Hierarchy in proofs of the existence of God

Yesterday was my last class session for Humanities 3: Philosophy and Theology. Our final reading included Locke’s variation (from the Essay) on the proof of the existence of God, which has naturally been a recurring theme in the course. He emphasizes throughout that God must be an intellectual being, because it’s inconceivable that matter could produce intellect — and an intuition struck me: is there a proof of the existence of God that doesn’t rely in some way upon mind-body dualism?

I threw the question out to both sections, and some interesting conclusions emerged. First, in none of the other proofs we discussed — Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes — was mind-body dualism so obviously crucial as in Locke’s. Yet it does seem that belief in some kind of spiritual reality is necessary for infinite-regress-prevention proofs (like some of Aquinas’s Five Ways) to be proving God rather than, for example, the Big Bang. The end of all his proofs is “And this, everyone agrees, is God” — but it’s ultimately mind-body dualism that makes it seem intuitively obvious that the first cause or prime mover can’t be material.

Second, and more essentially, it seems that all the classical proofs depend more broadly on ontological hierarchy, of which mind-body dualism is a decisive piece. God can be purely spiritual and yet produce matter because the spiritual is above the material and can therefore produce it, while the opposite could never be the case. And while Anselm’s proof may seem immune to this, he isn’t sheerly trying to prove the “existence” of that-than-which-no-greater-can-be-thought — he’s trying to prove that that thing is God, in the familiar and traditional sense. The definition isn’t just a clever move to be able to deduce existence, but to be able to simultaneously deduce everything else we know about God — and that depends on an ontological hierarchy providing “objective” standards for what’s greater.

This reliance on mind-body dualism and ontological hierarchy, more than any logical missteps in the proofs, may account for why they are so unconvincing to most people today.

“I like to think (right now, please!)”

Adam Curtis’s All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (part 1, part 2, part 3) is pretty excellent. It puts forward an ambitious and interesting thesis, which I think deserves more engagement from the anti-authoritarian left than this rather defensive response at New Left Project. To try and compress Curtis’s already over compressed argument into one thesis, he identifies the idea of a self-regulating homeostasis as a widely accepted common sense of our times, and one which makes it difficult for us to think about changing the world, either about what such a change would mean or what the role of power would be in accomplishing such a change. That New Left Project response is right to point out other traditions which influence the anti-authoritarian left and have more to say about power and radical change, but this doesn’t negate what I think Curtis is trying to do. The ideological assemblage he puts together has a certain coherence, but I don’t think it’s supposed to be exhaustive, I don’t think he’s denying that there are other elements which could be assembled in other ways.

This does, though, raise a problem with the documentary, and indeed with Curtis’s work more generally. I think he’s doing this kind of Foucaldian tracing of discourses, but I’m basically guessing, because he’s not very explicit about what he is doing. There are various things about the way the program is put together that imply certain things about the epistemology, although they’re also rather contradictory. Curtis’s signature method, the construction of a documentary largely from archive footage some distantly, some closely related to the point being made, emphasizes the intellectual configuration being constructed is partial. In particular, building the program around juxtaposition tends to push against interpreting the relationships between the elements as causal, which of course is emphasized by the jumps in time throughout the program.

An example of a poorly-considered web design

In searching through the websites of Chicago-area universities, I came across the following navigation panel:

Out of mercy, I have removed all direct evidence of the university’s name — but I think it’s clear someone needs to fire their web designer immediately.

Entrepreneurial Academics

When I was in elementary school, I was part of a group of students who were tested to see if they qualified for the “gifted” program. Reportedly, my results were borderline, with the guidance counselor telling my mom — and her subsequently telling me — that I was ultimately not “gifted” but made up for it with hard work. Then, for the rest of my life, I heard a clear narrative of decline over and over: there was a time not so long ago, the story goes, when someone could graduate high school in Flint, then step into a job at “the shop” (GM) and be essentially set for life, with a virtually guaranteed job, generous benefits, and a pension. I watched as people tried to convince themselves that Flint could reinvent itself — by finding another institution that would provide them with the lifestyle that GM had taken from them.

This brings me to this guy. (Incidentally, I’ve shared several posts from The Last Psychiatrist, a blog I discovered yesterday and subsequently devoured — very much worth adding to your Google Reader.)

The “Apocalyptic Theses” and the preferential option

Via a pingback from Todd Walatka — which highlights a concern Brad once raised about the need for low-church ecclesiology to be taken seriously — I find this interesting insight on Nate Kerr et al.’s “theses”: namely, the liberation theology language feels tacked on. They quote Sobrino to the effect that the church’s mission to the poor preceeds the church itself, but as Todd says:

Saying that the preferential option is at the center and heart of the church’s mission (and is the mission) seems overstated within the general flow of the theses. It seems that the most basic mission of the church in the theses is to witness to the apocalyptic transformation accomplished by God in Christ, which may include the preferential option, but is not identical with it.

He then goes on to point out the specific lack of continuity in terms of liturgy:

Thesis 4 is indicative of the differences here. In this thesis, the danger of liturgy is to see a direct correspondence between our work and divine work, to see it as our (successful) seeking after God. The danger is an idolatrous misconstrual of our place in the event of God’s grace. Liberation theologians also offer very strong critiques of ritual and liturgy (see, for example, Segundo’s The Sacraments Today) but in a different key, and one that flows directly from the preferential option as the mission of the Church. Their central critique is not that liturgy raises our action too high but rather that it devalues human action by ideologically focusing our attention on the reconciling action of God in liturgy and away from the demand to build the Kingdom beyond the liturgy.

Thinking in more specifically theological terms, I wonder if what is at stake is a different concept of God’s freedom in Barth and in liberation theology. Where Barth’s concept of divine freedom is always thought in terms of divine transcendence, it seems to me that the liberation theologians — as represented by Gutierrez’s brilliant On Job — see God’s freedom as a kind of contagious freedom, one that drives us to take responsibility for our actions.

The freedom of transcendence is perhaps always a hierarchical mode of freedom, where God is free to be God and we’re free to acknowledge how unworthy we are of God (which then is supposed to have good effects, though the logic here seems reminiscent of the South Park “underwear gnomes”) — by contrast, the liberating freedom is a “flattening” freedom that empowers human action instead of just inexplicably forgiving it.

The problem of narrating a Fall

In my course on the devil, I have emphasized the contrast between patristic accounts of the fall of the devil (whereby he generally gets jealous of humanity) and Anselm’s radically ahistorical account in De casu diaboli. On the one hand, the more “mythological” patristic account makes more narrative sense, while Anselm’s represents more of an attempt to think through free will at its most radical and abstract. On this scale, Milton’s account in Paradise Lost is basically in the patristic vein, albeit altered by Milton’s Arian theology — Satan becomes jealous, not of humanity, but of the revelation of the Son, who seems to interpose another “layer” between God and angels, implicitly demoting them all.

In class today, however, I argued that the real action is not in the fall of the devil — which Milton never “directly” narrates, putting it in the mouth of an angel who himself was not present for the event — but rather the fall of Eve. What is interesting to me is the way Milton’s account of the fall of Eve reveals an inherent limit to “mythological” narratives of the fall, namely that the pressure of creating a comprehensible narrative creates a tendency to insert some kind of fundamental imbalance into the situation such that, in this case, Eve was bound to fall long before the devil entered the scene. The fact that Milton was such a clearly devout man who wanted to “justify the ways of God” shows just how irresistible this logic is (and shows Milton’s own integrity as a thinker, as well).

Hierarchy and infinite regress

I’ve written before on the Christian tradition’s fear of infinite regress. Now for various reasons, I’m thinking about the ontological hierarchy so prized by our Radical Orthodox friends and wonder if that, too, is in part motivated by a fear of infinite regress, in the form of a vicious circle.

As readers of Pseudo-Dionysius will recall, in the hierarchy appointed by God, the “higher” members minister to the “lower” members, mediating God’s goodness to them and thereby bringing them to the highest level they are able to attain. To a certain extent, then, the higher beings are “for” the lower, but at the same time they can’t receive anything from those lower beings — that is to say, the lower beings’ relationship to God is determined by its mediation through the higher beings, but not vice versa, or at least not in the same way. Thus while beings in a hierarchical ontology as opposed to a monadic or individualistic ontology are determined by relation, there is no real possibility of mutual determination. Relationships are unidirectional, all stemming ultimately from God as the “master signifier” of the chain. No infinite regress occurs because everything flows from God down the chain, with no “circles” of mutual determination anywhere along the line.

It would be easy to collapse this hierarchical scheme into a monadic one where everything stands in unmediated relationship to God, and I for one can’t think of a reason why the hierarchical approach would be obviously preferable to the monadic. A relational ontology, including mutual determination, seems to me to be obviously preferable to both — from the perspective of such an ontology, both would indeed fall into the same category. Of course, a thorough-going relational ontology would ultimately have to displace God as “master signifier” as well, allowing God and creation to be mutually determined — a move that in Christian theology shouldn’t be too much of a stretch given that God’s own “internal” life is supposed to be one of mutual determination among the trinitarian persons. (Moltmann’s later work moves in this direction.)

Of course, this whole line of thinking only works if hierarchy really does exclude mutual determination. It seems to me that if hierarchy was thought in terms of mutual determination, it would fail to be hierarchy at all — it’s not like a general has to take a vote among his troops before making a decision, for instance. But maybe I’m wrong.

Theses on The Dark Knight

The following post was co-authored with Kelsey Craven, a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Northwestern University.

1. The Dark Knight is a critique of Batman, and precisely because of this, a critique of the neoliberal order. Here neoliberalism is understood as the combination of authoritarian politics, either the rather clumsy Republican version or the slick managerialism of the Democrats, in the service of the ever-greater concentration of capital by means of primitive accumulation (“privatization”) and financialization.

2. Batman and Harvey Dent are the two sides of neoliberal politics. Both depend on the wealth of Bruce Wayne in order to operate. That wealth is of course inherited, but it is greatly augmented by a stock issue in Batman Begins—surely a strange plot point for a comic book movie. Under Bruce’s father, the Wayne fortune underwrote both the water and transit systems of Gotham, effectively privatizing central government functions. Bruce simply continues this trend by privatizing law-enforcement, driven initially by his thirst for vengeance against the ungrateful “criminal” class.
3. Batman’s alleged project, to wage a war against “criminality,” must necessarily be a war against Gotham’s citizenry within the context of Gotham. This too is a major theme in Batman Begins, wherein the League of Shadows boasts of their capacity to infiltrate every level of government and considers this fact a legitimation of their intent to drug Gotham’s inhabitants, inciting them to destroy their city from within. Gotham is decadent. This theme re-emerges with the Harvey Dent/Two-Face storyline; when the female cop, who seemingly works directly under Commissioner Gordon, is confronted by Two-Face as to her role in the murder of Rachel Dawes, her response is: “They [the mob] got to me early, my mother’s hospital bills!”
4. It follows that:
   • Batman’s fight against “criminals” is a fight against the working class.
   • Within Gotham, a civil servant is incapable of supporting herself and her family without outside financial assistance.
   • All wealth within Gotham is concentrated within one of the following two organizations: the mob or the Wayne Estate. It follows that the citizens must then serve one, the other, or both so as to survive within the existing social structure of Gotham.
   • Should the mob be defeated (criminality), Bruce Wayne will quite literally own Gotham.
   • With regards to this power structure, the citizenry are seemingly complicit.
5. Batman’s elaborate show of keeping his hands clean by refusing to use guns is accompanied by tremendous “collateral damage”—in Batman Begins, the emphasis is on direct property damage, particularly the very water/transit system his father built, while in The Dark Knight, the focus is on “social chaos,” which in practice amounts to the refusal to submit to Batman’s sole authority. In response to the chaos he himself generated, Batman shows a decided willingness to torture, while still maintaining the pose of holier-than-thou pacifism. The most extreme example is when he pushes a mob boss off a roof—when the mob boss points out the fall will not kill him, Batman responds, “I’m counting on it.”
6. Batman’s main tactic in his pet crusade is the inspiration of fear, hence the bat, the animal that frightened him as a child. He learns this tactic from the League of Shadows in Batman Begins and, as an aside, it makes his lamentation to Alfred in The Dark Knight—“This is not what I had in mind when I said I wanted to inspire people”—that much more ironic. Bruce Wayne is truly delusional. Insofar as fear is what he seeks to inspire, he is something of a counterpart to Scarecrow, and both must be considered at once psychopaths and terrorists, with the latter being only more honest with himself concerning his desire for power by way of fear.
7. That “reducing crime” is not Batman’s true goal is clear: the “criminals” he fights early in the film are in fact imitators. One would think that people standing up and defending themselves and others in a situation of social chaos would be positive, but Batman derides their efforts: not only do they forfeit their ethical purity by using guns, but they’re also poor and tacky, running around in hockey pants.
8. The Joker is the protagonist and hero of The Dark Knight. He is the only truly ethical character in the film. As he repeats three times, he is “a man of his word.”
9. The Joker’s response to the neoliberal order of Gotham City is the only human one: he wishes for its destruction, initially symbolized by Batman. He enacts that destruction with joy, taking full responsibility for his actions in a way that Batman never can.
10. In Gotham, just as in our present socio-political context, mental illness might be seen as a legitimate, individual rebellion against patriarchal law and its resulting hierarchy. (What better response to capitalist multi-tasking than autism?) It is thus only fitting that the Joker should seek allies in the mental instituion, that is, the one instiution that effectively falls outside of the mob/Wayne axis.
11. “Terrorism” is not the appropriate description for the Joker’s actions, because terrorism is a strategy used by weak political actors (like the pitiable Batman) to advance their ends. The Joker wants to destroy the entire framework within which ends can be pursued, as shown by the following quote:
    

    I took your little plan and I turned it on itself. Look what I did to this city with a few drops of gas and a couple bullets. You know what, you know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that like a gangbanger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because that’s all part of the plan. But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everybody loses their minds! Introduce a little anarchy, upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair.

12. Yet it’s not a sheer negativity—or better, it’s a negation so thorough-going that it becomes its own kind of positivity. The Joker’s plots require huge amounts of labor and creativity, and he calls forth a community characterized by loyalty and fearlessness. Already in the very attempt to destroy the neoliberal order, an alternative spontaneously begins to take form.
13. Aside from the Joker, Harvey Dent is the only other character who escapes sheer bad faith: he is the “good liberal.” Dent actually believes in the spectacle, as is clear in his participation in and enjoyment of the theatricality of the courtroom scene—and this despite the fact that this very theatricality points up the bankruptcy of the judicial system, including a corruption that extends to allowing a witness to carry a gun into the courtroom. His betrayal by the system he sought to reform was arguably even more painful to Dent than the loss of Rachel.
14. In the end, the Joker succeeds only in forcing a slight reorganization of the power structure—Dent’s murders are covered up and Batman is scapegoated. The symbol of the brave vigilante watching over everyone is replaced by the symbol of the brave martyr to whom society will be forever indebted. In both cases, the people remain passive spectators. However, were the Joker’s project to be comprehended by the populace, a more thoroughgoing destabilization would be achieved by default—for it is the Joker who consistently addresses the populace at large, demanding action and above all the assumption of responsibility. In sharp contrast with the practitioners of the “noble lie,” the Joker is not only a “man of his word” but attempts to drive others to be the same.
15. To allay any suspicion that this interpretation is motivated by a contrarian’s willfulness, we conclude with some words of wisdom from the loyal Alfred. We are referring here not to his oft-quoted characterization of the Joker as a man who “just wants to watch the world burn,” but to his final solution to men who “can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with.” The famous quote occurs in the context of an analogy between the Joker and a Burman jewel thief who steals from the British colonialists and throws his spoils away—a situation that is only revealed when soldiers find a child playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine. Much later in the film, when Bruce Wayne asks how the soldiers finally defeated their foe, Alfred replies: “We burned down the forest.” Who, then, wants to watch the world burn? Alfred himself says it: the lawmen, the money men, the punishers.

Ontology as Morality

Radical Orthodoxy is the most intellectually sophisticated version of postmodern Christianity — a class that for me includes Hauerwasianism, the Emergent Church, the evangelical development of “worldviews,” and creationism, to name just a few examples. The postmodern versions of Christianity are all helpful in understanding what postmodernism was all along: a moralizing discourse that approves or rejects various ontologies based on their putative moral effects. Modern subjectivity? Immoral — it caused the holocaust, environmental degradation, etc. The disseminatory play of difference? Moral — it helps us to be open toward the other. Though postmodern Christianity does sometimes deploy what purport to be factual critiques of its target ontologies, the emotional charge is ultimately on the moral effects: evolutionary theory, for instance, is immoral because it undercuts belief in God and in human dignity.

In the case of Radical Orthodoxy, a particular version of Neoplatonism is put forward as the only “robust” ontology, the only ontology that can ground a peaceful, presumably socialist polity. Such an ontology is supposed to have prevailed during the High Middle Ages. There are occasional gestures toward demonstrating how much better things were back then, but it all takes place on a very formal level — and when push comes to shove, it is claimed that the goal is to rejoin an alternate future (because apparently “progress” occurs in this ontology).

More generally, in clear defiance of the etymology of “ontology,” there is very little serious effort to base their robust ontology on how things actually are. Analytic philosophers studying brain sciences presumably have the “metaphysics of a serial killer”: alright, but does Radical Orthodoxy have a better way to account for the results of brain science? I suspect that any such attempt would amount to yet another reassertion of the ontology that they know is true because, in some imagined alternate future, it produces beneficial moral effects.

The only credible way forward for a genuinely robust ontology — i.e., one that would be persuasive to those for whom actual reality is a more decisive factor than purported moral consequences — is Pannenberg’s. In my view, his method in Anthropology in Theological Perspective charts the course for any attempt to hold speculative thought — and here I would count non-vuglar-materialist philosophy and psychoanalytic theory along with theology — accountable to empirical evidence.

Thinking Hierarchy Beyond Weakness and Nostalgia: A Draft

What follows below is the latest draft of my AAR paper. I’m planning on sending a similar version to the respondent, but reserve the right to make revisions and may possible expand it, with some more Schmitt and a longer ecology section, for consideration at a journal or two. So I’m posting it in this form to see if anyone has suggestions. Do let me know in the comments (though don’t worry about typos – I don’t care about those at this stage and will likely catch them on the next read through – just far too lazy to do that tonight – fuck writing for an audience, this is a blog of cruelty).

When young intellectuals today begin to think the relationship between the political and the religious they must think about hierarchy. The spectre of hierarchy haunts the work of those, like myself, who think about this relationship from within a radical tradition of critique and constructive conceptualizing. This spectre of thought is taken up in two of this generations most radical and creative movements – deconstructive theology (also known as secular theology and weak theology) and Radical Orthodoxy (in all its varied forms, and it is very varied). Because these two movements are both so influential when attempting to think anew the relationship between the political and the religious and so haunted by the spectre of hierarchy we must first locate where these movements position us.

Let’s begin, admittedly somewhat arbitrarily, with deconstructive theology and its most influential proponent – John Caputo and his weak theology. For Caputo the history of theology and religion has been one of “rouged theology”, by which he is not all that subtlety intimating that theology has been a whore to power. Caputo’s weak theology of the event attempts to outdo Luther with his own grievances against not just the Catholic church, but all religious organizations. For religious organizations, in Caputo’s view, set themselves up hierarchically with people claiming power over others in such a way that they commit violence against others and to the very spirit of their religion. Caputo’s negative view of hierarchy is thus a critique of power itself. Not much more needs to be said on this manner – anyone who does not see some truth to critique of hierarchy as a critique of power is invited to read some history, or at least the papers, where the abuses of power throughout the history of the Church are evident (Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant, saying nothing of the other world religions).

But we need not to go as far as Caputo does, at least not yet. From a reserved position we can take from Caputo’s critique the sense that hierarchy is another name for organizations of power. Contemporary hierarchies posit that there is a God above us all from which we gain our own power via participation and gift. This need not be the god of anything we recognize as religion, for anything can come to take this place of the highest become the principle of organization. [Indeed Philip has shown masterly how this is the case in contemporary culture with regard to money.]

But it is often this highest that is the object of contestation. For Caputo the bestowing upon the name of God all glory and power makes the highest ultimately a tool yielded as a weapon in the hand of the oppressor. Caputo, rightly in our view, brings attention to bear upon how the highest name – God – can be used in the service of great violence that destroys not only others but the worthiness of the highest itself, but others argue for the necessity of this name. John Milbank, one of the founders of Radical Orthodoxy, is one such proponent. He makes the cogent point that hierarchy not only serves the abuse of power, but the highest principle – God – limits and measures violence. In Milbank’s view the need for hierarchy is based on the need to reject “secular immanence” ‘which is totalizing and terroristic because it acknowledges no supra-human power beyond itself by which it might be measured and limited’. And I can only appeal to the history books as well as the papers for evidence of this. God’s name has become so deterritorialized that the death of God has truly opened not to liberation, but to more and more cultural scientism and blindness to the limits of consumption (and thus to capitalism itself).

But this deterritorialization of the name of God has lead equally to the name of God being invoked as the cause of everything from who wins sporting championships to the imperial crusades of super powers and reactionary terrorism of fringe and heretical religious sects. And though Milbank and others in the movement of Radical Orthodoxy recognize and have criticisms of resurgent fundamentalisms, is their answer really sufficient to respond to these reactionary movements. Will more Thomism, and Thomism of a strange stripe, really free Christianity from its most deterritorialized form (the American civil religion) or firm up the backbone of the Vatican to emphasize their opposition to capitalism rather than their current focus on the far less important questions revolving around sex? And, facing the brutality and stupidity of what Thomas wrote about Jews, Muslims, pagans, and what should be allowed to be done to them, what would such a strange Thomism really offer to the question of religious pluralism? Not to say they won’t, but it thus far no real answer has been given aside from some vague hang waving about particpation and the analogia entis.

These issues are at the core of charges of nostalgia levelled against Radical Orthodoxy. A charge that has not gone without response – Milbank writes‘[it] is not at all to say that we should have remained forever in the culture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. No, it is an unknown future that we have missed and must seek to rejoin.’ It seems to me that Milbank does show that his thought is not reactionary, in so far that he argues for a future different from the merely calculable quotidian future of capitalism, but this does not mean he has avoided nostalgia. For though he wants us to return to the future that could have been, and this is a future that Milbank believes would have been better, this is done through a return to the conditions of that future – the pre-1300’s Middle Ages. Setting aside the historical question of whether or not these were truly better, more hospitable times where ‘contrary to all the assumptions of secular sovereignty, [society was] all the more democratic the more it is genuinely hierarchical’ , this proscription offers us nothing but a mythology or fabulaton which remains unconnected to any real radical political movements – though some influence on the Vatican via the current Pope does seem apparent.

It seems that we cannot truly go along with Milbank and Radical Orthodoxy with regard to hierarchy – at least not as it currently stands. Though Milbank rightly shows that hierarchies spring up regardless of whether or not people believe God to be dead. Further holds that the political hierarchy is dependent on the mystical hierarchy of the corupus mysticum in such a way that it can limit the abuse of power if the political hierarchy would only realize what it should be directed towards. But the shortcomings remain and suggest that rather than the position of Milbank and Radical Orthodoxy deconstructive weak theology is to be preferred.

This is not my view. For ultimately Caputo’s theology brings us to conclusion that only liberalism can open the path to true religiosity – remaining open, thus faithful, to the weak call of God. In a 2005 key note address in Knoxville, Tennessee Caputo presented the political import of his weak theology by stating that if his weak theology called for any global politics it would be closely akin to three branches of government, balanced against one another by various checks, with a strong tradition of rights stemming from the indeconstruablity of justice. That is to say, the political import of weak theology is an idealized version of the American liberal system writ global. Thus Caputo’s Kingdom of God is always deferred in its fullness and never is on earth as it is in heaven.

This sort of infinite deferral forms the negative eschatology of classical liberalism in that here positive liberty is infinitely deferred via the apparatus of negative liberty. But we now live in a neo-liberal world, of which American neo-conservatives form but a sect. Now negative liberty has taken the place of positive liberty. Violence is used to bring to the peoples of the world, as if a gift from God, this freedom not to be anything except what they want. I recognize the liberation that comes from being free of identities hierarchies bestow or force on people, but this is all illusion. For any attempt to think the political or the religious must think the non-representative political of capitalism. Caputo’s critique of hierarchy as power is incomplete because it only offers negative liberty, an offer that neither avoids joining with the burden of “sharing” this negative liberty or responding to the hierarchy of capitalism that thrives on such infinite deferral. Thus when Caputo says that he does not support radical revolution, but rather piecemeal reform, it is because he has lacked the vision to see that all capitalist economics has taken on political powers outside any influence from representation and thus can only be overcome by way of sufficient strength – which is not to say violence, for any response to this present crisis calls for something even more cunning and cruel than an atom bomb.

Let’s step back for a moment and locate ourselves within the wider world. Carl Schmitt famously said that all modern theories of the state, and thus all theories of the political, were secularized theological concepts. This echoes Michael Hardt who said in a recent interview that he and Antonio Negri write about the history of theology and employ theological concepts because the history of politics has been tied up with the history of theology. Is it unsurprising then that in the history of ideas “hierarchy” comes to us first as a theological concept and not a political one?

The first instance of the concept of hierarchy we’re familiar with today, as an abstract nouns, comes from the theology of Pseudo-Dionysius. In Dionysius’ formulation a hierarchy is ‘a scared order, a state of understanding and an activity approximating as closely as possible to the divine’ receiving all power from God to move toward that for which it is given. The goal of a hierarchy is to enable beings to be as like as possible to God and at one with God. In Dionysius’ thinking this is essentially a good thing. The more we are like God the more we are good and humble, holy and just, loving and creative.

This short mapping of our two Johns – Jack and Johnny – suggests that they represent two starkly opposed position. But we find ourselves not hopelessly torn between two sets of coordinates, but focused on what could be a coordinated attempt to bring about a thought of all good, all justice, love, and peace, as being gifts from a loving, creative God that yearns for creation to be free – that is our map is clearly the same Pseudo-Dionysian territory. Caputo, the one who hates hierarchy and all power, also says ‘“kingdom” is not, in itself, altogether a “bad name” […] Just so long as what reigns in this kingdom is justice and not terror, and no one enjoys special royal privileges or privileged access in the corridors of power, and there is not a purple or royal robe anywhere to be found, then I will be the first to step forward and declare myself a royalist who is dreaming of a kingdom to come.’ Milbank, the nostalgic one, hoping for a return to the hierarchy of the Middle Ages with its serfs and lords, is caught with his own ‘viens! viens!’ on his lips: ‘‘By contrast, transcendence appears hierarchic and fixed, but its ontological height resides beyond all immanent heights, and therefore is as close to ontic depths as to ontic elevations. For this reason, its truth can be mediated to us and we can, one day, be liberated.’ The true difference between their thinking of hierarchy is properly theological – they differ precisely on who God is, but share in their God-drunkenness – though each has their own favourite drink. In thinking hierarchy everything depends on who their God is.

Then should we not all be doing theology? Attempting to formulate exactly who God is? What our end is? What our highest is? Whether these are even coherent conceptions of God? Perhaps; obviously in this day and age there is more need for theology than ever. But is this really the problem for our age? It would seem that there are plenty of competing claims about God and our life with God – some would say we live after the death of God, others that the religious is returning and with that the return of all sorts of gods (though surely these gods are not that much different than before), still others say there is one, true God who will judge the living and the dead. Surely all these claims suggest that our problem remains theological, but I want to suggest that the reality of our crisis is not so simple precisely because of the spectre of hierarchy.

As humanity is made more and more aware of the real, ecological limits to capitalism – that is to the very liturgy common in global society – ecological reason becomes more important. Philip expresses this forcefully in Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety: ‘For to be rational today is to pay attention to the universal limits of human experience. The truth of common experience is the ecological limit, the suffering of the planet.’ With this in mind we have to recognize that the problem can no longer be theological in the old style. Here I echo the words of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: ‘It may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still to be discovered on our plane of immanence today. This is the empiricist conversion (we have so many reasons not to believe in the human world; we have lost the word, worse than a fiancée or a god). The problem has indeed changed.”

Hierarchy is still a concept in ecological reason, but it has undergone significant changes. The clearest example I can think of, and very helpful as an image for all of us who are not pure ecologists, is the change from food chains to food webs in ecosystem ecology. A brief explanation will make the importance of this clear. The history of the concept of ecosystem demands that we accept relationality beyond just the living organisms, the biotic community, but extend it to that of the dead and the inorganic or “never-living”. An ecosystem captures the dynamics of communities of the living and the dead as they interact with the never-living so that when energy animates the system there is an exchange of material between the living and the dead. One such interaction is the exchange of energy that takes place in eating amongst organisms in the ecosystem. The old model was that of a food chain which was basically a static hierarchy – this is the same model that people appeal to when chiding their vegetarian friends for not eating meat even though humans, they say, are on the top of the food chain. This model was not sufficient to truly model the complex relationships and exchanges between organisms and so the food web was introduced. In this model the hierarchy is not top-down, but rather flattens out, graphically, the relationships to show the relative interconnectedness of each organism to one another. I’m tempted to call this an immanent hierarchy, but perhaps a better understanding is that it intimates the potencies of each organism – what appears to be the lowest may be truly irreplaceable or it may be very replaceable – regardless it has a place in the hierarchy that is not so naively assumed.

Does this ecological reasoning help modify the coordinates deconstructive theology and Radical Orthodoxy locate us within? Does it help us to respond to our contemporary problem? Does it foster belief in this world? I want to suggest that it does or at least can offer a way forward from the seeming aporia of deciding whether we believe in a weak God or a God who is all being. We recognize that God must be thought about – theology must be performed. But this theology needs to be couched in ecological reason, it must recognize that our thinking of God cannot locate God at the heights and the lowly earthworm at the bottom, but must move beyond transcendence and immanence and recognize that all conceptions of God can only give express a potency for thought and life. Irregardless of whether or not we are only in so far as we participate in God or we are in the same way God is, our being is more hierarchically complex than weakness or nostalgia can account for. Hierarchy is the conceptual name for an actual organization and if we think more creatively about what is highest we may be able to short-circuit what appears to be the inevitable self-destruction and entropy of every organization. This paper has been an attempt to think towards that end.