Agnology - a study in human ignorance

Resource site for Political Theology

2008-05-15T22:39:12Z

Tongues of Judgment, Tongues of Fire

2008-05-02T17:07:09Z

The Judgment of Language in Postmodernity Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there.
Genesis 11:1-2 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. ]]> 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. But castles in the sky have enjoyed popularity for a long time now. You might even say Babel was such a castle in the sky. Community is dearly bought, and language is the mortgage payment, the means by which we maintain our commonality. The people would not have gathered to build at Shinar if they did not speak alike. The psychology is convincing. You build your castle or your tower into the sky, and you think, this will last, this will make us as one. You have to. 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.” 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. Again, the psychology rings true and human: we must find some commonality lest we be scattered abroad (Gen. 11:4) or lest we resort to religious bloodshed (Descartes’ Discourse). If we can’t find this ground for commonality, what profit hath a man of all his labour? If we cannot build our sky-castles, what is left? III. Traditionalists have made an honorable habit of lamenting the degeneration of language for many years. George Orwell wrote in 1946, “most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.” Rather than stand by with Stoic reserve and proclaim the death of language, Orwell takes the stance of an activist: culture may indeed ruin language, but the way we view and use our words makes or breaks a culture. Cultural and political chaos, he argues, “is connected with the decay of language.” It would be hard to argue against his point. But of course, one man’s linguistic decay might be another man’s differance. Language is slippery like that. Which is unfortunate for the modernist, who would rather have it pinned down like so many insect specimens stuck to a board. Postmodernity would rather see words alive, wet, and slippery. Word, language, logos are not specimens to be analyzed, argued Jacques Derrida. “Logos, a living, animate creature, is thus also an organism that has been engendered. An organism: a differentiated body proper, with a center and extremities, joints, a head, and feet.” Things with feet can scamper away when you’d rather them not. Or sometimes, they undergo a metamorphosis into something entirely unanticipated. Derrida wants to embrace the two-edged nature of language, its slipperiness, its danger. Sure, he says, language can’t be pinned down. Why try? Why try to build your castle in the sky. Derrida never lifted a hand to help the Shinarites build the Tower of Babel. He was making dirty jokes in the pub the whole time. IV. In 1969, sociologist Peter Berger wrote, “we have come a long way from the gods and from the angels. The breaches of this-worldly reality which these mighty figures embodied have increasingly vanished from our consciousness as serious possibilities.” But not yet entirely, Berger allowed. He went on to tell of a priest working in the slums of a European city who was asked why he continued to work in such a place. The priest gave the answer: “So that the rumor of God may not disappear completely.” 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.” V. Modernity is the Tower. Postmodernity Babel. Afterwards? Pentecost. VI. If God is there, if He is not silent, what will He say concerning our modern project? Or, what has He already done to us and our words? At the end of the book of Ecclesiastes, the Preacher describes the death of man as a quiet passing into meaningless and impotency. “Desire fails,” and mourners wander about the streets (12:5). A handful of dust returns to the earth as it was (v. 7), and all the projects of man become as vapor (v. 8). In the end, every work will be brought into judgment (v. 14). The wicked will be punished, the Preacher says. But what might be even more frightening to them is not the judgment of a future life, but the futility and absurdity of the present. Vapor of vapors. It is the death of their works which frightens them. For what purpose is a man’s life if when he dies he becomes a mere memory—a logos killed by a subsequent logos? In short, each man fears he will become a mere rumor. Much better he go out, not with a whimper, but with a bang. The worst thing in life is to die and have no one notice—let alone go to another life. Better to have the wish of Camus’ Meursault fulfilled: “For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.” Better to be judged by men than by another life. Ultimately, divine judgment is the removal of human language and—by effect—unity and purpose. When the nations gathered under Nimrod, their project was ruined by the dispersal of language. When Nebuchadnezzar boasted to heaven of his majesty, God drove him “from among men” (Daniel 4:32). In his madness, Nebuchadnezzar identified himself with beasts, eating like them, dwelling with them, and even adorning himself after their manner (vv. 32-3). His tongue was taken from him. So what then? The Preacher of Ecclesiastes follows his dour pronouncement that all is vanity with the ironic explanation that his whole purpose was “to find words of delight” (12:11). One wonders at first whether the Preacher is indulging in one last frustratingly satirical gesture. Words of delight? If all the projects of man end in vanity, if words cannot be interpreted or last forever, what is there to delight in? The ironic conclusion of the matter: “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.” The argument of the modernist was that it is was the fear of God which inhibited man from uniting together. But here, the final command is to fear God, knowing that He “will bring every deed into judgment” (v. 14). He has sworn it, this much is certain. The triune God swears by Himself, and His judgment is no rumor. VII. Language is elusive—in this Eliot agrees with Derrida. The idea that the real meaning of words can be found is a deceit—as Eliot says: a lie of the “quiet-voiced elders” of modernity. Logos is untrustworthy—a patricidal son, one who rises up to silence the language which preceded him. No one “Logos” can therefore be known to the postmodern. But of course, this opens a particular biblical criticism. John’s gospel in particular talks of the mystery of logos, and claims: no man has seen the Father (1:18). This is Derrida’s position, so far: Logos is invisible, unknowable. But of course, we also know from John’s gospel that the Father became known through the Son. Meaning is communicated through a Word. The Word was spoken and now dwells and tabernacles with us. The Word is spoken and written. And Jesus has the audacity to claim that if you have seen the Son you have seen the Father (John 14:9). You see the Word, and because He obeys the Father, you have seen the Father, too. Derrida knows only disobedient patricidal words. Jesus gives us another type: the obedient Word. Derrida’s theory of language is a tragedy. The Bible’s is not, though it is a mystery. How, then do we encounter the Word through words? We are only able to find this meaning, says Eliot, when we find ourselves in Dante’s “dark wood, in a bramble, / On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold, / And menaced by monsters, fancy lights, / Risking enchantment.” We see light in darkness. We proceed through to heaven only after making the trek through the monsters and chaos and insecurity of hell and purgatory. Therefore, postmodernity is purgatory. VIII. So, in the end, after we’ve wrestled with a word all night and have at last bested it—then, as the darkness begins to break you come face to face with this Word. And He says: “Let me go.” And we say, “Not until you bless me.” You present Him with your most difficult problems (the problem of evil, the problem of the meaning of life), and all He does is answer you with another riddle. Even when you have Him pinned—physically— you can’t win. And then, in the middle of this stalemate, the Word turns to you and He gives you a new name and blesses you because you wrestled with Him all night—and that is enough. What more can you require of God in language? He extricates Himself with a Word. But that’s all you needed anyway. T.S. Eliot said that ours is an age of moderate virtue and moderate vice—we are a decent, godless, lonely people whose only monument is “the asphalt road/And a thousand lost golf balls." But even after the gradual loss of community and pleasure and language, Eliot holds out a quiet hope. In “Little Gidding,” he presents us with an iconic figure. This figure is a poet who has come to pray at a monastery in order to arrive at “the intersection of the timeless.” The poet awakes in the morning and is met by a ghost who grants him the burden of wisdom and reveals to the poet how the world has become impotent, passionless—how it indulges in empty laughter and the pursuit of beauty which will never be attained. The scene changes in the middle of the poem when a dove descends with a “flame of incandescent terror,” holding the promise of redemption “from fire by fire.” The poem concludes with a reflection on how the timeless is joined to the time-bound, how history and the dead saints of the past are still with us and remind us that for all our dreams of progress and greatness, we will always end up right where we began. And it is at this point, when we humbly acknowledge the vanity of all our work, that the fire of hell’s judgment transforms into the Rose of Dante’s Paradise. The poem concludes:

And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.

In the end, the crowned Trinitarian knot transforms judgment into blessing. God humbles in order to exalt. We kneel in order to rise absolved of all sin. Fire purifies our tongue, like Isaiah, so that we might be restored to salvation. IX. Modernity builds towers to heaven. Postmodernity lives in the shadow of death. Over one hundred years ago, Nietzsche’s postmodern madman called the empty churches and cathedrals of Europe the tombs and sepulchers of God the Word. Orwell tells us we have destroyed our world with words. Derrida says that the very foundation of our world is based on the violence which one logos does to another. The glory of the Lord is long departed, the prophets say. Experience teaches us dead things usually stay dead. Dead stones aren’t supposed to come alive to speak the good words of salvation (Luke 19:40). A dead God isn’t supposed to hear the words of the living, nor take up His dwelling among men and their works (and if He did, wouldn’t He destroy them and babble their tongues?). But on the other side of Babel and Babel’s judgment, there is another divine act: “And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting and divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them” (Acts 2:3). Heaven came down to Babel and divided tongues and dispersed the peoples. Heaven came down on Pentecost and gave divided tongues of fire to unite the people. Fire purifies the tongue, we know (Isaiah 6:7). And the pure-burnt tongues of Pentecost made God’s people as one to hear His Word, and still the audience was confused (Acts 2:6; cf. Genesis 11:9). But perhaps that condition of uncertainty was the very beginning of faith. Postmodernity is like a child who loves to be told beautiful stories, but has trouble imagining any of them to be true. All that remains is to show him a true story. Give him a Father who is not a passing rumor, a Word in the flesh, and a Spirit who descends in tongues of fire.

A Gift Half Understood

2008-04-29T15:59:04Z

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.]]> The Revolution Before the Reformation Is evangelical law an oxymoron? In other terms, can the gospel be used as an adjective—or otherwise—to qualify something natural, such as civil law? The question is by no means recent; perhaps some of the most formative discussion of the issue took place in the few centuries leading up to the Reformation. The common interpretation of the period suggests that the late medieval ages saw a gradual shift away from an older Platonic hierarchy which the Scholastics had done much to establish. The narrative told by such medieval political scholars as Quentin Skinner and Walter Ullmann is that the thousand year reign of Christendom imposed a deceptively fragile unity on Europe—both theologically and politically. Oliver O’Donovan suggests that this fragile unity was held together by the formula of Pope Gelasius (492-496), “Two there are … by which this world is ruled.” That is, by the spiritual power of clerics and the royal power of kings. A general wholeness of Christendom—however tense or conditional—typified the early medieval tradition. The paradigm was essentially Platonic: a hierarchy descending by means of reason or belief from higher spiritual knowledge (and power) to the material. This hierarchy was mirrored politically in an authority structure which descended from God to the Church and thence to the King and to the People. This hierarchy posits that all Christian kings owed their allegiance to the Church, with the Roman pope at its head. A consequence of this hierarchy is that political science, as such, did not really exist before the 13th century, for any questions of political authority were more a matter of theology, not political science. As the papal apologist Giles of Rome (c. 1243-1316) stated in a finely crafted syllogism:

All temporal things are placed under the dominion and power of the church….The power of the supreme pontiff governs souls. Souls ought rightly to govern bodies…. But temporal things serve our bodies. It follows then that the priestly power which governs souls also rules over bodies and temporal things.

The reintroduction of Aristotle to the Western world in the 13th century had the effect of energizing the latent arguments of the critics of the Christendom which Giles wished to defend. Walter Ullman goes so far as to suggest that the Aristotelian “cosmological revolution” had the deepest influence in the “sphere of governmental science.” A new flood of scholars wanted to reveal the glories of Aristotle to the Platonically-stifled Middle Ages. The forced unity of Plato and his Scholastic children was gradually giving way to the more organic and diverse natural world of Aristotle. “Aristotle himself had shattered the (Platonic) wholeness standpoint by stating that man and citizen corresponded to two different categories of thought: the good citizen need not be a good man, and vice-versa.” Dante Alighieri fashioned his political theology after this Aristotelian influence, arguing that the State was inherently embedded in nature and therefore “an item of the whole cosmos,” and out from under the direct authority of the Church. God still works as the “supreme agens” in the natural world, but makes distinction between His operations in the natural and the supernatural worlds. Perhaps the most pronounced argument for the divorce between politics and the supernatural was advanced by Marsilius of Padua (c. 1275-1342). Few details of his life are known, and it seems fairly certain that his ideas carried far more weight centuries after his death than during his brief rise to notoriety. Combining both an Aristotelian naturalism and the voluntarism of his contemporary, William of Ockham, Marsilius developed a concept of political authority which explicitly rejected any connection to the supernatural realm of grace, and based it firmly in the vox populi. Marsilius’ political voluntarism argues that will, and not abstract reason, is the essence of law. In other words, law is what you make it. Law must be spoken of in the lower-case; there is no Greater Law up in the sky to which all earthly forms should be conformed. Rather, “law is made, not given, and it is made by the community of citizens.” The ideas of Marsilius were a clear break from the thought of Aquinas, although both were influenced by Aristotle. Alexander D’entreves points out that where Aquinas “proposed to conciliate” the realms of nature and grace, Marsilius “draws a clear-cut and impassable line of demarcation.” What has nature to do with grace? Or grace with nature? In an interesting passage of his Defensor Pacis, Marsilius makes a biblical defense of his position. Calling John Chrysostom to his defense, he argues that if Christ wanted His new world to be ruled by priests with coercive powers, He would have structured it after the Mosaic law, with all its earthly blessings and punishments. And, Marsilius goes on, if priests did have coercive power to enforce the law it would hurt those upon whom they exercised it: “since the person who observed [these laws] under coercion would be helped not at all toward eternal salvation.” The priest should help his flock toward eternal salvation and not confuse them by meddling in earthly affairs. D.G. Hart, among others, points to Marsilius at this point as a forerunner of Protestantism. And in truth, Marsilius was remembered with a great deal of affection by certain 16th century reformers. The value of Marsilius to the English reformers, in particular, is clear. The circumstances of Marsilius’ lord protector in the 14th century were uncannily similar to the English King Henry VIII’s domestic troubles in the 16th. Henry VIII, of course, needed an heir, and a new wife to facilitate this. And, just like Marsilius’ king, he found the pope painfully insensitive to his dynastic needs. At this time, Thomas Cromwell, chief minister to Henry VIII, recalled Marsilius’ old arguments in Defensor Pacis. If a king needs to enact a divorce (or any civil policy) for the benefit of the country, he should do so without needing to defer to the pope. What right did the realm of grace have to interfere with the realm of nature? Even Marsilius’ more extreme forms of voluntarism were embraced by the English theorists. It was on similar grounds that many of the English theorists objected to John Knox’s more idealistic reforms north of the border. Because of the rhetoric of certain Protestants, it seems necessarily to now make a gratuitous caveat—Marsilius was not a Protestant. Nor was he called the “morning star” of the Reformation. That title belongs to another. Certainly his radically naturalized theory of political authority held practical advantage for 16th century Protestants who found themselves caught between violently foaming papists and potentially amiable civil authorities. But to suggest that Marsilius was motivated by the same primarily reformational impulses as John Calvin or Martin Luther requires a leap of faith few seem ready to make. An alternative reading of the period is implied by William Cavanaugh, who argues that emerging nation-state of the 16th century used the period of theological upheaval to its advantage by playing each side against each other: the conflicts “were not simply a matter of conflict between ‘Protestantism’ and ‘Catholicism,’ but were fought largely for the aggrandizement of the emerging State over the decaying remnants of the medieval ecclesial order.” James Jordan also suggests that the reformers often found themselves cornered into seeking the protection of the emerging nation-state, making, in essence, a Faustian bargain in exchange for the freedom to practice their religion. Now once we have disabused Protestants of the historical claim to be principled rebels against clerical authority (in line with Marsilius and the Aristotelians), what is left? What was the reformational spirit concerning political authority? It may be clichéd to attempt to capture anything so vague as the “spirit” of something so broad as the Reformation. However, it does not seem as ambitious to suggest that at least certain strands of the Reformation were self-consciously trying to provide a legitimate tertia via in the midst of what was essentially a civil war between the papal apologists and the rising Statist party. Oliver and Joan O’Donovan suggest that Marsilius had served to solidify and intensify this civil war, making “secular political monism the counterface of the dominant hierocratic monism of the papalists.” The issue then is whether, and how, the early Reformation stood outside this raging civil war. Against the Monads Is evangelical law an oxymoron? Ironically, both the Marsilians and the papalists come to the same answer. Both suppose a monadic system of authority, one civil and the other clerical. Marsilius argued for an exclusively temporal world which was ruled just as exclusively by secular powers. The papalists argued for the inherent superiority of the world of grace over the world of nature, and therefore concluded that grace should rule temporally over nature. The proto-Reformational writings of John Wyclif suggests to us that evangelical law—or lordship (dominium)—is the proper alternative to these two monadic systems. The O’Donovans propose that Wyclif introduced a reformational political theology which hearkened back to early medievalism—“a coherent communal ethic that is Augustinian, Christ centered, and idealist.” The source of Wyclif’s political authority is neither voluntaristic, nor strictly Platonic. Giles of Rome had argued that the soul was superior to the body, and therefore should have dominion over it in fullness of power (plenitudo potestatis). In his treatise, On Civil Lordship, Wyclif provides an incarnational alternative:

Again, Christ is the supreme doctor of the human soul (a matter of faith); but he would not treat the soul, his beloved bride, quite rightly, if he left her on earth and liable to moral sickness without leaving behind one law sufficient to ensure her health; therefore he must have left such a law. But with the perfect direction of the soul, the body, too, and all the goods of fortune befalling it are accounted for. So he left a law sufficient for the regulation of both body and soul and of whatever goods of fortune might befall.

This all-sufficient law is Christ’s evangelical law—“the law expounded by Christ in the course of his pilgrimage on earth to meet the need of the church militant for government.” This law, as Wyclif stresses, is not limited to the supernatural aspects of law, but should serve as the foundation for human law, as well. Contrary to Marsilius, he argues that non-evangelical human laws are not more effective in maintaining the peace of church and society. Rather, “any just laws … are Gospel law.” And contrary to the papalists, he argues that the medieval development of canon law is merely a human effort to supplant Gospel law: “For when you take away the theological material from canon law, what you have left is simply civil law.” Wyclif advances against two fronts here, suggesting that both clerical and civil authorities have been liable of offenses against evangelical law. And in both cases he advises that the community of Christ should “discreetly” make efforts to correct the offending party—whether clerical or civil. Much of Wyclif’s political theology returns to an earlier medieval idea of authority, Augustinian and Gelasian in tenor. Drawing on Old Testament parallels, he reasons that God has two representatives in His community: “the king in temporal matters and the priest in spiritual.” The temporal power, acting under the conditional authority of an age that is passing away, “must restrain the disobedient with severity.” The priest, however, acts with the authority of “the age of grace,” and should therefore rule with power tempered by mercy—thereby acting as a type of Christ, who combines the powers of king and priest in His already-but-not-yet Kingdom. Wyclif admits that—following Old Testament typology—kingship maintains a sort of eminence over priesthood, as both Melchizedek and Christ appear first as king, then priest. However, this does not lead directly to a form of State priority over Church. For while the Church—contrary to its late medieval claims to temporal power—must guard its other-worldly character, it is also established as the herald of a coming Kingdom. The civil power fills a necessary role until the fullness of the eschaton, but it is only a kingly steward, not the true proprietor of the earth. And, on this account, it must be humble, for “civil lordship is occasioned by sin and of human institution.” It is heir to all the weakness of flesh: “this is Augustine’s understanding of civil laws, that, for the most part, they are shot through with wickedness” Along these same lines, Oliver O’Donovan argues that the secularity of the civil power should reflect the State’s eschatological status:

Applied to political authorities, the term “secular” should tell us that they are not agents of Christ, but are marked for displacement when the rule of Christ is finally disclosed. They are Christ’s conquered enemies; yet they have an indirect testimony to give, bearing the marks of his sovereignty imposed upon them, negating their pretensions and evoking their acknowledgement.

Therefore, the Church must act not only as priest, but also as a prophet of the coming Kingdom. It must denounce the libido dominandi of the human State, judging its wars, its slavery, its tyranny. And yet, in order to maintain its prophetic witness, the Church must not be compromised by wealth or property, and must stand—in a certain sense—outside the system, while still working to change the system through its Christ-appointed means. The essential political theology of Wyclif manifests the early Reformation tertia via and provides against the two reigning monisms of his age. These monisms, as Wyclif’s theology insists, resist the necessary eschatological tension of Christ’s statement concerning the nature of his kingdom in Matthew 18. One must be in this world, yet not look to this world for one’s authority. One must engage the realm of nature, and look for a certain sacralization of nature—one immanent but distinct. Until the fullness of time we must inhabit two worlds which are in fundamental tension. This tension and fullness of natures is just as real and necessary in theopolitics as it is in our Christology. When David Is King Can evangelical law work? It seems easier to talk of this tension between worlds when an unfaithful Saul is on the throne. A prophet would require courage to confront such a king, but would have his course of opposition set clearly before him. And yet, what if God intervenes, casts the tyrant from his throne, and establishes in his place David, His faithful son? What if David consults with Samuel the prophet and asks for wisdom concerning the evangelical law? How does one maintain the tension after the king kisses the Son? The question is an eschatological one. Is the Gospel a present prescription or a future promise? Again, a common reading of political eschatology places the Reformation squarely on the side of the Gospel as promise. O’Donovan characterizes this reading as “the Protestant thesis,” which counters the late medieval and early modern natural law theories which interpreted the lex evangelica as a supplementing of Scripture with judgments from other (presumably more natural) sources. Protestantism, by means of sola Scriptura and the law-gospel distinction, was supposed to have restored the Gospel to its proper (and more restrained) domain of eternal salvation. The problem with this “thesis,” as O’Donovan argues, is that acts of “law” are imbued with “a certain alienation … for they are cut off from our hope, and can tell us nothing of God’s final word of grace in Christ.” It should be conceded that several Reformation traditions do seem content to accept this “alienation,” whereby the realm of grace grants independence to the realm of nature. Luther’s two kingdoms theory falls generally into this distinction, as do the more Erastian tendencies of mature Anglicanism. However, again, we find examples which counter these more compliant traditions. One counter-example is set out in Martin Bucer’s 1550 work, De Regno Christi. Bucer found himself in exile from his native Straussburg due to his opposition to unfavorable terms of peace which Charles V had imposed on the defeated German Protestants in the Smalcaldic War. After taking a position at the University of Cambridge, Bucer began work on his treatise, which he addressed to the young King Edward VI. At that time, Edward—the son of Henry VIII—was viewed by many as the great hope of English Calvinism. In his dedication, Bucer wrote to the king of his hope for the “fuller acceptance and reestablishment of the Kingdom of Christ,” a project he trusted Edward to lead forward. The reformation of Edward’s father had been tenuous, at best—often driven by less-than-Reformed impulses. Bucer, like many of his contemporaries, wanted Edward to provide for a true, full, reformation of the English church, something he believed would begin with a reform of the relation between the church and the Christian state. David Wright comments that Bucer hoped “King Edward would protect the church as it trained the people in the ethics of love and service. Like King David, he should hold the sword, but also provide a reasonable autonomy for the church.” Bucer argues that establishing a faithful David (or Edward) on the throne does not break down the inherent separation between the heavenly kingdom and the earthly one. This argument, in itself, is nothing novel. However, Bucer also advances this distinction in an interesting way: the church should maintain its distinction, not by giving up its kingdom-nature, but by forming itself as a counter-kingdom to the temporal one:

There is a similarity between the kingdoms of the world and of Christ, in that, as do the kings of the world, so also Christ our heavenly King wants his subjects to be received into and sealed for his Kingdom, to be gathered into his congregation, to come together in his name, and to be ruled by his ministries by means of certain covenants and sacraments of an external nature.

The essential difference between the “external” signs of citizenship is that Christ’s Kingdom binds its citizens to an eternal life, “beyond the power of earthly kings.” Bucer reminds Edward that Christ, too, is a king—in fact, holds kingship over largely the same individuals who owe fealty to Edward. Christ, like Edward, is covenantally bound to provide, not only for his citizens’ spiritual needs, but also for earthly concerns, “since no one should come empty-handed into the sight of the Lord in solemn assemblies.” The Church is a distinct polis with an incarnational telos. The poor are fed. Individuals are trained for their callings, as the “Spirit distributes gifts to each individual, so that everyone contributes something to the common advantage” (ad communem utilitatem). Bucer acknowledges that earthly kings own the same responsibilities. And yet, it is not in the power of earthly kings to offer what the Kingdom of Christ can: “a willingness to share readily.” The Church, through the Spirit, renews the lives of its citizens so that they are “willing and strong as possible for this salutary sharing of their wealth and patience in poverty.” Bucer encourages earthly kings to follow the example of Christ, as much as possible, in establishing this work. And yet, hoc proprium est regni Christi et plane obtinentis—this work belongs properly and in fullness to the Kingdom of Christ. True kings are therefore types of Christ, as well as types of Old Testament kings. But in this role, the Christian king must recognize that he has not supplanted the Church, nor assumed the role of priest. For while the Christian king can expect and require the lawful submission of not only Christian laymen, but also the priests, the Christian king must himself submit. For kingdom submits to Kingdom, and vice versa. The tension is clear, and is not something to be ignored. The respectful terms of mutual submission (until the eschaton, when things will be made clear) can easily be undone, should either the state or the church lose its piety. For this reason, when Bucer recommends the kinds of clerical advisors which the king should appoint, he counsels against appointing “priests and theologians of grand titles…who have waded into the lavish stipends of these most holy offices.” Instead, he should appoint “those whom he discovers by their fruits to be endowed and aflame beyond others with the knowledge and the love of the Kingdom of Christ, just as ‘David consulted’ about the renewing of religion.” The Church therefore serves the role of priest and prophet, while owing service to two kings—one a great King and one a lesser king. The kind of service rendered unto the lesser king might vary, based on the historical circumstances—but the prophetic witness must be maintained regardless. Samuel can render service in succession to both rebellious Saul and faithful David. The prophet can call both kings to judgment (1 Samuel 13:11-13; 2 Samuel 12:1-12). The advantage of the righteous king is that he will respond well to that judgment (2 Samuel 12:13). While the prophetic call requires historically-viable courses of action, the essence of the call remains the same: to stand blameless of compromise, to intercede on behalf of the nation, and to assure the nation of the certainty of God’s judgment on their works. Conclusion

And if, as they say, it were unsuitable for the Word to reveal Himself through bodily acts, it would be equally so for Him to do so through the works of the universe. His being in creation does not mean that He shares its nature; on the contrary, all created things partake of His power. Similarly, though He used the body as His instrument, He shared nothing of its defect, but rather sanctified it by His indwelling. --Athanasius, De Incarnatione

The Incarnation is at first glance a source of immense, even cosmic, tension. The idea that the divine could be joined in hypostatic union to the human baffles comprehension (especially to the Gentile mind, as Athanasius reminds us). It seems a great humiliation for Grace to enter Nature. And yet, ironically, it is this “humiliation” which is also the justification of Grace. For Grace had created Nature good, and “it was impossible, therefore, that God should leave man to be carried off by corruption, because it would be unfitting and unworthy of Himself.” The justification of Grace is contained in its grace-ing of Nature. Its vindication is found when it breaks the metaphysical boundaries which are supposed to bind Nature, permeating every last corner of a corrupted world which had forgotten the goodness of its original state. And so the Incarnational Kingdom promises to establish a peace between justice and mercy, between Nature and Grace. In this, the Incarnation gives us the third paradigm, which stands against any monadic hierarchology—as Yves Congar termed it—of Grace over Nature, or Nature over Grace. The Incarnation gives us something else: graced nature. This is the reformational spirit which stands apart from the civil war of the monads and the power struggles of canonist and royalist. The story of the Reformation as demythologizer has grown tired. And yet, the fact that it is still told is itself a cautionary tale, or perhaps a self-fulfilling prophecy. Much of modern Protestantism, in attempting to hold off the swarms of natural law idealists, has fallen back to an anti-Incarnational doctrine of political authority. Any public manifestation of our faith is often viewed with suspicion. The notion that the public sphere could be “sanctified…by His indwelling” is rebuked with Marsilian fervor. And yet, the Incarnation itself appears as a theopolitical renewal, a pledge that “the Lord touched all parts of creation, and freed and undeceived them all from every deceit.” It is itself the paradigm of a new creation, the good omen of a coming Kingdom. Nature may still groan in anticipation of a glory to come, but the firstfruits—the foretastes of glory—are already here. The Incarnation reveals and intensifies this longing (Romans 8:23)—but it also reveals and intensifies the mystery of Christ and His Body (Ephesians 5:23). Christ’s Kingdom is here in His Body while He still sits at the Father’s right hand; the Church is therefore left in a position of eschatological and incarnational tension, but it does so having already been vindicated. It has already received its commission to disciple the nations, and can therefore reveal to Nature the reason for its groaning, and so gift the world with a taste of the royal glory of things to come.

The Wrestling Match: Derrida and the Meaning of Life

2008-04-23T15:33:47Z

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.]]> 1) The kettle I am returning to you is brand new; 2) The holes were already in it when you lent it to me; 3) You never lent me a kettle anyway. Analogously 1) Writing is rigorously exterior and inferior to living memory and speech, which are therefore undamaged by it. 2) Writing is harmful to them because it puts them to sleep and infects their life which would otherwise remain intact. 3) Anyway, if one has resorted to hypomnesia and writing at all, it is not for their intrinsic value, but because living memory is finite, it already has holes in it before writing ever comes to leave its traces. Writing has no effect on memory (135-136). In other words, Plato wants to have his cake and eat it, too. On one hand, he wants to maintain that written words are lesser things, mere shadows on the wall of the cave (and therefore not real). On the other hand, he warns us shrilly that writing can damage reality by distorting it. So which is it? Derrida does seem to have cornered Plato. Plato wanted at first to make the written word irrelevant, or unreal. Signs are different—weaker—than the things signified, Plato maintains. In fact, this premise is exactly what Plato uses to differentiate himself from the sophists. Derrida wants to embrace the two-edged nature of language, its slipperiness, its danger. Sure, he says, language can’t be pinned down. Why try? Why try to build your castle in the sky. Derrida never lifted a hand to help the Shinarites build the Tower of Babel. He was making dirty jokes in the pub the whole time. So what do we make of all this? I think that both T.S. Eliot and Dr. Leithart acknowledge Derrida’s criticism of Plato and modernity. But they also point out that, as Christians, we can advance the argument another step. Yes, words are impossible to interpret from age to age (as Solomon said). The idea that the real meaning of words can be found is a deceit, as Eliot says—a lie of the “quiet-voiced elders” of modernity. But of course… as you may have noticed (and Dr. Leithart points out in Deep Comedy), Derrida opens himself up to a biblical criticism when he starts using terminology like “logos,” and “father and son.” John’s gospel in particular talks of the mystery of logos, and claims: “no man has seen the Father.” This is Derrida’s position so far: logos is invisible. But of course, we also know from John’s gospel that the father became known through the son. Meaning is communicated through a Word. The Word was spoken and now dwells and tabernacles with us. The Word is spoken and written. And Jesus has the audacity to claim that if you have seen the Son you have seen the Father. You see the Word, and because He obeys the Father, you have seen the Father, too. Derrida knows only disobedient parricidal words. Jesus gives us another type: the obedient Word. Derrida’s theory of language is a tragedy. The Bible’s is not, though it is a mystery. Eliot reminds us that we can never hope to fully pin down language. It is too elusive—in this Derrida was right. And this is something that Derrida—like Balaam’s ass—can teach us, I think. Our search for true words is “useless in the darkness.” We 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, in the end, after we’ve wrestled with the word all night and have at last bested him—then, at the breaking of day, the word says: “Let me go.” And we say, “Not until you bless me.” And then, in the middle of this stalemate, the Word turns to you and gives you a new name—that is enough. What more can you require of God in language? You present him with your most difficult problems (the problem of evil, the problem of the meaning of life), and all he does is answer you with another riddle. He gives you a new name and blesses you because you wrestled with him all night. Even when you have him pinned—physically— you can’t win. He extricates Himself with a Word. But that’s all you needed anyway. I’ll finish up with a brief quotation from Stanley Hauerwas: “We know who we are only when we can place our selves—locate our stories—within God’s story. This is the basis for the extraordinary Christian claim that we participate morally in God’s life…. Grace is not an eternal moment above history rendering history irrelevant; rather it is God’s choice to be a Lord whose kingdom is furthered by our concrete obedience through which we acquire a history befitting our nature as God’s creatures” (The Peaceable Kingdom, 27).

The Rumor of God

2008-04-22T20:31:58Z

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?

Toward an Incarnational View of Political Authority

2008-04-22T20:30:45Z

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

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.

Zosima: A Presentation

2008-02-29T19:56:42Z

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. Ivan—despite his prose poem—wants to believe that his arguments are Euclidean, logical, empirical even. Children suffer. Horribly. And would you, if offered the chance to be the architect of this moral scheme accept if you knew that just one child would suffer the cruelty that Ivan describes? It’s a devastating proposition. This is the classic “problem of evil” in its most dreadful formulation. Like Ivan, Zosima will begin by stating the problem of evil, and then move on (like the Grand Inquisitor) to show how mystery, miracle, and authority can save (rather than enslave). Dostoevsky very clearly does not engage the problem of evil head-on (which distresses some; and we’ll come back to this point). Zosima introduces the question by discussing his childhood readings of Job. He is distressed by Job’s sufferings, and is dissatisfied about the resolution of the story. Can God’s replacement of his sons and daughters actually be expected to make Job feel good? How can a man even love his “replacement” children when every time he looks in their faces, he sees the dead faces of his first children? And all this is done so that God can boast to Satan: “See what my saint can suffer for my sake!” What the hell kind of justice is that? Forget about Job, who among us would actually feel comfortable acting like God in that situation? This is where Dostoevsky suspends us briefly—leaving us exactly where Ivan had left us a few chapters before. In Ivan’s narrative, this tension, this dissonance is “resolved” by the Inquisitor, who asserts his authority to mitigate the evils of the world. Says the Jesuit: the world is evil and unjust. So I must impose my authority on them so that they might be fed as well as possible. They will have to give up their freedom, but it will be worth it. The Inquisitor assumes authority (along with its attendant miracles and mystery). What Zosima teaches, in contrast, is that all must be responsible for all. The Inquisitor (representing, I think, both the late medieval Western church and early modernism) sets up false sacraments and symbols of authority, and places them on a very high shelf where very few can reach. Zosima offers authority, miracle, mystery—the whole package deal—to everyone. Not in the false universalism of the French Enlightenment, or of Kant, or of Marx’s proletariat. But personally and intimately and sacrificially. Zosima relates his story of how, as a young soldier, he was to face an enemy in a duel. But he remembers back to his godly brother (who died when he was young) and what he had said to Zosima and his servants when dying: “’My good ones, my dears, why are you serving me, why do you love me, and am I worthy of being served?’ ‘Yes, am I worthy?’ suddenly leaped into my mind [says Zosima]. Indeed, how did I deserve that another man, just like me, the image and likeness of God, should serve me?” The bitterness which Zosima had allowed to fester in himself when reading Job so many years before had killed the seed of faith. But here, years later, he found the seed had matured and brought forth fruit. Zosima bows before his enemy (a posture he would come to be in very often) and begs forgiveness. Zosima’s ethic is foundation and practical. Countering Marx: All men and all stations in life can be good and necessary; only live as though they are as free as you would wish yourself to be, remembering like Zosima the words: “Am I worthy, such as I am, that another should serve me, and that, because he is poor and untaught, I should order him about? ….See to it that [even] your servant is freer in spirit than if hew were not a servant…. Why can my servant not be like my own kin, so that I may finally receive him into my family, and rejoice for it?”(317) Zosima counters Nietzsche: “[Do not] fear the noble and powerful, but be wise and ever gracious. Know measure, know the time, learn these things. When you are alone, pray. Love to throw yourself down on the earth and kiss it. Kiss the earth and love it, tirelessly, insatiably, love all men, love all things, seek this rapture and ecstasy. Water the earth with the tears of your joy, and love those tears.” (322) For Zosima, humility is salvation. Humility before your brother is his salvation. Nobility in itself is therefore unworthy of us, because it exalts the individual above others. Zosima also counters Kant. Kant wanted an abstract ethic, where some vaporous standard of Reason would bind all men to a common purpose. But Kant’s universal ethic was not personal. Personal circumstances, loves, biases, and sins would only mess up Kant’s universal kingdom. People are too darn complicated. Reason stands above all that. And for this, Zosima says: such a mentality is an absence of true, personal love, and is therefore the very essence of hell. “This fortunate being rejected the invaluable gift, did no value it, did not love it, looked upon it with scorn, and was left unmoved by it…. And he beholds paradise, and could rise up to the Lord, but his torment is precisely to rise up to the Lord without having loved, to touch those who loved him—him who disdained their love.” (322) All these other mindsets have as their stumbling block the sin of pride. In order to accept personal responsibility for others, it is necessary to humble oneself before them, as Father Zosima illustrates when he kneels before Dmitri Karamazov and in showing kindness in response to the insults of the Karamazov patriarch. The difference between Zosima and Ivan (and Kant and Marx and so on) is that Zosima is willing to debase himself before the base, and to love the unlovely. Ivan is willing to occasionally love a beautiful blue sky or a person who shows him kindness precisely because it does not impose on his own self-dignity. His autonomous selfhood and his superiority remain intact. In contrast to Ivan, Zosima’s universal-personal ethic requires a certain kind of existential leap. While Ivan struggles to maintain his ethical freedom, Zosima surrenders his freedom to a higher authority in order to receive it again. As Robin Miller points out, “true authority transfigures and disperses itself into responsibility, a radically egalitarian responsibility of each for all and all for each.” This paradox is decidedly non-Euclidean, and therefore escapes Ivan entirely. How can a man lose his individuality only to gain the salvation of others? So we come back to the problem of evil. Has Zosima answered it? Cut through the rhetoric. What does Zosima say to the Grand Inquisitor and to the child who was pulled apart by his master’s dogs? Dostoevsky and Zosima in some ways give no answer. With his account of the sufferings of children, Ivan breaks your heart. And Zosima says, let it stay broken. Your heart must stay broken. Look at the suffering children. Observe them. Listen to them cry. Then do something. Love them. Embrace them. Bow before them and ask their forgiveness even when you have done nothing to offend them—for you are as guilty of their suffering as the one who actually hurt them. There is evil in the world, Zosima says. And God allows it. But why? The answer, besides being contained in all of Zosima’s teaching, is given away before you even read the authorial preface: it’s epitaph: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24). Dostoevsky beats this principle into us throughout the novel: salvation comes through death and suffering. Zosima’s death brings salvation to Alyosha in a way he had not known it before. He comes to terms with his calling, and begins to the see and love not just God, but the world which God made (think of his echoing of Ivan’s words as his own to Rakitin). Ilyushechka’s death brings salvation to his father and his boyhood friends. Fyodor Pavlovitch’s death, too, brings salvation—ultimately—to Dmitri. And I think you can even see that Smerdyakov’s death might hint at the salvation of Ivan. I think that if you return to Ivan’s nasty proposition to Alyosha (would you be the Creator of this world if you knew the suffering that would happen in it)—the proper answer would be a quiet but confident, Yes. God knew what He was doing. Greater things come out of suffering and death. That is—if we “kiss the earth and love it, tirelessly, insatiably, love all men, love all things.”

Sacrifice, Gift, and Dickens

2008-02-12T22:49:39Z

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.]]> Dickens’ Broken World The polarity in A Tale of Two Cities is famous to the extreme point of cliché: Dickens’ world is divided into fat bestial nobles living off the lard of the land, and half-mad, half-crazed peasants with skeletal children hungry for blood. But even through the thick purple haze of Dickens’ prose it’s possible to discern an incisive critique of modernity which was ahead of its time. The polarity of the Tale’s famous opening paragraph reveals a society completely disintegrated. Class was set against class, nation against nation, and—eventually—revolutionary against revolutionary. As Dickens tells his story, one begins to realize that it is the “best of times” precisely nowhere. The works of Immanuel Kant probably never made their way to the coffee table of Madame Defarge, and yet the German philosopher in many ways crystallized the ethic of modernity and the Revolution. For Kant, the guide to morality was no longer “love your neighbor,” which he considered too circumstantial , but an autonomous obedience to an impersonal ethic called Reason. Reason was supposed to guide individuals’ actions apart from any direct consideration of their neighbor. The Jacquerie of Dickens’ Tale are therefore the direct, though illiterate, descendants of Kant. For the representative figure of Madame Defarge, there is no brooking of empathy for anyone—the Cause transcends all personal consideration. Dickens portrays several examples of how modernity sapped all mutuality and love out of its members. Perhaps the first example we have is the imprisonment of Doctor Alexander Manette, held in Bastille for years by the aristocratic Evremonde family. While the Bastille often summons up images of out-dated medieval methods of punishment, the idea of solitary confinement was a decidedly modern system. Dickens had made a tour of the arch-modern prison system of the Philadelphia Quakers in 1842. What he found in those prisons disgusted him:

In its intention, I am well convinced that it is kind, humane, and meant for reformation; but I am persuaded that those who devised this system of Prison Discipline, and those benevolent gentlemen who carry it into execution, do not know what it is that they are doing. I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers.

Of course, the idea was consistently modern: an individual left to himself, protected from adverse social influences, would be able to reflect on his life and reform himself according to the standard of reason which he possessed: “left alone with only their conscience, prisoners could not be influenced by the bad example of their fellow inmates.” In the case of Dr. Manette, this progressive form of imprisonment leads to insanity. The irony of his story is that even when he is freed and held up as a hero by the Jacquerie, he is eventually manipulated by the revolutionaries in order to quench their own bloodlust. Even heroes deserve less consideration than the Cause. The Restorative The situation in Dickens’ England is not much better than that in France. In the opening scenes of the Tale there is very little sociality. A coach carrying several passengers is anything but communal:

Not one of the three could have said, from anything he saw, what either of the other two was like; and each was hidden under almost as many wrappers from the eyes of the mind, as from the eyes of the body, of his two companions. In those days, travellers were very shy of being confidential on a short notice, for anybody on the road might be a robber or in league with robbers.

Dickens’ protagonist, barrister Sydney Carton, also manifests this social disintegration, telling one person: “I am a disappointed drudge, sir. I care for no man on earth, and no man on earth cares for me.” While Carton began his career in law with great promise, he fell into patterns of drunkenness and vice, with sparks of brilliance only occasionally appearing through the heavy mask of laziness. Carton falls for the beautiful Lucie Manette, daughter of the imprisoned doctor, but watches as she eventually gives herself to his rival and look-alike, Charles Darnay. Carton sees in Darnay his better self: respectable, full of good intent, selfless, and—of course—the object of Lucie’s affection. Karen Odden points out that while Carton and Darnay are “positioned initially as antagonists…. they become mirrors for each other and then, finally, as Carton takes Darnay’s place, with generosity and a spirit of self-sacrifice, identical.” The climax of Dickens’ Tale sees Darnay taken captive by the revolutionaries for crimes he never committed, and Carton realizing that his moment of redemption has come. Using his striking resemblance to the prisoner Darnay, Carton takes his rival’s place on the guillotine’s block. Quoting the biblical promise, “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” Carton ascends the steps to his death, and has a prophetic vision as he dies:

I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman, weeping for me on the anniversary of this day…. I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away…. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

The surface inference is clear: Carton, by his death, expiates his past sins, receives the promise of resurrection, and serves as an example to his namesake. The Christological typology is clear and, again, almost overly clichéd. And yet, Dickens’ portrayal of Carton’s sacrifice also has a more subtle social implication. The Gift Long before Carton dies, he promises Lucie, “For you, and for any dear to you, I would do anything.” And along his path to the guillotine, the motivation of Dickens’ protagonist remains constantly personal. At first it seems too obvious to state: Carton is dying for Darnay and his wife and daughter. And yet, the personal dimension is something wholly lacking among the Jacquerie. Carton decisively counters the abstract ideologues among the Jacquerie, and also the greedy aristocrats who preceded them. Carton’s sacrifice is portrayed by Dickens as a restoration not merely from death unto life, but of greater fellowship in life. Carton’s sacrifice of love is a personal gift, and one which brings blessings to both the giver and giveé. For Kant, an individual acts out of duty to a universal standard of reason. But for Sydney Carton, sacrifice must be personal. Love cannot be given to an abstract, nor duty to a vaporous standard of Reason. John Milbank points out:

To die for any old invisible other is the very reverse of valuing otherness, because otherness must involve not just diversity and difference but specific diversity and concrete difference. All these things have to be visibly or audibly or in some way sensorially registered.

And further, sacrifice brings the giver and the giveé into a relationship established on love, whereby both receive the blessing of resurrection. Carton, in giving himself for Darnay, resurrects his better self, and prophetically sees his namesake love him and prosper long after Carton’s own death. And so Carton’s resurrection is also a resurrection for Darnay, and for Darnay’s son. For Dickens, this eminently Christian view of sacrifice is the hope for entire societies, not just individuals. The hope for a “peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy” society of individuals is contained in sacrifice. The modernistic ideologies competing against this Christian view always pit one group against another. Capitalism sets loose personal ambition in the hope that selfishness will inadvertently create the by-product of wealth. The aristocrats of Dickens’ novel, while often exaggerated for dramatic purposes, manifest this ideology: each person has their place, and the rich are supposedly the economic benefactors of the poor anyway. On the other hand, Marxism, like the Jacquerie, sets class against class in the hopes that the human race can be freed via an impersonal egalitarianism. Sacrifice takes a different road. Augustine wrote that there “is nothing so social by nature as man, nothing so unsocial by corruption.” The ethic of sacrifice therefore recognizes that the investment of sacrifice works a social (mutual) resurrection. In the end, Mr. Sydney Carton gives us a fundamentally anti-modern hero. Here is a man who does not die for an abstract. He does not ascend the altar of the guillotine as an expiation of national sins, as the Jacquerie believed. He dies for a woman, for a man, for a child. His gift brings blessing back upon himself; his resurrection is necessarily paired with the resurrection of his fellow men. And in his death, he establishes a mutual bond of love which joins individual men together in a way that liberty, brotherhood, and equality—in all their vapor—never could.

One Moment

2008-01-23T16:59:23Z

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.

A Reformed Consideration of Political Theology

2008-01-03T19:49:23Z

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. The Eschatological Critique The differences begin to emerge in the not-always-hypothetical case that the State actually begins to listen to the Church. Both Hauerwas and O’Donovan look to Constantine for a theological watershed. O’Donovan’s thesis is accurately stated by Cavanaugh: “If Christology is given its due political weight, then after the Ascension the nations could simply not refuse to acknowledge Christ…. Nevertheless, the government is not the church; the church exists to serve as a distinctive witness, to remind the government of its temporary status” (Cavanaugh 2003: 403). However, O’Donovan also argues that Christendom—in which the State humbles itself before Christ—is a natural effect of the Ascension. Cavanaugh says of O’Donovan: he is “unusual in this respect.” Cavanaugh points out that Hauerwas and O’Donovan both advance eschatological arguments against the State, but that Cavanaugh pushes his eschatological argument much farther in effect: “Hauerwas has no doubt that God’s reign will triumph, but he wants to be more reticent than O’Donovan about how in fact God’s reign is manifested on the way” (Cavanaugh 2003: 404). At this point, regardless of your personal eschatological tendencies, it might seem as if Cavanaugh and Hauerwas at least have Augustine on their side, while O’Donovan has only Gary North and the late Mr. Rushdoony. However, it seems to me that—no matter how you dress up O’Donovan—he advances a much subtler argument than the theonomists, and one which sounds very Augustinian. For O’Donovan, the fatal weakness of the Missional view is the way in which it poses the dichotomy between the two cities. Hauerwas, he argues, takes a similar position to those of Luther, Marsilius, and countless post-medieval theorists: the Church-State divide is analogous to an inner-outer divide. The Church pertains to salvation and the soul, while the State (the secular) can only condemn and affect the body. O’Donovan posits that we should ditch the inner-outer (spatial) analogy for a temporal one:

Secular institutions have a role confined to this passing age (saeculum). They do not represent the arrival of the new age and the rule of God…. The corresponding term to “secular” is not “sacred,” nor “spiritual,” but “eternal.” Applied to political authorities, the term “secular” should tell us that they are not agents of Christ, but are marked for displacement when the rule of Christ is finally disclosed. They are Christ’s conquered enemies; yet they have an indirect testimony to give, bearing the marks of his sovereignty imposed upon them, negating their pretensions and evoking their acknowledgement. Like the surface of a planet pocked with craters by the bombardment it receives from space, the governments of the passing age show the impact of Christ’s dawning glory. This witness of the secular is the central core of Christendom (O’Donovan 1996: 211-12).

The shift is subtle. By moving the split from spatial to temporal, O’Donovan allows room for the State to serve a teleological purpose, rather like the Pauline doctrine of the law as taskmaster. (O’Donovan affirms the patristic idea that government exists for the evil doers and not the righteous, and thereby allows that we will need less and less of it as Christ progressively conquers His enemies.) The Church then occupies the position of the eternal City of God which claims the transcendent citizenship of the Christian, but also condescends to influence the city of man:

The church does not philosophise about a future world; it demonstrates the working of the coming Kingdom within this one. Through the authorization of the Holy Spirit it squares up to civil authority and confronts it. This may lead to martyrdom, or to mutual service. The service rendered by the state to the church is to facilitate its mission…. It may facilitate it, first, simply by performing its own business responsibly and with modest pretensions (O’Donovan 1996: 217).

The Christian State is humbled—humiliated, perhaps. And, while it may be legitimized in some way, is remains in an awkward position: “The Christian emperor was, as it were, a spy in his own camp, an uncomfortable situation which the bishop could do little to make more comfortable” (O’Donovan 1996: 201). The Incarnational Critique This next critique follows closely from the spatial-temporal distinction that O’Donovan makes from Hauerwas’ work. If, as Hauerwas argues, the Church represents the immaterial and the State the material, the effect is that while both are political entities, the Church is “a polis without a police department,” as Cavanaugh summarizes it. In other words the Church is a counter-polis, but must not exert any threat of violence upon the body. This dichotomy is at the very least seven hundred years old, and presupposes the old views of Marsilius of Padua, who argued that the Church should stay out of material/political concerns because it would only compromise itself by doing so. It seems that some sort of duality is inevitable, while O’Donovan still believes it is possible to maintain a healthy distance from dualism. The duality of Marsilius and Hauerwas tries to protect the Church from corruption by associating it with some sort of Platonic immateriality. It’d be counter-productive for a pastor to try and sway local politics; every minute he spends on temporal concerns is a minute he could’ve spent on matters pertaining to salvation. I’d like to suggest that the “problem” of church-state relations floats on top of the philosophical undercurrent of the divide between the natural and the supernatural. Both realms exist, and as far as I am aware, all parties (Reformed, Missional, and otherwise) associate the State with the natural order and the Church with the supernatural order. After the 5th century pope Gelasius, the medieval Church assumed the formula: “Two there are by whom this world is ruled as princes.” However, while the Reformed view recognizes this duality, it makes a another crucial claim. The Church stands against the State as a counter-revolutionary prophet, priest, and king; but it also serves in some way to legitimize the natural order once the natural order has bowed the knee to Christ. The Missional view rejects the idea that the saeculum can be in some way redeemed. Missionalists like Hauerwas and Cavanaugh see the Church’s role as prophetic, just like O’Donovan. However, they view the State as irreversibly flawed, a temporal counter to the Church. The secular order is assumed to be ascendant and adversarial—at all times. Random Historical Considerations While O’Donovan does not, to my knowledge, dogmatically claim the Calvinist views he describes, he presents them as a counter to much of the prevailing dualism of the Reformation period. When he discusses John Calvin, for instance, he allows that Calvin’s distinction of the “two-fold government of man” sounds Marsilian—with its division into that which pertains to the soul and that which “regulates external conduct” (III.19.15). However, Calvin bids farewell to Marsilius in that he wants to establish a “structured church authority which was subject to the exegesis of Scripture yet possessed sufficient social objectivity to provide effective institutional government” (O’Donovan 1996: 210). In other words, the Church (which oversaw the government of the soul) was intended to guide the powers which regulated the body. This is archetype of the city-state of Geneva, which O’Donovan argues was intended to be the founding utopia of Reformed political theory. And while Calvin may have harbored some dualistic tendencies, O’Donovan sees enough divergence in Reformed thought to write about “the Calvinist reversal of the Marsilian legacy of the early Reformation” (O’Donovan 1996: 213). O’Donovan also suggests that Calvinist polity necessarily tends toward localism. Since Calvinism divested both the pope and emperor of any universal power,

The Calvinist influence was uniquely dependent on its city-state model. Church structures deprived of both universal papacy and bishopric were arranged in local units of a size that groups of ministers and lay elders could meet in consistory to exercise the church’s authority. This created a powerful engine of shared lay-clerical decision-making at local level. The Calvinist Reforms provided a forum of local politics (O’Donovan 1996: 211).

At this point the Reformed system seems to provide a means by which some of early modern political theory can be salvaged. The Missional view seems to imply that any system spawned by Christendom or early modernity is fundamentally flawed. O’Donovan is skeptical, but not as definite in his analysis of early modernity, in which he sees traces of earlier medieval traditions (O’Donovan 1996: 226ff). * * * Summing it all, the distinguishing marks of the Reformed and Missional views are subtle, but still carry their proponents to different destinations. Cavanaugh summarizes the Missional goal: “The political task of the church post-Christendom is to suffer rulers as faithfully as possible, to the point of martyrdom if necessary, to wait upon the Lord and not to presume to rule in his place” (Cavanaugh 2003: 404). O’Donovan and the Reformed tradition, however, go one step more, arguing that martyrdom effects victory. The blood of the martyrs may be what built the Church, but it was the martyrs themselves who cried out for blood, as John records in his revelation. As O’Donovan poses it, the real question is whether God will answer that call for vengeance or not. Sources and Suggested Reading Cavanaugh, William. Torture and Eucharist. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998. ________. “Church.” In Blackwell Companion to Political Theology, eds. Peter Scott and William Cavanaugh, 393-406. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. Hauerwas, Stanley. The Peaceable Kingdom. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983. ________. Against the Nations. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992. Leithart, Peter. Against Christianity. Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2003. O’Donovan, Oliver. The Desire of the Nations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ________. From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999. Ullmann, Walter. Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages. London: Methuen, 1961.]]>

An Exile of Love

2007-12-17T16:22:28Z

Kant’s Kingdom of Ends and the Kingdom of God The modern impulse is a matronly one. From the first spark of the Enlightenment project, the modernist had the aim of cleaning up the mess which had been created by the untidy medievals. Descartes in his Discourse on Method begins by posing the question: if all men possess reason, why do we end up in disagreement on so many issues—often to the point of bloodshed? The ethical application of the modern quest for universal agreement is centered on the principle that “reason,” rather than external authority, provides mankind with the means to achieve order. And, further, it is possible to establish a internal “law” which would have all men treat all men with equity. The medievals had imposed the threat of ecclesial judgment on men in order to force them into line with divine law. For the moderns, however, this external threat reeked of arbitrary violence; surely there must be a more rational way to establish a universal law than to fall back on ecclesial powers which allegedly derived their authority from a Being not bound by law. For the modern, any law of ethics must be based in human autonomy, centered in the self. Immanuel Kant, following in this stream of thought, proposed his own modern Golden Rule—one which is ultimately impersonal, autonomous, and lacking in the self-sacrificial virtue of the biblical alternative.]]> The Quest for the Universal The biblical Golden Rule, which states that we ought to act toward men as we ourselves would wish to be acted upon, was the “universal law”—to use Enlightenment language—of the pre-modern world. In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant gives us a modern retelling of the Rule in the form of his categorical imperative:

Therefore every rational being must so act as if he were by his maxims in every case a legislating member in the universal kingdom of ends. The formal principle of these maxims is: "So act as if thy maxim were to serve likewise as the universal law (of all rational beings)."

Kant’s ethical concern is to establish a rational, universal ethic which at the same time protects the individual’s autonomy. His two ends seem contradictory at first: how can a law which is universal allow for the ultimate freedom of the individual will? Or, practically, how can we establish that Peter should not rob Paul without infringing upon Peter’s will? The biblical Golden Rule would at first glance give the simple answer, because Peter himself would not want to be robbed by Paul, or anyone else. For Kant, however, this is not enough. The Golden Rule is too situational; it is based on the assumption that someone else would necessarily wish what you wish. Kant’s own rule, or “kingdom of ends,” moves “beyond” the unique situation, and even the persons involved, in order to arrive at the goal of universality. As E.W. Hirst explains Kant’s kingdom of ends, “if I can conceive my action universalized without contradiction, then the action is right. Morality depends upon a certain ability to will, i.e. to will without contradiction.” The result of this is that, “the reference to other persons…is only indirect and instrumental in order to find out what is duty for myself.” Like Descartes, Kant wishes to provide mankind with the realization that it is possible to live in a world where one can know what is right and good, by using the faculty of reason, rather than through external or situational obligation: “the essence of things is not altered by their external relations.” By application, if all men possess this same internal faculty of reason, they are likewise participants in a “legislature” of the kingdom of ends. Each legislator, in turn, must view his associates as equals—as ends rather than means to an end. There is no social (medieval) hierarchy whereby a greater person might treat a lesser person differently than he himself would wish to be treated. Rather, the universal law—by its impersonal, universal nature—establishes the freedom of the individual will. Kant even goes so far as to equate the autonomy of the will with the universal law: “An action that is consistent with the autonomy of the will is permitted; one that does not agree therewith is forbidden.” Hirst comments that Kant, in his drive to establish a common morality and parallel autonomy of will, neglects entirely the personal dimension of ethics. In spite of the corporate metaphor of a legislature, Kant’s “kingdom” is composed of legislators who do nothing other than recognize a universal law which already exists in their individual minds. There is no need for discussion or debate; disagreement has been prohibited among the legislators. Says Hirst of this kingdom: “There is no suggestion that selves are united in any sense other than that they are alike subject to the same idea of duty. Kant still regards the self monadistically, able to attain ethical perfection by itself.” In addition to this, there is no sense that one man would not hurt another out of interest in that other person as a person, or neighbor—as Christ would put it. “The love of our neighbor from the Kantian point of view reduces down to the practice of social duty, not from any regard for our neighbor as such, but from reverence or respect for the Moral Law.” It seems that in the end, Kant’s ethic is guilty of the same charge that he leveled at the Golden Rule—that it is a self-respecting law which neglects the concerns of one’s neighbor. Transcendence in the Flesh The impersonal nature of Kant’s kingdom of ends should prompt a reconsideration of the biblical Golden Rule, which John Milbank argues is, in practice, much more than the law of simple reciprocity—where one acts in order to be acted upon in a certain way:

Reciprocity is summed up in the golden rule, and…is re-formulated by Kant. However, reciprocal friendship in the Middle Ages involved much more than this. Agreement in the good, upon which friendship was based, did not mean merely respect for the dignity of each other’s freedom. Instead it meant an orientation to a finally unknown, transcendent good, that was nonetheless ceaselessly and newly mediated through concrete historical circumstances.

This appears to be the key aspect of the Golden Rule which Kant failed to account for. While Kant aims to establish universality, he wants to do so without what might be termed an incarnate transcendence. In other words, the Golden Rule is a universal law; but it is also what Hirst calls an intra-personal law which it expressed in the mutual fulfillment and sacrifice of desires among people. Kant’s kingdom of ends existed in objective rationality. Milbank contrasts this to the medievals:

In Thomas Aquinas, for example, one will find—shockingly, perhaps to us—not a word which construes charity as the neutral altruistic love for the remote, but much about a hierarchical, preferential exercise of charity according to specific relations and affinities….there is no indifference to the remote or alien involved here, since within the ecclesia the remote for us is close to the warmth of charity for others, and all are close to God.

For moderns like Kant, the hierarchies and external obligations imposed by medieval society appeared entirely too subjective—one might even say, too earthy. As Milbank argues, the modern ethic is the “elevation of the disinterested above the interested.” Kant’s very premise is that morality is binding because it exists apart from persons and situations. Writes Milbank: “Kant—with immense honesty and non-evasive rigour—concludes: ‘it is wholly impossible to explain how and why the universality of a maxim as a law—and therefore morality—should interest us.” Implied is the idea that if we did actually have a vested interest in the law, it would no longer be valid. And this is the crucial divide between Kant and Christ, between the modern and the pre-modern. Milbank points out that Kant’s ethic is a defensive, protecting ethic; it does not seek to sacrifice for another’s benefit. Rather, Kant’s idea of “sublime” duty manifests itself publicly as “the safeguarding of abstract negative freedom and private property. By contrast, the morality of ‘Virtue’ is confined by Kant to the strictly private and non-jurisprudential sphere.” There is no drive toward self-sacrifice in Kant. And it would seem the act of laying down one’s life for a friend poses serious problems to an impersonal universal code. The one ethical point which the medieval churchmen all began with is the point which Kant is unwilling to discuss—that there might be a Supreme Personality behind the universal law. When Kant argues that external (or personal) relations do not alter the ethical code, he presses his point so far as to argue that it is the autonomous will of man that provides the basis for judgment, and that “even the Supreme Being” must subject Himself to this universal law. Of course, the medievals disagreed. E.H. Stokes points out that for Augustine, the obligation of morality is necessarily binding because it derives from “a supremely righteous will.” In the ultimate hierarchy, God imposes a moral standard upon His creatures, who owe Him respect and obedience. And in this, a law of universal reason is established—and not because of an internal, self-respecting autonomy. But contrary to the modern assumption, this imposition is not violent, nor does it breed disagreement. Stokes summarizes Augustine: “the bond of unity in the city of God is personal devotion or love to the founder of the city.” God is Himself the “perfect harmony,” the Person whose commands order the world and give to men the kind of love which “readily [bears] all things for the sake of the loved object.” It is this sort of external, social, personable order which provides a marked contrast to Kant. His world is tidy, coherent, and clear of the messiness of human interaction. It exists in a rational plane, above circumstances which require sacrifice rather than duty. Kant’s kingdom of ends ultimately fails to recognize the external, social demands of humanity. For, as Augustine argued, “there is nothing so social by nature as man, nothing so unsocial by corruption.” In failing to connect individual man with a transcendent Body, such as the Church, Kant effectively cut man off from any sort of sacrificial ethic. By removing the transcendent, demanding personality of God, Kant made an exile of love, and a hermit of man.