Posted on: March 9th, 2015 Zizek & Newman: “Believing at a Distance”

In his (admittedly highly eccentric) would-be defense of Christian orthodoxy, Slavoj Zizek chides us moderns for the chronological snobbery which strangely betrays our naive ignorance:

Was there … at any time in the past, an era when people directly ‘really believed?’ As Robert Pfaller demonstrated in Illusionen der Anderen, the direct belief in a truth that is subjectively fully assumed (“Here I stand!”) is a modern phenomenon, in contrast to traditional beliefs-through-distance, like politeness or rituals. Premodern societies did not believe directly, but through distance, and this explains, for instance, why Enlightenment critics misread ‘primative’ myths–they first took the notion that a tribe originated from a fish or a bird as literal direct belief, then rejected it as stupid, “fetishist,” naive. They thereby imposed their own notion of belief on the “primitivized” Other.

Now consider (Jaroslav Pelikan on) Newman:

By contrast with … the eagerness to be explicit about everything possible (in Lewis Carroll’s phrase, ‘to believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast’), the tradition of orthodoxy, in Newman’s reading, had always observed a reverent restraint.

Pelikan goes on to point out that for Newman (or Newman’s reading of Church Fathers such as Athanasius and Gregory Nazianzus), in its precreedal history “the content of the apostolic tradition had remained secret” in important ways.

Here Zizek resonates with Pelikan’s Newman in their common indictment of the (post)modern tendency–on the part both of believers who embrace it and their cultured despisers who reject it but project it onto ancient people of faith–to posit direct, literal, irreverent and unrestrained belief.

Nobody ever, Zizek is arguing, believed like that. Hence his claim that “we believe today more than ever.”

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Posted on: March 21st, 2014 Dissertation Idea 1.1 (Ratzinger, Bonaventure, & History)

Given a hearty “thumb up” by my academic director. Any comments, please send them my way!

I.               The philosophical explananda: why certain prominent thinkers (modern and postmodern) articulate a philosophy of history that is fundamentally theological in form. Possible “exhibits” to include:

A.   Hegel

B.    Badiou (Saint Paul: the Foundation of Universalism)

C.    Zizek (The Fragile Absolute)

D.   Agamben (The Kingdom and the Glory: for a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government)

II.             The theological explanans: Ratzinger’s Bonaventurian theology of history as expressed in his interpretation of the Hexaemeron and other of the Seraphic Doctor’s works, as a pathway into the inherently and unavoidable theological structure of (all?) western historiography and philosophy of history (with special attention given to the role of revelation and eschatology in Ratzinger’s thought, especially as situated in their thirteenth century milieu).

III.           The statements made by the above thinkers about this genealogical state of affairs. Are such statements adequate? Can they be supplemented by Ratzinger’s account of the nature and character of historical thought?

 

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