Per Caritatem

In chapter seven of his book Faith, Reason and the Existence of God, Turner begins by giving of brief summary of Radical Orthodoxy’s critique of Scotus.  According to Radical Orthodoxy, Scotus’ onto-theological downfall involves the following:  (1) Scotus believes that it is possible to demonstrate God’s existence by natural reason apart from appeal to the premises of divine revelation.  Hence, for Scotus, natural theology is possible, and he readily engages in it.  (2)  God’s existence can be demonstrated only if existence is predicable univocally of God and creatures.  (3)  In order for being to be predicable of God and creatures then we must “have available to us some concept of ‘existence’ which is neutral as between any difference there can be between the Creator and the created-the difference, namely, between ‘infinite’ and ‘finite’ being” (p. 125).  This third proposition in particular is claimed by the proponents of Radical Orthodoxy to make Scotus guilty of onto-theology.  (4) “[I]f there are any predicates predicable univocally of God and creatures, a fortiori those same predicates must be predicable univocally, that is to say neutrally, also as between any and all differences of creatures one from another” (pp. 125-126).    

Though Turner is clearly not an advocate of Radical Orthodoxy and finds a number of flaws in their claims, he does in agreement with Radical Orthodoxy hold that Scotus’s insistence that existence must be predicated univocally between God and creatures (and not analogically as St. Thomas claims) is problematic. However, Turner’s reason for this particular criticism of Scotus is quite out of step with Radical Orthodoxy’s sensibilities, viz., Turner wants to show that the existence of God can in fact be demonstrated without the necessity of a univocal concept of being between God and creatures.  Hence, for Turner, Scotus and St. Thomas (at least according to Turner’s read), natural theology is a valid enterprise. 

Quoting from the Ordinatio (1 d3, q1-2), Turner highlights two ways in which Scotus attempts to define univocity.  The first definition is summarized by Turner as follows: “‘p’ is univocally predicated so long as ‘p’ and ‘~p’ are contradictories” (p. 127).  The second definition states that in order for a deductive inference to be valid, the middle term must have the same meaning when related to the major and minor premises.  Although Scotus’s definitions seem fairly straightforward, Turner argues that Scotus’ second definition is

but a condition of deductively inferential validity which depends upon, and is not itself a definition of, the univocal predication of terms.  For of course we cannot know that a deductive inference is valid unless we know that the middle term is predicated univocally in both antecedents; hence we cannot know that the middle term is univocally predicated from the fact that the inference is valid.  To say, as Scotus does, that ‘univocity’ of meaning is that possessed by such middle terms as are required for deductive validity is to beg the question:  the determination of validity presupposes criteria for the determination of univocity, not the other way around (pp. 127-128). 

If Scotus’s second definition is amiss, then how do things stand for his first definition, viz., that a term is univocal if a contradiction results when we affirm and negate it of the same subject (e.g.,  Igor is wise, and Igor is not wise)? According to Turner, who here appeals to Richard Cross to support his claim, this definition of univocity does not state both necessary and sufficient conditions of univocity and thus is deficient as a definition.[1]Scotus gives us only necessary conditions, and, as Turner will attempt to argue in a subsequent chapter, viz., chapter ten, “there are terms, predicated of the same subject, the affirmation and denial of which are genuine contradictories, even though the affirmation and denial are related only analogically” (p. 128). 
 

Notes 

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[1] Cf. Cross, Duns Scotus, Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 37. 

 

[Part I]

Turner acknowledges that surface level analyses of both the stylistic and temperamental contrasts between St. Thomas and Eckhart cannot be denied.  For example, it is certainly the case that Thomas’s theological discourses emphasize clarity,[1] understatement and sobriety in contrast with Eckhart’s “hyperactively paradoxical extravagance.”  Likewise, one might rightly conclude that these stylistic differences are related to temperamental differences between the two and   manifest themselves in, as it were, Thomas’s confidence in theological language given its subalteration to apophaticism, and the acknowledgment that our theological language always fails,[2] in contrast to Eckhart’s more “anxious” view of language.

One reason for these great differences in theological temperament and style is that Eckhart “wants to constrain all the paradoxical tensions of the theological project into each and every theological speech-act” (p. 103).  In other words, Eckhart wants the material rhetorical aspect of his language to match up with its formal significance.  Thus, “he must bend and twist and stretch theological language, because he wants theology as language ‘poetically’ to do what it says, and so, as it were, to speak its own failure as speech” (p. 104). 

Turner then addresses the ways that some postmodern thinkers have tried to employ Eckhart for various projects of deconstruction and claims that Eckhart would have had “little sympathy with the anti-metaphysical implications” of endeavors of this sort.  According to Turner, to attempt to remove Eckhart’s apophaticism from its metaphysical underpinnings would be to reduce his theology to “mere rhetoric.”   In spite of all the stylistic and temperamental differences, Turner believes that Eckhart’s theological purpose is in no way at odds with St. Thomas’s.  For both Thomas and Eckhart,

all theology must begin in, be mediated by, and end in the darkness of unknowing; and if, that being so, all creation in some way speaks God as irreducibly ‘other’ than it, why should not our language itself, being the natural expression of human rationality in its created materiality, speak God as unutterably other, not only in what we say in it, but also in the manner in which we say it, in its rhetorical forms themselves? [...] Thomas says:  all theological language fails.  Eckhart’s rhetoric gets theological language itself to fail, so that its failure says the same.  Thomas says:  all talk about God breaks down.  Eckhart gets the breakdown of language to say the same:  the rhetoric says what he and Thomas both say in it.  The material voice of the rhetoric speaks theologically at one with the formal significance which it utters” (pp. 105-106). 

Thus, in Eckhart’s theological discourse we find a strong emphasis on the materiality of language itself.  God is, as it were, found (and not found) in the materiality of the “foregrounded signifier.”  Moreover, since Eckhart’s language does what it signifies, it manifests something of a sacramental character.  For Eckhart, “reason, language, ‘at the end of its tether’ has the same shape it has for Thomas, the form of an openness to an unknowable otherness.  Thus does Eckhart’s rhetoric say for itself that which cannot be said in it” (p. 106). 

Notes

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[1] Turner’s description of Thomas’ discourse is helpful, viz., “Thomas is famous for his lucidity; as it were, the materiality of his theological signifiers disappears entirely into what is signified by them, and there is, in Thomas, an almost ruthless literary self-abnegation, a refusal of eloquence:  the language is made to absent itself in any role other than that of signifying.  Hence, for the most part, Thomas’ theology aims for a language of pure transparency; it has the transparency of the language of physics, or of any strictly technical discourse” (p. 102). [2] By Thomas’s “confidence” in theological language, Turner has in mind “a trust that our ordinary ways of talking about creation are fundamentally in order as ways of talking about God, needing only to be subordinated to a governing apophaticism, expressed as a second-order epistemological principle:  that all theological affirmation is both necessary and deficient.  We must say of God anything true of what he has created, because that is all there is to hand with which to say anything about God, because there is no special ‘hyperessential’ meaning available to the theologian, and because we therefore know that whatever we say is in any case inadequate.  Once we know that everything we say about God fails anyway, we can freely indulge the materiality of those metaphors, the carnality of that imagery, and calmly exploit all those possibilities of formal inference and logic, which appear to unnerve the anxious Eckhart” (pp. 102-103). 

 

In chapter 5, “Reason and Rhetoric,” of his book, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God, Turner engages in a fascinating discussion of Meister Eckhart’s theological rhetoric.  By the terms “rhetoric” and “rhetorical,” Turner has in mind, not some sophistic mode of communication, nor a derogatory label, but rather all the ways in which human speech-acts communicate qua performed in distinction from what is communicated merely by the words themselves regardless of how they are performed/uttered.  Summarizing his previous, more detailed discussion of “uttering performances,”[1] Turner writes, “[a]ctions ‘speak’, as gestures do.  Verbal utterances are actions too, and so ‘utter’ as all actions speak, and not just as words uttered.  Therefore, within verbal utterances we may distinguish between what is said in saying the words, and the meaning which the action of saying them bears” (p. 98).   To illustrate, Turner gives the example of Judas’ kiss-a kiss, which communicates irony because in the action of greeting Jesus with a kiss, Judas’ is actually betraying Jesus.  We are able to grasp two meanings in the one act of kissing because we perceive a distinction to be made between what is said by the action or utterance, and what is communicated in its being acted out or uttered.  This distinction is also seen in our willfully refraining from acting or uttering.  For example, consider what is communicated by silence when one spouse decides to engage the other in what is commonly called silent treatment.   As Turner explains, “these two ways in which a communicative act can ‘mean’ may stand in many different kinds of relationship with one another” (p. 98).  In the case of Judas, we have a relationship of contradictory meanings.  However, a complementary relationship may also exist, as in the case of a kiss between a bride and groom. 

With these material and formal distinctions of communicative meanings in mind, Turner embarks on his discussion of the differences in rhetorical “feel” between Eckhart and St. Thomas.  Though both men were Dominicans, educated in the same priory and perhaps both studied under Albert the Great, the Eckhart and Aquinas manifest stark, and one could even say, polar opposite rhetorical strategies.  According to Turner, these strategies are not simply due to differences in temperament and use of stylistic imagery, but instead flow from a more fundamental difference of “theological strategy.”[2]  

Oliver Davies, who is well-known for his work on Meister Eckhart, describes Eckhart’s theology as a kind of “poetic metaphysics,” in which there is a “foregrounding of the language itself, of the signifier.”[3]  To this description, Turner adds that Eckhart’s poetic theological discourse is itself rhetorically performative or exhibits, as it were, “a quasi-sacramental character” (p. 100).  That is, Eckhart’s language not only says something, but “it is intended to do something by means of saying,” which is, as Turner mentions in an earlier chapter, according to the classical medieval account, the nature of a sacrament-”a sacred sign which effects what it signifies” (p. 100).  With regard to Eckhart, it is commonly claimed that his abundant use of negative imagery and language is indicative to his strand of apophaticism. Turner, however, regards this surfeit of negative imagery as merely incidental because it doesn’t get to the heart of what apophaticism truly is.  Negative metaphors, after all, are still metaphors and hence still language;  “and if the ‘apophatic’ is to be understood as that which surpasses all language, then, as the pseudo-Denys says, it lies beyond both ‘affirmation’ and ‘denial’” (p. 101). In other words, the apophatic is not a particular kind of language, but is the failure of language.  Hence, the extreme negativity that marks Eckhart’s theological discourse

is not just something said by means of emphatically negative vocabularies, for it consists in his sense of the failure of all language as such, even of negative language.  Nonetheless, Eckhart the preacher wants theological language in some way to participate, as one might put it, in the event of its own failure.  Negativity, therefore, is not just a stylistic or decoratively metaphoric emphasis of Eckhart’s theology; it is a living, organizing, feature of the language itself and is intrinsic to its compositional style as theological writing (p. 101).

In one sense then, it is a language, but this language simultaneously says and unsays.  As Turner so aptly put it, Eckhart,

‘foregrounds’ the signifier only immediately to disrupt its signification, block it, divert it, postpone it.  Thereby the language performs rhetorically what it says technically:  the performance utters what the utterance performs.  And this rhetorical device, as it were of forcing the sensuous, material sign the character of its own self-subversion as signifier, is what accounts for that most characteristic feature of Eckhart’s language:  its rhetorical self-consciousness, its strained and strenuous, hyperactively paradoxical extravagance-its apophasis by excess.  The language, naturally, bursts at the seams under the pressure of the excessive forces it is being made to contain, the language as body bursts open under the pressure of it overloaded weight of significance
(p. 102). 

 Notes

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[1] Cf. chapter 3, pp. 68ff. 

[2] Turner notes that from the late thirteenth century onward, we find sharp turn towards “a more conscious cultivation of a distinctive theological rhetoric,” and that it is possible that these new rhetorical techniques in theology were connected with “the emergence of vernacularity as a major theological medium” (p. 99, 100).

 [3] Meister Eckhart:  Mystical Theologian, London:  SPCK, 1991, p. 180, as quoted in Turner, p. 100. 

 

Apparently Peter Martyr Vermigli had quite an influence on Thomas Cranmer’s Eucharistic theology.  In the translator’s introduction to Vermigli’s Oxford Treatise and Disputation on the Eucharist, 1549, he notes that Cranmer and Vermigli shared research during 1547-1551 and that “Cranmer’s collection De re sacramentaria resembles Martyr’s biblical and patristic sources in the Treatise” (p. xxxii). Vermigli, in fact, was a frequent guest at Cranmer’s  house.  During one particularly important visit, Martyr shared with Cranmer “two new texts, which proved most significant in defining the Eucharistic theology of both men in the fateful years of 1548 on.  One was his own manuscript copy of Chrysostom’s Ad Caesarium monachum, which he presented to the archbishop [...] The other consisted of excerpts from Theodoret’s first two Dialogues, which reinforced the same Christological analogy for the sacramental relation as did Chrysostom.  Cranmer makes use of both of these texts in his 1550 Defence” (p. xxxiii).

For more on Vermigli, see the following:  Part I:  St. Augustine, Vermigli and Calvin on the Eucharist  and Part II.

My friends at the Church and Postmodern Culture Blog recently posted my short and very reader-friendly article entitled, “Embodied Human Beings and Our Gravitation Towards Ceremony and Ritual.”  Please join the conversation if you are so inclined.