Per Caritatem

Last Fall in my “What is Enlightenment?” course we read The Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and Adorno. As a whole, I found the book quite interesting, though a difficult read. Some of the intriguing aspects include the following: a Foucaultian knowledge and power as synonymous thesis, criticism of the totalizing tendencies of the Enlightenment, and the thesis that rationality of the Enlightenment becomes purely functional–a functionalized reason with no content etc. However, the one thing that bothered me about the book was H & A’s negative view of jazz. (This in no way detracts from their overall critique, it just personally bothered me). In several places, H & A criticize jazz, yet their critique seems odd and somewhat misinformed. For example, they list Guy Lombardo as jazz figure and do not mention any African American figures. The strange thing about this is that the history of jazz, which of course involves the great suffering of African Americans, in some ways parallels H & A’s own sufferings as Jews. Given H & A’s negative presentation of jazz, I’ll try to paint a different picture for those of you who are not so familar with jazz, but who are open to giving it a try.

Two central elements of jazz are improvisation and syncopation. Improvisation might be defined as “instantaneous composition.” In other words, when a jazz player improvises, he or she is not playing written music, but is instead spontaneously composing, utilizing various scales, patterns, melodic lines etc. that he or she has practiced to the point that they are second nature. What many people do not realize is that improvisation did not originate with jazz. In fact, as R. Beirach notes, “prior to the beginning of the 19th century, the roles of composition, execution and improvisation were much less clearly separated, and accomplished musicians were expected to be adept at all three” (in the CD jacket of “Sunday Songs”–an excellent CD where Beirach does the “unthinkable”–he improvises over traditional classical works). For example, the great composers Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin were known for their skill in improvisation.

Turning to the second element, syncopation, we might explain this as an emphasis on the “off” or “weak” beats. That is, in 4/4 time, the strong beats are 1 and 3. Most traditional classical music and even rock music emphasizes the strong beats. However, jazz accents the weak beats (2 and 4), and this produces a completely different rhythmic feel. The combination of these two elements–improvisation and syncopation–is the heartbeat of jazz, and it is perhaps not accidental that the fusing of this spontaneous composition with accenting the “weak” beats arose primarily from a people who were themselves oppressed by those who would want to stress the static, and in H & A’s language–reduce all particularity to universality. By definition, jazz resists both.

“The Thomistic Telescope: Truth and Identity” by John Milbank

University of Dallas, Aquinas Lecture , January 27, A.D. 2006(transcribed with tolerable accuracy by Jonathan McIntosh)

This lecture is concerned with the relationship between truth and identity. The question of truth is deeply related to the question of identity and stability. If we think of truth as saying ‘what is the case,’ as in ‘it is true that there is a cat perched on the window sill,’ then the cat has to stay still long enough for us to verify this, and it has to be distinctly recognizable as a cat, too fast a flash of mere fur would undue everything. We can invent something stable for ourselves by making it sufficiently rigid and treating it in the same way, much like a table. Then it seems we can be sure of saying some true things about these sure things. But then we can wonder if these stable things are really the way they appear, securely shaped and colored, and definable. The more radical course is to invent something more abstract, like the number one. This seems more certain and controllable. But then we realize we can only define ‘one’ in relation to something like ‘two’. This no longer seems like the pure one that can’t be multiplied or divided. In this way the most fundamental, self-identical thing turns out to be elusive and inaccessible. It would have to be immune to participation and multiplication. But the one’s we know about can be multiplied and divided.

Then we are inclined to resort to a further abstraction, turning from arithmetic and algebra to logic. Whatever the self-identical is, we know it can’t be both one and non-one. This gives us the law of excluded middle or non-contradiction. No single thing can be and not be what it is at the same time and in the same respect. If this were possible, then even tautologies would not be true.

Since the time of the ancient Greeks, just this law has been seen as the foundation of all logic, and so of all truthful discourse. Here we have at least a form of truth. Modern thought, starting long ago with certain medieval currents, has sought to build on this formality towards a secure epistemology and even an ontology. But here a doubt must always persist as to whether one can cross the chasm between logical possibility and given actuality. Is anything more than a thin formal truth available to us? Can we get beyond the banal truths of logic? For the ancients and much of the middle ages, things were otherwise. The law of excluded middle ruled actuality because it was taken that there were real stable realities out there in the world. Aristotle in his Metaphys: said that without stable substances the law of non-con cannot hold. One can at the very least mean that W/o stable substances or forms out there in the world, the law of non-con cannot be applied to a deprived reality which would then be somehow really contradictory.

I suspect, however, that Aristotle’s doctrine of act over possibility means that more radically he thinks that only the actuality of ontological substance makes it true in the realm of logic which ponders possibilities that the law of non-contradiction really does hold. At the very least, one can see that if this law applies only in the realm of logic, one has a very meager doctrine of truth. It certainly will not allow that things insofar as they are as somehow true, as Aquinas holds in his doctrine of the convertibility of transcendents, it will not allow us to make statements about how things are or as they appear to us to be. So can we be assured that there are real actual, self-identical items in the world?

Plato seems to have half-agreed with skeptics like Protagoras. The material world was in itself in a temporal flux. If it exhibited relative stabilities that we can rely upon, this was because it participated in eternal, immutable archetypes of everything. Trees in the formal eidos of trees, just acts in the eidos of justice. Aristotle by contrast thought the eidei were perfectly stable within the material, temporal world itself, without any participation in transcendent forms. These two different views of the forms were then synthesized in different ways by later commentators on Aristotle, by the neo-platonists, and then by Jewish, Muslim, and Christian thinkers. To say that the world contained eidei, and the participation in those supreme eide that were the divine ideas, was to say that even if the world does not itself think (and most people affirmed even the idea of a thinking world in the case of the celestial realm beyond the lunar orbit) it is nonetheless composed of thoughts or the reflections of thoughts that are meanings. Things are incarnate meanings. Beings themselves are therefore also truths, because they exist as manifesting themselves in ordered patterns, related to ends they seek, and the ordered proportions and relations they enter into with other beings. There is an ordained proportion between the way things exist and our knowledge of things. We’re not like visitors to this solar system from some strange galaxy, as cosmic ethnographers, making observations and taking little notes that reality never intended us to be capable of making. For Platonic/Aristotelian tradition, forms exist in things so that they might be known. Knowledge is not a mirror of things, not a representation of them, but rather a process whereby forms migrate from matter to a higher mode of being which is intellectual existence. An act of thinking for Aristotle was identical to the realization of an objective eidos as a thought, even if a thought is not quite so good in terms of its existentiality, it is higher in terms of its formality.

Inversely, to have a thought and to realize an eidos further fulfills an unfolding of an active capacity of thinking itself. Thought for this model was not possible on account of the accident of mirroring, based on the example of the eye mirroring light, what Rorty called the mirror of nature. Rather, thought was believed to be possible on account of an archain ontological proportion or ordering which Aquinas call convenience, a proportion between things as existing and things as known.

Realism and nominalism.

Already in the Middle Ages, beginning as early as the 12th century with people like Roger Bacon, etc., this way of looking at things started to seem unsatisfactory. On traditional model, it appears that one can only teach someone to know by having one attend to one’s inner light, which intuits and judges by nature without any other reason. One could not under this jurisdiction teach a fundamental method which says to accept only the transparently clear and what can be measured and proved and shown to work in a repeated fashion. So in a long process culminating in 17th century, there is a method that says knowledge is not a matter of mystical communion with being, and a strange realization of the purposes of being, but instead was logical certainty, representational measure (accurate like a camera), and technological experimentation. Often these recommendations were accompanied by a new kind of theology, beginning with nominalism. This theology said in effect that God has laid down the world with an order that is radically contingent, according to decrees of his free will. This order does not necessarily reflect the divine ideas, and it embodies no relative necessities of essences. For this reason our mind’s do not operate by gathering the ways in which the world symbolizes and participates in God, nor by abstracting out an unfolding pure essence. Instead we are to observe God’s gift of creation in a detached manner, now more like investigations of this planet from another galaxy. We respond to the divine freedom with free usage of the world for pragmatic ends that we invent and contract with others to observe, a movement toward political liberalism.

What was seen as especially mysterious and unnecessarily obscure in the older view was the idea of universal ends. Surely besides trees one does not need to suppose that there is a real eidos of tree, even if it exists only qua universal in our mind. Isn’t our idea of a tree, after all, just a generalization of a tree that serves as a sign? This getting-rid-of universal essences is known as nominalism or termism. Universals are simply conventional names or terms, not naturally subsisting realities. However, we have already seen that the eidei were seen as the guarantors of truth, and the operators of the law of non-contradiction. How can one now have truth w/o them?

First of all, the entire Platonic-Aristotelian tradition that had always hesitated between, trying to include both stable substances residing in a stable eidos on one hand, or in an individual substance on the other, be this material or angelic, the nominalists now chose exclusively the latter fork, arguing that the sameness of an individual tree, belonging to a particular species, was much more secure than some vague essence of treeness. In the second place, they tended to declare (esp. Ockham) that actually universal essences as much as flux violate the principle of non-contradiction. For traditional realists, the tree as individual tree always shows something universal, not in any one aspect, but en toto, and not in terms of a parceled out share, because there is no self-standing essences out there in the world apart from individual trees. Concomitantly, the universal form tree in mind as universal also is the fulfilled comprehended individual tree or set of trees. Either way, the universal and its opposite individual seem to coincide. Nominalism was a strategy for a purged Aristotelianism, fully following through as it supposed from the law of non-contradiction.

Ockham and others also suggested that notions of participation and analogy of attribution also violated the law of non-contradiction. Something cannot both be like and unlike some higher thing, not simply in some isolatable aspect, for then one could parcel out analogy between univocity and equivocity, but truly as its whole self.
Something similar again applied to the nominalists with ideas of real relation. Something cannot be intrinsically and not just externally and accidentally related to something else without it seeming that it must be itself as not itself. One can notice here how close real relations and a notion of universals are to each other. A real relation implies something in common between two things, rendering them what they are. Inversely, if trees embody a universal form of treeness, even though this form does not stand like a totem in the middle of the forest, like a mutant golden fir, then it means that something like the hidden relational community between all the trees. Likewise, the really universal tree in the mind only exists as the really relational intention of all particular trees.

Universals, analogical participation, and real relations—these were the three essential components of the realist idea that the world holds together as a kind of archain harmony ordained by God. In God, the source of this harmony, order was at once actuality and knowledge. Creation echoes this by a reciprocal interplay between being and knowing, and it was that that literally was thought to sustain the world in being. Aquinas is quite clear that world couldn’t exist without spirits, without the government exercised by angelic and human spirits. Being urged towards knowing, knowing could be distilled from being, but knowing always must return to the surface of harmony and potential for knowing that finite being contains, and that could be encompassed only by God’s infinitude. Such an outlook in effect claims that, as Balthazar put it, that only the awareness that we participate in the divine understanding, which always understands more of the creation than we do, ensures that we do not think of our thoughts of things as merely solipsistic elaborations of our own being, without any real intentional reference.

As we have seen, this theme of cosmic harmony was once viewed as guaranteeing the operation of law of non-contradiction, and so the presence of identity, and therefore the possibility of truth. Now the nominalist in effect declared that this was, after all, a half-pagan myth of ungraspable and mysterious fluctions. Far from guaranteeing truth, it violated the law of non-contradiction itself. They therefore proclaimed the disenchantment in the name of logic, evidence, experiment, human political freedom and divine freedom and priority of divine will, which was self-giving.

If two accounts of truth were at stake here, so also were two accounts of Christianity. For the older, realistic account, in actuality there is no bare being. Actual being is accompanied always by value, shows itself always as meaningful truth, just as it always communicates itself as goodness. As Balthazar also says in his Theologique vol. 1, for Aquinas and others, truth was more than mere representation of being, because it was also being manifesting itself as beauty; likewise the good was more than mere selfish desire, because it was an aiming at the beautiful that is the objectively lovable itself. Balthazar thus rightly draws the crucial yet latent character of the older vision. Beauty as taking care of herself was little mentioned simply because beauty was so fundamentally presupposed, the link between being, truth, and goodness, a link that Aquinas describes this as convenientia. In the realist vision, being as value was free gift, but also a gift of a reciprocal exchange of gifts between being and knowing, knowing and willing. Truth was what being and knowing offered each other and what knowing and willing (desiring and knowing) offered each other.

In the new nominalist account, by contrast, the only being that can truly be known is represented being, which is the bare facts of individual possession of a being as self-identical. One is one, and all alone, and ever more shall be so. Finite things can now be considered in logical abstraction from their createdness, simply as existing. Already beging with Scotus and extended by Ockham, this bare minimal logical conception of being nevertheless informs a new minimalist ontology. Each thing existing fully possesses its own being. If it did not, if it borrowed its existence from a supreme esse whom it resembled, as it was for Aquinas, then as being it would also apparently not be. And as being finite, its actual existence that it possesses would also be infinite. Already Scotus declared that the analogy of attribution and participation seemed to violated non-contradiction. The result was that for Scotus, while God as infinite creates finite beings in respect to their particularity and caused occurrence, he did not as for Aquinas create general abstracted being in the mode of finite ens commune as such. Being here was no longer intrinsically and ineluctably a gift, and being as finite being no longer reflected the divine infinite harmony, which ensured that it was always an exchange of reciprocity.

However, this did not mean that gift was abandoned. Modern Franciscan theologians characteristically argued that this allowed the gift to be de-ontologized. Since being is not the gift, finite being is pure free gift, beyond any supposed existential necessities. Reciprocity is lost, but this is not to be regretted. Instead the divine gift to us is purely gratuitous and does not return to God by way of a created reflection of the divine order. Likewise, since the created return is in no way naturally elicited, humans make an entirely free response from within a freedom more ontologically outside divine determination than it was for Aquinas.
Meanwhile within the created order, reciprocity and teleology is replaced by formal contract and a moral law valuing primarily free personhood—the road to John Locke (and indeed to George Bush) is opened up. The debates about truth which concern the question whether identity resides in the individual only or also in the essence, is also a debate about the gift. Does the gift arise as free and unilateral beyond being, or does being without the gift lose the reciprocal dimension of the gift, the dimension of gift exchange with complements free unitlaterality? Just as essence for Aristotle and Aquinas compliments the self-standing individual (essences having to do with exchange and relation) the debates about truth then are simultaneously debates about the nature of goodness and the nature of charity (a debate that the new pope touches on in his first encyclical). Those who find essences, analogy, and real relations contradictory will most likely find the idea of a free gift that expects or hopes for a return to be also contradictory, as likewise violating the law of non-contradiction.

Names against nominalism

So which side is right? Perhaps this is the most fundamental debate within western culture. We can call the Scotist and Nominalist way that of modern Christianity, and say that it’s in large part responsible for modernity as such. However, modern Christianity and modernity have increasingly run into conceptual problems. These are primarily problems within nominalism itself. All its key strategies eventually turn south. This may be summarized in three difference instances.

First of all, the idea that a universal is a sign. As John Andileus (sp?) has shown, building on the labors of Jacques Maritain, the idea in Thomists in the Baroque era, especially those in the school of Quenburrow (?) in Portugal and supremely in the Portugese theologian John Quanzo (or John of St. Thomas) produced an effective counter-repasse (?). Not only is the universal a sign, but a thought as such is in its character and as a word, following Thomas, is a kind of sign. A first encounter with one’s first tree would already think it under the sign tree without explicit reference to other trees. One would only see it as an individual tree through the inchoate recognition that there might be other trees of different shapes and sizes that were still trees. Because we only grasp the individual tree by a sign of tree in general, the relation of tree to sign of tree must be a real relation and not simply a kind of relation that we fantasize for ourselves in our mind. We cannot think of a tree without its sign and then merely bring the two together as we please. No, since the tree is only invoked through the sign at all, the sign must be really and not accidentally related to the tree. This circumstance does not then apply only to our concept of the tree, but also to our percept and to our imaginary image of the tree. Hence, whereas the nominalists said that the concept is only a sign, the Quoinerists (?Baroque Portuguese Thomists?) said that even a percept and mental image is a sign. It followed then that if even the rawest material of all thinking still involves this sign relation, then it can never be a question of only a sign nor a merely stipulated relation. If a percept or an image is itself a sign, even if only of one item, it is already a faint adumbration of the concept. Consequently, a concept is a more abstract and reflexive sign, is also indispensable for a more fully developed knowledge even of individuals, and is therefore never a mere sign only.

Nominalism’s very names therefore are names on its tombstone. We cannot therefore attain proper description before attaching names of a general type. It’s not true that we begin with individuals and then move to generalization.

Second instance, the elusive individual. Let us look at problems which emerge with the idea of individual substance. Ockham thought that he had reduced the list of categories to substance and quality. However, if there exist only individuals, the notion of qualities attaching to individuals, and the often accompanying idea that we only perceive individual in terms of those qualities (rather than seeing things through accidents, as per Aquinas), seems problematic. Just what is this mysterious attachment? It seems just as occultly synthetic as essence, real relations, and analogy. Qualities ought simply to be the individual substances or else other individual substances accidentally attaching to it (i.e. the substance?) like limpets to a rock.

In consequence, in the early 20th century, Frege and Russel attempted to carry through the nominalist program still further to iron-out this inconsistency by reducing every is of predication to the is of pure identity. ‘X is Y’ as in ‘this apple is red’ is comprehensible as ‘x equals y’ where ‘equals’ means identity. There must be no obscure or impenetrable attachments. However, as the American Catholic philosopher Autis-Hill (?) has shown, this radical program is unsustainable. One cannot reduce all qualitative aspects under which individual things appear to us simply to the things themselves in their bare extensional existence. We can’t say we just have a totally individual red apple and not an apple that is showing itself partly through redness. For the apple tree comes to assign (?) creaking, resisting, growing, concealing, and so on. If we try to identity all these things we would produce nonsense. Why? The referent, the tree, is only available to us through a multiple senses or aspects in which attending to we also intend. The collapse of the attempt to reduce quality to equality within individual substance entails also the problematization of the very nominalist notion of the individual substance as such. Just as that seeming ally of nominalism, the sign, leads us back to universal and real relations, so also, as phenomenology realizes, its other seeming ally, the individual substance, proves intrinsically to be multiple and self-concealing, like the back of a tree that always remains no matter how many times we run around it. Instead of it being the case that there are only atomic things, it turns out that there are instead multiple qualities since the tree has no monopoly on signs. Just how it is that we perceive through all this fury but one tree is the mysterious thing. For Aquinas, we perceive an essence through accidents. The mind constructs a kind of analogous holding-together that enables it to intentionally reach the real tree. Once nominalism self-deconstructs, it seems that the analogy lies not only between things, but somehow within things as before them, allowing them to be. Even individual things are a bundle of analogical things. Another way of putting this: there can be no access to ontology without a complex phenomenological detour. The problem of aspects seems to ruin individual substance and to disclose the analogical infinity of the particular thing in a way that older realism had not seen.

The collapse of nominalism, therefore, does not simply take us back to the older realism without any changes. It’s actually the same with signs. Quanzo (?) already saw that if thoughts are signs, then the signs of culture are lived thoughts and real relations. Beyond Aquinas, as Maritain already suggested, Quanzo started seeing human historical culture as essential to the unfolding of our thought and participation in the divine logos. Philipp Rosemann has powerfully argued that there is much more historicism in Aquinas than we usually think. Dealy (?) plausibly argues that C S Pierce linked signs and real universals in a fashion like Quanzo, and that his claim to kinship with Scotus rather than Aquinas was mistaken. Pierce added to the counter-nominalist reaction the point that if a universal as real is still a sign, then it is only partial, and so aspectual in relation to the thing, and has to be interpreted by a formally third position which abducts to an absent indicated reality. Although Aquinas also knew that one can never survey the relation between thought and thing, since we only ever know things through thoughts, Pierce adds again a more temporal dimension. Not only does the eidos arrive in the mind like an event, it must always be interpreted through a hermeneutical process that runs to infinity. What guides this interpretation? It can only be for Pierce the will toward more realizations of the good in the world which yet assumes that this unfolds further a real ontological bond between the sign universal and the absent original which it conveys to us. In a comparable fashion, Balthazar rightly suggested that already for Aquinas truth was not just Greek aletheia, a disclosedness of being, but also Hebrew annet, truth as bond or fidelity or troth—one gets to truth by plighting one’s troth to being. But the semiotic perspective accentuates this plighting as a renewal through variation of ontological vows through the course of historical time. Truth, as event echoes onwards and never quite in time, fully occurs.

So signs and aspects have started to undo nominalism and to insinuate a reborn and extended realism, a kind of Thomistic telescope, the same organon, only drawn out allowing us to see further and more clearly.

Suggesting a third new lens for the telescope and this has to do with the question of numbers and sense. As Claire Autis Hill reminds us, Frege saw a way out of his reduction of predication to equality via Cantor’s (?) mathematical set theory. Thing and quality could be identified insofar as a qualified thing is one example of a single set of kinds of things. The red apple is identical with the apple if it falls within the set of all apples. One could say that in order to handle qualities, nominalism must turn to sets rather than essences. More suspiciously, sets are the minimum obeisance nominalism is forced to render to essence. Already, it had emerged with Cantor that sets are afflicted with paradoxes, rather like the third man argument that is supposed to afflict Plato’s forms (which it doesn’t). The most famous example of this paradox, though by no means the only one, is Bertrand Russel’s paradox: the set of all apples is clearly not itself an apple, otherwise it could not claim to contain all apples (in a way that is less clear for the Platonic form of apple). The set of all sets not containing themselves can’t be an example of what it contains, otherwise it cannot be exhaustive and fulfill the very condition of being a set. On the other hand, if it is not contained by what it contains, it is itself an example of a set not containing itself as a member. An ineluctable contradictory conclusion ensues: this set includes itself as an example of itself precisely because it does not do so. These paradoxes only intrude when one invokes the infinite—all sets, etc. Graham Priest argues that diagonalization, the paradox whereby that which is inside a set exceeds it (diagonalizes out of it) has always lurked whenever it is seen that the finite can be infinitesimally fractionalized (?)–whenever one thinks of a finite thing as actually containing infinite divisions within itself. Hence the infinite presumed set of divisions inside a grain of sand exceeds the grain. More subtly, inside the tree is an organic series with infinite potential that could exceed the whole tree like a cancer. Likewise, we cannot say which hybrid of the infinite subset of types of apples will ultimately mutate into another kind of fruit altogether. Much more profoundly, for Aquinas, the accident of participated infinite esse exceeds the finite essence of the creature, as shown by Marion. Being diagonalizes out of createdness.

Now it seems that realism has failed to secure identity, and therefore truth, but nominalism has failed just as dismally. Neither essences nor supposed atomic individuals submit to the law of non-contradiction after all. The world is radically paradoxcial. Interestingly, analytic philosophy has shown this every bit as much as Derrida. Must we be skeptics? If so, how is that there appears to be a relative stability and identity amongst things? As Plato indicated in Theatetus, the idea that there is only flux and appearance must itself appear in the flux, and therefore seems to identify a contradictory stable flux and true appearing of this unstable flux to knowledge. Today, with supposed redundancy theories of truth, one can’t really cross out truth or deny the interval between being and truth which being opens up, in favor of a reduction of knowledge to one more ontic event. Indeed, we are only in contact with being because of mediation. We know something is there only to the measure that it resists our knowledge, and we also know that there is more to be known, like the back of the tree. We can only speak of being because it gives itself as true and yet in this showing also presents a certain palpable reserve. Although being and truth are totally joined together, being always opens up a distinction between the two. Thereby giving truth, being also gives a gap between truth and being that is the never closed future horizon for understanding.

Either the relatively stable identities of eidei are true realities, or else the one paradoxicaly stable form of truth is the form of truth of formless flux, which finally lacks identity, because it shows and reserves an ironic lack of reserve, the concealed as unconcealed nullity. In neither instance can we appeal to the absolute sway of the law of non-contradiction.

Identity beyond non-contradiction

It seems then that the Thomistic telescope must incorporate the insights of Nicholas Cusa following those of Meister Eickhart. Cusa sought to salvage the Proclean/Dionysian tradition that had been associated with Dominican order (to which Aquinas belonged) by admitting that universals, real relations, and participation violated the law of non-contradiction. He also tended to see universals as signs opening endless perspects or aspects in a rather Renaissance kind of way. Likewise, finite truth was for him also a continuous task—a human-artisanal construction, since he also effectively stole from the nominalists the theme of finite human sub-creation. For Ockham finite spirits like God cannot in principle cause finite being to be, since being is a bare univocal existential that can be posited outside divine creation. But in Cusa’s writings, for humans to create is to receive something and surprise themselves, since humans only share to a limited degree in the divine capacity to absolutely originate. So the theme of co-creativity is restored to a participatory context, and part of that restoration involves the notion that the maker is surprised by what he makes without commanding it in advance. This finally can only be understood as a participation in the paternal divine utterance of the eternal logos, since the father is never without the logos and is in a sense surprised by the son and understands by this surprise.

And while for Cusa we can only create triangles or spoons, we only create these as essences, but must thereafter observe the infinite unfolding constraints and possibilities of triangles and spoons which as our own fabricated offspring endlessly take us by surprise and cannot be lawlessly manipulated at our pleasure. Just as makers of computers couldn’t anticipate what they would do to us. Just as when we divide or modify things in nature we can’t really change essences. Can change trees but can’t get rid of the idea of tree that has appeared to us through an integrity only through real trees growing. The point that even artificial things exhibit essence was elaborated in the seventeenth-century by Rob Cudriff, who noticed that even an invented thing like a clock or watch contains certain regular relational schesis (?) and has a certain regular nature because it is a contrivance of mind, even if that mind cannot fathom all the implications of its regularity.

This is another refutation of nominalism—the idea that there can be a pure construction entirely within our control made out of entirely disparate brute elements. No, the most basic elements contain the direst mysteries and the most inescapable ambuscades (?). In sign and aspect, number and poeisis, Cusa like Pascal later on, recognized the impinging of the infinite that is the heart of the finite. Truth for him, as for the tradition, is the identical, the known aleid (?). Only the finite identical is subject to non-contradiction, since as bounded it cannot violate its own bounds. In the infinite, Cusa argues, this does not apply. Here the minimum is also the maximum. Here, since the infinite God is all things, including all opposites, and yet he is simple as well as infinite, he must be at the same moment and in the same respects be these opposites otherwise his simplicity would be violated. However, since the finite is itself invaded and upheld by the presence of the infinite, contradiction collapses identity here also. The point is the circumference of the circle and its center. The tendency towards the infinitely small is also the tendency towards the infinitely great, and so forth.

As for the Catholic-Platonic-Aristotelian tradition in general, so for Cusa finitude is in flux and can only borrow relative stabilities of essence and individual substance from the infinite divine ideas uttered in the logos. However, he adds to this that participation in perfect identity is also participation in perfect non-identity. So the ultimate ontological scenario can always be envisaged this other-way-around. Only when apparent finite identities collapse in the unbounded is there a stable reality, paradoxically. And then these two metaphysical schemas can be combined. Only when the one is itself other to the one and so is many, is it also the one returning to itself as origin. Trinitarian theology allows Cusa to put this in more dynamic terms. The actively possible one is the generation of the actual many. The Holy Spirit displays this reciprocal bond where absolute becoming and absolute unchanging being are further coinciding opposites.

On this understanding, therefore, finitude reveals itself as a contradictory mystery. Only two rival truths are now possible, even if they could appear alarmingly akin to each other. There is first of all the truth of non-truth of nihilism that will require a mode of faith in nothingness if it is to evade the recursivity of the truth of non-truth. Secondly, as an alternative there is the at-once conjectured and experienced truth of transcendent metaphysics or theology. This alone now offers us the truth of truth, of a fully ontological truth. (This is the heart of radical orthodoxy—only theology saves us from skepticism without surrendering to foundationalist or humanistic finalities.) For the latter position, the theological one, every creature exists by diagonalizing out of its finitude through participation in being. Humanity is the site of conscious awareness of this exit. The human being can be the living, self-aware diagonal, or else can perversely choose to suppress this contradictory reality. Humanity is the infinite plus one, beyond yet not beyond even the infinite extensions of the universe.

Truth, then, as was said at the outset, requires identity, but this, as it turns out, can only be found in incomprehensible infinite non-identity in which the finite world incomprehensibly participates. This infinite non-identity is itself the Trinitarian play between the infinite charos (?) of the one and the equally infinite apeiron of the complicated and so simple and ordered many expressed in the logos. This play spins off from both as a rising unity, without surpassing them, in the form of the Holy Spirit which is at once the bond of desire and the freedom of charity. Truth in the creation reflects this infinite exchange and is only ever present insofar as we catch a glimpse of that reflection. Truth in creation is to a degree present in the constitutive relational interplay between individuals and universals and between being as substantial and being as intellectual. This interplay runs also, as we can now see thanks to the Thomistic telescope, along the temporal axis between nature and culture and between essence and event, sign and number, substance and aspect.

Dr. Rosemann’s Response

It is clear from Professor Milbank’s talk why Radical Orthodoxy either is or quickly is becoming one of the most powerful and influential movements in contemporary Christian thought. The reason is that RO is aiming at the whole. Reflect on the different names Milbank mentioned or alluded to: Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, Cantor, Pierce, etc. What these names stand for are the different fields or branches of knowledge that RO touches on in its theses. RO refers, of course, abundantly to theology while at the same time belonging to the philosophical tradition. This is very appealing because too often does philosophy and even theology content itself with minute investigations of very limited aspects of reality that at the end of the day remain insignificant and boring. What we want to know about, for example, is not the meaning of one particular term but the meaning of it all, ultimately, and RO is attempting to answer this question, not only the meaning of it all but also the meaning of infinity as it is reflected in all of metaphysics and even in contemporary mathematical theory, so Milbank is able to use mathematical metaphors (diagonalization, etc.).

Something else that is attractive about RO is that it is an un-modern movement, a collaborative project. Look at its publications. Milbank is not the only one belonging to this loose collaboration of people. There are colleagues interested in theology, economics, literature, etc. It has to be this way because and individual is not able to cover all these areas. Milbank proposes a large, comprehensive, sometimes daring synthesis that creates questions of detail that collaborates and co-workers have to work out. This is unmodern, involving not an isolated individual subject trying to grasp it all, but rather a project that is much more communitarian.

What is at stake in RO is, really, everything, such that even political questions are at stake because there are practical consequences. Most importantly what is at stake is the relationship between nature and super-nature, between creation and the creator. Milbank used different kinds of terminology to frame this problem, but one importance set is the notion of the gift which is very important in postmodern debates. What kind of gift is the creation? Creation has to be a gift because God was in no way obliged to give us creation. But what kind of gift is it? Is it the kind that is given anonymously? Gifts are not autonomous and so can’t be used autonomously. Or is creation like a gift in which the giver is identifiable. Does this gift have a reciprocity built in, one that upon closer scrutiny yields up the mystery of its donor?

The second kind of gift does have a problem. Did God give us creation in order to be recognized? Does God need to be recognized? If we read the creation in this way, is God perhaps intelligible? This is why in Christian intellectual history there have been movements that have rejected this reciprocal view of gift, such as the Nominalists. The Nominalists argue that God gave us this gift in such a way that it is not possible by reading the book metaphysically to return to God.
Milbank rejects this, but in his own version of the reciprocal gift he incorporates an important insight of Nominalism, namely that the distance between the one who gives you this gift and the one who receives this gift must be recognized, has to be built into the gift. Milbank does this by saying, Yes, there are signs of the giver in the gift but they are paradoxical, they present themselves in the form of mysteries, in form of the incomprehensible. Therefore, Milbank is trying to overcome the contradiction between these conceptions of the gift and incorporate perhaps an insight of nominalism into his overall synthesis.

One has to ask the question. Rosemann is interested in Nominalism in a way that will recognize its historical truth. Nominalism arose in the fourteenth-century not because some thinkers were intent on destroying the truth. There had to be a motive. Why were thinkers rejecting the Thomistic or Christian-Aristotelian synthesis of the thirteenth-century? Because they thought it led to serious theological problems. Aristotelianism at the end of the thirteenth-century met with a series of condemnations, and those condemnations forced thinkers to reevaluate the intellectual situation, and it was on this basis that nominalism arose with its rigid distinction between God’s absolute power, which we don’t know, and God’s ordained power or God as he creates the world around us in such a way that it is not possible to make inferences from this creation back to God. We need to acknowledge the historical truth of nominalism, which Milbank has done in his paper.
One aspect that is the most important in Nominalism. The bridge between the created order and God—how is the gap bridged? What is the essence of the relationship between the created and the creator? Is it a metaphysical relationship, such that in order to discover God I analyze the structures of creation and make philosophical inferences that show that ultimately the created must have an origin that is God? This is a metaphysical relationship. Nominalism says you can’t do this because God’s gift is absolutely gratuitous and such inferences are impossible.

What then is the way back from creation to creator? The answer is that it is personal. God must reveal himself as person, and the appropriate response on our part is not to understand God as being, an abstract metaphysical entity. Heidegger says that if God is being, then you can’t pray or dance to him. Is it not important, then, to acknowledge this insight of Nominalism? The ultimate response of creation to the creator has to be a personal one, and the initiative in which God invites creation to respond to him has to be a personal initiative and cannot be captured in metaphysical categories.

Milbank’s response to Rosemann

Milbank agrees with what Rosemann is saying in regard to Nominalism, but it is also crucial to ask why it happened, and Milbank attempted to develop that argument in his paper and to suggest that some of the radicalism in Eckhart and Cusa, the extreme playing in paradoxes in the relationship of God to the world, is very much the result of trying to hold on to the tradition in the face of the nominalist critique, which in a way is saying that Aquinas in part is trying to offer us a rationalist theology, but if we really go down that rationalist route, some of the conceptuality it uses doesn’t apparently makes sense, and so it is at this point that you are driven into something more paradoxical, more mystical, without losing the technically, but also you are driven into something more humanistic. You are driven to say things like, reading the world as a gift as a sort of mystery, is something you have to explore more openly in sort of poetic discourses. It is not an accident then that later Christian writers who are true to the mainline of the tradition, like Hamann or Coleridge, are much more literary in character, right up to Claudel (?) and Pegis (?). Rosemann is right in that Milbank is trying to synthesize the idea that the gift is purely gratuitous and one-way with the idea that it is also in a way reciprocal. The key to this is that if you have a really radical gift, like creation which posits something, then there is a sense in which it has to give a return or the possibility of a return. A really radical gift just can’t exist except as gift, i.e. as a kind of acknowledgement of itself as a gift. So this does try to incorporate the nominalist insight, if one is thinking of this as having to do with the absolute power and mystery of God [as per Nominalism]. Milbank’s concern, however, is that the nominalist insight doesn’t always do that, but sometimes thinks of God too much in terms of efficient causality instead of in terms of gift, whose model would then be borrowed from the terms of this world. So, for example, in Ockham, his so-called semi-Pelagianism indicates a way in which he is incapable of realizing that when you are comparing divine with human input, it is not a zero-sum game, but is rather in other terms (i.e. gift). Milbank wonders whether the specter of the nominalists is a matter of not having a metaphysics at all [as per Rosemann’s characterization of what Nominalism is saying]. Sometimes it seems like they have a very thin kind of metaphysics. It is very important that if you are thinking of the gift as enigmatic and not obviously there, especially because we are fallen creatures and in the face of evil, that it is only finally deciphered in personal existence. If you [Rosemann?] are saying we need to connect analogy more powerfully with Christology, Milbank agrees. But then Aquinas is a much more christologically-centered writer than he has been taken as. A later writer like Bayrool (?) whose metaphysics is focused on Christ and spirituality and participation in Christ, Milbank is very sympathetic to that and doesn’t want to see the personal and metaphysical as necessarily opposites. The way in which Aquinas can think of God as “to be” rather than simply as the “one,” is in part because he thinks of God as personal and therefore as actual.

I wanted to share a few thoughts from Reardon’s reflections on Psalm 103. Reardon points out that this psalm illustrates what St. John Cassian called the “third sense” of Scripture—a kind of “interiorization of sacred history” in which we engage when we pray. According to Cassian, the “second sense” of Scripture is “its relationship to Christ, in whom the Bible is ‘fulfilled.’ He is the exegetical key. He is the Lamb who opens up the seven seals of its mysteries (Rev 5). Any reading of Holy Scripture, then, that attempts to bypass its fulfillment in Christ will attain to the letter that kills, not the Spirit that gives life” (p. 203).

Because of our union with Christ, we Christians read the Bible as our own book, our history. “The lengthy story of God’s dealings with His people is the history of our own souls” (p. 203). Directing us to a quote by St. Jerome who said, “When you pray, you speak to the Bridegroom; when you read the Bible, He speaks to you,” Reardon then adds that “the reading of Holy Scripture is thus a privileged locus of the Christian’s dialogue with the Lord. For the soul in Christ, the Bible is preeminently the book of the heart, where we study our own history and come to know our own identities in Christ. This ‘third sense’ of Scripture corresponds to what Bernard of Clairvaux meant when he called the Bible ‘the book of experience.’ It means that we do not correctly interpret the Bible except in permitting the Bible to interpret us” (p. 203).

Turning to Psalm 103, we see the Psalmist attempting to do just that—to take into his heart the merciful acts of God in history. “Bless the Lord, O my Soul, and forget not all his benefits” (vs. 2) … “He made known his ways to Moses his acts to the people of Israel” (vs. 7) … “He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us. As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him” (vs. 10-13). So with the psalmist we are invited to remember God’s mercy—his covenant with us—to “interiorize” the command, “Forget not all His benefits, He forgives all your iniquities” (p. 204).

Father, help me with the psalmist to “interiorize” and contemplate your great mercy toward me, your forgiveness of my sins and the depth of your love shown to me in the giving of your Son. For your mercy indeed is not a “hazy benevolence. It has a definite history that climaxes in specific acts of salvation” … “By this we know love, because He laid down His life for us” (1 John 3:16) [p. 204].

The following is a somewhat “sketchy” and selective recap of John Milbank’s informal talk (given to UD philosophy students prior to his formal lecture on another topic). [Some of the details may be fuzzy, particularly my account of his Aquinas lecture—by that time in the evening my brain was on overload. Also, given my time limitations this weekend, I’ll have to post the Aquinas lecture notes early next week].

During the informal talk, Prof. Milbank shared a bit of his background, viz., that his formal training encompasses theology, philosophy and history. His dissertation was on Giambattista Vico whom Louis Dupré describes as an anti-Enlightenment figure. According to Dupré, just as Descartes presents the human person as the constitutor of reality, Vico presents the human person as the constitutor of human history. In this sense, Vico remains within the Cartesian tradition, yet he is also in radical discontinuity with the modern understanding of history as “brute facts” that must be objectively uncovered. Milbank also noted that Hans Urs von Balthasar has been quite influential in his own thought. (Joel Garver has written some helpful articles on von Balthasar: An Overview of Balthasar’s Project; Balthasar’s Formative Influences).

Given his historical training, Milbank stessed that reason and faith are not outside of history—history is the mediating factor, and we always reason in a historical context. Philosophy, particularly Christian philosophy, should take on and embrace the historical. So-called “pure” philosophy is a post-Christian invention. For the Christian, there is no strict separation between the natural and the supernatural.

Citing examples from ancient Greek philosophy, Milbank said that philosophy in antiquity was a way of life and including things like oracles and gods. Moving to Augustine, we don’t see anything like a sharp separation between faith and reason, rather the two are intimately intertwined. Milbank’s point seemed to be that making hard and fast distinctions between philosophy and theology, faith and reason etc. are simply not helpful—why do it? He also exhorted Christian philosophers to read the Scriptures and unashamdely draw from them. (Words that were for me as sweet as honey!) Here one might appeal to St. Augustine’s writings, which are saturated with Scripture.

Milbank then posed the question, “What is reason?” In the Middle Ages, reason was intimately connected with divine inspiration, now reason is some kind of supposed “objective” thing. Heidegger in fact saw the danger in this. Reason, explained Milbank, is not un-inspired and should not be viewed in contrast with faith. Then Milbank asked, “What is divine revelation?” Divine revelation offers a restoration to the possibility that humans can grow in God-likeness. Part of revelation’s purpose is to heal reason. The greatest revelation is of course found in the Incarnation. At the core of revelational reality is that God became a human being. So revelation is about a divine descent into flesh! Here in regard to special revelation, we are not talking about a “thin” degree of mediation, but a more intense degree of mediation. If we hold fast to history and event, we won’t run into the confusion caused by Enlightenment dualisms. We as Christians should think in Christological terms (in Westminster language—our hermeneutic, not just for Scripture, but for life in toto [which includes philosophy] should be Christotelic). If we keep in mind that nothing is owing to us and that everything that we have is a gift–we will be more quick to embrace that idea that reason is a gift of God as well. The fact that we are oriented to God is a graced thing. According to Milbank, for Aquinas, revelation is understood as an illumination of the mind (not something extrinsic)—we are not speaking in terms of propositions to which we assent.

Discussing theology and philosophy, Milbank said theology doesn’t really mean much if it doesn’t make a difference in relation to our philosophy. Theology must have something to say about nature. Rhetorically, Milbank asked, “How far, e.g., is Newtonian physics the outcome of a certain set of theological assumptions?” (Great question!—Sounds very Van Tillian to me.)

Repeatedly, Milbank stressed that an “ahistorical” reason doesn’t exist and that revelation is grounded in history. In closing, Milbank alluded to the possibility of Christianizing some of the things that Hegel was doing—and then asked, “Why adopt a view that would not take into account the advances of historical processes now available to us?”

For those of you who are able to attend, don’t forget that tonight is the 2006 Aquinas Lecture, “Aquinas and Truth” by John Milbank,University of Nottingham. (See below for additional information).

N.B. I’m sure that the response by our own, Dr. Philipp W. Rosemann, will be excellent as well.
__________________________________________

John Milbank, University of Nottingham
Research Professor of Religion, Politics & Ethics

Response by Philipp W. Rosemann, University of Dallas

Friday, January 27, 2006
7:30 p.m. Lynch Auditorium
Reception to follow
Gorman Faculty Lounge

Professor John Milbank is one of the founders of Radical Orthodoxy, an influential intellectual movement that seeks to overcome the problems of modern secularism through a reconfiguration of theological truth, especially as articulated in patristic and medieval thought. Challenging the oppositions between theology and philosophy, Protestantism and Catholicism, conservatism and liberalism, Radical Orthodoxy’s agenda has drawn enthusiastic support as well as strong critique. This year’s Aquinas Lecture will provide an opportunity to meet John Milbank and learn more about his vision for contemporary Christian thought. John Milbank holds an appointment as Professor in Religion, Politics, and Ethics at the University of Nottingham, and is director of the University’s Centre of Philosophy and Theology. He is the author of numerous books, including Theology and Social Theory, The Word Made Strange, Truth in Aquinas, The Suspended Middle, and others.

For more information, please phone the philosophy office at 972.721.5161.

Toward the end of chapter 1, M & P discuss Aquinas’ view regarding God’s knowledge of singulars. (I’m sure that I’m not grasping everything being said here, but I found this section fascinating and wanted to make a few comments and to post of few passages for discussion). Contra Avicenna who claimed that God knows “every singular, but universally,” [De Veritate, Q. 2 a. 5 resp.] Aquinas argues that knowledge of universal causes cannot produce knowledge of singulars. Instead “Aquinas suggests that God is much more of a country bumpkin rusticus [alluding to the De Veritate passage where Aquinas speaks of the possibility of a country bumpkin having knowledge of e.g., a singular eclipse] capable of a brutal direct unreflective intuition of cloddish earth, bleared and smeared with toil. For God’s mind, although immaterial is (in a mysterious way) commensurate with matter, since God creates matter. Because he can make matter, so also he can know it. This does not mean that He receives matter into Himself; He does not receive forms or species either. Rather, He knows by the one species which is His essence, and knows things outside Himself entirely by His productive capacity—form and matter alike—for both are fundamentally existence. At this point, one might note how very far Aquinas has moved from Aristotle” (p. 14, Truth in Aquinas). Of course we can’t know singulars in the way that God knows singulars, yet a “token bumpkinhood” is still obtainable. Then M&P go on to explain Aquinas’ account of how we participate to a certain degree in the divine knowledge of singulars. But first the authors take us through two phases of Aquinas’ take on understanding.
First, we have the “Aristotelian” phase in which the form is abstracted from the hylomorphic compound and eventually the intelligible species is received in the passive intellect (the species having been further abstracted after passing through the senses and “landing” in the imagination) and then expressed by the intellectus agens. The product of this expression is, following Augustine, the verbum, the inner word (p. 14). Next, in the “Augustinian” phase, Aquinas (for theological reasons) moves beyond Aristotle and suggests that “a concept does not just leave matter behind” (p. 15). For Aquinas, matter is created by God and as such comes from the divine mind. Consequently, if our mind has to abstract from matter, this shows a “deficiency of understanding” (p. 15). The Augustinian element comes to help us in this lack—i.e., the idea of verbum being like a sign. As M & P explain, “A sign points away from itself by means of its nonetheless essential mediation, back to what it represents. Thus, Aquinas, like Augustine, speaks of all knowledge as intentional, as returning to concrete things that we cannot fully grasp. This concurs with the fusion of intellect as intention with desire, which returns us to things, encouraging us to learn more of them, since to intend something is also to desire to know more of the truth of the thing—this goal being regarded as a good. Thus in Aquinas, there is much more sense than with Aristotle, of knowledge as a never completed project” (p. 15). But still, how does this Augustinian insight help to explicate how we have knowledge of singulars? Here M & P point to Aquinas’ theory of the imagination. Like Kant, Aquinas held that when we sense, we likewise imagine something—imagination being the “place” where sense and intellect mysteriously mingle (p. 15). The crucial difference between sense and imagination though is that we are normally unaware of the latter, yet aware of the former. Given that matter cannot enter the mind, the senses are barred from granting the mind a knowledge of singulars and instead must be mediated by the imagination (p. 15). “Thus the imaginary images of things here become an oblique mediating principle which provides a mysterious echo of material sensing in the intellect … and in this fashion we receive a notion of the singular and hence some awareness of the form/matter compound” (p. 15). So the account seems to involve a reflective returning to the imagination—i.e., we turn to the imagination, abstract the intelligible species and become aware of the singular image through a reflexive return to the imagination—“as when looking at something in a mirror one becomes aware of the mediating principle—the glass surface of the mirror itself” (p. 16). Although our mind can’t know singulars, Aquinas emphasizes that we know as mind/body composites—not just as minds. Given our composite status, we do in a sense know singulars. “Of course, as a proper bumpkin, God does not tend to be subject to such complex phases, for He does not know discursively or by syllogism or dialectic” (p. 16). [Я так люблю их метафоры! ]

The central theme of the first two chapters of Truth in Aquinas might be characterized as a desire to subvert the rigid distinctions between philosophy and theology and in particular to show that such rigid divisions do not apply to Aquinas. “Our claim in the present case is that Aquinas’ apparently clear avowal of an autonomous reason and philosophical theology cannot be rendered consistent with certain other crucial passages in his writings and therefore must be reinterpreted. In the light of other passages, we shall argue, the distinctions between faith and reason, on the one hand, and ‘philosophical’ theology (divina scientia) and sacra doctrina, on the other, can only be considered as relative contrasts within a more fundamental gnoseological situation embracing two poles, in either case” (p. 21). In short, M & P claim that there is an inextricable link between the natural and the supernatural.

In the first essay, they speak about epistemological issues, viz., Aquinas’ definition of truth. First, they point out that according to Aquinas, Truth is a transcendental—Truth is convertible with Being, and as such is part of a dynamic complex. “Truth, like Being, shatters the usual hierarchy of categorical priorities in such a way that the humblest creature equally shines with the one light of Truth as the most exalted, and is just as essentially disclosive of it” (p. 6). Next, they mention three “Augustinian determinations of Being”—Being, Life and Knowledge—which for Aquinas form a circle. “As a being, a thing remains in itself; as living, it opens itself through the operations of life towards others; and as known or knowing it returns from others to itself” (p. 7). Then the transcendental, Beauty, enters the picture. For Aquinas, Beauty is defined in terms of proportion and fittingness. So with this account, we have a notion of truth that has acquired an aesthetic (Gr. aisthetikos meaning “perception”) dimension. Access to truth is only accessible in relation to aesthetics and is thus available through the senses. “Every judgment of truth for Aquinas is an aesthetic judgment” (p. 8).

Then M & P discuss the idea of truth as adequatio between res and intellectus. The first adequatio is that the things correspond to some extent to the ideal in the divine mind because God creates them. So there is correspondence of creation with the reality of the divine mind. Secondly, there is the correspondence between the things and our mind. Employing the example of what we know in knowing the treeness of a tree, M & P write, Since the tree only transmits treeness—indeed, only exists at all—as imitating the divine, what we receive in truth is a participation in the divine. To put this another way, in knowing a tree, we are catching it on its way back to God” (p 12; emphasis mine). In other words, we understand the tree in its full existence which includes its telos. Moreover, the tree does what it is designed to do in order to participate in God on its own level of being—i.e., to live up to its own image in the divine mind. The activity is directed at a telos, and this is the Creator’s plan for the tree. Consequently, in order to properly grasp the tree, we must grasp it in its participation in God. So an autonomous understanding of the tree apart from God is not knowledge (in the fullest sense). [Again, this strikes me as having a good deal of continuity with thinkers in the Reformed tradition like Dooyeweerd and Van Til. I am sure that there are differences as well, but I wonder if this is not an area for fruitful, future study.]

All for now, hopefully I can post more on chapter two next week…With school and teaching kicking in, I’m sure that my posting frequency will soon diminish, however, I’m going to enjoy it while I can!

I’ve been tagged…by Mike Vendsel!

Four Jobs I Have Had:

1. Adjunct philosophy instructor
2. Language tutor (Russian, beginning Latin, Koine Greek)
3. Guitar teacher at a private music school
4. Professional jazz guitarist (that translates—playing in clubs, restaurants, and even grocery stores—the grocery store gig [Central Market] was incredibly odd, aesthetically unpleasant, completely impersonal, but…it paid well and being an ‘eternal’ student and poor, I took it)
Honorable mention: Selling odds and ends on Ebay—it takes a bit of everything to get through grad school these days

Four Movies I Could Watch Over and Over Again:

1. Shadowlands
(One of my favorite scenes is when C.S. Lewis invites Joy to the faculty dinner/drink party and he introduces her to Christopher [the atheist guy-- an interesting and kind man except for in the scene described here]. Christopher says something like, “I assume you are from America [and hints to the boldness of American women or something like that].” Joy, say, “yes, I am.” Then Christopher makes a comment about Jack’s (C.S. Lewis’) childrens’ books and how Jack makes him suffer by reading passages aloud to him. Joy, picking up on Christopher’s sarcasm says, “I find them rather magical.” Christopher, surprised says, “Jack, I think you’ve found your soul-mate.” Jack says, “Well, Christopher, I thought you didn’t believe in the soul.” Christopher in his snooty way says (something like), “the soul, I correlate to the feminine and somewhat irrational, while the logical relates to the masculine.” Joy without missing a beat retorts (something like), “Since you mentioned the rather outspokenness of American women, I was just wondering, Christopher, are you rude or just stupid.” A great scene!)
2. Les Choristes
3. Les Miserables
4. Lord of the Rings Trilogy
Honorable mention: Luther with Joseph Fiennes (I love the psychological struggles that they bring out in Luther)

Four Books I Could Read Over and Over:

1. Holy Scriptures
2. Augustine’s Confessions
3. Christ in the Psalms by Patrick Henry Reardon
4. The Pilgrim’s Regress by C.S. Lewis (a very, very funny book)

Four Places I Have Lived:

1. Moscow, Russia
2. Tver, Russia
3. Portland, Oregon
4. Boston, MA
non-honorable mention: Aubry, TX –the desert days

Four TV Shows I Watch:

1. CSI: Miami
2. Various PBS specials
3. Law and Order
4. Crossing the Jordan

Four Places I Have Been On Vacation:

1 & 2. Prague, Czech Republic (twice—the first time I took a three day train from Moscow to Prague; the second time, Will and I braved an aeroflot plane ride)
3. Tallin, Estonia
4. St. Petersburg, Russia

Four Websites I visit Daily:

1. Google
2. Webster’s dictionary
3. German, Latin and Russian on-line dictionary sites (perhaps not daily, but often)
4. Amazon.com (probably every other day)

Four Favorite Foods:

1. Lobster
2. Zucchini and just about any kind of vegetable
3 & 4. Thinstrovani cusa and thinstrovani zemaki (I’m not sure about the spellings, but these translate from Czech as “stewed chicken” and “stewed potatoes”. My dad (who died in 1998) was Czech, and he was a great cook. Unfortunately, he didn’t teach me any Czech, but I do remember three Czech words—the two mentioned above and “poopak”, which translates “bellybutton”—yes, this is the extent of my Czech vocabulary—stewed chicken, stewed potatoes, and bellybutton! Sounds like a great book title.

Four Places I’d Like To Be Now:

1. Philadelphia—drinking coffee/chai and conversing with Mike and Rachel
2. Prague—drinking coffee/chai with Will and reading a book at the Globe bookstore
3. The (Христианская Библиотека в Москве) Christian library in Moscow, Russia listening to a lecture by Sergey Hudiev
4. A small jazz club in the northeast listening to Pat Metheny play the guitar

Four Bloggers I’m Tagging:

1. Pete Enns (Yeah, I know that he doesn’t have his own blog, but he could post his “fours” on Mark T.s blog where he visits and posts regularly. I can’t even get him to visit my blog—maybe it’s because I sat in his office chair—the one with the Harvard banner hanging over it—I don’t think he liked that. Or perhaps its because I wished him, “Happy Anniversary” when it was his birthday—that didn’t go over well either. Or maybe he didn’t like the fact that I keep emailing him for his class syllabus and he hadn’t created it yet and thus had to whip one up :)
2. Sean Choi (my analytic philosopher friend whom I met at an SCP conference in California and who kindly took Will and I to the airport—though he did kindof drive like a maniac.)

*I’m new to the blogworld and just about everyone else that I track daily has been tagged already, so I’ll have to limit mine to two.

In chapter one of Truth and Aquinas, M & P discuss Aquinas’ theory of truth and state the following:

“If a thing is truest when it is teleologically directed, and that means when a thing is copying God, this would suggest, as Aquinas indeed affirms, that truth is primarily in the Mind of God and only secondarily in things as copying the Mind of God. […] Aquinas seems to suggest that when one knows a thing, one does not know that thing as it is by itself, but only insofar as one meaningfully grasps it as imitating God. […] the placing of imitation ahead of autonomy suggests that for Aquinas, borrowing is the highest authenticity which can be attained. One must copy in order to be, and one continues only as a copy, never in one’s own right” (p. 10)

This strikes me as something like Van Til’s archetypal/ectypal distinction, i.e., that our knowledge is analogical and true insofar as it corresponds to God’s archetypal knowledge. Likewise, the idea of imitation over autonomy reminds me of Van Til’s mantra of “thinking God’s thoughts after Him,” and the part about “continuing as a copy” recalls Van Til’s stress on understanding the human person as essentially imago Dei. Van Til doesn’t tend to use terms like “teleology,” but still it seems that we are at least in the same “tonal center” here. Any thoughts?

Since John Milbank will give the Aquinas Lecture at the University of Dallas on Friday, Jan. 27, I thought I’d post a few thoughts relating to his book, Truth in Aquinas, co-written with Catherine Pickstock. Milbank is of course one of the key players of a “movement” known as Radical Orthodoxy. (If you are not familiar with RO, I have posted two papers on my website that might be helpful: Radical Orthodoxy and Reformed Theology: Continuing and Expanding James K.A. Smith’s Dialogue and my book review of Smith’s, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy). In short, one might say that RO challenges what it sees as a mistaken rigid division between theology and philosophy (sounds very Dooyeweerdian and Van Tilian). In other words, the Christian worldview requires an interpenetration between philosophy and theology. (Much more could be said, but I don’t want the post to go on forever).

I first read Milbank and Pickstock’s, Truth in Aquinas, while taking a course at UD called, “Christianity and Postmodernism,” taught by Dr. Philipp Rosemann. One of the questions raised concerning the book was, “Is this an interpretation of Aquinas or does it use Aquinas as a starting point for its own purposes?” Also, “What kind of interpretation is intended in this book? What methodology is employed?” In other words, the book attempts a certain interpretation of Aquinas, but what are the principles used to interpret it? M & P do not explain their principles of interpretation, nor their criteria for interpretation. However, the authors are aware of the fact that what they are saying does not take into full account Aquinas’ view, and that they are making certain conclusions that they know Aquinas would not make (e.g., p. 64, p. 82, p. 86). So is this justified? Rosemann, a medieval and postmodern specialist, raised an interesting counter, along with the following two examples. Aquinas himself does the same thing when he interprets Aristotle in order to get at Aristotle’s “real” insights. E.g., Aquinas uses the following terms: (1) superficies verborum (“surface of the words”) and (2) intentio profundior (“deeper intention”). In regard to Augustine, Aquinas speaks of Augustine’s “deeper intention,” and in his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Aquinas uses the distinction between what Aristotle teaches outwardly (exterius) and what is the “hidden truth” (veritas occulta). So Aquinas as well fails to explain his method. He, as did Augustine, wanted to go beyond the surface of pagan thinkers because he wants to Christianize them (“plunder the Egyptians” so to speak). Yet, Aquinas does not tell us explicitly how he reads these thinkers so as to render them to support Christianity. So can we simply dismiss RO’s method given the precedent set by Aquinas?

I was browsing through some pictures this evening and ran across some shots from the 2004 Women of Westminster Conference (featuring Dr. William Edgar as our key-note speaker and including shots from the jazz gigs) and thought I’d post some. This brings back great memories. We need to do this again in the near future! Perhaps at the 2006 graduation in Philly?

I recently listened to a lecture series on Augustine’s Confessions taught by William Cook and Ronald Herzman. One theme emphasized by Cook and Herzman dealt with Augustine’s relationship and attitude toward pagan thought. Augustine, of course, was quite conversant with classical literature and as he reflects on his early schooling, he questions the value of reading, e.g., Virgil’s Aeneid. He seems at first to view his early training somewhat negatively, noting that his teachers stressed style (the elegance of the wording) over content—in other words, if one described his lusts in elegant Latin, he would receive his teachers’ praise. Yet, as the Confessions unfold, Augustine recalls that his reading of Cicero’s Hortensius caused him to begin thinking of higher things. Interestingly, Augustine was drawn to the book because of its form (not its content), yet the content gripped him. After this experience and given his mother’s (Monica’s) Christian influence, Augustine decides to turn to the Bible in his new search for wisdom and truth. However, because (at that time in his life) Scripture doesn’t have the same stylistic appeal as Cicero’s work, he discounts it.

The next major pagan influence comes with his reading of the Platonists. These texts were instrumental in regard to Augustine’s break with the Manichees. The Manichees were dualists who believed that matter (material) is evil and that the spiritual is good. With this dichotomy they viewed the Old Testament with repugnance. Augustine had adopted this view and it was no doubt an obstacle that prevented him from embracing Scripture. (Sometime later Augustine encountered Ambrose’s teaching on the allegorical interpretation of Scripture which provided yet another “break” from his Manichean bonds). Through his reading of the Platonists, Augustine was presented a new way of understanding evil—evil as privation. This afforded Augustine a different paradigm for viewing the possibility of a good creation and for not imputing evil to God. Augustine, however, explicitly notes the absence of Christ and the Incarnation from the Platonist account. Interestingly, the “final” text that led to Augustine’s full embrace of the Christian faith was from the 13th chapter of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans. With this text, the Word and the Spirit definitively broke the chains that bound Augustine’s heart to sin, and he was converted. Of course the struggle with sin continued throughout Augustine’s life (as it does with us all), but I think it’s safe to say that the dominion of sin was broken.

I’ve been reading through the Psalms for several months now and have been using as a devotional commentary, Patrick Henry Reardon’s, Christ in the Psalms. Commenting on verse 5, “How magnified are Your works, O Lord, how exceedingly deep Your thoughts,” Reardon writes:

“Once again, these praises of God bear specific reference to the things of our redemption. The ‘works’ of God have to do with the sending of His Son (cf. John 3:17; 6:29), the giving of His Son (3:16), the handing over of His Son (Rom. 8:32), ‘the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His mighty power which He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand’ (Eph. 1:19, 20). The exceedingly deep thoughts of God, likewise, have to do with the mystery of Christ, the profound counsel of our redemption, ‘the wisdom of God in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages for our glory, which none of the rulers of this age knew’ (1 Cor. 2:7,8). It is in the blood of Jesus that these exceedingly deep thoughts of God are made manifest to our minds, for ‘in Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace which He made to abound toward us in all wisdom and prudence, having made known to us the mystery of His will’ (Eph. 1:7-9). God’s exceedingly deep thoughts, of which our psalm speaks, have to do with the ‘mystery [of Christ]…which in other ages was not made known to the sons of men, as it has now been revealed by the Spirit’ (3:3-5)” [Patrick Henry Reardon, Christ in the Psalms, pp. 180-81].

Thank you Father for sending Your Son for the likes of me–to die in my place for the forgiveness of my sins and for adopting me as your very own.

To rest, confide, entrust—
O faith sublime,
in Christ.

Whose glorious Gospel captivates, subdues, confounds.
This mystery I have come to know and yet shall ne’er outgrow,
The Cross of my Lord by whose blood I am owned.

Tis bliss, tis safe –
The vain seeking of the prodigal has ceased.My Father has found me,
freeing me through crushing Him.I, adopted – He, forsaken,
a divine mystery indeed.

New life, new hope, new eyes—
all gifts divine, bestowed in love by Him who lives
and more who reigns.

To rest, be still, embrace—
Your faith sublime,
O Christ.

I recently read a post on Generous Orthodoxy announcing a blog book club on the topic, “Women in the Theological Academy.” The reading participants include James K.A. Smith (Calvin College) and others from the GO Think Tank. The blog invites all to join in reading Living on the Boundaries: Evangelical Women, Feminism And the Theological Academy (IVP, 2005) by Nicola Hoggard Creegan (a member of the GO blog) and Christine D. Pohl. The blog discussion of the book’s ideas will begin in about two weeks, around January 25. I haven’t bought the book yet, but I plan to and am grateful that such a discussion is taking place. I very much agree with GO’s post, “It’s an important read for those of us working in seminary, church, or academic settings, and for anyone who reads theology.”

I recently wrote a paper for graduate seminar course at UD called “What Is Enlightenment?” (an excellent course—taught by Dr. Philipp Rosemann) comparing an Enlightenment approach to Scripture (Spinoza’s grammatico-historical method) with that of the Church Fathers (and trying to bring the latter into conversation with a Reformed perspective). Since the blog is somewhat on a music/theology theme, I thought I would share one last analogy before returning to the Plato/Augustine/eros-caritas topic). So here it is:

Instead of approaching Scripture as a collection of divergent and contradicting accounts, the Christian comes to Scripture as a unified whole—whose unfolding drama is permeated with Christ. To illustrate this essential unity of Scripture, I offer the following analogy. Scripture presents us with a metanarrative whose structure could be likened to the purpose for which the sonata allegro form serves in a symphonic composition. The sonata form is divided into specific movements in which a primary theme is stated, developed (in terms of various sub-themes related to the primary theme), restated and brought to a final conclusion. The sonata form provides the structural framework through which the musical piece is presented as an “organic” whole with a specific, progressive goal. Moreover, the theme of the symphonic piece must be understood within the sonata form in its entirety and should not be isolated or interpreted as it appears in the individual sections. To do so would not only deny the natural progression (i.e., the progressive unfolding) of the composition, thus destroying its unity, but it would also greatly obscure the thoughtfulness and care with which the composer has crafted the theme and all its variations. Likewise, false conclusions could easily be drawn, as the various smaller portions within each movement have specific purposes—serving as contrasts, transitions, modulations—and yet must always be interpreted in light of the work as a totality. For example, modulations into various tonal centers (other than the original tonal center) are common in a symphonic piece. A work may begin in the key of C major and may modulate to the key of G minor for several measures. If one were to simply analyze the section of the piece in which the modulation occurs without relating it to the composition as a whole, one could easily falsely conclude that the piece was in G minor. Any such artificial severing could easily result in one’s failing to understand that the composer’s diversity is in no way set in opposition to the overall unity of his work, but rather is a purposed and creative act manifesting in a most mysterious and profound way the beauty of his original theme. Moreover, the dissonances created by the various sub-themes—if taken without thought to the final movement—can appear (and quite “logically” so) entirely unintelligible. Yet, when understood in light of the finale, the dissonances add tremendous depth to the piece when considered holistically and likewise intensify the sublimity of the final resolution.

Connecting the analogy with Scripture, we understand Christ as the central theme of Scripture in whom the two testaments find their unity and without whom the two testaments cannot be harmonized.

Multiperspectivalism (not relativism)

A simple C major triad is composed of the notes C, E, and G which are the root, 3rd, and 5th of the C major scale. This chord produces a very consonant, “happy” sound. Similarly, the notes D, F#, A form a D major triad (also the root, 3rd, and 5th of the D major scale) which produces the same quality of sound as the C major triad. The “rules” of music theory and composition would suggest that a D major chord would not harmonize well with a C major chord. In fact, if the two chords are played together in the same octave, the sound produced is not pleasant at all. However, if a D major triad is played on top (i.e., voiced an octave higher) of a C major triad the sound is quite different as the D, F# and A now create an extended harmony becoming now the 9, #11 and 13 in relation to the C triad and, as a result, produce a very rich sounding harmony. I wonder whether perhaps “some” (not all—please don’t read relativism or “sappy” ecumenicalism into this) of our theological disagreements are analogous to this example. In other words, in light of who God is (infinite), a great deal of our seemingly incompatible finite perspectives actually do harmonize, but different groups/traditions are drawn to focus more on the C, E, G triad, whereas others give their attention to the D, F#,A triad.

The Flatlands of Timeless Truths

One could find the notes G, Bb, D in the second mvt of a piece and the same exact G, Bb, D (G minor chord) in the 4th mvt. and “pull these” out in order to analyze them and “logically” conclude that both are simply G minor triads. However, this completely ignores the context in which they are found (e.g., what chords precede and what chords follow? Is this a chord of the tonal center being emphasized or it is a transition or borrowed chord leading to a new tonal center? At what point in the piece does this chord occur and how does it relate to the tonal center of the previous movements? Or perhaps it should not really to be analyzed as a G minor chord at all, but rather as part of a totally different chord [e.g., C, E, G, Bb, D = C7 chord, the G, Bb, D are the 5th, b7th and 9th of a completely different chord, and more than that a chord with a completely different purpose, sound and quality. Abstracting in such a way, is to like pulling these notes off the page of the score and throwing them on a blank page and asking the orchestra to play the notes. Undoubtedly, the notes will sound like a G minor chord, but what has happened to the symphonic piece? –The piece is ruined, it is unintelligible, it has been flattened – no dynamic marking can be inserted as there is no climax, no forward movement and no sense of beginning or end whatsoever. In the same way, it seems that systematics detached from a biblical theological (redemptive historical Christian metanarrative) has similar tendencies. I am not saying, “down with systematics,” but I do think systematics divorced from BT is problematic.

Well, the “big exam” (my comprehensive exam for my MA in philosophy at UD) has come and gone and by God’s grace and the prayers and encouragment of a loving husband and few good friends, I passed!

Dearest Lord Jesus, thank You for seeing me through this, for Your presence with me, and for the encouragment of Your people. Lord, should it have gone otherwise, grant me the heart to see You as I see You now–as my faithful and ever present Divine Warrior who fights for me and who is intimately involved in every aspect of my life–even in things like comp exams.

I recently finished Plato’s Symposium in which Socrates describes the philosopher as a lover, driven by Eros. For Plato, love is the feeling that something is lacking or missing. As Marias explains, in the Symposium Socrates tells a myth about Love (the god, Eros), the son of Porus (plenty) and Penia (poverty) [p. 57]. Love is both rich, yet simultaneously needy and lacking. According to Socrates, Love (as well as the lover) seeks that which is lacking–in particular beauty. Because Love seeks beauty, Love must feel a lack of beauty and thus, concludes Socrates, Love cannot be a god. Love is rather something in between humans and gods. This something “in between” describes the philosopher–something halfway between the wise person and the ignorant person. Marias goes on to point out that beauty for Plato is more easily visible than truth–it is brighter and more immediately evident. So between beauty and truth we have an intimate connection, as beauty becomes a kind of path to truth. The philosopher, being a lover of the vision of truth, first contemplates the beauty of particular bodies, then bodies in general, then the beauty of souls and finally Beauty itself (the Form of Beauty)[p. 57].

Clearly, for Plato love/eros as construed above is the driving force of philosophy, as the philosopher him/herself is best understood as a lover. St. Augustine, having been influenced by Platonic thought modifies the concept and it becomes caritas (charity). With his statement, “Non intratur in veritatem nisi per caritatem,” (”One does not enter truth except through charity.”) St. Augustine Christianizes the concept, placing it in harmony with the teaching of St. Paul 9pp. 57-58).