Miscellaneous Micah

Alright, it's time to return to what brings readers to this blog--MICAH PICTURES!

These span from Easter weekend to this morning. Hence the name.

Messin' with Plato

Those last Radical Orthodoxy summaries might or might not come soon.

Along with Jeff and Robert from the Ooze, I'm now working my way through Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition, and the debate is wonderful. Given the utter confidence with which Milbank and company plow through their books, it's nice to read some theology and philosophy professors punching back. I'm not entirely comfortable with some of their conclusions, and I'm almost certain that James K.A. Smith reads Plato's Republic wrong, but I'm sure all that will come out in the Ooze thread.

In another wonderful development, I've found many moments of resonance between the Platonist C.S. Lewis's English Literature in the Sixteenth Century and the Platonist John Milbank in his The Word Made Strange.

I've also finally defragged my laptop's hard drive into submission, and I now have a dual-boot Windows/Linux machine. I plan to do most of my work in the latter, but for Mary's sake (she uses it too, after all), I kept the Windows partition up and running. There's an undeniable, geeky feeling when the Ubuntu screen comes up and I start writing in Open Office.

More Radical Orthodoxy essays

Alright, so here are some comments on the rest of the Radical Orthodoxy essays.

"Wittgenstein after Theology" by Conor Cunningham

Cunningham's basic upshot is that, despite Wittgenstein's reputation and his own insistence that he operates outside of metaphysical debates, he defaults to a Kantian-style immanentism, claiming agnosticism about "things in themselves." The problem with that move, as with Kant's, is that to deny the possibility of knowledge, one must have a grasp on the beyond-entity's relationship with knowable things. Thus Christian theology, which holds that God the Father is ineffable but maintains strong doctrinal confessions of the relationships between that ineffable and the created, intelligible, mediating reality through which we worship the ineffable Father, offers a more proper intellectual humility in lieu of agnostic pride.

The essay also discusses post-Scotist ontology (there's Scotus popping up again) as making room for modern atheism to happen:

If God is God purely because of quantitative omnipotence, then a Nietzschean remains "holy" in his hubristic rebellion, as it is only a matter of amount which separates creator from the created. God is in effect immanentised because God is only one more ontic entity struggling for "expression." (83)

My Miltonist heart soared when I read that section; Wes Arblaster sent me a link to a Radical Orthodoxy treatment of Paradise Lost the other day, and I'm sure he's going to make this sort of argument, but I think it will still play well if I treat PL in my dissertation. At any rate, Cunningham's argument is that analytical rejections of metaphysics really only mask a crass immanentism.

"Heidegger and the Grounds of Redemption" by Laurence Paul Hemming

The kernel of Hemming's argument has to do with nihilism and its relationship to Christian theology. Nihilism, in his argument, rejects not the God of Christian faith but the Scotist "being" that purports to precede God and creation. Thus nihilism does not nullify Christian theology but clears out the space that modernist theism once claimed, opening the way for alternatives, such as Nietzschean agonism and Christian theology, to make their appeals. A quote from Hemming works nicely here:

Nihilism is the situation from out of which I am called to redemption, it is the experience of world apart from God. Understood like this, nihilism is that place from out of which I come and into which I fall in the continuing desire to be faithful, the continuing need to redeem the place in which I find myself. (105)

"Augustine beyond Western Subjectivity" by Michael Hanby

Hanby's essay is a wonderful exploration of Augustine's major works in search of an ontology rooted in relationship. Ultimately ontology, for Augustine, happens as the human person participates both in common life and in the life of the Trinity:

The creature's "nature" is not primarily an indeterminate self-positing given, subsisting behind its intentions, but rather is finally determined through its intentions by the company she keeps and the objects of her worship, expressed through the descriptions she gives of herself and the world. Again, despite many "trinities" that can be discerned in the mind's activity, it can only be an image of God, only manifest God in creation, insofar as it doxologically participates in God's charity through the historic ecclesia. The self, who serially is through activity which is formally doxological, is an icon for the "object" of its worship, by which that "object" and the self are in turn made manifest. (115)

Self, in other words, is always relative to other selves, and being is always a gift. To negate the giftedness and the gift-character of existence itself is in fact to surrender to nihilism.

"St Anselm, Theoria and the Convolution of Sense" by David Moss

I'm getting tired of summary, so Moss's point is that Anselm construes friendship as grounding being. A quote:

Rather fancifully, one could suggest, then, that if Heidegger's way to thought was in mediation upon the concrete and universal "Here I am," and Descartes' upon the abstract universal "I am a thinking ego," than what we are set to think with Anselm is the thought: "We are friends."

Moss sees Anselmian friendship as the actual, concrete working-out of Hegel's self-consciousness. I perceive my friend while at the same time perceiving that my friend is perceiving me. Reflection of reflection and all that.

I'm not going to give a synopsis of "God's Sex" by Gerard Loughlin here; I'm certain I can remember it when comps come around. Yeesh.

I think I'll do the other summaries later; I've grown tired.

Plowing Through

I've finished Radical Orthodoxy and should write synopses of some of the major essays tomorrow. Now I'm about a quarter of the way into Milbank's The Word Made Strange, which I hope to finish before Mary gets done with her school year--it's a book that takes some solitude and some time to read.

Right now I've got a copy of C.S. Lewis's monster book on 16th century English literature out from the library, and I'm going to let it serve as a counterweight (and it has some serious counterweight--it makes quite an impressive noise when I drop it on the counter!) to Greenblatt's early new historicist collection on Renaissance drama.

I'm also reading through some Beaumont and Fletcher plays, and they're lovely diversions from the weight of literary scholarship and post-critical theological essays.

All in all, my first forays into comps-reading promise good things ahead.

Revelation: Of the Eye, not the Event

"The False Legacy of Suarez" by John Montag, the second essay in Radical Orthodoxy, sets out to clarify some of the changes in theological language that have happened inside those traditions called "Thomism." As the early modern era dawns, writes Montag, the medieval notion of revelation as something akin to light--something that illuminates for the sake of seeing what God has already created--gives way to a view of revelation as an event, a moment when God places intrusively something into "natural" creation that was not there before.

Of course, "nature" was something different for medievals as well. Thomas's use of the term happens within a world in which every created thing has a nature. "Natural" is always an adjective for Thomas; there are no "natural" and "supernatural" realms. Instead, supernatural moments involve rising above one's (postlapsarian) natural capabilities:

Within Thomas's conception of creation-as-gifted, the "supernatural" refers to gifts which are beyond the nature of fallen humanity, and thus to "the human being whom one finds behaving generously, justly, truthfully. (And of course, it is only God to whom the term "supernatural" could never be applied: who graces God? Who elevates the nature of divinity?)" (45; quote from Nicholas Lash)

So, Montag argues, ontological/epistemological denials of the accessibility of "the supernatural" already assume two "realms" rather than two intensities of sight (as per Milbank) with which one might see the same Creation. Once again, late medieval philosophy turns out to have been quite influential in later, post-Kantian philosophy.

Speaking of which, I thought, five years ago, that Milbank was somewhat arbitrary tracing so much back to Duns Scotus. I thought thus until semester, when materialist after materialist cited Scotus's break with Augustinian metaphysical traditions as the source of Enlightenment and later Marxist materialisms. As it turns out, Milbank must have read those dudes before I did. Go figure.

Blowing my Mind

Actually understanding a Milbank essay is a nice experience. I just had such an experience. I'm reading Radical Orthodoxy for my comprehensive exams, and after a semester back in the philosophic saddle, I'm back to the point where I can understand what Milbank is writing when he writes "The Theological Critique of Philosophy in Hamann and Jacobi."

So much of modern philosophy begins with the late medievals in Milbank, and in this case, the strong separation between theology, the positive discourse about revealed data, and philosophy, the prior science that orders being and knowledge for the sake of setting up a ground for theology and other discourses, begins with Duns Scotus. Separating the science of metaphysics from the Being of God, Scotus renders all of theological speech essentially empty, giving priority to abstract being and setting the terms within which one can speak or not speak of God. Patristic theology has a more robust sense of the connectedness of reality:

By contrast, in the Church Fathers or the early scholastics, both faith and reason are included within the more generic framework of participation in the mind of God: to reason truly one must be already illumined by God, while revelation itself is but a higher measure of such illumination, conjoined intrinsically and inseparably with a created event which symbolically discloses that transcendent reality, to which all created events to a lesser degree also point. (24)

Over against this participatory mode of metaphysics, Milbank lays out post-Kantian metaphysics and epistemology as ultimately nihilistic, emptying things of their depth because, by Kantian rules, only the manifold surfaces and their transcendental products are even available.

If I can stay disciplined, I'm going to try to blog the books and essays I read for comps as I read them this summer, perhaps adding to that reflections on teaching Plato when August comes. If my ever-wonderful readers would like to comment or add to the reflections that I post, I'd be most grateful.

Semester's Over

Huzzah!

I woke up at 4:00 this morning for perfectly natural reasons, and when I'd finished being perfectly natural, I discovered that I was fully awake. So, rather than putting off until tomorrow the tabulation of my semester grades, I decided to put finishing touches on my last paper AND knock my grades and end-of-semester teacher paperwork out. I did both and dropped everything where it needed to be dropped on campus before I had to report to the public library, and I AM DONE!!

Now my months of discipline begin. I'd like to take my comps in May, but I've told all my profs that I'd do them in July, just in case. Between now and then I've got to stay focused, to read a book or two a day if I can.

But right now, sleepy and content, I'm just enjoying the moment. Okay, I've already started posting next fall's Plato and Boethius syllabus on my course web site. But that's fun for me, alright?

Just seeing if Blogger will take thorns.

This is Caedmon's Hymn, BTW.

Nu sculon herigean heofonrices weard,
meotodes meahte and his modgeþanc,
weorc wuldorfæder, swa he wundra gehwæs,
ece drihten, or onstealde.

He ærest sceop eorðan bearnum
heofon to hrofe, halig scyppend;
þa middangeard moncynnes weard,
ece drihten, æfter teode
firum foldan, frea ælmihtig.