Per Caritatem

I am currently reading via interlibrary loan, J. Todd Billings’ new book, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift (Oxford Univ. Press, 2008).  Although I haven’t finished the book yet, what I have read up to this point (about 100 pages) is excellent!  Billings has done a great service to Calvin scholarship, showing himself quite conversant both with major contemporary critics of Calvin (e.g. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock) and with Calvin scholar extraordinaire, Richard Muller.  In chapter two, “Calvin’s Doctrine of Participation:  Context and Continuities,” Billings rather convincingly argues against hackneyed claims made by the “Gift theologians” (e.g., the well-worn, Calvin is a nominalist charge, Calvin radically separates divinity and human which results in a Nestorian Christology and a deficient doctrine of the Eucharist etc.), and builds a very solid case based on a close reading of Calvin’s commentaries in conjunction with the Institutes, Calvin’s shorter works, and an extensive interaction with the current secondary literature, that Calvin has a rich theology of participation in Christ and a metaphysic that, as Billings puts it,

affirms a differentiated unity of God and humanity in creation and redemption, such that humanity may participate in God through Christ; union with God is not only the eschatological end, but a paradigmatic feature of the God-human relationship (p. 26).

Given that the end of the semester is drawing near, I do not have time to give a more extensive summary of the book; however, I hope to do so this summer. 

This post is a kind of “follow-up” to the previous short series on Scotus and the univocity of being. Given that finals are approaching and papers are coming due, this will unfortunately be a very informal post with the hopes of at least pointing out features of Radical Orthodoxy’s critique of Scotus and his influence on modernity that seem to me worth further exploration. (Much of what I say below is inspired by a recent discussion given by a fellow classmate at UD—J. McIntosh).

First, the absence of Neoplatonic elements in Scotus (in comparison with Augustine and Aquinas) is interesting and this absence no doubt is interpreted as a serious lack by RO proponents. RO of course highlights the Neoplatonic aspects of St. Thomas, and in my opinion for good reason, as these seem downplayed in many accounts which want to portray an overly “rationalistic” Thomas (think of the way in which numerous introductory texts to St. Thomas present selected excerpted texts so as to further this portrait). Moreover, RO, Pickstock in particular, has brought to our attention the vast differences between Thomas’ view in which truth is understood as adequatio of the mind to the object, which involves participation (intrinsically) understood—again there are strong Neoplatonic themes here—and Scotus view, viz. that what one knows is a picture or representation of reality. More explicitly, in Scotus’ representative epistemology the concept in which the meaning lies is separated from reality—thus, RO will say that things are turned into meanings. The movement here in the direction of modern epistemologies is not difficult to discern. RO, following the Christian Neoplatonic/Thomistic participatory path, wants to emphasize that there is a greater ontological depth in knowing as they favor a “thicker” metaphysical terrain. Lastly, in the representation model, things are indifferent to the mind, whereas for RO’s Thomas, one’s knowing the tree is not indifferent to knowing the tree, rather, the tree is there to be known—as Pickstock (I believe) puts it in Truth in Aquinas, you “catch the tree on its way back to God.”

I am also quite sympathetic to RO’s rejection of the dualism between theology and philosophy, and frankly, I see much continuity with Milbank’s read of Aquinas and certain emphases of Gilson. Milbank stresses that Thomas breaks with Aristotle in many places due to his Christian faith. For example, contra Aristotle, Thomas upholds the Creator/creature distinction in his claim that metaphysics studies ens commune (created being) and not being in its entirety. In making this distinction metaphysics is subservient to theology and not vice versa. In other words, we might say that Aristotle still falls prey to and promotes onto-theo-logy whereas, according to RO, Aquinas gives us a theo-ontology.

Other interesting topics for further study would be why theology must be construed as a science on the model of Aristotle, the relation between a metaphysics of participation and whether this necessarily involves some (Christianized) theory of recollection or divine implantation of ideas, as well as the significance of Scotus’ reduction of exemplar causality to efficient causality and how this fits into RO’s more global critique.