THE LAND OF UNLIKENESS

Aron recently wrote a great post looking at some features of nothingness in the Zen and Christian traditions. People clearly got a little riled up, so I thought I’d stoke the flame a little by throwing Pseudo-Dionysius into the mix.

As far as “nothingness” goes, most would probably expect a chunk from the Mystical Theology, but I prefer to pull from The Divine Names for the more systematic questions. In ch 1, Denys lays out the theurgical nature of his project: all of this, he says, ultimately comes down to the incarnational call of the Trinity to us, that we “rise up to it.” So, all the ontology, the hermeneutics, the trinitarian theory, etc… is for the greater end of theosis. Sometimes I wonder if Denys thinks that the best thing to do is become a monk. Anyway, the theurgic end of all theology is important to keep in mind when trying to understand what Denys does next with the Trinity.

The short term goal of the Divine Names is to lay out the way in which our names for God actually do or do not refer (or cohere – whichever anachronistic hermeneutic you want to sock him with) to God. The problem is, we’re not actually referring to “some-thing”. There is no X that marks God’s spot, at least, not in any way that could be grasped by finite beings. And here is the great similarity to the discussion about Aron’s post. I’ll end with these quotes.

We leave behind us all notions of the divine. We call a halt to the activities of our minds and, to the extent that is proper, we approach the ray which transcends being. Here, in a manner no words can describe, preexisted all the goals of all knowledge and it is of a kind that neither intelligence nor speech can lay hold of it nor can it at all be contemplated since it surpasses everything and is wholly beyond our capacity to know it… And if all knowledge is of that which is and is limited to the realm of the existent, then whatever transcendsbeing must also transcend knowledge.

How then can we speak of the divine names? How can we do this is the Transcendent surpasses all discourse and all knowledge, if it abides beyond the read of mind and of being…? How can we enter upon this undertaking if the Godhead is superior to being and is unspeakable and unnameable?….

…Since the union of divinized minds with the Light beyond all deity occurs in the cessation of all intelligent activity, [then] the godlike unified minds who imitate these angels as far as possible praise it most appropriately through the denial of all beings. ((from The Divine Names, Ch 1, PG 592D-593C, trans. Colm Luibheid (Paulist Press, 1987) ))

These 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’

David began the von Balthasar blog conference last night over at The Fire and the Rose with the following introduction:

In a world where we are bombarded by seemingly endless amounts of information, I trust this conference will offer something distinct and interesting. While blogs have been disparaged (often rightly) by academics, I hope this experiment demonstrates that theo-blogging can be a place for academically rigorous and theologically sophisticated work. More importantly, in a conference examining the interrelation between theology and exegesis, I hope most of all that these essays provoke us to return to the text anew for a fresh hearing of God’s Word. May we gain a greater appreciation for what von Balthasar accomplished, and, following his example, learn to cultivate a faith that always seeks understanding.

My contribution will be posted tomorrow. In the meantime, definitely head on over and read the inaugural posts, here and here. Lois Miles has a great piece on von Balthasar’s reliance upon the contemplative mysticism of Adrienne von Speyr. The essay gives a nice biography of their relationship, including a bit on the creation of von Speyr’s commentaries on Scripture. Cynthia Nielsen, in her usual exemplary style, helps us understand Balthasar’s insight that aesthetics and hermeneutics can not be separated without comprising the wholeness of the Scripture – “a recovery of theologico-aesthetic sensibilities that had been lost with certain modernist interpretive currents.”

By all means, please engage these authors by commenting. I think this format of blog conference is a unique opportunity for scholars around the globe to extend the theological conversations that just aren’t (unfortunately) getting air time in places like AAR and the like. Additionally, the kind of interaction that has already begun exhibits a kind of charity that is as rare in the larger, more established venues. As David mentions, the blog medium hasn’t garnered the best reputation among the academic elite. Hopefully our fellowship will help change that perception.

In the 1940s, Henri de Lubac was unusual, at least as far as Roman Catholic theologians go. He was a Thomist, but not by the criteria that the majority of Thomists would have judged other Thomists: he wasn’t educated in Rome under Reginald Garigou-Lagrange, the leading Thomas scholar of the first half of that century; like M.-D. Chenu and Yves Congar, he wrote a lot about the church before Thomas, which led Garigou-Lagrange to write an article called “The New Theology: Where Is It Headed”; he disagreed with the primary commentators on Thomas, such as Cajetan and Suarez; he accused the Thomists of adhering to a Wolffian rationalism and a model of pure nature (thanks to Cajetan and Suarez) that rather than preserving the integrity of human nature and the gratuity of grace resulted in an incoherent idea of human nature which either demanded grace from God out of a plea for justice, or made the natural and supernatural merely two species of the same genus – the supernatural and natural are different, but only on account of the supernatural being a “super” natural. Continue reading ‘Henri de Lubac and the origins of The Mystery of the Supernatural’

Here are a couple stanzas from a recently posted poem by Brendan Sammon at The Well at the World’s End. He wrote another poem in August called “Right and Left Leave No Right Left” that is equally worth a complete read. A nice balance to all the foment from certain once enjoyable periodicals.

Between the Realist and the Idealist

The Idealist says
“The truth is not here!
It waits for us somewhere out there!”
The Realist says,
“There is only the here,
And the truth is we only know where.”
….
Whose ideas are real?
Whose reality ideal?
The answer is never inerrant;

But between all ideals
And everything real
Where the real ideals
Make ideas grow real,
Beauty is always inherent.

Here’s one to get the thomists out there involved – you know who you are. ((no, not you scott. You’re “scotian” or “scotusian”)) This week, I’ve had the fun task of analyzing Rahner’s and de Lubac’s positions on the beatific vision and Gaudium et Spes, 22. It’s been interesting to gain a deeper understanding the interpretations of how Christ “fully reveals man to man himself…” ((Gaudium et Spes 22))

The whole thing goes back further than Aquinas, even to Augustine in passages like his Letters XCII and CXLVII (De Videndo Deo). The following is from Letter XCII.

And we shall become the more like unto Him, the more we advance in knowledge of Him and in love; because “though our outward man perish, our inward man is renewed day by day,” ((II Cor. 4:6)) yet so as that, however far one may have become advanced in this life, he is far short of that perfection of likeness which is fitted for seeing God, as the apostle says, “face to face.” ((I Cor. 8:12))

Continue reading ‘Rahner and de Lubac on the final knowledge of God, pt. 1′

If the Enlightenment and subsequent periods of modernity have done anything to alter what it means to be human, they have set humanity at a distance from the world, positing a radical degree of separation between the created order and Aristotle’s rational animals. Where God factors into this rift, and how one structures the dialogue between Philosophy and Theology, depends largely on how one schematizes God in relation to Being. It was Hans Urs von Balthasar who adroitly drew out the ramification of the human mind’s prodigality when he said, “[T]he human person himself would stand as the synthetic element, not only between [Church and world/Faith and Reason], but secretly above both.” ((HUVB, “On the Task of Catholic Philosophy in Our Time,” Communio 20 (1993): 148; although von Balthasar was not the first or last to issue this warning.))

Continue reading ‘Cosmic Aesthetics: Begbie, von Balthasar, and some musings on modernity’s implications for theological aesthetics’

In this last post on Henri de Lubac’s article “On Christian Philosophy,” we will examine Lubac’s conclusion that for such a thing as Christian philosophy to exist, it must necessarily renounce its hitherto held dogma of closed rationalism, broaden the scope of reason by accepting desire, and open itself finally to the mystery of the incarnation as its ontological impetus and telos. First, let’s recap the argument thus far explored in the previous two posts (which can be found here and here).

The problem is how to conceive of the relationship between the Christian faith and philosophy. Lubac early on dismissed grounding the language of faith in Philosophy. He was also uncomfortable with the idea that philosophy can retain autonomy, yet all the while receiving contributions from the Faith. Rather, it is in the very essence of thought and reason to be open, not closed, constantly drawn forward and refreshed by faith. Philosophy can not help but be indelibly altered by its interaction with faith. Indeed, as Lubac affirms at the end of the article, within the deep structure of reason is the tectonic movement of the supernatural. But, Christian philosophy as it was then conceived was so constituted by an image of a reason hermetically sealed that there was no place for the mystery of the supernatural. The mystery could not be allowed to “fertilize” the soil of reason. Philosophers maintained the sphere of pure nature as the ground of philosophy.

Continue reading ‘Henri de Lubac “On Christian Philosophy”, part 3′

Lubac wants to reorder the structure between Christianity and philosophy, not only to protect Christianity, so to speak, but also to see philosophy as something more than the technological principle he thought it had become in its attempt to rationalize the unrationalizable. In other words, philosophy begins not (only) with the rational, and thereby proceeds in some mechanistic fashion to rationalize everything else, to bend all to its will. Not only should it not do this, but it does not in fact. Rather, all philosophy begins “by being more or less orphic, or Christian, or Buddhist, or the like…” and is then “open[ed] by its essence to Christianity”… “philosophy itself must by a necessity of law be finally Christian.” Continue reading ‘Henri de Lubac “On Christian Philosophy”, part 2′

August 13th is the day that Anglicans, especially Irish Anglicans, remember Jeremy Taylor (d. Aug 13, 1667) whose various clerical posts included serving as chaplain to Charles I and, later in life, as Bishop of Down and Connor in Ireland. I first learned of Taylor last year in an article by Edmund Newey titled “The Form of Reason: Participation in the Work of Richard Hooker, Benjamin Wichcote, Ralph Cudworth, and Jeremy Taylor”. ((Edmund Newey, “The Form of Reason: Participation in the Work of Richard Hooker, Benjamin Wichcote, Ralph Cudworth, and Jeremy Taylor,” Modern Theology 18:1 (2002): 1-26; at Ingenta)) Newey’s central thesis relates to the concept of theosis, also called deification, in four Anglicans and the Cambridge Platonists movement in Anglican theology (Wichcote and Cudworth often being considered the first of the Cambridge Platonists). Tonight, I’ll look at Newey’s introduction and exegesis of Hooker. Continue reading ‘Theosis among some Anglicans, part 1′