The Judgment of Language in Postmodernity

I.
Modernity is like a young boy with his fat fingers full of ill-gotten licorice and lollipops, standing on the kitchen counter yelling out in a shrill voice that his mother is sleeping. Before he can taste of the sweets, his mother rises grumpily from her nap and metes out parental judgment in the old fashioned way. Is this what he wanted from the start?

II.
What has happened is this: we desired to build up, and not out. The Tower was the modern goal: to shepherd our common modern language of science into a technological marvel which would bring us to the heights of heaven. Our metanarrative ambition, as David Bentley Hart calls it, drove us upward, to “transcend the conditioned finitude and contingency of stories by discovering the meaning, limits, and motives of all stories.” Rather than fill the earth with many stories, we ground them into mortar and bitumen and layered them up into one tall Enlightenment Tower and expected it to stand there forever. Modernity used the lingua scientifica to erect its own god to replace the One who had faded into rumor. And for some reason, modernity expected the unity of the Tower to stand.

Continue reading "Tongues of Judgment, Tongues of Fire" »

He has been manifested in a human body for this reason only, out of the love and goodness of His Father, for the salvation of us men.… The first fact that you must grasp is this: the renewal of creation has been wrought by the Self-same Word Who made it in the beginning. --Athanasius, De Incarnatione

Protestantism has come to inherit a certain reputation. The story which is told, and which many children of the Reformation have come to enjoy, begins with the idea that it was modern, Protestant world which disenchanted the world, in Max Weber’s memorable phrase. It could perhaps be argued that the evidence against the Reformation is largely circumstantial—a matter of being in the wrong place at precisely the wrong time—except for the fact that so many modern Protestants want to take credit for the crime (particularly in the more historically-oriented traditions, Lutheranism and Calvinism). We are very happy to play the role of homewrecker in the early modern divorce between nature and grace.

The political terms of this divorce are central to the story: the Reformation cemented a new dualism of civil and spiritual authority, in which the civil—or temporal—realm was disenchanted of the meddling influences of the spiritual (which was identified with the sacerdotalism of the papalists). The medieval idea of two swords within one Christendom was replaced by the modern idea of Luther’s “two kingdoms,” in which the temporal had jurisdiction over this world, and the spiritual over the next. D.G. Hart argues along these lines that Protestantism was the capstone of Western political secularism:

By reducing the authority of the church in the secular or nonreligious sphere, Protestantism solidified the separation of church and state that had long characterized the West and came to dominate the modern era. Gone was the notion that revelation or churchly authorities govern the civil jurisdiction. Instead, with Protestantism… came the possibility for the study of and theorizing about politics to emerge as a separate sphere.

Oliver O’Donovan suggests that this sort of story-telling can be dismissed, in part, as self-congratulatory (and perhaps misguidedly so). A further question might arise as to why this particular telling of the story neglects a certain strand of early Reformation thought, one which did not seek to divorce nature from grace, and yet stands out as strikingly Protestant. For in between the theoretical worlds of monadic nature and monadic grace there lies a hypostasis —it is here that an alternate narrative of Protestant political authority resides. The parallelism between the metaphysical realms of nature and grace, and the political realms of the civil and the ecclesiastical, suggest that our view of the nature of political authority cannot be divorced from our view of the paradigmatic significance of the act of Incarnation. For it is at this hypostatic juncture that the realms of nature and of grace most pointedly intersect, and must therefore inform our view of political authority.

Continue reading "A Gift Half Understood" »

In Solomon Among the Postmoderns, Dr. Leithart wrote:

We can no more bring the world under our complete control than we can guide the wind into a paddock for the night. We can no more give permanent form to the world than we can sculpt the evening breeze into solid shapes. Our projects are not sandcastles on the beach. That image, for Solomon, would suggest something far too solid and permanent. Our projects are cloud castles on a windy day.

Solomon asks, “Who knows the interpretation of a word?” and the modern believes the question not to be rhetorical. A word can be known. A word can be analyzed, parsed, spread out like a patient etherized on the grammarian’s table. The word, the basic building block in language, can be used to build to truth if—in its foundation—it is “perfectly known and incapable of being doubted,” as Descartes put it. Peace and unity can only be won if humankind can begin from these objective foundations of truthful language and build up an entire structure of Truth. Modernity lacked the advantage of those at Shinar; moderns live post-Babel, with many tongues. So modernity had to construct a new story of the language of Reason, the tongue which all men possess. This is something common to modern philosophers from Descartes to Locke to Kant.

This is what Derrida is attacking (although, as we’ll see in a minute, his line of attack is a complicated one). Plato’s Pharmacy is a long, winding, playful piece—one which took me to the very end before I decided it was worthwhile. But it in spite of its wanderings, in the end it provides a very sharp critique, first, of the way we view words, and second, the way we view truth.

Continue reading "The Wrestling Match: Derrida and the Meaning of Life" »

The rumor of God seems an unwieldy thing. It’s like some childhood game of telephone which delivers truth over to falsehood and ends in a complete unraveling of language by the end of the line. Such is the way that men speak of God, say the postmoderns. One age delivers their myth to another age, which in turn shapes and distorts according to its whim. In the end, you have a god for urbanites and a god for trailer parks, a god for the rich and a god for the underprivileged, a god for any economic or political culture in which you find yourself. When God is only a rumor, when He has been presumed dead, you find not one, but many, to take His place. In short, postmodernism is polytheistic.

This is the problem in an age of self-proclaimed doubt, where the wisdom of modernity’s elders is distrusted. Truth, according to popular belief, has been cast out on the wind, and who can shepherd it home? This seems to be what Eliot had in mind when he wrote:

Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?

The deceit of the elders: a promise that our wrestling with words and meaning would not end in futility—that it would matter. They were wrong and they were liars, says Eliot. Their search for knowledge was “useless in the darkness into which they peered.” The moderns sought “knowledge derived from experience,” but time gave the lie to that sort of knowledge. We have learned that time imposes new patterns and experiences which dizzy us, disorient us. “Every moment is a new and shocking / Valuation.”

So it is with language. Logos birthed in chaos will engender uncertainty in culture (in a weird hybrid of Derrida and Orwell). Do we raise a cry of alarm, like Orwell? Or, with Derrida, do we slyly poke fun at the doddering old moderns as they try to summon Truth with the word “truth.”

He has been manifested in a human body for this reason only, out of the love and goodness of His Father, for the salvation of us men.… The first fact that you must grasp is this: the renewal of creation has been wrought by the Self-same Word Who made it in the beginning. --Athanasius, De Incarnatione

Protestantism has come to inherit a certain reputation. The story which is told, and which many children of the Reformation have come to enjoy, begins with the idea that it was modern, Protestant world which disenchanted the world, in Max Weber’s memorable phrase. It could perhaps be argued that the evidence against the Reformation is largely circumstantial—a matter of being in the wrong place at precisely the wrong time—except for the fact that so many modern Protestants want to take credit for the crime (particularly in the more historically-oriented traditions, Lutheranism and Calvinism). We are very happy to play the role of homewrecker in the early modern divorce between nature and grace.

The political terms of this divorce are central to the story: the Reformation cemented a new dualism of civil and spiritual authority, in which the civil—or temporal—realm was disenchanted of the meddling influences of the spiritual (which was identified with the sacerdotalism of the papalists). The medieval idea of two swords within one Christendom was replaced by the modern idea of Luther’s “two kingdoms,” in which the temporal had jurisdiction over this world, and the spiritual over the next. D.G. Hart argues along these lines that Protestantism was the capstone of Western political secularism:

By reducing the authority of the church in the secular or nonreligious sphere, Protestantism solidified the separation of church and state that had long characterized the West and came to dominate the modern era. Gone was the notion that revelation or churchly authorities govern the civil jurisdiction. Instead, with Protestantism… came the possibility for the study of and theorizing about politics to emerge as a separate sphere.

But the question could arise as to why this particular telling of the story neglects a certain strand of early Reformation thought, one which did not seek to divorce nature from grace, and yet stands out as strikingly Protestant. For in between the world of monadic nature and the world of monadic grace there lies a hypostasis —it is here that an alternate narrative of Protestant political authority resides. The parallelism between the metaphysical realms of nature and grace, and the political realms of the civil and the ecclesiastical, suggest that our view of the nature of political authority cannot be divorced from our views of the historical significance of the act of Incarnation. For it is at this hypostatic juncture that the realms of nature and of grace most pointedly intersect, and must therefore inform our view of political authority.

So we were all damned to hell last week. It falls to Zosima to bring us out. Of course—the question is—does Dostoevsky’s account of Zosima provide the answer to Ivan and the Inquisitor’s devastating critique of faith in the previous section. Apparently, Dostoevsky worried about the adequacy of his response, too. Robin Feuer Miller points out that right before the serial portion of his section “The Russian Monk” was due to be released, he wrote to a friend doubting whether his Grand Inquisitor blasphemy would be answered well enough by the holy monk. What I think we need to realize here at the very beginning is that the answer Zosima is supposed to give is not Euclidean. The kiss of Christ and Alyosha which we talked about last week should clue us in—Dostoevsky is not going to provide a logical mock-trial-like rebuttal to the atheist’s charges. Dostoevsky rather recognizes that both the argument for and the argument against faith are ultimately stories. Ivan’s arguments culminate in “prose poem.” And Zosima life story acts in the same way. In fact, Dostoevsky seems to go out of his way to highlight the narrative aspect of his argument: commenting again and again that his account was told to him, and he cannot be sure the words he recounts are true to what was originally said.

Continue reading "Zosima: A Presentation" »

The grandfather of modernity, Rene Descartes, began his modern project with the idea that all men should be able to agree with one another. Abstract reason—available to every man—was supposed to provide the means to attain this universal agreement. Men no longer needed the Church, or some external authority, to tell them to behave. And yet, several generations and bloody revolutions later, some authors began to point out how miserably Reason had failed as a peacekeeper. Two such authors were Charles Dickens (1812-1870) and Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881). Modernity, as they told the story, had transferred man’s moral responsibility from his neighbor and directed it toward the individual himself or—worse—to a Cause. Both Dickens and Dostoevsky suggest in their respective novels, A Tale of Two Cities and The Brothers Karamazov, that the only way to reestablish moral community in this broken world is to restore an ethic of mutual and personal self-sacrifice against the impersonal ethic of the Enlightenment. Ultimately, one must choose between “Reason” and sacrifice.

Continue reading "Sacrifice, Gift, and Dickens" »

I stood on the edge, my outsized five-year-old head staring down at a pair of skinny white legs. My toes were wrinkled, shriveled up like used sponges sopping-wet, clinging to the floor. They wouldn’t move. No matter how much I willed them to. They were stuck to the ceramic floor. Like peanut butter to the roof of your mouth or superglue between your fingers after the art experiment you did when your mom wasn’t looking. My feet wouldn’t move, so I glared at them. Fiercely. Angrily. Move, just move, I thought. If I hadn’t been five years old and a Baptist I would have sworn. But I was both, so I only stared.

Then I looked out and saw the water. It was so deep I knew that it didn’t have a bottom. My dad was the tallest man I knew apart from Michael Jordan and he couldn’t touch the bottom. He just floated there waving his arms and quietly telling me to jump. But I knew I wouldn’t float. I’d sink straight down through his arms to the very bottom and stare up angrily at the world and die prematurely. At five years old. What a horrible way to go.

Most of the postmodern voices within the political theology movement seem to be running together at full speed away from the liberalized Gomorrah. But even while they share the same fear of getting caught in a downpour of brimstone, it also appears that some are headed in slightly different directions. I’d like to briefly contrast two sub-movements within the broader group of post-liberal refugees. For no reason other than personal caprice, I’ll call them the Reformed and the Missional movements. The former label is a bit unfairly associated with the work of Oliver O’Donovan, formerly of Oxford University, now of Edinburgh. O’Donovan is actually an Anglican, but shares enough in common with the Reformed tradition that I’m going to ignore that minor moral failing. The Missional movement I’ve associated with the work of Stanley Hauerwas (of Duke) and William Cavanaugh, who studied under Hauerwas and now teaches at St. Thomas in the barren tundra of Minnesota. Since our group has already been introduced to the work of Cavanaugh (and Hauerwas, by extension), I’m going to look at two Reformed critiques leveled by O’Donovan at the Missional view: the eschatological critique and the incarnational critique.

Continue reading "A Reformed Consideration of Political Theology" »