a society, that is, the more it sacrifices personhood, the better the products it achieves. But when we say that man is capable of creating by being a person, we imply something entirely different, and that has to do with a double possibility which this kind of creation opens up. On the other hand, ‘things’ or the world around acquire a ‘presence’ as an integral and relevant part of the totality of existence, and, on the other hand, man himself becomes ‘present’ as a unique and unrepeatable hypostasis of being and not as an impersonal number in a combined structure. Un other words, in this way of understanding creating, the movement is from thinghood to personhood and not the other way round. That is, for example, what happens int he case of a work of real art as contrasted to a machine. When we look at a painting or listen to music we have in front of us ‘the beginning of a world’, a ‘presence’ in which ‘things’ and substances (cloth, oil, etc.) or qualities (shape, colour, etc.) or sounds becomes part of a personal presence. And this is entirely the achievement of personhood, a distinctly unique capacity of man, which, unlike other technological achievements, is not threatened by the emerging intelligent beings of computer science. The term ‘creativity’ is significantly applied to art par excellence, though we seldom appreciate the real implications of this for theology and anthropology.

John D. Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, 216

So, essentially, those in the Archdiocese who are making this decision are saying that, contrary to what we might have believed, agape is not unconditional, but dependent on the Archdiocese’s imprimatur of City Council policy.

Tell me, where does Christ append an anti-secularity clause to his “do it to the least of these, you do it to me”? What kind of Church is this that demands compatibility with bureaucrats before it will do the work of Christ?

Read the whole story here.

PS. Vox Nova has picked up on the discussion here.

This poem came out of studying The Cappadocians, three men and one woman who were 4th centery Eastern, Greek speaking xtians who had a huge part in the formation of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. They were affirming the goodness of Creation in the midst of all the muck and dung that we seem to endlessly make out of our lives and world. This has often been a great struggle for me. So there are Hebrew and Greek words referring to various human, social realities. Nietzsche has breathed in my ear in times of agnostic, nihilistic struggle in the past so he shows up dueling with Macrina. I wrote it during a rain storm outside the GF Java Cafe in my hometown of Jamestown, TN.

Like Mercy

“Sweet Rain…like God’s own Mercy…”

What exactly is the connection, the connection between a world of harmonic order and a world of suffering, decay…death?

The rain pours upon the earth, invading but belonging in every pore, awakening parched roots. Dry and dead now leap for joy, springing to the sky

Water pours upon the earth, dancing and splattering…splattering/dancing…dattering splancing upon the streets, rolling over pavement, falling over steps in the ever-moving niagra of spinning cosmos

Water…one of those fundamental elements…rolls over and into the pores of earth and…and thunder rolls, lightening strikes

Harmony or discord?

Walls fall, lifeless bodies collapse down the collapsing hills of collapsing houses of collapsing earth. Lifeless bodies of deer and cattle and dogs and cats and Adam and…and it would’ve been a damn good time to be a fish

Soul rolls over and into the pores of Adam, ish and isha, man and woman, mother and son, son and sister and father and neighbor and polis and oikos and agora and oikonomia and…creation…and out of the Alpha Rhythms of participatory love bodies are enraptured, so babies are born in the midst of heroic words like “till death do us part.” Homes are built, gardens are planted. Games are played while laughter is shared. Songs are sung and enraptured bodies move to the rhythms of the dance

Pointing and jumping, laughing I scream “look! Look! LOOK! Harmonic order!”

Soul rolls over and into the pores of Adam and all the ways and webs of the knitting together of Adam and…and reputations fail, economies collapse as bodies collapse as families collapse as marriages crumble as children collapse as cities collapse and as lies are told lust takes over, giving forth torture and greed, hunger and rape, famine and coldness

All of a sudden that madman runing through the streets that night with the silly mustache shouting” God is dead and we have killed him” seems not so far from of right. Adam seems to care much more about power games than love games…and people are torn and lives collapse and…and it still would’ve been a damn good time to be a fish!

Harmony or discord? What is the connection?

This fish feels the jaws surround and the darkness elbow out the light

And in the darkness I hear Macrina sing, pointing, shouting, jumping up and down, “look! Look! LOOK! Harmonic order envelopes chaos. There is not beginning, no arche, without an end, a telos.” And her voice echoes

“Get up Lazarus”

“Shall these bones live?”

“Where oh death is thy sting?”

“The heavens are telling”

“He is not here, he is risen”

“Sweet rain…like God’s own Mercy..Mercy that upholds it because it is good. It is fallen but it is good…

Discord or Harmony?

Macrina I hope like hell you are right because…because the deaf want to hear, the lame want to leap, the dead want to live and…and I am just so fucking tired of wanting to be a fish…Amen

Bibliography

Copeland, Robert M. “The Christian Message of Igor Stravinsky” The Musical Quarterly. 68.4 (October 1982), 563-579.Stravinsky, Igor. Symphony of Psalms for Chorus and Orchestra. London: Boosey and Hawkes Inc.,1948.Taruskin, Richard. “Russian Folk Melodies in ‘The Rite of Spring.’ Journal of the American Musicological Society. 33.3 (Autumn, 1980), 501-543.Walsh, Stephen. “Stravinsky’s Choral Music” Tempo, New Series. No. 81 Stravinsky’s 85^th Birthday (Summer, 1967), 41-51.

As a philosophical historian of ethics, Alasdair seems almost obsessively concerned with recounting the development of practical rationality through the emergence of late modern liberalism. In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? MacIntyre argues that the loss of a teleological orientation in the account of social formation necessarily results in competing practical rationalities. Pursuant to which, modern social science lacks the ability to recognize much less help redress the fracture in practice and rationality caused by the loss of ends-based reasoning. ((I am here employing MacIntyre’s definition of practice: “By a practice I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established co-operative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended” (After Virtue: A Study in Moral Philosophy, revised edition [South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984], 187); by “goods internal” to a practice, MacIntyre means the kinds of goods (results) that can be had only by successfully pursuing certain activities, whereas external goods are those that are not specific to an activity, but can be obtained through a variety of activities (e.g. prestige, riches, status, social influence, etc…).)) “And hence arises the fundamental incompatibility of theories of justice framed in terms of one of those schemes with theories framed in terms of the others.” ((Alasdair MacIntyre, “Précis of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?,” in The MacIntyre Reader, ed. Kelvin Knight (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 106.)) MacIntyre is here trying to articulate not only the relationship between theories of justice (or any philosophical pursuit for that matter) within a particular philosophical tradition – e.g. Socrates to Plato to Aristotle, etc. – or even the relationship between competing traditions – Humean rationalism versus Aristotelian virtue ethics – but also, and in many ways more importantly, the relationship between that philosophical tradition and the communities in which it finds itself at different times. “The history of philosophy as a form of rational inquiry is in such cultural and social orders embedded in the larger history of culture and society and will be, if too much detached from that history, in certain respects distorted or even unintelligible.” ((MacIntyre, “Précis of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?,” 106.)) MacIntyre is clearly wary of attempts to define philosophy in a neutral or absolute sense, divorcing it from the concrete lived experience of its practitioners as members of a organic organization. But because philosophies relate to their social context in different ways, it becomes necessary for MacIntyre to describe how rationality and concepts of justice arise in each particular social tradition as what he calls “socially embodied traditions of rational inquiry.” ((MacIntyre, “Précis of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?,” 107.)) Thus begins MacIntyre’s account of the highly contextual matrix of virtues, practices, and traditions, all as interconnected and mutually supporting elements of human society. MacIntyre’s writing does not lend itself to quick summation, or short citation. What follows is my attempt to briefly spell out three elements of his project – his account of the formation of individuals in a distinct practice, the ends (or goods) they seek in those practices, and the pay off of the first two, a theory of practical rationality that is dependent upon but also elucidates elements of the community in which it arises – which together, I think, will be helpful for stabilizing an image of community and practice in mind in discussions of such Church activities like interpretation of Scritpure.

An Aristotelian teleology. MacIntyre establishes the majority of his account of practical rationality on the Aristotelian/Athenian framework of the polis as the organizing locus of practice. He argues that an Aristotelian history of philosophy is superior to both alternative (Enlightenment & Neitzschean) accounts in that an Aristotelian phronetic teleology can both explain itself as well as the idiosyncrasies of an Enlightenment/rationalistic hyper-individualism and Neitzsche’s brilliant but flawed alternative to said individualism. The Aristotelian framework is able to do this not because it captures some objective, neutral assessment in a more rational way than the latter, but rather because it is able to describe the way in which it and the other ideologies fit into concrete social matrices. ((MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 144-45; similarly, Hadot: “for [Aristotle], philosophy was incapable of being reduced to philosophical discourse, or to a body of knowledge. Rather, philosophy for Aristotle was a quality of of the mind, the result of inner transformation, The form of life preached by Aristotle was the life according to the mind.”)) In such a framework, success in a particular practice – say farming – clearly depends on more than the mere aggregate of mastery over discrete functions – sowing, harvesting, etc… Rather, success depends on the ability to decide on immediate action whereby one evaluates the success of previous attempts, ((Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 31: “It is a distinction which will inform later judgments upon one’s earlier mistakes in a rational, well-grounded way only in one is able to explain what it was about one in an earlier state that led one into error”; see also, “Practical Rationalities as Forms of Social Structure,” 4: “Such apprentices learn to make two kinds of distinction: between what merely seems good to them and what really is good (a good way to plough a field, for example, or to write an elegy); and between what is good or best for them in their present circumstances and what is good unqualifiedly. They learn to make these distinctions in the course of acquiring habits of action and of judgement which discipline and redirect the initial untrained desires and responses which they brought with them to their apprenticeship.”)) and eventually the ability to think abstractly about and evaluate something like farming at its best, and thus a distinction is drawn between thinking about efficiency as the good of the moment and excellence as the best overall. ((MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 31: “[I]t is important to note that the kind of judgments invoking this second type of distinction are themselves subject to later judgments invoking the first kind of distinction. What seemed to us at one stage a perfect performance may later be recognized either as imperfect or as less perfect than some later achievement. That is to say, in all these areas there is not only progress in achievement but also progress in our conception and recognition of what the highest perfection is.”)) Such evaluative ability only comes from long periods of familiarity with a particular practice in which one can imagine the end toward which one is proceeding. To do so requires the second kind of evaluation, in which the best is not idealized, but rather is seen as a real condition toward which one is striving and can attain.
What directs [participants in a practice] toward that goal is both the history of successive attempts to transcend the limitations of the best achievement in that particular area so far and the acknowledgment of certain achievements as permanently defining aspects of the perfection toward which that particular form of activity is directed. Those achievements are assigned canonical status within the practice of each type of activity. Learning what they have to teach is central to apprenticeship in each particular form of activity. ((MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 31.))

MacIntyre is quick to point out that excellence in that activity is not reducible to merely following the rules to the point of perfection. Rather, attaining to excellence demands “a freedom to violate present established maxims , so that achievement proceeds both by rule-keeping and by rule-breaking.” ((MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 31.)) Only the practitioner able to imagine the best within the established framework, even when the best leads her to divert from that framework, will be able to make that kind of advanced discernment. In other words, success in practice depends on being formed in a dynamic practical rationality inherent to that very practice.

Goods of Efficiency vs. Goods of Excellence. Too often, however, external goods (“good of efficiency”) challenge that imaginative ability by tempting practitioners to act for the sake of obtaining those external goods rather than for the sake of obtaining the internal goods of excellence. ((MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 32.)) After all, the qualities prized by the “goods of excellence” and the “goods of efficiency,” while sometime matching up superficially are often accounted for differently in important ways. Justice or fairness in a system ruled by “good of efficiency” will be the outcome of holding to contractual agreements – i.e. justice is observing a prior mutual social bond. ((MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 37: “it will always be as if justice was the outcome of a contract , an episode of explicit negotiation… But the rules will have to be at least minimally acceptable to almost all for them to function as rules of justice for any extended period of time, and this will characteristically involve that some of the same constraints are imposed on those who are relatively rich and powerful as well as on those whoa re relatively weak and powerless.”)) In this case, there is nothing inherent about justice. On the other hand, justice in a system of excellence will be understood as that which is “due excellence” and therefore injustice entails both wronging the one upon whom the injustice is perpetrated as well as upon the perpetrator because she is denying herself a particular good in that she will now face some kind of punishment.

Political Orderings. However, MacIntyre wagers that the only framework in which a concept of justice can be sustained without fracturing into competing account of goods or deserts (i.e. Competing mutual social agreements about justice – or orthodoxy?) is a community that orders goods in such a way that its members orient themselves and their actions toward achieving a common goal. In such a community, “a polis,” the multiplicity of practices, internal goods, and external goods are all ordered with a view toward the greatest possible enjoyment of all goods by its members. ((MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 34.)) Note, however, that even enjoyment has a strongly teleological flavor here. “The constitution of each particular polis could therefore be understood as the expression of a set of principles about how goods are to be ordered into a way of life.” ((MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 34.)) MacIntyre here unveils his definition of practical rationality as one which “aspires to show what it is for the citizen of the polis qua citizen – the citizen who acts in accordance with the ordering of goods established in his particular polis – to act rationality.” ((MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 34.))

While this is truly one of MacIntyre’s outstanding achievements, it is also one of MacIntyre’s most contested arguments; ((Jennifer A. Herdt, following L. Gregory Jones’s and Jeffrey Stout’s respective arguments, takes it that MacIntyre is here being inconsistent in that he claims that particular human life and traditions are narratively unified, even if traditions are not unified across the board by a normative narrative; Herdt claims that MacIntyre needs a third option between the emotivist and his own to resolve this inconsistency, namely her tradition-trascendent alternative (“Alasdair MacIntyre’s ‘Rationality of Traditions’ and Tradition-Transcendental Standards of Justification,” The Journal of Religion, 78 (Oct., 1998), pp. 524-546, esp. 525.  )) by clarifying Aristotelian practical rationality as acting in such a way that one stands in relationship to a set of ordered practices with a particular end in view, MacIntyre locates rationality within practice in such a way that seeks to avoid a naïve absolute (or universal) rationality (i.e. classic liberalism). ((MacIntyre points out that classic liberalism is actually idiosyncratic in that it purports to a neutral rationality, while in fact being informed a social tradition of prizing the individual’s preferences in way which are highly incompatible with an Aristotelian ordering; see especially, “Practical Rationalities as Forms of Social Structure,” Irish Philosophical Journal 4, (1987): 13-15.)) In eschewing a neutral foundation for knowledge, however, his critics assert that the thereby makes his proposal vulnerable to relativism or perspectivism. However, he  inasmuch as both presuppose not local modes of thinking as they purport but rather a rationally neutral individual, a blank slate which is recognizable only by virtue of its social role and therefore reducible to social role. The individual, for MacIntyre, is primordially directed and motivated. On a microcosmic level, the individual is potentially motivated by the ordering of goods particular to her polis, the ordering without which the person has no recourse to practical rationality. On a macrocosmic level, all individuals are oriented toward a true good, but only insofar as she committing herself to a particular practice. For, it is in initiation into that practice that she begins to move toward finding that good that transcends her local practice.

By advancing in a distinct practice, by learning how to make discrete decisions, and then later to judge the outcome about the decisions, the individual learns how to distinguish the good from bad in terms of her practice. Eventually, the individual also learns how to judge the best in her practice, and may even become an expert in that practice, setting a new standard of the best. However, this person may eventually move on to other practice, and indeed is already involved in a community that is larger than her particular practice. She is involved in a polis that attempts integrate the variety of practices (and their respective goods) in which its citizens are involved.

This integrative activity of the political community thus has as its aims and end the achievement of a form of life which is the highest good, and that form of life provides a telos above and beyond those internal to the practices integrated into that form of life. This telos is the telos of the practice of making and sustaining this type of political community by participating in it as a citizen; let us call this practice politics and let us call such a form of political community a polis. ((“Practical Rationalities as Forms of Social Structure,” 6-7.))

The measure of the success of the polis in integrating those goods will affect how much or how little she is able to move toward a broader conception of the good, and ultimately her understanding of the ultimate telos toward which her life and all lives are moving. So, the polis is not only responsible for ordering the rationality of discrete practices, but also for ordering those practices and the ensuing rationality toward a higher good – “the polis is the form of community concerned with all human goods.” ((“Practical Rationalities as Forms of Social Structure,” 7.))

This would be an excellent opportunity for me to offer my sincere thanks to everyone who contributed to the conference. Whether you made a large or small contribution, we are in your debt for what turned out to be a fascinating and thought provoking event!

In any event, we were busy. I was in Chicago with many of you at AAR. However, Aron seems to have joined that contentious group of protesters who haven’t quite come to terms with the AAR/SBL estrangement. Fear not, they’re getting back together, maybe even by 2011. Aron made up for his absence by attending the Chesterton Conference in Niagra, Ontario. Look for his paper to appear here soon once I steal it from his laptop.

I’ve recently become interested in the Bible again after reading Irenaeus’ Against Heresies and teaching the Revelation unit in my advisor’s Seminarian course a couple times.I’m currently writing a paper on the regula fidei, and at Joshua’s suggestion began reading up on some literary theory, including Northrop Frye (although I wonder what you had in mind when you made that recommendation, JADR). Anyway, I stumbled across this bit in Frye that made me laugh, and for lack of anything substantial to post at the moment, I thought I’d toss this one out there:

It took me some time to hit on the right formula for a course in the Bible. I consulted the curricula of other universities, and found that they gave courses called “The Bible As Literature,” which involved chopping pieces out of the Bible like the book of Job and the parables of Jesus, saying, “Look, aren’t they literary?” that approach violated all my instincts as a critic, because those instincts told me that what a critic does when he is confronted with any verbal document whatever is to start on page one at the upper left-hand corner and god one reading until he reads the bottom right-hand corner of the last page. But many people who have attempted to do that with the Bible have flaked out very quickly, generally somewhere around the middle of Leviticus.

- Northop Frye from Northrop Frye and Jacy McPherson, Biblical and Classical Myths

Meanwhile, the Longest Overtly Sophiological Poem I know
by Janet Leslie Blumberg (Deep Grace of Theory)

Meanwhile, let me regale everyone with two passages from the longest overtly Sophiological poem I know. Or so I will posit… to see what you think. (It ought to further our discussion of precursors to sophiology among the Renaissance humanists, at any rate.)

This poem was written by an acquaintance of Giordano Bruno and a fellow renegade, John Donne, although Donne chose to go under cover so as not to die as Bruno did. Or to die as Donne’s own brother had died during the Elizabethan anti-Catholic purges of the 1590s.

In 1611, Donne was asked to commemorate the untimely death of his patron’s adolescent daughter, and Donne seized upon the occasion to write not only about Elizabeth Drury, but also about what he called “the Idea of a Woman.” And while he was eulogizing the young woman who had died (and also eulogizing the passing of more than she), Donne performed an “anatomy” upon the “corpse” of the desolate world that “Shee” had left behind her at her passing. The poem is called “The First Anniversary: An Anatomy of World,” and it turns out to be, among other things, a prescient lament for the “death” of Sophia in the coming mechanistic age.

(If you are wondering how Donne could have gotten to this dark proleptic vision of the new world order, apart from having lived through such a ferocious persecution of the “old religion,” I believe that it came to him from reading his kinsman Francis Bacon’s earliest book, The Advancement of Learning, published in 1605.)

Donne’s poem is very long, and most of it is as hypnotic and compelling as the two brief sections I will now cite. Donne is writing here of the condition of the cosmos after the death of “Shee”:

‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;
All just supply, and all relation:
Prince, Subject, Father, Son, are things forgot,
For every man, alone thinks he hath got
To be a Phoenix, and that there can bee
None of that kinde, of which he is, but hee.
This is the world’s condition now, and now
She that should all parts to reunion bow,
She that had all magnetique force alone,
To draw and fasten sundry parts in one;
She whom wise nature had invented then [ie. had “discovered”]
When she observed that every sort of men
Did in their voyage in this world’s sea stray,
And needed a new compass for their way;
She that was best, and first Original
Of all fair copies, and the general
Steward to fate; she whose rich eyes and breast
Guilt the West Indies and perfumed the East,
Whose having breathed in this world, did bestow
Spice on those Isles, and bid them still smell so,
And that rich Indie which doth gold interre,
Is but as single money coined from her.
She to whom this world must it self refer,
As suburbs, or the Microcosm of her,
Shee, shee is dead; shee’s dead: when thou knowst this,
Thou knowest how lame a cripple this world is,
And learnst this much by our anatomy,
That this world’s general sickness doth not lie
In any humour, or one certain part,
But, as thou saw’st it rotten at the heart,
Thou seest a hectic fever hath got hold
Of the whole substance, not to be contrould,
And that thou hast but one way, not to admit
The world’s infection, [which is] to be none of it.
For the world’s subtilst immaterial parts
Feel this consuming wound and [this] age’s darts.
For the world’s beauty is decayed or gone –
Beauty, that’s colour, and proportion….

To which one earlier section should now be added:

Let no man say, the world itself being dead,
‘Tis labor lost to have discovered
The world’s infirmities, since there is none
Alive to study this dissection,
For there’s a kind of world remaining still,
Though shee which did inanimate and fill
The world be gone, yet in this last long night
Her ghost doth walk, that is, a glimmering light,
A faint weak love of vertue and of good
Reflects from her, on them which understood
Her worth; And though she have shut in all day,
The twilight of her memory doth stay,
Which from the carcase of the old world, free
Creates a new world, and new creatures be
Produced: the matter and stuff of this
Her vertue [is], and the form our practice is….

So we can see that Bruno is not the only Renaissance humanist willing to go over the top….

Ben Jonson, Donne’s playwright friend (and an open Catholic who nevertheless had managed to survive into Jacobean times), remarked in exasperation that “had it been wrote of the Virgin Mary, it had been something….” But because it was only about the young Elizabeth Drury, a girl Donne had never laid eyes on, the poem exasperated some of Donne’s lady friends and former patronesses as well. Donne wittily replied, “I wrote of the Idea of a Woman, and not as she was.” If any other lady felt slighted, he continued, then she had only to undertake for herself to live as the true exemplar of that “Vertue” he had praised. Then she could rightly regard the poem as written of herself!

However, as you may have noticed, the poem is filled — shades of Ben Jonson — with unmistakable Marian imagery. The Holy Mother is the special guardian of sailors; she is the perfume of the East, and so forth…. But what about that “best, and First Original / Of all Faire copies,” which is also Marian through and through (the New Eve), via the same thinking about her pure and elevated humanity that Bulgakov and the Eastern tradition expounds? At the same time, like Bulgakov, the image draws upon the Platonic Idea, and upon the potent relationship of Prototype and Image. Or what about the figure of “Shee” as the indwelling harmony of the world?  And at the same time as the cosmological Greek Eros who, in the face of Strife and chaos, “should all parts to reunion bow.” She is also Nature, as God’s providential order still indwelling the material world, struggling to maintain it despite its now-fallen state, and she is even God’s Providence itself (ultimately, as in Aquinas, Providence is superior — “steward” — to Fate).  Then She is the World Soul, too, the indwelling divine life that continues to “inanimate and fill” this decaying ghost of the world, re-membering it as it once was, and as it yearns to be again: the paradaisical “golden world” that God designed and intended, God’s divine artistry….

And Renaissance minds were always expecting that the worlds of art could and would imitate this greater and more original Reality, instead of merely copying the “brazen” world in which we fallen humans must dwell, with its “preponderant mass of unreason.” Hence Donne’s imitatio of Woman in terms of “the gold of divine wisdom” (as Bruno’s Tansillo’s explicated the golden color associated with the Goddess Diana). Elizabeth Drury will be extolled by Donne as the Golden woman she is divinely meant to be, and not merely as one of those tarnished copies that are likely to appear in the inferior Ages of Silver or Brass….

We also have clear evocations in the poem of the figure of Wisdom in Proverbs, and of Dante’s Beatrice. Like Bulgakov’s Sophia, the “Shee” of this long and compelling poem can be recognized and known in many dimensions and many aspects: she appears on occasions to be created or divine, mortal or immortal, feminine or cosmological, immanent or transcendent. If Shee is indeed an Idea, this idea is no mere “concept” or “empty abstraction” but what Bulgarov calls “the living thought of God.”  Thus, in a very real sense, “Shee” is one with the essential life and being of the universe, and she is also one with the being of the young Protestan believer named Elizabeth Drury. (By the way, I suspect that Bulgakov’s dismissive comments about the emptiness of the scholastic reception of Aristotelian terms have something in common with Heidegger’s complaints about the shortcomings of medieval “ontotheology”; such criticisms fall upon these earlier thinkers because they are being read — or not read — at something of a distance, and in Heidegger’s case, certainly, through the abhorred conceptual framework of the modern centuries, out of which he struggles so hard to emerge.)

So, I ask you, how on earth, without thinking Sophia in her divine and created oneness (and distinction), could Donne have made such extravagant and contradictory claims, even in principle, about a young Protestant girl? (I don’t care how prominent – and wealthy – her aristocratic family was!)

One way he managed it, of course, was by relying heavily on “Christ in her,” the mystical union of the believer with Christ, which is “the hope of glory.” Except that this by no means would explain everything in the poem. Had Donne restricted himself to Christology and the Body of Christ, he would not have written many, many of the lines contained in this poem. Why, we even have the Aristotelian anima and the Thomistic form here — Form as the indwelling unitive functioning and life that sustains each created being by virtue of the kind of being it is (that is, according to its eidetic nature). No, Donne is uniting here, in one extended Metaphysical conceit (which is the very life and essence of this eulogy), elements drawn from a multitude of resources and traditions, and he is uniting them into a single principle: the creaturely “Shee” who is also divine.

In my judgment, this is not animism, not “vitalism,” not “occult forces,” and not “mere metaphysics” – even though the later 17th century “natural philosophers” would dismiss 2000 years of patient and exceedingly brilliant Western thought with such labels. But their own energies were preoccupied with gazing at other chosen and elect objects, and in gazing at them within the new mechanistic framework they required. Yet these new “objects” of learning, like previous ones, were still quite capable of arousing all of the old erotic devotion in their students, because of their astounding inherent beauty and power. (This is why Lesslie Newbigin aptly called the Enlightenment the “conversion experience of the Modern West,” in Foolishness to the Greeks: the Gospel in Western Culture.) So the early modern thinkers would all impatiently wave aside a past that seemed to clog their way.

But what these ardent and brilliant devotees of “matter in motion” and the new calculus waved aside in the short run, proved to be inescapable in the long run. It returned first as “force,” when Galileo’s “kinematics” yeilded to Newton’s much more powerful “dynamics” of motion. And many decades later, it would emerge again, and this time decisively, as a certain uneluctible numerical quantity that kept showing up in the equations of steam engines and water mills, a quantity that was always the same. This quantity came to be called “energy,” of course, and ever since Clerk Maxwell and Einstein, physics has been the story of the conquest of the material world by energy, and of “solid bodies” by “fields.” In a wonderful irony of history, the name energy (believe it or not) was borrowed directly from the German nature philosophers, who were quite enamoured of old Aristotle’s energeia and had been writing a good deal about it….

*  *  *  *

I keep recalling the very first question asked in this Bulgarov conference, requesting help in providing a  “conceptual framework” for grasping Bulgakov’s “mystical lyricism” and for working out, for example, the “physical” and “historical” ramifications of the believer’s union with Christ. Sophia’s efficacy for philosophy and theology, it seems to me, lies precisely in her inaccessibility to any thought that refuses to think the co-inherence of formal energies within the organizations they inform, and at the same time the transcendence of those formal energies — as more fundamental and more enduring than the material organizations they create and sustain. Compare: “Wisdom is to be understood ontologically, not as an abstract quality, but as the ever-present power of God, the divine essence, as the Godhead itself” (66) and “Wisdom in creation is ontologically identical with its prototype, the same Wisdom that exists in God” (72).

To think Bulgakov, then, means to think ontological identity, to think a formal and dynamic oneness underlying that which we do not cease to keep, structurally and functionally, “distinct.”  (This is the deep structure of classical Greek taxonomical logic in general.)  And it is not nonsense. But it is not the “sense” or “logic” deriving from the “word-concept-object” schema of modern epistemology either.

I do happen to think, though, that this kind of thinking originated and sustained in order to thhink the ratio or logos or proportion-ality of those elegant formalities discovered in the world by the Greeks, and so beloved by them. In Plato and Aristotle, we find a thinking of form (eidos) as the real and dynamic being sustaining and moving all things, but formally distinguished “according to their kinds.” The formal elegance at work in the world was for the Greeks astoundingly multiple, but in a deeper sense, at its core, it was one, and is what first aroused the Socratic longing to engage dialectically in pursuing the Eidos, that beautiful Stag, “in-animating” the world in and through its kinds.  Only thus could an education in the various formal ways of knowing (in knowing in each with exquisite depth something of the formal elegance of one of the quite different kinds of determinacies unfolding in the world) — only thus could such an education possibly be formative and liberating.

It was, I believe, something like an indwelling of the divine Sophia, seen in and as the ratio-nal energies of emerging determinateness itself (kinesis) — this divine energy that was glimpsed so tantalizingly within each of the kinds of things to which the Greek disciplines were devoted (the creaturely Sophia) –  this is what  opened the very possibility of the liberal arts as ways of knowing, and made them capable of forming and transforming human personhood. Only by the oneness within the ontological diversity of that which the liberal arts explored lay a power capable of lifting and transfiguring a human knower into a lover of Wisdom, and into an imitator of her.

And until the 17th century at least, the Western tradition would never lose sight of this Greek love affair with the ordering principles of the world, or lose its faith in the dunamai of the arts and sciences to build in us the enhanced capacities to discern and engage with and be affected by the beauty of what we are coming to know. This Greek word dunamis is in Aristotle translated as a “faculty” or a “discipline” or way of knowing (in The Nicomathean Ethics) and it is in Plato “a power to know” (Ion). But a knower endowed, with with however many such powers, does not become a lover until the divine Stag is glimpsed in (and through) these paths into the truth of the eidos, whereupon the mind is raised to a higher state and friendship becomes possible.

It was the miraculous manifestation of patterns of formal energy in each of the kinds of things (ta onta) that, in the first place, convinced the Greeks that human beings could become able to come to know anything, and on that basis of givenness, that they could develop various formalized means of perceiving them more exquisitely. In this tradition, disciplinary communities and their methodologies are what develop in us our capacities “to be affected” and this is what enables us to press further on in our knowing. Every communal disciplinary pursuit, whether theological or not, whether “first philosophy” or merely one of the “seven pillars of Wisdom” (from Prov. 8 ) interpreted as being the Seven Liberal Arts, could help to equip the lover of Sophia to rise to a higher and deeper contemplation of the divinity in and through the creature. (“Sapientia hath builded herself an house,” and the medieval university was a garden, a mother, a fountain for the cultivation of human nature.)

It is very difficult for us today to “flesh out” the “mystical lyricism” of Bulgakov or to read the dynamical formal elegance of earlier Western thought, and assimilate it to our own standards of clear thinking, because it is necessary at every turn to rely upon a thinking of the “dual” (but non-dualistic) principle of immanent transcendence.  In contrast, modern epistemology labored to contain all phenomena within an apparatus of mutually exclusive, self-enclosed structures, such as “solid bodies” and “motion” in the case of Galileo, or “objects” and “concepts” in Locke, or “the world” and “clear and distinct ideas” in Descartes.

This is why I am grateful that Bulgakov works so very hard to reinvigorate the “consubstantiality” shared by the members of the Trinity, in order to grasp it as being more than an “abstraction” or a mere “concept.”  God’s Ousia is the very “life” and “being” of the Godhead; it is “God’s divinity”; “God’s divine Godhead or nature.” But also, these are very old Greek philosophical gestures, seen in the thinking of the mutual and reciprocal relationships between the Eidos and its instances, and within the Eidos between its eidos-name, its eidos-ideal, and its evolving formal definitions. This thinking of the oneness that participates distinctness is the essential seed of Socratic/Platonic dialectics and it is brilliantly developed by Aristotle when he claims that the form-al nature as such (essence or eidos) is most truly itself when it is fully realized in the actuality of its instances. (That eidectic realization is what he calls an ousia, something that is more akin to a Christian hypostasis.)

Basically, though, I think that I sould show that it is this thinking of immanent transcendence and of transcendent immanence, this fundamental dynamic — that any-thing and its intrinsic formality are one and also distinct (not same) — upon which all knowing is based in the Socratic “philosophical” way of life.
But if I dare to claim that sophiology was working at the heart of Western “first philosophy” (theology) and continued in the West prior to the rise of Newtonian mechanics, then someone might well wish to protest that she is never called by her name. But yes, she was. She was named as Sophia in the very name of philo-sophy itself, and this is not “mere semantics.” It would also be easy to show the profound influence in the Christian West of the Wisdom tradition from Proverbs, prior to the scientific revolution. Look too at the ubiquity of the divine feminine, as in Fortuna and Natura, as in Mistress Kynde, and as in the medieval and Renaissance figure of Truth as a naked woman standing on the summit of her high hill….  Are these merely verbal echoes or merely visual conventions? It was Locke who taught us how to think the “concept” as an abstraction quite apart from the empirical “object.” Have we in the Modern West forgotten how to think the living substance of the Word/word, or of the Image/image, so that we do not even read the sophia in earlier Western philosophy?

For this too, perhaps, “Bulgakov arrives from the East….”

Perhaps all of these “signs” I have mentioned are genuine and iconic pointers, urging us to think more fully the ways in which “hagia sophia” may have survived, for many, many centuries in the West, just as she did in Constantinople, and always, everywhere, as “the last, silent revelation of the Greek genius bequeathed to the ages” (Bulgakov, 2).

“We must not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.”- T.S. Eliot

I have admired the greatness of Eliot as a poet, but never expected to use a bit of his work for a meditation of education such as this. However, it seems to me that this quote from Eliot is filled with profundity and enormous implications for our practice as educators and continuing students. I must say from the outset that my reflection on this quote is not an exegesis of Eliot’s poetry (though certainly such an venture is a worthy endeavor and has been embarked upon by interpreters much more able than I), but rather a contemplation of these words as they stand on their own, detached from the context of his work in which it is originally embedded.

I will begin with a memory. A couple years ago I made the routine visit to my hometown of Jamestown, TN where I was born and raised in the same house until I went away to college at the age of eighteen. While home on this visit I distinctly remember riding in the car with a family member, perhaps my dad. The road that we were travelling upon was a route that I had taken hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times in my life. It was the road from my family’s home to the center of town. About a mile into this route is a field, off to the left, which has cattle and much green grass in its midst. It is perhaps ten acres or so. What was so distinct about the memory is that, to my amazement, I noticed something about the field that I had never noticed before. What I saw was a patch, or perhaps angle on a patch, of trees that I had never noticed before. What struck me with such awe was the fact that I had been travelling this stretch of road almost everyday for the first eighteen years of my life and many times in the ensuing years and had never noticed this patch of woods! It taught me, or perhaps reminded me in a deeper way, that no matter how much we have partaken of God’s creation there is always more to see, touch, taste, and feel.

This “always more-ness” of creation is rooted in the fact that creation derives its being through participation in the Being and Life of the infinite Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So there is always more to any creature than just themselves. If we have eyes to see,ears to hear, and skin to touch we will find that creation and its creatures are iconic gateways into the infinite depth of God from which they draw life. Because this infinite depth just that, infinite, there will always more to contemplate, to learn about a person, a tree, a sunset, etc. For us as educators this means that we must never approach a class or subject we are teaching our students in such a way that we work under the assumption that we comprehensively “understand it” and intend to lead students to this same comprehensive understanding. Rather, if we are teaching the Interior Castle by Theresa of Avila, for instance, we must lead our students into the depths of Theresa’s text as fellow sojourners who are all students of Theresa. For Theresa’s text provides an iconic gateway into the life of the Triune God. We may lead students into the depths of Theresa a hundred or more times in our lives as educators but there will always be “another patch of trees to see.” There will always be the light of new dimensions, angles from which we have not ventured a look at Theresa’s castle, a fresh harmony we have yet to hear in her music.

I think this is perhaps some of what Eliot’s turn of phrase means for our craft as educators. We are to lead our students into continual exploration of the depths of our discipline, for there will always be new vistas, or at least clearer vision of what we are beholding. When we behold this new depth of our subject matter we must pray for the grace to always and ever “arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.” No doubt that we and our students will find ourselves at times at the point of satiation, believing like the (cynical) laughing Sarah and Abraham, that we “know the deal.” Geriatric age couples do not have children and one does not encounter fresh dimensions of truth in texts that have been read for hundreds of years and which we have read over and over. And yet this small imagination of Sarah, Abraham, us, and our students shows not a lack in the depths of our subject matter, but a failure in our ability to imagine and encounter a world in which we will ever journey into fresh knowledge. This is so for this world, and the disciplines of study which lead us into exploration of this world, find their being and life in the Being and Life that is beyond all category of being and description…the infinite ocean of love and joy that is the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As teachers and learners may we be given grace by this God to “not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.”