What is the state of Deleuze and Christian apologetics?

Alex has written a response to a recent article in on Deleuze in Modern Theology by Jacob Sherman. I was able to meet Jacob at the AAR last year when we presented on the same panel. His paper on Bergson and the science/religion debate was interesting and in general I found him to be a very generous and insightful young theologian. Of course, my narcissism was also indulged when I saw that Sherman cites my Angelaki review essay of Peter Hallwards Out of the World.  That said, I think Alex’s critique of the article is essentially correct and he hits on some meta-questions that theologians need to address if they are going to insist on critiquing philosophy. It seemed unclear to me what Sherman thought theology could get from Deleuze’s philosophy other than a kind of notion that the re-enchantment of the world is possible. That argument can be made without reference to a particular philosopher and theology needs to make it as such, but regardless how Deleuze fits into such a re-enchantment is far more complex than I think theology hopes to go. In some sense I want to affirm that this is indeed part of Deleuze’s project, while it is also a somewhat tendentious translation of the imperative to “believe in this world”, for Deleuze’s project of immanence is one that says in the very disenchantment of this world we find a deeper enchantment. I would argue that this is not the same project of theological re-enchantment of the cosmos, particularly as found in orthodox Christian theology.

The most important question Alex brings out, though, is one of audience. Who is the audience for such writings? Though, from what I know of his project, I don’t think Jacob would want to be lumped in with the Radical Orthodoxy crowd his article follows homologous logic. Philosopher X tries to do Y, but fails to do Y because they need theology Z. Theology Z does Y for the very reasons that X failed to. Is such an argument made to make the comfort the doubting faithful? Is it made to bolster the confidence of the theologian? What is the purpose of such apologetics?

Does not religion need to be reinvented rather than defended?

Update on Hicham Yezza

Simply stated, there is no justice in Britain. Head over to Peter Tatchell’s article at the Guardian for the update. Please also leave a comment to counteract the neanderthal nature of most you’ll find there.

What is the Hermeneutic Scene for Revolutionary Road?

Sam Mendes makes good films. American Beauty still touches me and Road to Perdition, while not as timeless as American Beauty, was a very remarkable movie. Revolutionary Road, his latest movie, reunites the two stars of Titanic, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, and presents the story of American-style suburban ennui and despair that can settle in to marriage. The movie, I think, can be watched as an existential rebuttal to the pure illusion of love presented in Titantic where there the two lovers, Jack and Rose, are spared the inevitable failure of their love thanks to the disaster of the ship sinking. As Shakespeare writes and Kierkegaard reminds us, better well hung than ill wed. As I’m going to talk about the plot of the movie and some folks may not have yet seen it I’m putting the rest of this post below the fold.

Leaving room

One often hears complaints that someone doesn’t “leave room” for something — most often freedom or mystery. I would contend that one should not consciously “leave room” for either. If freedom is really free, it brings its own room with it, and if there really is some irreducible mystery, its mysteriousness can take care of itself. Indeed, pushing as far as possible in the realm of the necessary or intelligible — that is, not “leaving” some predetermined “room” for freedom or mystery — seems to me to be precisely the way to trace the contours of these elusive realities.

Nature, grace, and anachronism

In the literature on Anselm, I’ve noticed what seems to me to be a real anxiety to make sure that Anselm isn’t “really” trying to get all the way to the necessity of the Incarnation by “pure reason.” The reason this explanation is necessary in the first place is that Anselm certainly appears to be doing that and doesn’t seem to view the attempt as problematic on a methodological level. In doing so, he is following in a proud tradition — for instance, Gregory of Nyssa’s “Great Catechism” is able to get to the Trinity and even to the creation and fall by means of something like the common sense of the Hellenistic world, though he recognizes that the Incarnation is going to be difficult to swallow. His general principle is to use Scripture for those who respect Scripture, and reason for those who accept only reason. Convincing the former is thought to be easier (though the historical record doesn’t seem to bear that out), but there isn’t a sharp division between the two that I can see.

I think that the reason for the anxiety about Anselm’s approach is that people are reading it in terms of Aquinas’s nature/grace distinction — i.e., reason can get you to a certain point (where Aristotle winds up), and then you need revelation, which is not contrary to reason but whose contents couldn’t be predicted using reason alone. The Trinity, for example, is firmly on the “revealed” side of this distinction, yet Gregory and Anselm both appear not to be worried about the fact that their reasoned argument has gone way over the line.

The reason for their lack of concern is probably that that line wasn’t a big concern of theirs, and we don’t need to read them anachronistically as though they knew about the nature/grace problem and were really concerned not to be doing something like “natural theology” because that would be somehow impious. Instead, maybe we should read them as doing what they’re actually doing — that is, assuming that the world described in Christian revelation is actually this very world where we are. If that is the case, then of course reason should be able to recognize the inner necessity of God’s actions in the world, because God is after all acting in this very same world where our reason finds its home.

I have a bunch of things that I want to say here but can’t fully support yet. For instance, I object to Aquinas’s two-tiered system first of all because it’s so inelegant. Another thing: maybe Barth’s polemic against “natural theology” should’ve gone further and also rejected the kind of “revealed theology” that’s defined in opposition to “natural theology.” Etc. I’m aware that there are all kinds of nuances that I’m not capturing here — sorry about that.

From A to Z: Freedom

I’m reading a study of Anselm right now, which includes a discussion of his counter-intuitive definition of freedom. For Anselm, freedom isn’t about rational deliberation or selecting among a variety of options — it’s about self-causation. If anyone remembers posts such as this one from when I was (as it turned out) working on Zizek and Theology, my point was to claim that Zizek has a similar definition of freedom and that his account of the relationship between the death drive and cognitive science is an attempt to ground that kind of freedom in the actual materiality of the brain.

This comparison would make kind of a good AAR presentation.

They do exist!

In a rare admission that Marxists actually continue to exist and study the economy, Brad DeLong mocks David Harvey for holding a view he doesn’t actually hold. I believe this counts as progress at least.

(I note that DeLong’s habit of responding to comments by means of bracketed insertions within the comments themselves is (a) more efficient than the standard method, but also (b) immeasurably more annoying. It could be the case, however, that I’m getting a bad sample in these threads, since he’s in a sarcastic mood after reading all of Harvey’s crazy mumbo-jumbo!)

Beyond the Apophatic

Martin Laird, in his recent study Gregory of Nyssa and the Grasp of Faith: Union, Knowledge, and Divine Presence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), coins the word “logophasis” to describe what happens after an apophatic mystical experience: “as a fruit of apophatic union with the Word (logos), the Word expresses (phasis) itself through the deeds and discourse of the one whom the Word indwells” (155). Here’s a longer quote:

Logophasis is a manifestation of the Word in deeds and discourse that follows directly upon an apophatic experience of union with or indwelling of the Word. It is precisely this logophatic dimension of Gregory’s apophaticism that has not received sufficient scholarly acknowledgment. For if what we have seen of the role of faith is true, then there is no apophaticism in Gregory of Nyssa which supercedes or is unaccompanied by logophaticism. (172)

One of the metaphors that Gregory uses in his commentary on Song of Songs is the fragrance of Christ, and he talks about this specifically in connection with Paul (whose experience in the third heaven was obviously a locus classicus of mysticism):

The fragrance of Christ inhaled by Paul is not simply about indwelling union. Through inhaling the Word present in the fragrance, Paul himself becomes fragrant, a fragrant transmission of the Word in the Church. Intimate and abiding as the indwelling presence of the Word is, it has at the same time a universal destination through Paul. (159)

This notion of logophasis may well save mysticism for me — much of what I’ve read in that genre strikes me as hugely self-indulgent, but it appears that here in one of the first attempts at a Christian mysticism, there is at least an attempt to get beyond the God-soul dyad.

My Dissertation: “Atonement and Ontology”

Now that I’ve completed my first full draft, I am going to share with you, my loving readers, what my actual dissertation topic is. It is entitled “Atonement and Ontology,” and the primary goal is to demonstrate that making sense of atonement theory requires what I call a social-relational ontology or at least a social anthropology.

Ratzinger’s tin ear

On the level of substance, it seems to me, John Paul II and Benedict XVI are essentially the same. What makes Benedict so controversial while John Paul was more broadly liked is not their teachings, but their gestures. John Paul was the master of the token gesture, which led many to believe there was something more and better going on beneath the rhetoric — but Benedict’s most famous gestures seem to indicate that he is somehow even worse than his public statements indicate.

The question of whether this is an unintentional “tin ear” problem or a reflection of John Paul’s more “catholic” attitude as opposed to Benedict’s preference for a “righteous remnant” is left as an exercise for the reader.