Followers of Bishop NT Wright (among whom I count myself, since he was a primary reason I left the PCA to become an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Texas) will know that his third (and final?) book in the series which began with Simply Christian which was then followed up with Surprised by Hope is called After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters, and is, among other things, the good bishop’s treatment of the Christian tradition of virtue.

This is good news, since (in my opinion) one of the most urgent tasks for the church in terms of its current vocation in our nihilistic culture of consumeristic emotivism is training the people in virtue, closely related to what the ancient church called paideia.

For a briefer taste of what Bishop Tom is up to here, check out this video lecture, given at Fuller Seminary a few months ago.

Here are some of my notes on this lecture:

For Aristotle, happiness (eudaimonia) which is our telos as human beings, is not something that “just happens” naturally. In fact, it is something which must be intentionally chosen, and then repeatedly put into practice, such that they eventually become “second nature.”

Nothing in this is inconsistent with how God graciously saves us and sanctifies us. As Reformed theology has always insisted, sanctification is synergistic.

NTW’s three proposals:

1. Rehabilitate virtue within Christian discourse, as opposed to Enlightenment and Romantic thought.

2. “Rethinking Aristotle into a Christian Key.” The eschatological vision of “new heaven & new earth” allows us to reframe Aristotle’s theory in a new and creative way, which other virtue thinkers have yet to grasp. Reframes “ethics” (as opposed to rules or consequence calculations, that is, deontology and utlitarianism / consequentialism) within the a theology of stewardship of creation. Substitute NH&NE (”new heavens & new earth”) & resurrection for eudaimonia.

a. The telos is the NH&NE, inauged by Jesus, and completed in the future.

b. This telos is achieved thru the kingdom-establishing work of Jesus.

c. Christian living in the present consists in anticipating the NE&NE through the Spirit-led practice of the acquiring of the theological virtues of faith, hope & love wh transcend & strengthen the cardinal virtues. These sustain our present existence which already reflect God’s healing & victory & glory of the future world. A true anticipation.

3. This challenges the church in such a way to sustain the mission to which it is called.

Pelonias in Hamlet: “To thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not be false to any man.”

Nobody knows the language of virtue as their mother tongue, but we do glimpse that country from afar from time to time, we pick up hints about how its language works, what patterns of brain & body are needed. The more we practice that language, the more easily familiar it will be.

“In coming to see the other correctly, we inescapably alter our understanding of ourselves.  Really taking in the other will involve an identity shift in us.  That is why it is so often resisted and rejected.  We have a deep identity investment in the distorted images we cherish of others … If understanding the other is to be construed as fusion of horizons and not as possessing a science of the object, then the slogan might be:  no understanding the other without a changed understanding of self.  The kind of understanding that ruling groups have of the ruled, that conquerors have of the conquered—most notably in recent centuries in the far-flung European empires—has usually been based on a quiet confidence that the terms they need are already in their vocabulary.  Much of the ‘social science’ of the last century is in this sense just another avatar of an ancient human failing.  And indeed, the satisfactions of ruling, beyond the booty, the unequal exchange, the exploitation of labor, very much includes the reaffirmation of one’s identity that comes from being able to live this fiction without meeting brutal refutation.  Real understanding always has an identity cost—something the ruled have often painfully experienced.  It is a feature of tomorrow’s world that this cost will now be less unequally distributed” (Charles Taylor, “Gadamer on the Human Sciences,” 141).

Thanks to Cynthia Nieslon for this.

“The Names of God” in the Summa Theologica (Section 1.13 / Question 13)

When Thomas speaks of the “names” (Lat. nomen) of God, he means the words we use to describe God, including his “attributes,” such as “good,” “wise,” etc. (not just biblical names such as “Lion” or “Rock”). In the first section (1.13.3) Thomas argues that some of the words we use do, in fact, refer to God literally. Unlike some words such as “rock” or “strong” which are metaphorical in that they posit an analogy between God and creation, other words such as “good” are literally referential of God, even though they, too, Thomas admits, are derived from our understanding of creatures.

Literal, yes, but univocal, no, for “no name belongs to God in the same sense that it belongs to creatures.” (69) The definition of “wisdom” is dependent upon its referent. So it does not mean the same thing when referring to God as it does when referring, say, to a serpent. (Since this is the case, it seems like Thomas does not believe in univocal language at all [not just with respect to God]).

(Section 1.13.5) Words of perfection describe something in God which preexists what they describe in creatures. In fact any term of perfection, when applied to a creature, refers to something independent of the creature. For example, to call a man “good” is to invoke the objective reality of “the good” which is totally independent of the man spoken of. Not so with God, however. When we say that God is good we are not invoking some standard which God is then compared to and subsumed under. Rather, what we are signifying is not distinct from God’s “essence, power, or existence.” (70) So “good” here is not univocal: it means something different, or at least something non-univocal, when applied to God vis a vis creatures.

However, “good” here is not (purely) equivocal, either. Otherwise, we would have no knowledge of God, for language of God would always be guilty of the fallacy of equivocation.[1] Rather, language about God is analogical, since it is neither univocal nor equivocal.

Analogy functions in two ways. First, many things (two or more) can have a “proportion” (relationship?) to a third thing. For example, “healthy” can refer to urine or medicine, because both are related to a third thing: the body. Second, two things can have a relationship to each other. For example, “healthy” can refer to medicine or to an animal, since these two things are related to one another directly (ie, without a third thing). Our language about God falls under this second category. The two “things” are creation and God, and they are related in terms of cause. The perfections in the cause “preexist in the most excellent way.” (71)

Hence Thomas’ arguments about language presupposes his argument about causation, that God is the cause of creation.

Not just words are univocal or non-univocal. Agents (ie, causes and effects) are, too, since “the non-univocal agent is the universal cause of the whole series.” (My “gloss” on this: Thomas is saying that the cause “contains” the whole series. Hence its “meaning” must contain the meaning of all the effects, or something like that.)

Thomas has been presupposing that language and causality themselves are analogous or somehow related, and he makes this pruspposition explicit near then end of this section: “[This universal agent ] can be called an analogous agent, in the same way that in predication all univocal predications are traced back to the first non-univocal analogous predication, which is being.” (72) Bauerschmidt puts it nicely: “Whatever we affirm in our language involves a logically prior affirmation of some sort of being.” (72)[2]

Analogical language lies between univocal language and equivocal language. Hence our language about God is true, although it still contains an element of non-fixedness or perhaps ambiguity.

I find it interesting that, throughout this entire discussion, Thomas is speaking about God as if God were not incarnate. I am not suggesting that this is inappropriate. However, it does seem that in the Incarnation opens up whole new possibilities between God and man. For now, in Jesus, there is not an analogy between God and man, but a unity or an identity.

There are two kinds of tradition which play important roles in the life of the church for the world.

First, there is (oral) “Tradition,” which, as St. Basil says, refers primarily to the handing down of ritual actions in the liturgical worship of the church. This kind of tradition is of course in theory subject to Scripture, though it is hard to imagine how it could “contradict Scripture.” On the other hand, there is a sense in which this kind of tradition is prior to Scripture in that, since time immemorial, it has conditioned the public reading of Scripture in specific, proscribed ways. The public reading of Scripture, in other words, is embedded or enfolded within this ritual action which is the church’s liturgy. (Scripture itself refers to this kind of Tradition.)

Second, a very different type of tradition is what Alisdair MacIntyre (and others) have described in the following terms (Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue p 221):

The traditions through which particular practices are transmitted and reshaped never exist in isolation for larger social traditions. What constitutes such traditions?We are apt to be misled here by the ideological uses to which the concept of a tradition has been put by conservative political theorists. Characteristically such theorists have followed Burke in contrasting tradition with reason and the stability of tradition with conflict. Both contrasts obfuscate. For all reasoning takes place within the context of some traditional mode of thought, transcending through criticism and invention the limitations of what had hitherto been reasoned in that tradition; this is as true of modern physics as of medieval logic. Moreover when a tradition is in good order it is always partially constituted by an argument about the goods the pursuit of which gives to that tradition its particular point and purpose.

So when an institution–a university, say, or a farm, or a hospital–is the bearer of a tradition of practice or practices, its common life will be partly, but in a centrally important way, constituted by a continuous argument as to what a university is and ought to be or what good farming is or what good medicine is. Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead.

In this latter sense tradition is an ongoing dialogue that takes place over large periods of time within particular communities.

I have a great deal of respect for Peter Rollins. Both of his two recent books are provocative and stimulating. What I appreciate about him is that he brings his knowledge of “postmodern” theory (Zizek, Derrida, Levinas, and others) to bear on Christian theology. Rightly so.

However, when it comes to what I regard as “the great divide” in the Church and in Christianity, Peter Rollins falls clearly on one side.

One side says that our worship is an expression of our theology and our convictions. The other side says that worship is something that we simply inherit from the past (as tradition or in Greek paradosis, ie, “handing down”) and then (yes, critically) reflect on that received tradition and ask questions like “In light of this way of worshiping, what can we realize about God and creation?”

Rollins clearly lands of the former side. Which means that he, along with, perhaps, the rest of the “emergent movement,” thinks that worship is, at the end of the day, an expression of our theology.

I disagree. I, along with the bulk of the catholic tradition in both the east and the west, think that “the law of worship is the law belief.” Lex orandi, lex credendi. Our theology flows from our worship, and not vice-versa.

In his Theology, Rhetoric, and Manuduction, Peter Candler “defines” participation and representation (p. 34):

By ‘participation’ I refer to an ontological principle by which creatures ‘are’ by analogy to the way in which God ‘is,’ but also the notion that sacra doctrina is a kind of scientia which participates in God’s knowledge of himself, and is therefore not something superadded to God.

And again,

Representation … is a matter of immediate apprehension by virtue of an exterior sign, and is removed from the variables of time and human communities. As such, representation is the fundamental philosophical and theological strategy of modernity.

I have been trying to map out the genealogy of modern Thomist movements (using Fergus Kerr’s Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians as well as The Cambridge Companion to Christian Thought), and here is what I found:

1. Leo XIII decided to “revive scholastic philosophy and theology which had fallen largely out of use,” and issues Aeterni Patris (1879), to “advocate the return of the church to ‘the wisdom of St. Thomas.’” (“Thomism [1], modern, Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, 703).

2. Desire Mercier, at the Higher Institute of Philosophy (which he himself established in Louvain in 1889) was able to bring (the study of) Thomism and scholasticism into dialogue with the contemporary scene, largely due to the fact that he was working in the vernacular (French), as opposed to many of his contemporaries at monastic schools, etc., who were required to write in Latin.

3. Thus the study of Thomism and scholasticism begins to gain currency in the late 19 century. Enter Maurice Blondel and Henri Bergson, who (were perceived to have) resonated with many aspects of Thomism. Many Catholic thinkers begin to be attracted to them.

4. But due to the non-Catholic aspects of some of their thought, they also cause something of a scare, and this prompts  a reaction (including Pius VII’s Humani Generis in 1950). Garrigou-Langrange and Gardiel, both 20th century Thomists who were reacting against (the catholic attraction to) Blondel and Bergson, both ground the mind’s immediate grasp of reality in the stable concept of being abstracted from the object of sense experience, thus securing a longed for stability. This sounds like representation to me. Garrigou constructed “a Thomistic metaphysics and philosophy of God grounded upon the three degrees of abstraction he had inherited from Cajetan, the 16th-century Dominican commentator on Thomas.” (“Thomism (1), modern” 704) Maritain (like Garrigou, a Dominican) was deeply influenced by Garrigou (especially his Cajetan view of the three degrees of abstraction), but also by Bergson (an influence he never superceded). Maritain is a “systematic neo-Thomist.”

5. Etiene Gilson. Gilson, the hallmark of whose work is a close textual attentiveness to the medievals (Augustine, Bonaventure, Thomas, and Duns Scotus) opposed Maritain’s proclivity toward abstraction as a basis for knowledge, and claimed that this kind of neo-sholasticism is not Thomistic. Gilson limited his work, however, by and large, to historical study of Thomas’ text.

6. Balthassar, de Lubac, Congar are more properly thought of as humanist Thomists, following Gilson, and are critical of Thomist scholasticism, including its Baroque and Twentieth Century retrievals.

Last semester I had the opportunity to do an independent study with Nathan Jennings at the Seminary of the Southwest in the moral tradition of virtue in Christianity. I felt that this tradition was something almost completely eclipsed in my Reformed theological training at Westminster Theological Seminary. I am grateful for the opportunity to engage in this study, which follows. For the introduction to this essay see here.

First, we recognize in each of these civilizations, a certain priority of the social. That is, the particular traits of personality or character which come to be prized in a given culture are rooted in the social arrangement of the time, along with the specific roles which accompany that arrangement. So, for example, in the heroic civilization described and narrated in the epic poems of Homer,  we find those qualities which make for an effective warrior are valued: loyalty (to kin), courage, and strength (principally physical strength). The warrior is the glue, you might say, which binds the society together, and so the virtues of the role of soldier  come to be seen (by Homer as well as his later ancient interpreters) as the highest virtues – at least in that particular society and culture – of the human moral life.

In fifth-century Athens, however, nothing could be more formative on the moral vision of Plato, Aristotle and the various schools (Stoicism, Skepticism) than the establishment of the democratic city state of Athens. Here a different politics, a different “prior social arrangement,” is going on other than that of Homer’s kinship-based, warrior society. Writes MacIntyre:

For Homeric man there could be no standard external to those embodied in the structures of his own community to which appeal could be made; for Athenian man, the matter is more complex. His understanding of the virtues does provide him with standards by which he can question the life of his own community and enquire whether this or that practice or policy is just. Nonetheless he also recognizes that he possesses his understanding of the virtues only because his membership in the community provides him with such understanding. The city is a guardian, a parent, a teacher, even though what is learnt from the city may lead to a questioning of this or that feature of its life.

No longer does the common good of the society depend primarily upon the warrior’s effective performance of his role. Here, in fifth century Athens, a different role is required with different standards, or excellencies, of performance. What matters now more than a society full of good warriors is a society full of good citizens, together with the different social role which accompanies the citizen.

This social situation gives rise the particular values of fifth century Athens. Hence young men were enrolled in various schools and academic formation societies in order to cultivate the virtues of   rhetoric (on the more pragmatic side) and justice (on the more theoretical side). Again, the four “cardinal virtues” of justice, temperance, prudence, and fortitude (among others) were seen as foundational to the well being of the city state.
With the rise of medieval Christendom, however, we find a radically different social situation. Gone are the days of classical Athens and its counterpart, that cultural echo which is the city of Rome. In this new political reality, several factors come into play to create a different kind of, and a different conception of, social space. First, no longer is the polis, as classically conceived, becomes the primary locus of one’s committed loyalty. Rather, there is a new city in town, that city set on a hill, the politeuma  of the church, together with her sister city, the Christian kingdom. In these overlapping communities a different set of excellencies, a different set of aretai, is valued, encouraged, and cultivated.

Second, in medieval Christendom, for example the span of Thomas Aquinas’ life in thirteenth century France, the church and the civilization of which it is the center is being challenged and confronted by Islam. This new cultural situation gives rise to the need for mission, and in response St. Thomas writes his Summa Contra Gentiles. Here we see an example of how the values of the community are not just for the purposes of the community itself, but also for its expansion, its social mission to the world.

Third, the Europe just before St. Thomas’ time is a Europe now getting the first tastes of the literature of classical antiquity mediated through a kind of proto-Renaissance. As MacIntyre points out, this widespread confrontation served as a social crisis of a different kind, one which forced the society how to deal with challenges from a pagan (ie, not just Muslim) world view . Such a social challenge was utterly new, nothing of its kind having occurred either in classical Greece or in its predecessor culture.

This new social situation gives rise to the particular values of medieval Christendom, values needed for the survival and bene esse of the Christian church community. Faith, hope, charity are at the top of the list of virtues required for the collective eudaimonia of the Christian church, which is why Thomas borrowed them from I Corinthians 13 and with them adorned the more secular virtues of Aristotle and the classical tradition.

We see, then, that each of these three predecessor cultures to modernity share a common feature: their social setting conditions the human character traits which it values. But the point is actually deeper than this: far from exhibiting a denial or even a nervousness of the social or political rootedness of moral discourse, these three predecessor cultures are willing openly to admit and celebrate this. And we are now in a position to show why that is: for all three of these civilizations, morality and the practice of morality was intended to serve the common good, the good of the whole community, in each of its different conceptions / configurations, respectively. And because the common telos of man / humanity is public, it is unitary in its public nature: we see no bifurcation – not in the narrative world of Homer, not in the city state of Athens, not in medieval Christendom – of the public and the private. If the private exists at all (a doubtful protasis), then it exists only for the sake of the public, for the sake of the commonweal, for the sake of the common good of all its members.

For Part II of this series go here.

Last semester I had the opportunity to do an independent study with Nathan Jennings at the Seminary of the Southwest in the moral tradition of virtue in Christianity. I felt that this tradition was something almost completely eclipsed in my Reformed theological training at Westminster Theological Seminary. I am grateful for the opportunity to engage in this study, which follows.

Within what Anglicans call the Apocryphal / Deuterocanonical books of Scripture, in the book of I Maccabees, we read in the first chapter that, after many years of Jewish struggle to maintain its own faithful identity in the context of Gentile rule,  that “certain renegades … from Israel … built a gymnasium in Jerusalem, according to Gentile custom, and removed the marks of circumcision, and abandoned the holy covenant. They joined themselves with the Gentiles and sold themselves to do evil.”

“What hath Jerusalem to do with Athens?” asked the African church father Tertullian in the early third century. According to the narrative perspective of I Maccabees, the answer is clear: absolutely nothing.
And yet this paper, investigating antique (ie, pagan) virtue is not written from the perspective of Jerusalem. Rather it is written from the perspective of Antioch, or of Rome, or of Canterbury. For Christianity is not merely Jewish, any more than it is merely Gentile.

And so in this paper we are perhaps asking, “What does Rome  have to do with Jerusalem and Athens?” For an answer to this question which is at once historical and theological we will turn to St. Thomas Aquinas. But before we do that, we will rely on Alisdair MacIntyre to guide us through times and seasons before and after St. Thomas. For what precedes Thomas – what he inherits and baptizes – is a rich and complex tradition of virtue. According to MacIntyre, this tradition has its primative origins in the ancient culture which MacIntyre calls “heroic” (primarily the narrative – epic and saga – world of Homer as well as those of other lands such as Ireland, Iceland, and Germany). It then finds its touchstone in the developments of fifth century Athens of Socrates, Plato, Sophocles, and especially Aristotle.  This tradition is then translated into Latin (with Cicero and Boethius playing mediating roles) and inherited (and sometimes rejected) by medieval theologians in the eleventh and twelfth centuries such as Peter  Abelard and Thomas Aquinas.

These three predecessor cultures – primieval heroic culture, fifth-century Athens, and medieval Christendom – are important as the backdrop to modernity. For in modernity the plot thickens, as the tradition is apparently discarded by such thinkers as Descartes and Kant. I say “apparently discarded” because, as MacIntyre crucially points out, most modern thinkers (including the profoundly Christian Kierkegaard) retain many fragments of theology from this predecessor tradition while at the same time both living in a radically new social situation lacking the social and political soil in which the previous world view had grown up, and rejecting many of the philosophical and theological bases in which these very retained fragments are rooted. This situation – retaining traditional concepts like “God” or “love” while rejecting their foundations or reasons – gives rise to moral incoherence, especially when accompanied by the complex rise of pluralism, in which many different communities of voices and cultures of voices pick and choose and arrange their fragments from the past differently. MacIntyre calls this state of moral confusion “emotivism.”

As I inquire into the nature of this moral tradition of virtue, however, I do so not simply as some generic Christian, but rather as a member of the particular tradition of Anglicanism. What, if anything, does Anglicanism think of this tradition of virtue? Has it received and developed it, or simply rejected it? Is this premodern tradition in need of retrieval within Anglicanism? To begin to answer these questions, we will examine and evaluate the work of 20th century Anglican moral theologian Kenneth Kirk. What is going on in his work from the point of view of the virtue tradition (with Alisdair MacIntyre as a prime interpreter, representative, and advocate)?

Before we turn to an evaluation of Anglican moral thought embodied in the thought of Kenneth Kirk, however, we need to look more closely at these three predecessor cultures to modernity. Instead of looking simply at the differences between these three cultures and civilizations, let us examine what they share, what they hold in common. When we do this, we find three broad overlapping features, more or less shared among them: (what I will call) a priority of sociology, a practice of philosophy, and a presupposition of anthropology.

See here for Part I of this series.

In this essay (a letter, actually) Gregory is arguing against those who say there are three deities.

I.    Some argue for three deities based on the idea of deity (that is, what Father, Son and HS have in common) as essence or ousia.

• This argument is based on analogy with the way we speak of human persons, or in this case, of men. The argument is that we can refer to “Peter, James, and Paul” because of what they all three have in common: man-ness. So what is going on here is that they are being referred to as individuals by reference to what they have in common.

• But this is actually problematic or misleading (though it would be futile to try to change the way we speak) and though this linguistic problem is relatively inconsequential for created things like men or pens, it matters supremely when we are speaking of God. What is going on here that the individual things are being referred to by their (common) nature.

• Gregory’s argument runs something like this. I might say “I have three pens in my backpack.” But formally speaking that is not actually correct. I don’t have three distinct essences of pen-ness in my backpack; I actually have three distinct participants in  or intstantiations of  “pen-ness” in my backpack. The essence of ousia of God is like “pen-ness,” and the hypostases of God are like the individual “things” which are subsumed under the category “pen” or “pen-ness.”

• To employ another analogy. Consider matter or materiality. If in my backpack I have three items: a pen, a rock, and a ball, I don’t say that I have “three matters” in my backpack. (It would even be a bit strange to say that I have “three materials” in my backpack.) It would be more formally correct to say “I have three material objects” in my backpack: three distinct hypostases, all of which participate in materiality or matter.

II.    Some argue for three deities based on the idea of deity (that is, what Father, Son, and HS have in common) as operation or act or energeia. But this cannot be the case because we know that all of God’s actions are shared or indivisible. We know this in two ways:

1. In Scripture we see that all of God’s actions are one. Father sees (Ps 84:9); Son sees (Mt 9:4); Spirit sees (Acts 5:3).
2. In our Christian experience we see that all of God’s actions are one. I have one “crown of free gifts,” one graciously given life which is from Father, Son & Spirit. I don’t have three lives, and so it must be the case Father, Son, & Holy Spirit are jointly at work in this activity of bestowing life to me.

• Therefore, even if one conceives of deity as operation / energeia (and we know that all our categories fall short of the infinite God, cf 152), one still must admit that there are not three deities.

• Note: Gregory’s argument here concerning the operations or actions of God, it seems to me, presupposes the neoplatonic principle that  energeia is revelatory of essence (see here).

In “Letter II” of his The Pillar and Ground of the Truth one of the things Paval Florensky is actually doing is providing some arguments, based in reason (as opposed to revelation) for the Christian doctrine of God as Trinity.

He does this in part by arguing negatively against secular ways of “knowing:” “The knowledge that Pilate (in John 18) lacked, the knowledge which all mankind lacks is above all the conditions of certitude.”

He then considers three basic attempts people have made to try to attain these “conditions of certitude:” the sensuous-empirical, the transcendental-rationalist, and the subconscious-mystical.

All pretensions to certainty, be they sensuous-empirical, transcendental-rationalist, or subconscious-mystical, are ultimately only asserting that something is given. “My sense perception is my sense perception. The sun shines because the sun shines.” This, in turn, reduces down to A=A, which is givenness in general. This tautology pretends to be necessary and universal, but in actually, in space and time, it destroys being. If A=A, then not-A=not-A, and so A comes to be defined in terms of not-not-A. So all connection between things, including the connection of being, is destroyed. Hence, tautology, A=A, destroys all being and rationality.

“Where there is no difference, there can be no connection.” Enter Pickstock, who argues that “context is everything,” that meaning comes in connections. (Hence the senselessness and the nihilism of asyndeton.)

“Where there is no difference, there can be no connection. There is therefore only the blind force of stagnation and self-imprisonment, only egotism. Outside of itself, every I hates every I, and, hating, I strives to exclude every not-I from the sphere of being. And even the I hates itself, I, over time: the present I hates the past I, etc.”

This state of senselessness is an unavoidable antinomy of human ratioality, which Florensky describes another way: “… it turns out that the rational is at the same time unexplainable. To explain A is to reduce it to “something else,” to not-A, to that which is not A and which therefore is not-A. But if A really is satisfies the demand of rationality, it it is really rational, ie, absolutely self-identical, then it is unexplainable, irreducible to “something else”…. Therefore, A is absolutely non-reasonable, blind A, opaque to reason.

Florensky is saying that real things, reality, life, is inot in accord with “rationality,” but with reason, by which he surely means (something like or related to) logos, the divine logos.

The alternative to A=A is indirect discursis of reason, which posits a chain, a regression of reasons, which either “dream of eternity” or ends in God. But this is only marginally better than the above.

One is an impenetrable wall; the other an uncrossable sea.
What does all this have to do with the Trinity? Florensky’s critique of these three rational systems does not hold for the doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity does not simply reduce down to A=A. Florensky shows, that when the church Fathers (surely he has in mind the Cappedocian Fathers) said that God is one ousia but three hypostases, they were in effect saying that A=A and that A=notA.

Are the things in the world connected? This, the problem of the one and the many, is the age-old problem of philosophy. Florensky’s ultimate answer is going to be: “Yes, the things in the world are connected, because the “things” or the hypostases in God are connected. This connection, in the language of ontology and metaphysics, is called essence or ousia. But, as we have seen above, in order for there to be such a connection there also must be difference. And, in God, there is: three distinct persons, three distinct hypostases in harononious plenitude.

Pickstock is correct: context is everything; meaning is in the connections.

Brian McLaren, who will soon be speaking at my the Seminary of the Southwest here in Austin soon, suggests that worship is art. He rightly states that “there is a huge difference between propoganda and art. Art says, ‘Hey, I’m telling the truth as I see it. And the truth might not be pretty.’”

Much of what McLaren says here is good and true, it seems to me. He is right to call out “the worship industry” in its propaganda-like consumerism, displayed in its attempts to create a pre-packaged “experience” for “worshippers.”

He is right to imply that for an artist to pander to people’s consumeristic desires cheapens her art.

However, worship is not reducible down to art; worship is not art. Worship and liturgy may contain esthetic qualities, and it is and should be beautiful. In The Pillar and Ground of the Truth Pavel Florensky describes Russian startsky’s as “connoisseurs of beauty.” However liturgy is not artistic expression.

I have been searching for an example to show how this is the case, and today Catherine Pickstock gave it to me. In her article “Asyndeton: Syntax and Insanity,” she praises writers like Joyce and Pound for their use of disorder in their writing in order to depict the disorder of the fragmented, modern world around them. In doing this they were consummate artists. This is good and true artistic expression. It is beautiful in its truthfulness (as McLaren would say).

However, what if the liturgy were to attempt to mirror this cultural disorder by itself becoming disordered? In fact this very thing has (unwittingly, perhaps) been attempted in the modern church, as Pickstock labors to point out in this article. Twentieth-century Anglican revisions of the Creed have used asyndetic syntax in the attempt to make the Creed more palatable or acceptable to the modern worshipper. (Hmmm … this actually sounds like what McLaren rightly critiques above: the desire to pander to the consummeristic urges of modern people.)

But not only is this bad art; it is damaging to the people, for it distorts the true purpose of worship and liturgy. Unlike art, the purpose of the liturgy is not to prompt people to reflect more deeply on the world around them, as noble a purpose though this be.  (This might, however, be a purpose of preaching.) Rather, the purpose of the liturgy is to put people into participatory contact with the transcendent God. And this is something which art – no matter how good – can never do.

I am yet again forced to the conclusion that the problem with “the emergent church” is the way it thinks (to the extent that this movement is a monolithic “it”) about liturgy and worship. It has many good things to say about art. And yet, there are lots of good artists and philosophers out there who can teach us about art.

Teaching about art is not the primary role of the church. The role of the church, again, is to enact the ritual, liturgical participation in God, which is, as Alexander Schmemann tells us, the life of the world.

This is something that artists cannot do. It is something that only the church can do.

“To use a word like ‘dispossession’ is to evoke the most radical level of prayer, that of simple waiting on God, contemplation. This is a complex area: let me venture some dogmatic assertions. Contemplation in its more intense forms is associated with apophasis, the acknowledgement of the inadequacy of any form, verbal, visual, or gestural, to picture God definitively, to finish the business of religion speech (the acknowledgement which is at work in praise as well), and the expression of this recognition is silence and attention. Contemplation is giving place to the prior actuality of God in what is misleadingly called ‘passivity:’ misleadingly, because it is not a matter of suspending all creaturely activity (as if that were possible) in pure attention to the divine void.” — Rowan WIlliams, On Christian Theology, p. 11.

Last night Bouquet and I went to the Killers concert here in Austin (thanks, Caroline, for the tickets!) and it got me thinking. At various points during the concert, but especially during the song “Smile Like You Mean It” I found myself looking around at the thousands of jumping, youthful hipsters, and thinking, “Wow. This is postmodernity.”

At a broad level, one of the things going on in theology today (though this has been going on for at perhaps a century) is that people are trying to retrieve Thomas Aquinas, and that for two reasons: first, to rescue him from the arid and stultifying “scholasticism” which can at times tend to co-opt Thomas so as to solidify certain medieval characteristics of the Roman Church, and second, to bring Thomas’ theology into our contemporary culture and discourse both to actually attend to his arguments but also (at a deeper level) to develop Christian tradition today through innovative, non-identical repetition.

This, in fact, is one of the primary agendas of Radical Orthodoxy. To postmodernize, if you will, Thomistic theology in ways that are faithful to him and to the tradition he inherited and developed.

Now, I received my M.Div from a conservative, Reformed seminary, I am grateful in many ways for the riches I received there. However, it does trouble me that, basically, the only exposure we had to Thomas was to label him as one of those nasty, medieval “Roman Catholics” who elevate autonomous “natural theology” at the expense of biblical revelation. There is so much more to the story than that, even within the Reformed tradition of Calvin and his followers.

This is one main reason I am grateful to be Anglican and to be studying at an Episcopal seminary, where Thomas’ importance (in this retrieved way, alluded to above) is second to none.

One towering example of an Anglican theologian (a 20th century one, no less, though he did rely heavily upon those Anglican Thomists known as the Caroline Divines such as Jeremy Taylor and Lancelot Andrewes) who loves and develops Aquinas is Kenneth Kirk.

In his book The Vision of God (in which he argues that “seeing God” is the “chief end” of man and thus of paramount importance for [Christian] ethics) he makes several points in his summary of Thomistic theology and its importance for ethics and Christian moral theology:

1. Theological reasoning is analogical.
2. B/c of this, we can learn of God by learning of (God’s) creation.
3. Man stands as intermediate between non-intelligent matter, on the one hand, and pure, incorporeal intelligence (ie, the angels) on the other. Man’s perfection, thus, is analogically related to the perfection of “brutes” as well as of angels.
4. Thomas is perhaps the first Christian theologian (after St. Paul, perhaps?) who takes our embodiment calmly. Up til him, the best theology could do was to say something like, “Live like angels if you can; if you cannot, then live as much like them as possible.” “St. Thomas insists on saying, on the other hand, ‘Live like men, that is, like embodied souls. And remember that souls embodied cannot behave as if they were disembodied.’ The soul, in fact, is not entombed in, but endowed with, a body. Bodily emotions and bodily goods, though not the whole of the whole of the human good, are genuinely and eternally a part of it.”“By this new approach to ethics, St. Thomas brought back the heroics of ascetic rigorism – always aspiring, often unregulated, sometimes tragically wasteful – to the test of reason, and subordinated them to the supreme rule of the beatific vision as commensurate to human nature.”
5. Though the body is now affirmed as something to be accepted, gently nurtured, and celebrated, this does not mean that deep meditation and contemplation “is idle day-dreaming. Every Christian must bring to it the same honest endeavor, the same perseverance, as the scholar brings to the solution of his problems. Without such earnestness, prayer will forever be barren.
6. This emphasis on meditation is for the “wayfaring man, though a fool” and not for the scholar or philosopher alone.
7. As much as Thomas stresses the key role of meditation and contemplation, he does insist that the intuition of the divine essence – the sight of God face to face – is sternly reserved for eternity.
8. One primary condition for success in meditative awareness in prayer of God’s presence now and for final beatific vision of God in eternity is ordered discipline

1. Kirk, Kenneth. The Vision of God (New York, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1947), p. 157.

2. ibid.

“I pray to Christ to wing me to my Jerusalem. for the Stoics say that heaven is properly a city, though places here on earth are not…. For a city is an important thing, and its people a decorous body, a multitude of men regulated by law, as the Church (that city on earth impregnable, invulnerable) is ruled by the Word, a product of the divine will on earth as in heaven. Images of this city the poets create with their pens; the Hyperboreans, the Arimaspian cities, the Elysian plains, are commonwealths of just men. And we all know Plato’s city, laid up as a pattern in heaven.”  — Clement of Alexandria, Strom.., iv, 26.

A couple of weeks ago I took my GOE’s (General Ordination Exams) as part of my process of pursuing Holy Orders in the Episcopal Diocese of Texas. All seven of the questions / areas (Holy Scripture, Christian Theology, Ethics / Moral Theology; Church History & Ecumenism; Liturgy & Church Music; Pastoral Theology; and Contemporary Society) were good and encouraging to me, but in particular I was stimulated by the ethics and moral theology question:

Lesser Feasts and Fasts tells us that in March of 1965, Jonathan Daniels, a seminarian at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, heard the appeal of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to go to Selma, Alabama, to join in the campaign to secure the right to vote for disenfranchised African-American citizens in that state.  One afternoon at Evensong, the words of the Magnificat spoke to him: “He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek.  He hath filled the hungry with good things.”  In that moment, he said, “I knew I must go to Selma.  The Virgin’s song was to grow more and more dear to me in the weeks ahead.”  Daniels went to Selma that summer; in August, he and three fellow volunteers were arrested.  Released six days later, they walked to a small store; a young black woman approaching the store, sixteen-year-old Ruby Sales, was threatened by a deputy sheriff.  Pushing her aside to protect her, Daniels was killed by a blast from the man’s shotgun.

Respond to the following question in an essay of three pages:

How does a virtue ethics approach in moral theology provide a way to interpret and un­derstand an example like that of Jonathan Daniels?

Here is how I responded:

The most fundamental way in which the virtue-centered, Christian moral tradition (for the purposes of this essay, I take this to be tantamount to “a virtue-ethics approach to moral theology”) differs from modern ethical theory is that, according to the former, there is more to the moral – or even the decisional – life of persons than merely the consciously rational dimension. It is this “more than,” this dimension of the human psyche beyond reason (or perhaps behind and under reason) which must be formed or shaped according to an informed rationality. For the most part ignored by modern ethical theory which tends to focus on reason alone (as if that is possible in the first place), whether in its (post-)utilitarian or (post-)deontological forms,  this dimension of the human psyche will inevitably be shaped and conditioned by something: left to its own devices it will be imprisoned by the drives and desires of human appetite (or, in the context of Jonathan Daniels, by human self-preservation).

What is interesting to me about this tradition (magisterially articulated and developed by Alisdair MacIntyre) is that, finding its synthesis in Thomas Aquinas, it absorbs and develops strains from both the “pagan” tradition of classical antiquity (especially represented by Plato and Aristotle in Fifth-century Athens) as well as the Judeo-Christian biblical tradition (including its emphasis on law in the form of torah, translated by the LXX and the NT as nomos).

For this tradition, how is this more-than-simply-rational component of our human nature (our will, our dispositions, our attitudes, our tendencies, our habits, our emotions) to be informed, influenced, and shaped? A good place to start is with the Greek word paideia, for this word occurs and recurs in both of the two traditions mentioned above which merge to form our virtue-based tradition of Christian moral theology.

In his What is Ancient Philosophy?  Pierre Hadot describes this practice of paideia in the context of fifth-century Athens. It was “a fundamental demand of the Greek mentality: the desire to form and to educate” (Hadot 11). Primarily intended to form the character of children “within the social group itself” (Hadot 12), the point of this discipline was to form the “future citizens [of Athens] by physical exercises, gymnastics, music, and mental exercises” (Hadot 12). Similar programs of formation, Hadot shows, were practiced in other social sub-groups within Athens and indeed larger Greek society, including the philosophical schools of Epicureanism and Pythagoreanism as well as Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum. But in all of these cases, the common denominator is that they all implemented and practiced paideia as a way to foster virtue of soul, in service of the primary community in question, the Greek democratic city-state.

It no coincidence that the writers of the New Testament (let alone the translators of the LXX) adopt this word in their writings, for example in Hebrews 12:11:

“Now, paideia always seems painful [or difficult] rather than pleasant at the time, but later iyields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.” (NRSV)

The most common translation of paideia here in English is “discipline,” which can be misleading if taken to refer to some kind of mechanistic or litigious law-based system of church discipline. But if we take this word in the context of community formation of the kind which was common in the social world of the author of Hebrews, it makes better sense to understand it as referring to the (trans)formation of character and soul, analogous to that of the “pagan” world, but also baptizing it the latter with the Holy Spirit and the love of God in the Gospel, the caritas which is the queen of the theological virtues, and therefore the queen of all the virtues.

Here, too, in the mind of the author of Hebrews, as well as that of St. Thomas Aquinas, the purpose of paideia is to form persons of virtuous character, in service of our primary community of commitment: the Christian church. Of course, a fundamental presupposition of Christianity is that the walls of the church are porous (all people, all image bearers are, at the very least, potential or possible Christians), and so the virtues are designed to enlarge the church as well, spilling over into the larger world.

In the life of Jonathan Daniels, we can see this formation of virtue at work. As he worshipped in the chapel at EDS in Cambridge (in the context of a personal struggle for the fullness of truth) his formation was epitomized and crowned by his experience of singing the Magnificat. And if he was singing the Magnificat, then he was doing much else besides: we was doing things like praying the Daily Office, in which the Magnificat is found, in and with a community of believers, a community of habituation, as Thomas Aquinas would put it. This practice, this celebratory discipline, had the power to do what Kant’s Categorical Imperative, for example, never could: to infuse into his soul the necessary habitus which would (over time, no doubt) allow him, even require him, to sacrifice his life for one of God’s children, victimized by the forces of evil.

Lesser Feasts and Fasts shows from Jonathan’s papers that this kind of formation really was going on in his life, at least in his own view: “the lived faith of the sacraments was the essential precondition of the experience [in Selma] itself” (346).

Rational principles alone cannot produce such virtuous action. But when reason governs our hearts (emotions, attitudes, appetites, desires, etc.) not so much like a king or a monarch, but rather “democratically,” as Thomas Aquinas teaches, this kind of loving deed is the fruit. In the split-second during which Jonathan saw the gun appear and point at the sixteen-year-old girl, there was not time to reflect upon what rational principles might apply in this situation. (Even if there were enough time, these principles are often – perhaps usually – morally inconclusive in isolation of other considerations.)

And yet, the split-second decision to jump in front of the bullet is only one of Jonathan’s ethical decisions which we are considering, and it is possible that it was the easier of the two. What caused Jonathan to “know” that he needed to go to Selma, consciously putting his life in danger? (Many other deaths and martyrdoms had already occurred by this point in the Civil Rights Movement.)

Here is where the Christian virtue tradition provides resources which are lacking not only in modern ethical theory, but in classical (ie, pre-Christian) virtue thought as well. For even Aristotle (for example in his Nichomachean Ethics) promotes such virtues as self-sufficiency and self-preservation. “Charity is not a virtue for Aristotle.” (MacIntyre, 175).

As Christian moral theologians Stanley Hauerwas and Charles Pinches argue, however, the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love turn virtue, as classically envisioned on its head. For with these Christian realities as well as that of grace, we are taught and empowered to live and die for God and for others, as the long line of Christian martyrs throughout history bears witness.

I am not arguing that only a Christian can lay down his life in sacrifice for another; St. Paul disabuses us of this notion in Rom 5:7. But no other “ethical approach” has produced as many martyrs as this Christian moral tradition, which shapes and forms our hearts, our characters, our dispositions, our desires, our emotions, our habits, not simply into the pattern of virtue in general, but into the shape of Jesus Christ, who out of love laid down his life for others, for us.

If there is any doubt left that this is, in fact, what was going on in Jonathan Daniels’ reality, then the following quotation, again from his papers as quoted in Lesser Feasts and Fasts should dispel it:

“I began to know in my bones bones and sinews that I had been truly baptized into the Lord’s death and resurrection… with them, the black men and white men, with all life, in him whose Name is above all the names that the races and nations shout…. We are indelibly and unspeakably one.”

The author of the book of Hebrews writes

Now, discipline always seems painful rather than pleasant at the time, but later it yields the fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. (Heb 12:11)

What does this “discipline” make you think of? Until about a month ago, I always took this to mean something like being reprimanded for doing something wrong, for example the kind of thing that happens in formal or informal “church discipline.” I think that is how this word sounds to most conservative evangelicals, as well. 

The Greek word, however, which here gets translated into English as “discipline” is paideia. Pierre Hadot, in his magesterial What is Ancient Philosophy discusses the ancient practice of paideia with which the author to the Hebrews was surely familiar. For it is the practice or the formation which is paideia which undergirded so much of what, say, Plato or Aristotle or the schools of Epicureanism or Pythagoreanism were trying to do. The practice of paideia was, as Hadot puts it, “philosophy before philosophy.” It was what formed members of the community to uphold the common good as that community understood it. The primary community in question here in the democratic city-state of (5th century) Athens.

Someone once said that everything you know you learned in Kindergarten.

Well I don’t know about that, but I did learn something in my Kindergarten years which has stuck with me for a long time: “Which of these things is not like the other?” is often a really good question to ask.

I realized last weekend while reading John Milbank on Alisdair MacIntrye that they answer this question differently when it comes to the following three things: classical antiquity’s virtue tradition of Plato & Aristotle, Christian theology, and the enlightenment ethics of modernity.

MacIntyre’s answer: the enlightenment ethics of modernity is the unique one of the three. Milbank: No, it is Christian theology.

Another way of putting this is that MacIntyre sees the classical antique tradition of virtue as having so much in common with Christianity that they can make common cause over against modernity. But Milbank responds by saying that, no, in fact classical antiquity has more in common with enlightenment modernity than it does with Christian theology, which is truly unique.

“Nowadays, there are philosophy professors, but no philosophers.” -Thoreau, Walden

As usual, Thoreau is not far from the truth. If there are philosophers

today, and if Pierre Hadot is right, then surely they are priests, monks, nuns.

In Radical Orthodoxy: a New Theology the authors write:

The great Christian critics of the Enlightenment — Christopher Smart, Hamann, Jacobi, Kierkegaard, Peguy, Chesterton and others — in different ways saw that what secularity had most ruined and actually denied were the very things it apparently celebrated: embodied life, self-expression, sexuality, aesthetic experience, human political community. Their contention, taken up in this volume, was that only transcendence, whcih ’suspends’ these things in the sense of interrupting them, ’suspends’ them also in the other sense of upholding their relative worth over-against the void. (3)

In Praying Shapes Believing Lionel Mitchell employs this same (theo)logic when discussing how the liturgical year “saves” ordinary time by transcending it:

The Christian year is a mystery through which every moment and all the times and seasons of this life are transcended and fulfilled in that reality which is beyond time. (14)

In modernity’s attempt to annihilate liturgical life and the liturgical worldview, it has along the way discarded with the ways which humanity has traditionally, going back to ancient and even pre-historic cultures and civilizations, marked and observed time. Milbank and Pickstock and Cavanaugh describe this phenomenon well, as I have blogged about before.

In trying to recapture and embody (corporately and individually) this premodern (and postmodern) way of life, a good place to start, for Christians at least, is with the feasts which the Jewish people, the Old Covenant people of God, celebrated and observed before (and after) the advent of Jesus.

In his magisterial _Commentary on the American Prayer Book_, Marion Hatchett correctly observes that, like Christians, the basic unit of time for Jews was (and is) the week, marked and adorned by the festivities connected to Sabbath practice.

However, the year also has a prominent role, just as it does in Christianity. There are three main feasts which were observed under the Old Covenant. I quote Hatchett (pp 36-37):

Basic to the Jewish year were three pilgrimage feasts, the origins of which may have been agricultural: Passover (probably associated with the arrival of the new flock), Pentecost (the wheat harvest), and Tabernacles (the new wine). The Passover commemorated the slaying of the first born, the exodus from Egypt, and the entry into the Promised Land. High points of the celebration were the slaying of the Passover lamb, the use of unleavened bread, and the special Passover cup. The offering of barley after the Passover inaugurated the seven weeks of harvest culminating in the feast of Pentecost, which commemorated the giving of the law and the covenant with Israel. The feast of Tabernacles celebrated the giving of new wine, the time of dwelling in huts or booths in the wilderness, the choice of the House of David, the choice of Jerusalem as God’s dwelling place, and the dedication of the Temple. Dancing and carrying the palm branches and torches were parts of the celebration.”

God bless Rowan WIlliams. Few leaders in the church if any do I respect more. However, in this interview with Richard Dawkins, he makes a fatal flaw.

Rowan says that God, as creator, “shapes the entire process” of evolution. For the purposes of this discussion I have no real problem with this statement.

Dawkins then supplements Rowan’s comment by adding, “by setting up the laws of nature in which context the entire laws of evolution take place.” And Rowan nods his head in agreement. This leads to a further discussion about the laws of nature, or the laws of physics, in which both men tacitly agree that there is something called “the laws of nature.”

This is my qualm with how Rowan proceeds. I think that a much better approach would have been for him, right at the point which Dawkins brings up this idea of the laws of nature, to say something like, “I am fine with that idea as long as what you mean is really just a convenient way of referring to patterns that we discern in the world that repeat themselves more or less consistently over time. However, I do believe that God is actively “behind” these so-called laws of nature such that every time an apple falls from a tree, it is God who is somehow willing or causing that apple to fall.” (This is not to deny the reality of secondary causation, by the way.)

He could have invoked GK Chesterton, who said that every time the sun goes up, it does so because God tells it to, and when it does, God excitedly says, “Oh, do it again! Do it again!”

To give too much ground to an abstract and distant (from God) set of laws of nature is to give the impression that Deism is true. Deism, the very topic of Dawkin’s book _The Blind Watchmaker_.

Much to Dawkins’ chagrin, Scripture and Christian tradition do not at all imply that the world is like a machine that God wound up and set in motion.

Rather, the world is an enchanted place, “charged with the grandeur of God” and God’s active presence. As the Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it: “God’s works of providence are, his most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing all his creatures, and all their actions.”

Incidentally, to see what one of Dawkins’ atheistic comrades Christopher Hitchens thinks of Rowan Williams, see here.

Ten years ago I would have worried that the following testimony from James Finley (from his book _Christian Meditation_) is an endorsement of pantheism. I am grateful, however, to have since realized that Christian / sacramental reality transcends the ability of language univocally to talk about God or even about being. Hence, I offer this wonderful account of a mystical experience of union with God:

One hot summer day I climbed up the ladder into a loft, as up into a cathedral of light and heat. The air was heavy with the primordial, sweet smell of hay, which was neatly stacked in the bails up to the ceiling along the back wall. I was sitting where I usually sat, on some bails of hay, which I had arranged near the open loft door that looked out over a meadow and the surrounding woods. I was reading the psalms. I stood up and began walking slowly back and forth as I continued reading. Everything within me was dry and empty in the hot, solitary silence. There was no sense whatsoever that anything extraordinary was about to happen.

Suddenly, I realized that what I had, up to that moment, thought of as the air was actually God! I was walking back and forth in God. I was vividly aware that the oceanic presence in which I was walking back and forth was sustaining my life, breath by breath. And this presence of God that I was breathing, and in which I was standing and walking about, knew me, breath by breath. And this presence of God that I was breathing, and in which I was standing and walking about, knew me, through and through, with oceanic compassion. There was nowhere to hide, nor did I need such a place. There was nowhere I could run from God. For even if I were to try to flee, God would be sustaining me, breath by breath, in my flight from him, and would be waiting for me, sustaining my life, breath by breath, when I arrived at my planned place of escape. I realized in some baffling, matter-of-fact way, that since God is the infinity of the mystery of air, I was living my life in God and was being held by God always.

There were no feelings. No images. There was nothing imaginary about it. The realization that the air is God was as concretely real and immediate as the smell of the hay, the silence, the small book of psalms that I continued to hold in my hands. I was simply amazed. After a while I sat back down on the bails of hay near the door and looked out through God at the meadow and woods.

An occasional red wasp came buzzing in through the open loft door, to hover in the heat for a moment before ascending to the beams overhead to work on its mud nest. The pair of barn swallows that had built a nest alongside the inside wall beams darted and glided over the meadow. The tin roof made its slight pinging, crinkling noises as it expanded in the hot sun. A cicada whined, unseen, somewhere off in the trees. And I kept sitting there, breathing God, until I heard the bell ring for vespers. I walked back to the monastery breathing God. I fell asleep that night breathing God. It seemed to me that this is what heaven must be like.

I woke up the next morning breathing God, and, in fact, I walked around in this state for several days. On Sundays we were allowed to take walks in the woods outside the monastic enclosure. I was walking along the dirt road that led up to a small lake in the woods where I would sit and read Saint John of the Cross. I was walking along, on this particular Sunday, breathing God, with my volume of Saint John under my arm. Just at the point at which the road curved and led from the open field up into the woods, I paused at a small tree that was hanging out over the road.

Standing there, breathing God, I reached up and touched one of the leaves hanging from one of the branches. As I did so I  looked up. There was one cloud in the sky. I said, out load, “It’s One!” The ground I was standing on, the leaf I was touching, the clouds in the sky, God that I was breathing, my own very self — were utterly, completely, ungraspably one! I walked a short distance up onto the edges of a large field. I sat in the tall grass. A strong wind was blowing. I sat there all afternoon, no moving until I heard the bell ring in the distance from the monastery bell tower, letting me know that it was time to go back to vespers.

I do not know when I lost the direct awareness of breathing God. At some point, perhaps later that day, it dissipated. The air seemed to me, once again, just the air. Except that I knew my experience of the air as being just the air was but my unawareness of what I now knew the air to be. Then even this inner clarity faded. I realized that I had a long road a head of me in learning to live in a habitual state of awareness of the fullness I had fleetingly realized.

Derrida leads to nihilism only if modern philosophy, that is the modern epistemological turn, is the only alternative.

But, alas, there is another alternative, the likes of Scotus and Descartes notwithstanding: premodern participation.

This is why John Milbanks says that modern philosophy is a detour which radical orthodoxy is trying to navigate out of. And this is also why he says that Christian theology — like Derrida — is a hair’s breadth away from nihilism.

In the context of writing about the Rule of St. Benedict, James Finley writes, “In this … loving awareness, all that is opaque becomes translucent, and then utterly transparent” (Christian Meditation p. 139).

This is the connection between liturgy and contemplation, between liturgical theology and contemplative prayer.

A tree, writes Catherine Pickstock in her After Writing: on the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy, is unintelligible if seen in utter disconnect from God. Without God, Rene Descartes and Duns Scotus nothwithstanding, a tree is unintelligible.

Alexander Schmemann makes similar points in his For the Life of the World.

Bathed in God’s light, however, the tree hints of God, and begins to display God. This is precisely what (the) liturgy, chiefly the Eucharist (and chiefly within the Eucharist the logic of the anaphora), celebrates.

What the Eucharist celebrates, then, contemplative prayer fosters and develops, training the disciple in this sacramental awareness, that all of creation shines with divine light which  is — ultimately and paradoxically — uncreated. When we (by “we” I mean Christians, children of God, although non-Christians can participate in true contemplation to various degrees) radically slow down and practice the disciplines of ascesis we can begin to glimpse God with the eyes of the heart.

“You made all of creation with wisdom / May the glory of Jah endure forever.” - Sinead O’Connor, “The Glory of Jah”