This is our last update here on the ol' site. We have not completely moved our discussions to www.thelandofunlikeness.com. We invite you to join us, especially those of you that helped sustain conversations already begun here (This includes Tony, our most recent interlocutor on the Heroic Generation post, who hope will email - editor- at-thelandofunlikeness.com - us!)
Happy Trails!
Please visit www.thelandofunlikeness.com from this day henceforth for all your Catholic Anglican, Balthasarian, Lacanian, Neo-Platonic, and sundry needs.
Read More......Hey everyone. Thanks for checking out the new site, but I'm embarrased to say that I'm still adding the finishing touches. Regarding the comments on the new site, everything should work now. The default setting in wp.org leaves comment moderation at Level: Fascist. Obviously, I've disabled that, and we should now be on the road to liberal commenting. Stay tuned for full site activity by the end of the week.
Dan
Just went to see Sicko a couple nights ago, and like all of Moore's films, the images stick pretty well. First of all, I thought it was an excellent movie--compelling, funny, irritating, and earnest. All of the criticisms that one can make of Moore are probably true but ultimately not very interesting. The bottom line is he just makes good movies about important topics. This one especially I thought had a sense of improvisation, lightness and self-deprecating humor that really made it a joy to watch. He has a measured sense of his own image and weaves it deftly into the substance of his film. I suggest people watch this in the theaters too, because the reaction of the audience is a big part of the show. When Moore shows the creation of HMO's via a white house tape of Nixon and Ehrlichmann people got genuinely angry (and foul-mouthed), and not in the pansy ass liberal way. More like that LA street riot way. And when we broke into applause at the words of a British statesman, it wasn't a self-righteous nod to someone who is affirming our own presuppositions, but acknowledgment of how surprising the truth can be, what a good idea democracy is, and the huge potential that Americans, perhaps alone among the peoples of this earth, have to mark this world with a genuine form of it.
Sorry for the unannounced hiatus we've been on these last 2 weeks. We've both been traveling, moving, summer-camp-counseling, recuperating, baby-in-the-er'ing, and etc... as I imagine many of you out there have, too. Further, TLOU will soon be relocating to www.thelandofunlikeness.com thanks to a generous grant from our pockets and valuable readers like you. The phones have been ringing all afternoon and we're only $25 away from our goal of a free dinner tonight!
So, run over to our new site if you have a chance, but don't worry, we will clearly announce our move. And, if you subscribe in a reader and made that subscription through one of the snazzy orange links throughout the site, then your reader will be automatically re-directed, thanks to Feedburner. Otherwise, you'll need to redirect your email path to the new address.
So, we should be back in full force, and on our new site, sometime toward the middle to end of this month.
Have a great 4th of July!
Joel Garver, a prof at LaSalle, has an insightful writeup over at his blog, Sacra Doctrina, on the state of children and violence in Philadelphia. Apropos our last conversation here, read his post if you get a chance. The information comes from the Report Card 2007: The Well-Being of Children and Youth in Philadelphia, "the city’s annual analysis of the overall condition of its youngest citizens." Despite the sad results, I agree with Joel's suggested plan of action: fasting, prayer, and service.
Read More......Happy Father's Day to all of you fathers and father/parent figures. God bless you and may your children recognize what a wonderful gift they have in you. May you experience God's peace and happiness through your children.
Throughout the week, I haphazardly meditated on the idea of parenthood quite a bit. Aside from my direct connection to Father's Day as a parent, I was privy to some really powerful experiences of parenting. Moreover, having recently read Balthasar's meditation on a mother's love and glance toward her child being the child's awakening to the world, to the very idea of a "thou", I had a helpful framework upon which to interpret my experiences.
The first instance occurred Wednesday night as I was biking home along South Street in Philly. I came upon a young mother and her child. The child, maybe one and a half, maybe a couple months older, was in the stroller. His mom, standing behind the stroller, was engaged on her cellphone in an argument, a cell-gument. I slowed, got off and walked my bike past the mom, up to the little boy.
"What's up, buddy?"
"......" (crying)
"How's it going? Are you having a good night."
(more crying)
"What's wrong?"
Tears streaming down his face, the boy reached toward me and said,
"da da...... DA DA!"
"uh, no, I'm not..."
I hopped on my bike, and headed for home. His confusion of me for his father was too weird, too difficult for me straighten out for him. I felt as if I had intruded, as if I had made things worse than they were already. Later that night, as I talked to my wife, I thought more about the situation. Of course, I wasn't intruding. I was trying to help the boy out while his mom was occupied. Indirectly, I was also trying to help the mom out. I didn't want to assume that she was intentionally neglecting her son.
But, the boy's confusion and need, the mom's indifference throughout my interaction with her son, the whole milieu highlights in a negative way Balthasar's description of the role of the parent in the process of a child's entrance into "this side of existence," to quote a friend in a recent email.
The second instance happened on Thursday night, on the Metro in DC. I was heading home to my wife and son in Arlington after another week in Philadelphia. As I stood in the crowded train, I saw a young father wearing his son, about the same age as the boy the night before, in a sling. The son gazed about the train, and the father cooed at him, talked to him, and caressed his face. Eventually, the boy expressed thirst, and the father let him out of the sling to give him space to hold the bottle. After a few minutes of drinking, the father began to play a game with the boy, acting like he was going to steal the bottle. The father continuously engaged and interacted with his son in loving playful ways. For some reason, maybe because I'm a new father, maybe because of the event the night before, this sight was powerful in its effect on me.
The last experience I'll share here was much like the first in that it included a young mother and a young child, probably about two years old. I was on the Metro Saturday afternoon, riding back to Arlington when the mom and child got on the train. She took a seat, positioning the stroller in front of her, the child facing away from her. The kid became agitated and began crying. She made a rather weak gesture to give the child his bottle, but he didn't see her do it and continued to cry. Her flat affect seemed to indicate that at best she had resign herself to his crying, and at worst she didn't notice it at all.
These three instances, in addition to my own joyous Father's day weekend with CHW McClain (a.k.a Chewy), provided some fertile ground for a deeper reflection on this topic and Balthasar's own writing on it. I won't presume to understand this whole concept, but (hopefully) my meager reflections will urge some of you more literate in this area of philosophy to take the next step. In any case, for Balthasar, truth alone cannot capture the miracle of individual being, of why there are "some" instead of "none". Rather, Love precedes all others in the ground of being, individual and general. Being can give existence, but can neither explain it's own "existence" nor can it generate essence. Balthasar's hypothetical engagement between mother and child demonstrates a child's coming into awareness of its existence because of its mother's loving and welcoming glance. The child's whole interpretive schema is therefore predicated on the mother's initial and continued welcome of her child, the other. From this welcome, the child understands not only its relationship with its mother, not only its relationship to the world, but also its relationship to existence as a gift, as a welcoming. The child understands both that its mother is a Thou AND that it is a Thou to the mother. As such, the child's foundational experience of being, its ontological grounding is one of Gift and Welcome. It's a beautiful description of the power, efficacy, and place of Love in the world, and it has had quite and impact on my own reflections of parenthood, both my own parenting, and parenting I witness.
Yet, of my three examples above, only one seems to gel with Balthasar's understanding. Not to say that Balthasar didn't comprehend the existence of parenting that lacked both in luster and substance. Rather, his explication serves as much as an ideal as it does as an endorsement of a kind of parenting, a rather non-Spartan kind - is Balthasar an early proponent of "attachment Parenting"?
Nevertheless, what does one do with the other two instances, of detached, unaffected parents who seemingly don't care or don't understand their children's need to be welcomed, coaxed into existence and what are the ramifications of this apparent lacuna in these boys' lives? One can only guess. But from Balthasar's writing, I surmise that there is a component in their understanding of their place - I mean this in a thick sense - in existence in the world, and as future hosts of existents. I guess the obvious conclusion, or at least obvious to me as an urban dweller and an urban teacher, is that children who lack welcome, who lack the early formation of a concept of the Thou-as-gift (because of their own being-as-gift), will also lack the ability to welcome others, be they children, their own and others'. They may even lack the ability to show welcome to their high school teachers. Instead of conceiving the other as gift, the other is intruder, usurper, or at the very least unwelcome. The gunshot victim wasn't someone else's child who was a cherished addition to God's gift of existence, but rather a .... well, that would be speculation to great even for me.
I have a friend who in recent weeks has lived out this conviction in his own life. I have been blessed immensely by his example. Thanks be to God for children.
pax et bonum
I'm halfway through Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, so let me begin by saying that if you respond to this post, please don't blow the ending for me before I can watch it.
I put Kurosawa off for years. Don't ask me why. I love nearly everything on the Criterion Collection, so much, in fact, that I have been plotting for about three years now to own the whole collection someday. When Borders has its teachers weekend, it's all Kate can do to keep me from buying whatever Criterion films borders happens to accidentally still have, like the original Solaris, wedged neatly between Snakes on a Plane and Spartacus, or more Ingmar Bergman. And while it's not a Criterion film, I'm probably the only person who owns the Decalogue who is still tempted to buy it every time I see it in all of its boxed-set glory.
Anyway, I'm finally watching Seven Samurai, and I completely see why it's a pillar of film. It's so witty, and the camera angles are great, and the music is awesome. Super subtle fight scenes amidst almost-clownlike acting.
One of the characters, Kikuchiyo, played by Kurosawa's main-man Toshiro Mifune, is introduced in the first hour as a total loser, who also has a tendency to seem a bit of an ass-hole, though he could be totally crazy. But you can see it coming, if you look hard enough. This guy is going to pull of a total Aragorn. Just as many of the humans thought Aragorn, also Strider, was just a "lowly" ranger, so too Kikuchiyo is dismissed as a clown, a wannabe samurai. I'm predicting now that he's either something along the lines of the long lost king of the samurai, or the savior of the village of the farmers. But, I don't really know anything about film, so my doozy of a prediction is probably way off.
The presentation on Love Alone went well, despite several factors of my own making. I did record the presentation, although I think I sound really stupid, say "um, uh, ok" and alot of other dumb things. But if there's enough demand, I could be persuaded to post it, or email, or something with it. So, to recap, I gave a bit (about 15 minutes) of bio first, and then worked my way into the text (see Friday's post for my introduction to the text). Balthasar's critique of the cosmological method went over like herbal tea, which I found surprising as that's the one thing I think he dismisses too quickly; I'm holding out for a place for cosmology (I guess that makes sense as I hope to be deeply immersed in Balthasar's doct. of creation by this time next year). The group, as much comprised of by parishioners as university faculty, found Balthasar's treatment of such themes as the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and modern biblical criticism highly contestable. As I said in Friday's post, I feared as much; how does one compress a book which was already the author's compression of his own work - 7 volumes at that - much less the philosophical and theological background one needs to comprehend Balthasar on even an elementary level. Moreover, writing in 1963, vB was writing from a specific perspective, addressing a set of specific problems arising from the split with Rahner. I imagine his motivation came not only from a pure intellectual interest, but also a desire contribute to the greater movement surrounding Vatican II, seeing as how he wasn't invited to attend by his Swiss bishops. Some of the concerns raised about the critique of the Anthropological method - its gross gloss and homogenization of Reformed, Renaissance authors, and modern biblical crit - can be explained by looking to the relevant Herrlichkeit volumes for Balthasar's engagement with the primary texts. But even then, as I mentioned to a friend last night, Balthasar writing in the sixties, didn't have some of the tools we do today, with Kuhn writing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions only a year earlier. Moreover, his area of work kept him pretty firmly ensconced in either confessional theology (e.g. his attempts to dialog with Barth) or germanic literature, although he does bridge out to French literature. I don't have the breadth of knowledge to make Balthasar able to stand up under the scrutiny of modern philosophy of science or post-structuralist concerns.
That said, I still agree with him (and Hans Frei) that theology in the wake of Kant and under the Germany academy (Schliermacher>Bultmann) did kowtow to a kind of hegemony of Reason, a turn to anthropology. His explanation of how cosmology lost footing, how anthropology under a guise of natural religion stripped Christianity of more and more of its qualities until it was loosing not only quality but also substance (God's love and doxa), makes a lot of sense to me and I think it jives with a lot of what's being said today by the likes of Frei, Hutter, and my old advisor, Dan Treier. I remember the first time I heard a form of this argument was in Dan Treier's modern theology class shortly after he had read Hans Frei's Eclipse of Biblical Narrative and Types of Christian Theology.
But, back to the class, my sincerest hope is that many of the atendees came away not necessarily with a comprehensive understanding of the work, but rather two things: 1. that they see where Balthasar was coming from, both historically and theologically, as I agree with Rowan Williams that he provides a great set of resources for Anglican theology; and 2. that they understand his lament over theologies loss of doxa, of a sense of God's loving self-revelation as not only an instance, or the instance, of truth, but also and primarily as something inexhaustibly and transcendentally beautiful. "If the absolute were not love (and the doctrine of the trinity is the doctrine to assert this), then it would be a logos that either stops short before love (adventist), or in modern (and titanic) fashion over-runs it and 'digests' it--which can only be done by falling back into the sphere of 'understanding'--and implies an attetat against the (Holy) Spirit. (LA, 72)
I'll try to sneak more posts in about Love Alone as I have time this week.
Sunday I'll be walking the parishoners of St. Marks' through some rudimentary tidbits of Balthasar's scheme, such as the analogia entis and his book Love Alone as a bitesized version of his Herrlichkeit, The Glory of the Lord. I photocopied a couple pages and the conclusion today in preparation for the class. As I did so, I was struck, as so often before, by the sheer volume of Balthasar's corpus, and briefly by the futility in presenting Balthasar's project in 45 minutes. But what I like in time and comprehensiveness, I believe I'll make up in ambition and excitement.
Love Alone itself is nicely structured and lends itself to a quick presentation; although, maybe not 45 minutes-quick... The layout is simple:
I. What is the core, essential aspect of Christianity? "What is specifically Christian about Christianity?"
A. Not its cosmology
B. Not its anthropology
C. Rather, "God's message is theological, or better theo-pragmatic. It is an act of God on man; an act done for and on behalf of man--and only then to man, and in him. It is of this act that we must say: it is credible only as love--and here we mean God's own love, the manifestation of which is the manifestation of the glory of God." (7-8) And so, Balthasar here inextricably links soteriology and aesthetics via Revelation....just as in love I encounter the other as the other in all his freedom, and am confronted by something which I cannot dominate in any sense, so in the aesthetic sphere, it is impossible to attribute the form which presents itself to a fiction of my imagination. In both cases the 'understanding' of that which reveals itself cannot be subsumed under categories of knowledge which imply control. Neither love in the freedom of its gratuitousness, nor beauty; since it is disinterested, are 'products'--least of all of some person's need. To reduce love to the level of a 'need' would be cynicism and egoism; only when the pure gratuity of love has been recognized can one speak of it in terms of fulfillment. To dissolve the magic of beauty into some 'truth' that lies behind or beyond the appearance, is to banish beauty altogether and simply shows that its specific quality has never been felt. (45)
...even in nature eros is the chosen place of beauty. The object we love--no matter how deeply or superficially--always appears wonderful and glorious to us; and objective glory attracts the beholder only by being some sort of eros--which can be appreciated deeply or only superficially. The two related poles were surpassed in Revelation where the divine Logos descended to manifest and interpret himself as love, as agape, and therein as the Glory.
The Chicago Reader Film Blog has a cool post about the use of the supernatural and cosmic in the latest Pirates of the Caribbean. The post asserts that while some of the imagery is borrowed from the french director Eric Rohmer, especially the green flash symbolizing the transference of a person from this world to the other, the film ultimately fails to plumb the depths of the supernatural to which it sets out. I agree. On a purely symbolic level (we won't even discuss the quality of the film), many images are introduced, but, like many of my high school students' essay, the movie fails to seal the deal. The introduction is given, a lot of irrelevant details are used (presumably) as supporting evidence, and the conclusion predictably is a happy one although divorced from the deep, spiritual elements. One feels as though one has been shot by Dick Cheney's shotgun, left with nothing else to do but apologize for being there in the first place.
Which brings me to the movie I really wanted to talk about today: The Fountain, directed by Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream). If you want to get really fucked up tonight, go out and rent this gem. Aronofsky, unlike Verbinski, seems to recognize that what matters more in the fantasy genre is drawing the audience in with the question of the supernatural, not the assumed, unexplored premise of the supernatural. "We've seen it all. It's not really interesting to audiences anymore. The interesting things are the ideas; the search for God, the search for meaning." This is where Pirates fails, not so much because it lacked the "ideas", but because it seemed to be unaware (inasmuch as a movie can be unaware or aware) that it even had the ideas.... maybe that's a little harsh. 
The Fountain, on the other hand, is bursting with the ideas and the questions. The imagery is overflowing, yet understated. Rather than throwing many different images on the screen, they return to the same imagery throughout the film, exploring new aspects, letting the chaos settle as the story nears its conclusion. I really appreciated the way the question of the supernatural didn't fight death, but embraced it, unlike Pirates where in the end the main character managed to evade death for the moment. Whereas Pirates of the Caribbean advocates and uneasy truce with death, the Fountain's main character takes a 100 year voyage to finally be at peace with his and his wife's death, the end of the book.
I'm watching The Fountain with an 11th grade AP English class tomorrow morning. I'm afraid it may be a bit heavy for them, but they'll at least get exposure to religious imagery in film. So, I'll let you all know how it goes.
Last week, I posted a photo of Johnny Depp, from his role as Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean III. As a result of my inclusion of that photo and the current interest in the movie among the masses, TLOU has received a crazy number of hits this week. So, if you're new to this blog, and even if you're just here for the photo of Johnny, welcome. Hopefully you'll stay for the content, which I'll admit is not usually along mass-media lines.
AD and I are in the midst of a unit on Theology and Art in the adult education at St. Mark's. Yesterday, AD presented Auden's Ars Poetica, The Sea and the Mirror, a continuation of sorts of the Tempest in poem form. AD had originally hoped to record it and post it here, as our first podcast. Unfortunately, that didn't work out, but I think he plans to share an outline and/or some of the more salient points of the discussion - maybe he'll even share one of his Auden songs with us, so there may yet be a podcast!
I'm up next Sunday with a discussion of Balthasar's opus proposal, which I was delighted (and somewhat chagrined after reading a heft chunk of the Herrlichkeitto find nicely summed up in Love Alone. Per Caritatem has hosted a cool series on Love Alone, so please visit her. I'm really interested in Balthasar's turn to the irrational via the concept of Love to explain the core of Christianity and delineate the task of the theologian. So, I hope to share some of that with you all over the next few days (as I come up with it).
My last post today... I promise.
Salon has a really complex but helpful interview with four bee and polination experts discussing the recent drop in bee population and the relating factors. Apparently, there are a number of factors, all of which have been proven to affect the health of the population, but none of which can account for the scale of the problem. 
I think we are facing a series of problems like this, problems that are environmental in nature, and this has been a real eye-opener for me as to how poorly prepared this country and countries around the world are in taking note of how climate change or global change will impact our ecosystems. Humanity is affecting our ecosystems, and it's very complex to determine whether this is due to environmental change or some disease. You can see now that it is very difficult to pull these things apart.
The fact that Christians aren't leading the charge in issues like the catastrophic decline of the honeybee and other polinator population is crazy. For me, it all boils down to the really poor to non-existent doctrine of creation and ensuing experience of the world many of us have. The experts are right; if the bee population can't sustain the polination demand, it's not like we're going to get our produce somewhere else. We're screwed. Hopefully someone will write a sequel to Assault on Reason and call it Assault on Hunny and my Tummy.
For those of you that know me, you'll remember that I spent three really formative and harrowing years under the tutelage of Kevin Vanhoozer in Deerfield, IL. Well, some of you may also know that during that time I helped KJV in a really small way by reading the first few chapter drafts of his Drama of Doctrine (I even got a thanks in the book for my small part). Anyway, I found this really delightful blog post on the DofD that I thought I'd share with you all. Enjoy
At least, about 2.5 hrs into the newest installment of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (hereafter PC), I felt like it was a neverending story. Not that it was that bad, but rather that it could have been shorter. Kate and I agreed that PC would have been more coherent, less like the runon sentences you occasionally read here at TLOU, had it been shorter - this coming from someone who just watched all three Lord of the Rings movies in their extended versions! As many of the reviews have indicated, the push for action and CG suffocated the drama, although Johnny Depp's schizophrenic routine really added a new element to the Jack Sparrow character. I'm not going to try draw any profound conclusions from the movie, because if there were any, I probably lost track of them at that 2 hour mark. 
Speaking of Lord of the Rings, thanks to Jay for drawing Aron's and my attention to The Children of Hurin (click the link for an interesting writeup), a new volume edited by Christopher Tolkien, an expansion of Tolkien's notes on a shorter story from the Silmarillion, and the newest addition to the TLOU bookclub. Summer reading, anyone?
I guess I should have just posted my proposal! But don't ask me for more (that is, until the proposal gets accepted and I actually have to write the paper)
Considering the importance of the Imaginary register in children’s literature, it is no surprise that the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, the best selling children’s books ever, has some fairly typical imaginary/fantasy elements, such as wizards and witches with improbable powers. Rowling, though, has stated that her books are simply “about death”—the one element which fantasies seem to always miraculously avoid. While the genre of fantasy in its purest sense obviates death, and thus the dimension of theReal, Rowling’s book are structured such that the Imaginary realm is always running into its own limit, the paths of fantasy always being surprised by the stroke of death.
The structure of Harry’s fantasy world, and consequently the structure of the books themselves, is centered on the loss of his parents, but especially that of his father, whose specter makes an appearance in book three, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, as part of a unique time travel sequence. Unlike most time travel sequences which are structured such that an alternative time thread must be created which runs parallel to the “real” time, and which functions as a powerful fantasy of how life could be “if only. . .” the sequence in this book maintains only one history—but with a twist. When Harry and his friends go back in time to ensure that Harry’s godfather, Sirius Black, is able to elude capture, we realize that everything they go back in time to do had already been accomplished by their time traveling selves. This would merely be a typical time-traveling conundrum were it not for the intrusion of the Real in the form of an impasse within the Imaginary. At the end of the initial narration Harry is saved from a gruesome death by the apparition of a stag controlled by what he takes to be the ghost of his deceased father. In the second narration the time traveling Harry, in a moment of shock, realizes that it was not his father who had conjured up the saving image but that it is his present, time-traveling self that must take the responsibility to perform the difficult charm.
The time travel sequence reiterates a theme that is present throughout the whole series, namely, that Harry must come to terms with his desire that his father could save him, or the fantasy that he might never have lost him. When Harry steps into the place that he had reserved for his father by performing the conjuration himself, we have a moment analogous to what Lacan referred to as the “traversing of the fantasy.” At this moment the fantasy dies, yet inasmuch as Harry is able to act from the place at which his fantasies had controlled him, we witness a sublimation in the Lacanian sense, that is, a re-structuring of the relationship of the Imaginary order to that of the Real, such that the Imaginary does not function to block the Real, but to maintain it, as well as the subject’s minimal distance from it.
I just finished writing up a proposal for this book on Lacan and Children's Literature in which I argue that one of the powerful things about the Harry Potter books is the way in which the Imaginary order is always cut by the Real, by Death. Harry's biggest fantasies concern the care that his parents, or Sirius, or Dumbledore might provide him, and as the books progress these supports get taken away from him, one by one. I also argue that the structure is that of a mobius strip, such that the opposition between the Imaginary and the Real is intrinsic to the structure of the fantasies of the characters. Rowling herself said the books are about death, which, in my opinion, the (pure) genre of fantasy has always completely obviated. Rowling, though, sets out like she's going to give the traditional weight to the imaginary elements (the overblown powers, the ridiculous dualisms) but then always manages to be very surprising in the way these fantasies run into their very own Real limits. The books are theologically right on, as well, for the very simple fact that Harry loves because he is not afraid to die.
Read More......The fourth and fifth sections of the Outlines, chapter 1, continues Hall's attempt to delineate the natural and supernatural. In my reading, Hall suffers primarily here by delineating science and theology enough that, in so doing, creates an emancipated, secular science that is able to carry on entirely in the absence of theology, regardless of how much he wants it to want the input of faith and the church.
Hall begins by elucidating the "natural order" or the phenomenal world, in which certain observable "laws" or regulating forces maintain a uniformity of experience. However, this uniformity must not mislead one to believe that this is an eternal or everlasting cosmos, as neither science can prove nor revelation attests to such. Rather, revelation states that "this order will, in due time, give place to a new one." Moreover, the phenomenal world has seen the breaking in of miracles and the supernatural, as testified to by the ancients' preoccupation with the uniformity of the supernatural long before interest in natural laws grew. "Theological science is more ancient than physical science—in fact, the mother of it." As such, Hall posits the following division of disciplines:So long as natural science confines itself to the investigation of nature as such, and theological science to the theistic and spiritual interpretation of facts undeniably established, there can be no conflict. But when natural scientists undertake to advance theological interpretations of their results, a collision is apt to occur between their crude speculations and more mature Theology. And when theologians continue to rely upon exploded views of nature, basing theological speculations upon them, a conflict occurs between out-of-date and up-to-date natural science. As Dr. Pusey says, unscience, not science, is adverse to Faith.
Reason and faith, then, are both important in the theological project. Reason according to Hall is "an intellectual process making for the acquisition of truth... invariably conditioned in its exercise by the will and affections." Faith, while having several different modes, is here "a department of reason, although dependant upon supernatural grace... the spiritual faculty by which we discern spiritual things." Thus, being an exercise of reason, "the laws of human reason hold good." Grace becomes important to Hall here, in that grace is vital to one's very ability to grasp supernatural knowledge. Consequently, he grants a special place to the sacraments inasmuch as they expose one to grace. Access to grace through faith is most evident in the common statements of faith embraced by the "Greek, Latin, and Anglican (churches)... with but slight verbal variations and with the same meaning... significant, in view of the diversity of races and usages which exists, and the age-long mutual hostility which has prevailed. Such consent is not to be found elsewhere." Rationalism, then, is not some pure form of access to reason, but is a crippled endeavor simply by virtue of its prima facie rejection of ecclesial authority.
While it seems that Hall's definition of natural and supernatural probably got a lot of mileage, particularly among more technologically or scientifically minded Christians (Janet comments on this is a previous posting's comment section), and maybe I'm even detecting a hint of CS Lewis' Miracles, his language is ultimately uncompelling and rather flat to me. I'm especially uneasy about his division of territory between science and theology. This is possibly due to Hall attempting to hedge the claims of science, and my nostalgia for cosmologies like Maximus', in which a theological understanding of the world not only precedes but informs a natural one, in which there is no comprehensive understanding of the natural world that does not flow from an initial engagement with that world's creator. Furthermore, while he tries to ward off the notion of an universal scientific reason, his separation of powers between science and theology seem to grant that there is a space apart from theology in which a kind of positivist and exhaustive scientific knowledge is possible. Of course, it now is commonplace to reject such notions almost entirely on their naivete toward the place of interpretation in all things, scientific or theological. Similarly, one could ask exactly what Hall means by a natural order, and whether investigation of such includes ontology. He certainly isn't clear as to how broad or narrow he expects the study of the natural order to be, but philosophers might make a convincing case for their autonomy under Hall's system. Conversely, if anthropology and ontology are theological topics, or at least not wholly secular disciplines, then Hall's secular science will be surely lacking in its exercise. My thomist friends can probably spell out for me how Thomas answers many of these questions, and I probably should point you all to this book as it helped me flesh a little bit of this out for myself as I was typing this post.
Rowan Williams has awarded the 2007 Michael Ramsey prize to the master of the worldwide order of Dominican Friars, Timothy Radcliffe for his book What is the Point of Being a Christian?
While I would like to see the award used to highlight excellent Anglican scholarship, since academic theology gets relatively little attention (whether by Anglicans or otherwise), hopefully the award will raise more awarness about Michael Ramsey's work.
I suggest to you that as the Cross and the resurrection were the spearhead of the gospel's relevance and potency in the first century, so they can be also for our contemporary world. Ours is a world full of suffering and frustration: of what significance to it is Jesus who lived and died nearly two thousand years ago? The answer is chiefly this: that in the death and resurrection he shows not only the way for human beings, but the true image of God himself. Is there, within or beyond our suffering and frustrated universe, any purpose, way, meaning, sovereignty? We answer, yes, and the death and resurrection of Jesus portray this purpose, way, meaning, and sovereignty as living through dying, as losing self to find self, as the power of sacrificial love.
I've been subscribing to TED posts in Google Reader for quite a while now, but I always seem to miss the best stuff. Thanks to AKMA for drawing our attention to this today. The video below is of Sir Ken Robinson's talk at the 2006 TED conference. I've typed out a couple of the really salient parts of his discussion.
Salient = things i'm interested in. so what.
My contention is that all kids have tremendous talents, and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly... My contention is that creativity, now, is as important in education as literacy, and we shoudl treat it with the same status.
...Intelligence is interactive. The brain isn't divided into compartments. Creativity...more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.
Joan Copjec's article "May '68, the Emotional Month" which appears in Lacan: The Silent Partners (Ed. Slavoj Zizek) fleshes out Lacan's distinction between shame and guilt in which shame is the experience, very close to anxiety, of being overly proximate to objet a, the object cause of desire. Guilt, on the other hand, is called a sham jouissance by Lacan and betrays a flight from anxiety, and thus a flight from Being. There is a play on the French word for shame (honte) and the science of being (ontology) giving us the neologism, hontology. Guilt arises because one has fixed one's response to the encounter with the object that induces anxiety, in a desperate effort to control the situation. Copjec writes: The fraudulent nature of this jouissance has everything to do with the fact that it gives one a false sense that the core of one's being is someething knowable, possessable as an identity, a property, a surplus-value attaching to one's person." (109) How then shall we steer clear of this transformation from shame into guilt, especially seeing that capitalism is founded on such a universal move of taking loans out on our shame, securing a future at the cost of Being. One helpful image that Copjec gives us is of the veil that covers this place of shame. Shall we avert our eyes from it? Shall we rip it off? Shall we tremble in fear of the priests who stand before it? Is it not clear that these are all responses which engender guilt (which, don't forget, has its own peculiar pleasure)? Copjec urges us to notice the veil itself, to enter into its arabesques, to thank God for the distance that it affords us, the breathing room. I've been looking at the wonderful images on Davis' blog, all of which are veils upon the almighty. For our words to be good words, we must speak from these terrible places, from these veils that inspire terror and unknowing. There is no way to abolish anxiety (as Auden said, it is the condition of human existence, and in this way our age is most honest) but there is a way to transform our relationship to it.
Read More......There's been two recent posts this week that quote at length from Yves Congar's The Meaning of Tradition. Some of Congar's ideas in the Intro relate to the recent discusson here re: Milinerd's and Reno's comments on Theological Education and Art Discourse, so I thought I would quote a small bit.Paul Claudel compared tradition with a man walking. In order to move forward he must push off from the ground, with one foot raised and the other on the ground; if he kept both feet on the ground or lifted both in the air, he would be unable to advance. If tradition is a continuity that goes beyond conservatism, it is also a movement and a progress that goes beyond mere continuity, but only on condition that, going beyond conservation for its own sake, it includes and preserves the positive values gained, to allow a progress that is not simply a repetition of the past. Tradition is memory, and memory enriches experience. If we remembered nothing it would be impossible to advance; the same would be true if we were bound to a slavish imitation of the past. True tradition is not servility but fidelity.
At last year's AAR, Hans Boersma gave a paper in response to Vanhoozer's Drama of Doctrine in which he suggested that Vanhoozer could benefit from appropriating Congar into his overall picture of how doctrine is developed and implemented. I confess that I don't remember much of his paper and can't find it in article form online. But I think the salient point is that inherent even to a proposal as generous as Vanhoozer's is the tension between the Protestant and Catholic relationship to scritpure, the (sometimes) radical individualism of sola scriptura and the perceived crustiness and equally rigid rules of tradition. In Congar's words:
This is clear enough in the field of art. Tradition conceived as the handing down of set formulas and the enforced and servile imitation of models learned in the classroom would lead to sterility; even if there were an abundant output of works of art, they would be stillborn. Tradition always implies learning from others, but the academic type of docility and imitation is not the only one possible: there is also the will to learn from the experience of those who have studied and created before us; the aim of this lesson is to receive the vitality of their inspiration and to continue their creative work in its original spirit, which thus, in a new generation, is born again with the freedom, the youthfulness and the promise that it originally possessed.[S]ince the Reformation there is controversy between Christians on "Scripture versus tradition", a controversy on the rule of faith.
At the dualism goes on...
Per Caritatem has an interesting 3 part series on a Reformed View of the Eucharist by Mike Vendsel that just ended last thursday. Vendsel reviews Douglas Farrow's article, "Between the Rock and a Hard Place: In Support of (something like) a Reformed View of the Eucharist". I must confess, I didn't know there was such a thing. Just goes to show the state of catechesis when I was growing up. Farrow's article basically posits two views: 1.is the "traditional" reformed view that attempts to safeguard a notion of Christ's ontological body, existing in space and time, quite distinct from the sacramental elements. This perspective reminds me of something a youth leader said to me back in high school: "We don't have sacraments; we have ordinances." At the time, I took him to be mincing words, but since then I have come to wonder if it really wasn't just an excuse to not deal with the tensions of being in a rather new tradition that has failed to articulate a metaphysic. Anyway, the problem with this for Farrow is how it radically seperates our materiality from Christ's, and the Gnostic connotation of the worshipper engaged in some mental/spiritual connection to Christ.
The 2nd view is is the RC perspective, best articulated by Thomas, summarized by Farrow: "by virtue of His divine omnipresence and omnipotence as the Logos, Jesus is able to provide on earth a eucharistic form of His humanity under the accidents of bread and wine, making present (albeit non-spatially) the actual substance of His exalted body and blood” (p. 171)
Calvin provides the foil to this view. For Calvin, the power of the Eucharist is not in dilluting Christ's humanity, but rather in transporting us to heaven in union with Christ - a kind of beatific experience, it seems.
I won't summarize the rest of the posts from Per Caritatem here, but rather direct your attention to the links to each post: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
The series followed a post on an article on the Eucharist by Catherine Pickstock, "Thomas Aquinas and the Quest for the Eucharist." The post highlights Pickstock's work with "Desire" and the allegory of the Grail. Here's an interesting quote from Pickstock that seems to encapsulate most of the summary from Per Caritatem:"Thus we can see that what the Eucharist is is desire. Although we know via desire, or wanting to know, and this circumstance alone resolves the aporia of learning, beyond this we discover that what there is to know is desire. But not desire as absence, lack and perpetual postponement; rather, desire as the free flow of actualization, perpetually renewed and never foreclosed” (pp. 178-179).
These posts got me thinking about how one might capture the distinctiveness of an Anglican view of the Eucharist. Rowan Williams talks about Hooker's doctrine of Christology and Sacraments in his book, Anglican Identities. A major theme Williams brings out is Hooker's emphasis of the incarnation as the redemption (or "restoration") of humanity via the work of the Holy Spirit, not simply a relationship of solidarity by virtue of his being human: "it is a relation with a humanity itself already transfigured (not annihilated)by the outpouring of a divine gift." The Holy Spirit can act upon and through us in multiple ways, including by not limited to the Eucharist - however one may theorize the relationship of Christ to the elements. "Papist error about the Eucharist is less in the doctrine of transubstantiation as such than in the insistence on this as the only legitimate account of how Christ acts... Hooker can say, boldly, 'there ensueth a kind of transubstantiation in us (67.2, p. 358); [similarly] Herbert argues that Christ died for humanity, not for bread, so it is the former that needs changing..."
While Hooker doesn't seem to want to spend a lot of time fleshing out the metaphysics of the Sacraments, the point is clear: Christ acts on us through his gifts. "Receive the gift of divine action and the effects of divine action follow - in Christ's humanity, in the bread and the wine, in the holy person."
Aron is in Seatle with his family this weekend (Bon Voyage, Aron), and I'm dealing with a broken AC and refrigerator, and one hot, uncomfortable baby. So, if we are a little scarce this weekend, I apologize in advance. While you await the advent of our next burst of posts, please go see Into Great Silence, and check out the First Thing's Blog's post on Bob Dylan's theological relevance. Here's a little teaser:
It would be interesting to know what message Pope Benedict thinks Bob Dylan’s songs espouse.
If only I had unlimited funds and unlimited time, I'd probably forgo schooling and just read journals, attend conferences, and scope out local restaurants in the world's great cities. As it seems improbable that any of you, our dear TLOU readers, are in the position to become my patron, then I must ask that whichever of you are nearest to St. Andrews must attend and record/videotape/take the best notes of your life, especially at Nick Wolterstorff's talk. I would pay good money to have that session. really.
While I don't usually subscribe to the Action Hero genre, I did attend the newest instalment of Sam Raimi's SpiderMan series. Back in 2002, Kate and I were looking for something fun to see as a date, not that we're that typical in our dating habits... ok, we are. Anyway, since then, each new Spiderman has been something of a tongue-in-cheek event for us. So, before my memory of the movie evaporates into the vacuous wasteland in which I put most other Hollywood spectacles, a few thoughts.
This Spiderman is certainly more adventurous that the first two in 2 ways (or, at least, I only noticed two - remember, it was a date). From the beginning of the movie, the audience is introduced to classic music and staging, recalling the age of Swing and Fred Astaire musicals. Raimi even goes so far to have Mary Jane walking down a circular staircase in a white satin gown, a hat tip to era pieces like Ziegfield's Follies. And the swinging-ness doesn't end there.
Enter the New Goblin, and then Sandman, and then Topher Grace, and then problems with Mary Jane... blah blah. Anyway, the second theme of the movie - memory - makes its first entrance with its dissappearance, that is Harry Osborn's amnesia from his short fight with Spiderman. This amnesia leads to a complete turn in Harry's behavior: he takes up painting, smiling, cooking, anything lighthearted enough to make him seem happy-go-lucky enough to distinguish him sharply from his father's alter-ego.
Whereas Harry forgets, Peter's memory haunts him. He seems incredulous that Harry has forgotten his former hatred. Then, he becomes obsessed with finding his uncle's killer. He has visions of his uncle's death, and his culpability in it. His vices win out when finally they congeal, represented by a substance from space that looks conspicuously like the X-Files' Black Oil. His clothes himself in his guilt, becoming the audacious Black Spiderman. He initially finds the increase in testosterone, or real-super-powers, maybe both, exhilirating. However, it blinds him to the plight of others. After he thinks he's killed the Sandman, he looses all sense of himself and becomes a cabaret-esque jigilo.
The dance scene is amazing; not so much for its artistry. Rather, this entire segment (on Peter's new, hubristic relationship to the world) seems so incongruous to the rest of the trilogy. Peter's dance is so frenetic, so Disney, that I couldn't help but laugh through the whole thing. It's at the same time both ridiculous and radical, like a scene from Jim Carey's Mask fused to a dance in Cabaret. Of course, Peter becomes disgusted with this new self, and attempts to shed his guilt by ripping the black suit from himself. However, the suit won't be silenced, and latches on to another, one so obsessed with revenge that he is in a church praying to God that he kill Peter Parker.
While the movie is clearly cheesey at times, and indulges in the spectacle throughout, there are certainly some insightful elements (I guess I'm thinking like a high school teacher here) that could be useful for demonstrating sometimes hard to grasp concepts like the communal nature of sin, the long term effects of habits (Peter's increasing aggression and jigilo-ness as he chooses to use the black suit more often), and the power of memory in making ethical decisions... and maybe the importance of real church bells instead of recordings in fighting off evil black substances from other planets!
It's worth it just to see them sledding
Or to see a spider moving its foreleg
How moving! Its going to get something to eat!
These monks are as close to children
As spiders are to the grass
Around the vegetable garden
And when they speak. . . .
But they have forgotten exchange
But prayer is changing
A reviewer said that they were aliens
The Word comes from outside us
The Bell clangs from other side of galaxy
Many of you will enjoy this, especially if you're familiar with my and Aron's sunday morning routine.
Thanks to Liquidoxology for the url.
The Land of Unlikeness (TLOU) one week old today. As I look back on the good old days of April 27th and last weekend, I remember the massive campaign Aron and I formulated, and all the good men we lost.
Muchas Gracias to everyone who has participated thus far. We love all four of you dearly.
xxxooo
Ch. 1 Q. 3 of Hall's Theological Outlines gets into the relations of miracles to the natural order of things with Hall holding that miracles are necessary in order for evolution to take place:
The advance of the αίών requires innovations, steps, and the entrance of higher forces than those previously resident in the κόσμος. The evolutionary hypothesis requires this supposition; and, unless we become materialists, we must assume that the progress of cosmical development, however gradual, depends upon an involution of forces which are supernatural to the previously existing natures which undergo development.
Maybe someone (Janet?) can let me know if this is hopelessly out of date. . . . but I do like his his use of cosmos and aion, reminds me a little bit of the way the structuralists talked about synchrony (cosmos) and diachrony (aion). Again perhaps Janet can let me know if this is off or on, here or there, or neither. I am a little surprised that Hall considers these evolutionary advances to be miracles (supernatural events which inspire wonder) rather than events like the sacrament of the host, which is supernatural but invisible and thus not technically a miracle.
Thanks Dan for starting off our conversation of Francis Hall's Theological Outlines. Lets have a go at question 2, on the supernatural. While I thought he opened clearly with his definition of theology, some confusion immediately comes in when he starts in on the supernatural , or at least some terms go by without being well explained. Of course, "the supernatural" is a huge topic, especially when we also look at philosophical concerns (which he apparently wants to do). I would like to quote this bit at the end though, and then make a brief comment: "Certain writers err in supposing that the distinction between lower and higher natures and between the forces resident in them (for this is what the distinction between natural and supernatural really means) has the effect of banishing God from nature and of reducing nature's Divine significance. It is God that worketh whether He employs the forces resident in lower or higher natures, or dispenses with the use of means." In other words, grace founds nature, as Balthasar and de Lubac stressed. And if we look at Hall's definition of supernatural, which is anything the causation of which cannot be assigned to visible or human means, then obviously men and women are fundamentally graced, and all of the natural causes which they assign and effect come from grace. Balthasar makes the same point at the end of "Love Alone" and it really grounds his understanding of universal salvation. More on that later.
Read More......Very funny and, suprisingly, insightful results to Ben Myer's "Worst Theological Invention" Poll on his Blog, Faith and Theology. In the couple weeks that the poll was open, 579 readers voted, with a resultant tie between "Biblical Inerrancy" and "Christendom", each with 18% of the votes. The most interesting aspect of that result was that most votes for (or against?) Inerrancy came from N. America, and those for Christendom came from Asia and Europe. Talk about biting the hand that feeds and slaps you.
Read More......Thanks to links from Generous Orthodoxy and Medius Temporis, I direct your attention to a recent speech by Marily McCord Adams, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford (Christ Church), on the fate of LGBT and female ordination in the wake of the recent Primate Meeting.
Adams offers a helpful, while opinionated, reading of the situation. I say helpful because she attempts to present a broad scope reading of the situation before launching into detailed critique and suggestions for ways forward. She also makes the theology behind many of her clear to the audience. However, she fails in one area: she begs the question about the equivalence between sexual identity and personal identity. Yet, I admit that had she stated from the get go that such was her presupposition, I believe I probably could hang with the arguments that she had built from the presupposition.
Nevertheless, I think its safe, and sad, to say that many will be drawn to the mercifully irenic tone of her argument when compared with the alternative offered by Forward in Faith, which spends much less time telling a convincing story and much more time bickering details.
Aron said the other day that he thought the way forward in this argument is not the political bashing and name calling that even the Anglo-catholics have resorted to these days. Rather, the solution must come from well-reasoned and charitable theological formulations. Hopefully, Adams can continue to move in this direction and encourage others to follow.
Moreover, as recently re-iterated to me by a much loved priest, the Church is once again becoming embroiled in another difficult controversy to which many are directing much attention when they should be attending to the details and needs of their own parishes and dioceses.
Today, Matthew Milliner, an Art History student at Princeton Univ., posted a reflection on Reno's article, which I wrote about yesterday. Milliner begins by recounting the recent art conference, Retracing the Expanded Field, at Princeton's School of Architecture. The conference included art critic legends like Hal Foster, who seem now to be arguing the same thing about the practice of Art Criticism as Reno does about Theology, namely that revolutionary movements in art, Post-modernisms namely, have been great for shaking up the paradigms, but they've done so to the extent that Criticism has yet to find a unified machinery from which to continue to assess art. Like the Heroic Generation, figures like Piet Mondrian and Andre Malraux (to use Milliner's examples), gained enough momentum to attract a following, but failed to provide a stable "baseline" from which others could grow or rebel. Now, many are without enough of a tradition or background to converse gainfully with others in the field, resulting in a kind of Babel experience. Milliner goes on to conclude that as with the supposed break of the Heroic Generation with the 2 centuries of theological neo-scholasticism before them, so the "post-moderns" broke with those before them, like the New Criticism group (Clement Greenberg, et. al.).
After posting on Reno's article yesterday, I began thinking more about the argument he made, that in criticizing the ethos of neo-scholasticism the Heroic Generation (HG) were in fact fatally disrupting the stability of RC theology. The so-called "baseline" deteriorated until at last the students of the HG had failed to develop the requisite tools to dialogue with the very generation of theology that the HG sought to "rebel against". What I want to reevaluate here is this notion that the HG is necessarily or entirely to blame for the atrophy of theological acumen Reno so detests in theological education today. Let me state that I, too, am unhappy with the lack of agility and breadth in the theological academy today. However, I am unconvinced that everyone he lists is culpable, or at least as culpable as he makes them out to be.
Balthasar, for instance, spends a good deal of time relating his own project to the last two centuries preceeding him. His analyses of figures like Bruno and Goethe, for instance, are some of the best in vol 5 of his Glory of the Lord. However, they are not disavowals of traditional catholic theology, but rather affirmations of traditional concepts in RC theology. Ironically, many of the arguments Reno makes against the HG are also arguments Balthasar makes about the orthodox theological generations preceeding him. They hadn't so much lead their students astray, rather they had relinquished the power of theology, whether in losing so much of the brilliance of the Fathers (Denys, Maximus), or in the lack of catholic scope in evaluating the movements of the Rennaissance or Romantic period. Reno calls for a Ressourcement of the Neo-scholastics as a base for theology, but why not go even further with Balthasar, Congar, and de Lubac - the orginal Ressourcement and unconvering the Fathers as a our stable base?
Going back to Milliner's argument, I am worried about his criticism of the post-moderns' rebellion against earlier movements like the New Criticism, which along with Clive Bell, Jerome Stolnitz, and most of the modern art world, elevated the work of art to an untenable status of "purposeless", "useless", and "an end in itself". Milliner's quote of Mondrian and Malruax's deification of art - "it is hallowed by its association with a vague deity known as Art" - only echoes stronger claims once made by Bell and reified (albeit in a more "responsible" academic form) by Stolnitz. Likewise, the French Ressourcement calls our attention to some of the more troubling foundations of modern theology laid by early modern theologians and philosophers. Seen in this light, they serve more as a agents of internal critique and less like Reno portrays them as external innovators and excursionists. In fact, Reno's argument might have fared better considering Rahner alone, as his theology served the purposes of the more liberal and unorthodox forms of theology today than Balthasar's.
Just as Milliner seems to be lamenting the confused state of Art Criticism today and seeks a stable and universal language with which to move the dialogue forward, so too Reno seems to wish for the good ol' days when theologians sat on the stoop and built the great edifice of scholastic theology, brick by brick, all talking the same language. I guess I'm just not very convinced we can or should return to such a tower.
Rusty Reno has a great review article over at the First Things website of Fergus Kerr's new book, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians: From Chenu to Ratzinger, on the last generation of Catholic theologians, covering greats like Yves Congar, de Lubac, Balthasar, and Rahner. The book actually goes all the way through JP II and Ratzinger/Benedict. Meant not as much as a survey of all RC 20th and 21st C theology, but rather as an examination of what Kerr considers the archetypes of RC theology in the last century, Reno lauds Kerr's decision to consider how these theologians "fundamentally changed the way in which the Church thinks." These are the theologians of the "Heroic Generation".
Since I'm pretty sure you have to be a subscriber to FT, and will therefore not be able to follow the above link, I'll do my best to highlight the salient points of the article, although you really should try to get your hands on it or, better yet, buy the book.
Kerr chose this particular group because he believes each in his own way articulates a form of post-neoscholastic RC theology. To be sure, the variance between each occurs in greater and lesser degrees. Whereas the distance between de Lubac and Ratzinger is bridged nicely by Balthasar, it could be argued that there is a fundamental split between Rahner and Balthasar. Thus, Kerr's survey functions less like Frei's "typology" and more like a historical text, exploring the nuances of these theologians' projects within the larger scheme of church theology of the time.
In this respect, one of the most interesting arguments, as Reno points out, regarding the attrition in RC theological culture after Vatican II. I know little about Bernard Lonergan, so I was surprised to learn that Kerr considers him to be one of the most acute philosophical minds in this group. Lonergan, according to Kerr, successfully overcame the dualistic, scholastic reading of Thomas, and proposed in his 1972 Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas a new way of understanding Thomas that was more sensitive to recent Continental developments. However, with Vatican II and the concurrent distaste for neo-scholasticism came a diminished vocabulary and skill set among theology students - they couldn't grasp either the original debate about neo-scholasticism or Lonergan's creative solution. In this way, Lonergan's impact was small, although his contribution was potentially large.
Reno states that Kerr makes a similar argument about Henri de Lubac and the loss of his unique contribution with the loss of fluency with Thomism, but I would disagree slightly here. Students, both of philosophy and theology, are rediscovering de Lubac on two fronts. First, von Balthasar's mediation of Lubac is worth noting, and as Balthasar's coverage grows, so does Lubac's. Second, Lubac's work on Surnaturel and similar works are gaining popularity among philosophy students who have followed the Derrida/Marion and Zizek/Badiou trains as far as they can go. Creative, orthodox theology seems to have something to offer them that exotic philosophies couldn't.
Reno ends the article by extolling the virtue of a stable, culture forming theology, geared toward educating the church in "the common framework and vocabulary, to prepare them to become full participants in the theological project." A "exploratory theologian" himself, he recalls popular dismissals of "dusty" Thomism and encourages, with Pope Leo XIII's 1879 Aeterni Patris, the reader to recognize that "without a standard theology, the Church will lack precisely the sort of internally coherent and widespread theological culture that is necessary for understanding and employing bold new experiments and fruitful recoveries of past traditions." Yet, while these archetypes of the Heroic Generation were largely innovators and criticized the status quo Thomism, they weren't seeking to destroy the base, necessarily, but Reno faults many of them, including an acrimonious bit toward von Balthasar for offering "only criticism, much of it bitter and dismissive, and he launched out in new directions with little regard for the official, mainstream theologies of the day." Had Balthasar attempted to engage theological education, Reno argues, there might have been some constructive value in offering his theology in an introduction to Catholic Theology. However, as it stands, Reno advocates in stead a critical examination of the time that these thinkers worked in. Although they offered many biting criticisms and little constructive engagements with Traditional theological education, we should strive to understand the problems they were trying to correct within their context. "[T]he old theological culture of the Church has largely been destroyed, while the Heroic Generation did not, perhaps could not, formulate a workable, teachable alternative to take its place." To this extent Reno practically blames Balthasar and others for creating the vacuum that Rahner ended up filling.
Today, lacking the educational and theological base that made thinkers like Balthasar and Rahner possible, Reno calls for a renewal of theology that cares about the concerns and suggestions made by the "Heroic Generation", but that also seriously evaluates and compensates for their errors.
Reno demonstrates his chastened appropriation in the last paragraph by calling for a ressourcement, this time one that doesn't only creatively summon the brilliance of the Patristics and Medievals, but one that also recovers the riches of the neo-scholastic period in light of the Heroic Generation.
"To overcome the poverty of the present, our generation must base its theological vision on a fuller, deeper form of ressourcement, one that discerns the essential continuity of the last two hundred years of Catholic theology. After an era of creativity, exploration, and discontinuity, much of it fruitful and perhaps necessary, we need a period of consolidation that allows us to integrate the lasting achievements of the Heroic Generation into a renewed standard theology."
Reno is right to recall our attention to the lost theologians of the 18th and 19th centuries. As recent work in Schliermacher has demonstrated, sometimes the theologians influenced by the events and philosophies of the European continent in the 20th century were too hasty in the dismissals of such figures. Maybe we can see what they couldn't thanks to their insights. Maybe our sensibilities, having been admonished by the "Heroic Generation", enjoy a special perspective that allows us to hang in the balance between those neo-scholastic minds and the post-war, Vatican II intellectuals.
Aron and I recently came up Francis Hall's Theological Outlines over at the Disseminary. Since the nice fellas over there uploaded all three volumes of the Outlines, we decided we should read them. So, until we finish them, or get tired of them, or you get tired of us, we're occasionally going to use this blog as a forum for discussion on the Outlines. We invite you to join us.
By way of introduction, let's look at Hall himself first.
Hall (1857-1933)was a priest and professor, at one time Chair of Dogmatic Theology at General Theological Seminary in NY. He was an active Anglo-catholic, and delivered a rousing essay on re-union of the Catholic Church at the 2nd Anglo-catholic Congress in 1923. From 1892-95, he wrote the three vols of the outlines. Then, from 1908-1922 he published the 10 volumes Dogmatic Theolgy.
Tonight, I'll quickly summarize the first section, a response to the question, "What is Theology?" Like any good systematician, Hall answers that Theology is a science, specifically the science of anything and everything that relates to God. Naturally, this means that not a thing falls outside the purview of theology. "Theology cannot be shut out from any sphere of being or fact, but treats of all things in so far as they are related to God and Divine purposes." Rather, theology, as our knowledge of God's natural and supernatural dealings (but especially in our world) is nourished by the involvement and findings of the other disciplines. So, while there should be a conservative element and compulsion in theology vs. a willy nilly rejection of tradition, there is also a progressive movement always happening in theology as the other disciplines and theologians make new discoveries. "Theology is a progressive science, for it can never exhaust the scientific bearings of the Faith; and is enriched by every increase in natural knowledge, in so far as such knowledge throws light upon Divine operations and purposes."
NB. Hall declares at the opening of his 4th footnote - a rather long footnote in which he outlines the history of the Systematic and Dogmatic theology tome - that "Anglican literature lacks a really complete treatise of Dogmatic Theology."
Not much has changed in over 100 years.
Back in the good ol' days when the Land of Unlikeness was just a twinkle in our eyes and wasn't called the Land of Unlikeness (last week), Aron and I toyed with calling it something like St. Bede's Blog. But in the end, Auden won out, and here we are.
Over at the the Disseminary they've come up with Theology Cards, like the one displayed here, and a Theology Game, apparently good for teaching Early Church History. Screw book club, I'm playing THE THEOLOGY GAME!!
A wonderful essay, delivered by the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Faculties of Trinity and Wycliff College at U of Toronto, can be found here. Thanks to Scott and the Faith and Theology blog (where, incidentally, there is also a lively debate about biblical inerrancy occuring just today!) for pointing me toward it originally. The essay is called "The Bible: Reading and Hearing" and is his attemt at a "renewed theological grasp of scripture. It is fitting, then, that in so seeking, he consults my former advisor, Kevin Vanhoozer, and his recent opus, The Drama of Doctrine. Williams raises a couple interesting and helpful points, that I thought I'd raise here, briefly.
First, Williams stresses that the test of any good theology of scripture is the primacy it gives scripture over everything else. This is a basic building block of being Christian. Moreover, this attests to the public nature of scripture; the reading of scripture is a public event. Listening and responsiveness to a unique and identifiable communicative act are the basic characteristics of the Christian, rather than self-generation or self-expression. Hence our understanding of the church as ekklesia. "From one (crucially important) point of view, the celebration of the Eucharist is that representation, the moment when all are equally and unequivocally designated as guests, responding to invitation."
Second, the bible addresses us in two ways: (i) as "one with" a specific audience of address in the text, as in exhortatory passages; and (ii) texts that, while not addressing a specific audience, suggest a "movement" or change, as in parables. In either case, we need "the capacity to read/hear enough to sense the directedness of a text. Fragmentary reading is highly risky to the extent that it abstracts from what various hermeneutical theorists (Ricoeur above all) have thought of as the world ‘in front of the text’ – the specific needs that shape the movement and emphasis of the text itself." Williams is concerned both by readers who too quickly draw polemical conclusions from passages, and readers who fail to draw any sort of conclusion about what the text is saying to us, the present audience that should be identifying with the original audience.
"I want to stress that what I am trying to define as a strictly theological reading of Scripture, a reading in which the present community is made contemporary with the world in front of the text, is bound to give priority to the question that the text specifically puts and to ask how the movement, the transition, worked for within the text is to be realised in the contemporary reading community."
Williams is not here advocating some arbitrary identification of our world with the text's. Rather, "the effects of the text" actually work to establish a connection with the reader by analogy with the "world in front of the text": "...the connections between elements of scriptural text, the connections that constitute what I have here been calling its ‘movement’, will be uncovered in the reader’s world as still effecting the same movement and making the same overall demands."
To fully realize this connection, the theologically sensitive reader understands the dual character of the text, as being an already completed work, but also a work that requires constant rereading and interpretation. "To identify a written text as sacred is to claim that the continuous possibility of re-reading, the impossibility of reading for the last time, is a continuous openness to the intention of God to communicate." There is an invitation, a Eucharistic invitation even, to reread, reinterpret, and respond to the claims the text makes on us, furthering the basic aspect (attitude) of the Christian mentioned above.
The last thing I wanted to note is Williams' reflection on the Resurrection in this context. Following the Eucharistic (responsive) aspect of reading scripture, Williams states that to properly hold our theologies of Eucharist and Scripture together, we need a proper Pneumatology, as the spirit is the "binder-togetherer" (to borrow a phrase from Orson Scott Card) of God and the Church. This requires, however, a robust notion of Christ's Resurrection. The scripture is an invitation by God through the Son to all to join him in fellowship. But, "If it is not the present vehicle of God speaking in the risen Christ, it is a record only of God speaking to others. For it to be an address that works directly upon self and community now, it must be given to us as the continuation of the same act, the re-presenting and re-enacting of the same scriptural reality of invitation and the creation of a people defined by justice, mutual service and the liberty to relate to God as Father and faithful partner." Resurrection as an ontological reality is the key to a theologically sound Eucharist and reading of scripture. Without it, the message of the scripture and the preforming of the Eucharist are simply remembrances of things past.
Williams' essay here represents to me a solid step toward clarifying a distinctly Anglican and (surprise) orthodox contribution to Theological Hermeneutics. I only wish he'd expand this into book form. It will be interesting to see how and if other Anglicans respond to this theology of scripture and the ontological affirmation he gives to the ressurrection and its association to the message.
Dan and I are reading Volume 5 right now of A Theological Aesthetics, and we're going to be posting often on our reading and subsequent discussions. We just looked at his section on Nicholas of Cusa, who he definitely respects as being kind of a super-Catholic--I say this because Cusa, like Pico, was obsessed with explaining all phenomena and all religion in terms of the catholic faith. Kudos to Cusa says Hans. Apparently Cusa was down with the analogia entis as well, which Hans likes, but what we gleaned this past week was that the analogy may be a little too tight with Cusa, as Hans accuses him of preparing the ground (eventually) for Idealism, which equals loss of feeling for eros, and an inability to see eros and God in the same picture. Every metaphor must limp it seems. I agree here, we must be careful about tightening these comparisons too much. The analogy must grow in both directions. Advice I take seriously as I critique Carl Jung's notion of quaternity for my thesis, definitely an example of too clean a symbol. Wrapping up an analogy should always falter at the last step (between the 3 and the 4) like Bjork says in Dancer in the Dark, where she hoped the penultimate song would never end.
Read More......The Passion of Joan of Arc, by Carl Dreyer (1928). Another dumb signifier, this one in a silent film, and perhaps one of the very first, for it seems like in order to be able to identify one we must have a sense of individuality, we must be ripped away from the church.
We see this played out on Joan's face during this intense film. She is placed between the church and God, and she learns that this the only place where she may take the sacrament, this is the only place where she is delivered, even if at the end she knows she is delivered by none other than Death. This is the desert of the real, something Simone Weil also touched on, something which the existence of the Catholic Church will always send looming up. It is true that we must always ask ourselves why we are not Catholics, and the answer should always set us somewhere outside of the domain of salvation, in between salvation and God. It occurred to me that, however deserted this place is, Mary must be there, an Ark herself, a tabernacle of grace. We see schizophrenia being created as the wily priests use her absolute faith in their cloth and absolute loyalty to the vision God has sent her. She defies Descartes by affirming that it was an angel and not a devil which appeared to her, but she does not escape being tortured by the representatives of this doubt. Is she pure because she does not know this doubt? Perhaps, but she must die and the church must function as the vehicle of this act, which ultimately is one of enjoyment, which at the end spreads to the crowds and the soldiers (British, I think) who cut them down with maces. Most crucial, and what sets Joan apart from the crowd, is that she at one point signs the abjuration, denies that the visions came from God, but then abjures this act as well. She is now in a desert beyond all human reach, for she cannot even trust her own insane loyalty. And this is where death, I don't know how the film manages this, death comes to appear welcoming. We feel that it is a consummation, a love feast. But only she has won it for herself.
I just watched the movie Being There, starring Peter Sellers. It's a real fantastic movie, one of the most profound statements on death, language, and TV that I've seen in a long time. The story revolves around this gardener whose name is Chance Gardner, who has grown up in an estate that he's never been allowed to leave. His only source of knowledge of the outside world has come through TV, which he watches constantly, while eating, sleeping, and talking to people. The movie opens with the death of his boss, the owner of the estate, and Chance is simply dumped out on the means streets of DC, completely out of place, an autistic baby man.
By the end of the movie the movers and shakers our great capital want him to run for president of the United States of America. How did this happen? I don't want to go into the details because what I'm really interested in is the relations to language, image, and The Other. In Lacan, the master signifier, while truly ruling the world of discourse, is primordially dumb, both in the sense that it’s most powerful when it's silent, and that it is in essence ridiculous, absurd, stupid, meaningless. The master signifier is not a word, but it is the Word. And it is not only the Word that determines our lives (perhaps a phrase that we misunderstood when we were three years old) but the Word that created the universe. How absurd that at the end of analysis we see that our desire is compelled by a misunderstanding, by a slip of the tongue, and that tongue was not even ours--we can't even claim the mistake as our own. Like at the end of The Death of Ivan Ilyich where everyone gathers around the bedside of the pitiful dying Ivan, and when they see the end has come, say "it is over." But Ivan Ilyich hears in his eternal fall, "Death is over." His ear fails him as he gains the ranks of the blessed.
But back to the movie, where we must take into account the name of our Gardener, that is, Chance. The master signifier is arbitrary, aleatory, pure chance, pure gamble, as is the Word--why does God speak to Israel, to Abraham, and Moses? Why does he choose the dunce, Peter, and all those greedy and cowardly tax collector types? We cannot know but we must believe, like Adam in Paradise Lost, which makes us end up sounding pious and ignorant, a label that we will never completely shake. . . . We should notice too that his last name is problematic as well—we never know if people call him Gardner because he is one or because that’s his name. Does not the Master Signifier name hold all the confusion that is related to trying to distinguish a name from a proper name, trying to distinguish Adam from Man, Jesus from the archetype laid down by Joshua.
As Chance finds himself in the middle of big money and big politics in Washington all of a sudden we realize people are calling him Chauncey; they have misheard him, there was some confusion, and he doesn't take any pains to clear it up. Is it Chance or Chauncey? Is he a gardener, or is Gardner simply his name? In avoiding the signifier Chance are they betraying their disavowal of the arbitrary nature of the Word, the kind of fear we feel when we read that, "God hardened the heart of Pharaoah"? How could heaven and hell be so arbitrary? But beyond that, how could Christians accept such an arbitrary God? Pascal said that we must simply wager on the truth of God's reveleation! Gambling? with God? Its ridiculous. Could even be a fraud.
How does the film represent this? By showing that everything Chance does he learned from TV, the ultimate source of dumb (even with all that talking!) if there ever was one. He shakes hands like prime ministers do, he kisses like fake lovers, he does yoga and aerobics simply because he sees it on the screen—and everyone says that he is the most authentic, the most real, person they have ever met. He is the only one who doesn’t lie in Washington, and yet everything he does comes from that buzzing talking box. Now this isn’t completely true because we must remember that he is one who works in the garden, and who knows the life and death of trees and shrubs. He becomes famous overnight for saying on a talk show that economics must be like gardening, having a time to grow and a time to die. We should also note that he is illiterate.
The women adore him, want to sleep with him, the men idolize him (some of them also want to sleep with him, especially when he tells them he just “likes to watch [TV!]”). He gets adopted by an extremely rich “king maker” and his wife: Ben and Eve. Ben is dying and Chance sees what everyone else does, but doesn’t mince words. He simply looks at Ben and says, “You’re dying, aren’t you?” Which makes Ben trust him with all his being and soul. So the master signifier, the Word, is not only dumb, but it makes friends with death. It sees death as simply another episode on television, a child’s view of death, mixed with an unassuming resurrection (watch Ponette). And we love nothing more than those who are close to death. And those like Yeltsin we can love only after they are dead.
When Eve, who is falling in love with him, attempts to kiss him, he can’t take his eyes off the TV, luckily enough there is a love scene at the moment on the screen and so he can imitate that with Eve and have a moment of “sexual relationship”--but the channel changes and his body goes limp. He says to her “I like to watch”; she is confused, but then falls to the floor, writhing. Is she masturbating? Is she coming? It's hard to tell. Chance is not really interested, as he’s attempting to imitate the yoga posture on TV at that moment. The next morning she says to him that because he did not take her, did not take advantage of her, she was finally able to take advantage of herself, and she was opened, purged, renewed. Is this a sexual relationship? I would say yes, a Lacanian, non-sexual relationship, relationship. They are truly in love because they give to each other what they do not have. He, as the final Word, has no desire, and thus cannot not desire her, cannot make love to her. But he has given her desire back to herself, and she finally sees her own self-love. Is she just a narcissist? Perhaps, but she has finally seen herself as one. Will they ever make love again? Will he become the president? These questions are absurd, which is why the final scene in the movie shows him walking on water, while Ben’s funeral goes on behind him. Here the narrative breaks down, well, the movie is over for one, but our ability to look into the future of these characters is nullified, for they have no future. Their exposure to the Word has un-sutured their lives, and they have become like mad Peters, walking on water in spite of themselves.
