Moving On

Hello friends,

Breaking the blog silence here.  It’s with bittersweet sentiments that I’m announcing the closing this blog.  It’s been a great two year run here at genu(re)flection and it’s been hugely beneficial for me as I basically materialized my transition from Reformed Presbyterianism to Anglicanism in these posts.  But, that’s just it.  My Anglicanism is now established.  I’m actually in the process of submitting myself as a candidate for Aspirancy in the Episcopal Diocese of Oklahoma, the first step towards the possible end of ordination into the priesthood of Christ’s Church.

New chapters sometimes lead to new books.

Additionally, this blog served as a window through which I learned how much I didn’t know and frankly, I started this blog with the rather naive pretense that I was actually a “theo-blogger” worth some salt.  I’ve learned otherwise and grown some needed humility.  The world of theology has been laid open to show itself as much larger and deeper than I considered it when I started this blog.  I’m not currently in divinity school and have realized that at this time in life, I simply don’t have much business discussing the matters of theology that are actually being talked about today.  Some day, Lord willing, but not yet.

However, I still love writing and am always seeking to learn more, especially theology.  With that, I’m excited to announce the birth of my simple, hopefully pretension-less, self-titled blog Caleb Scott Roberts.  A title like this means that nothing is off-topic and I have freedom to write within my current capabilities and interests.

To all my readers and commenters here, thanks so much for all the feedback!

And if you care to read where my thoughts go from here, I hope you’ll occasionally check out my new blog at www.calebscottroberts.blogspot.com

God Bless.

Formal Immanence, Effective Transcendence

As discussed previously here and here, the Greek understanding of reality, form, and meaning was all bound up in the notion of kosmos wherein that which was real possessed by nature the urge to reveal itself, to make itself manifest.  That quality of self-revelation was the logos and it was what animated the intelligibility of the kosmos.  In my last post, I distinguished this from the Christian metaphysical paradigm in which the logos is not a quality belonging to the physical universe itself but is rather located within the Godhead where He, not it, resides as the Second Member: Jesus Christ.  So, using the Greek understanding of logos, the Incarnation can be conceived of as a necessary manifestation of the nature of the Logos himself, a nature which always makes itself appear.

Returning to Creation itself, Dupre continues his discussion on Greek and Christian conceptions of nature, stating:

If nature for the Greeks emerged, for Christians it was brought to emerge. [...] Nevertheless, since the creative act transfers a form aboriginal in God to an extra-divine existence, a divine presence somehow continues to dwell in creation.  Divine causality is formally immanent as well as effectively transcendent. (30)

Put more simply, this should be no more difficult to express than through the words of the Psalmist when he rejoices that “the heavens declare the glory of God.”  Creation necessarily bears the personal imprint of its Maker and this imprint is not the equivalent of some divine name-tag stuck upon the world; as Dupre indicates, God is present in the forms of the universe because those forms are His but the existence of those forms are credited to His transcendence over their manifestations.  Therefore, as Dupre continues:

The doctrine of creation redefined the teleology of the Greek physis by rendering the course of nature intrinsically dependent on a transcendent principle.  But it did not reduce nature to a mechanism that was moved from without, as the later theory of creation as efficient causality was to do.  Indeed, the idea of God’s immanent presence in creation soon drove Christian theologians, especially in the Greek-speaking world, to Neoplatonic philosophy.  In Plotinus’s and Proclus’s theologies the One — which Christians identified with God — remains present in its emanations while nevertheless transcending them.  Nature itself re-presented God and this representation laid the basis for a theology of the image and for an original Christian mysticism.  Already the Epistle to the Colossians (1:16) had referred to Christ as ‘the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creatures.’  The creature, archetypically present in the Son, is an image of that uncreated image.  For the fourth-century Cappadocians Gregory of Nyssa and his brother Basil, human physis bears the image of its divine archetype, the Logos, image of the Father.  The soul recognizes the divine image in itself and in the cosmos and returns both it to their divine archetype. (31)

So, the bridge of intelligibility that lies between the human subject and the cosmos around him is a shared possession of the divine image which is, as Dupre said, “archetypically present” in Jesus Christ.  The means by which we apprehend the beautiful  in others and Creation is the soul’s perception of the common representation, the epitome, of the Triune God that is manifestly expressed in all that exists.

To Be Real is to Appear

Continuing my study into the intelligibility of the cosmos within Louis Dupre’s Passage to Modernity.  In his words:

If there is one belief Greek thinkers shared, it must be the conviction that both the essence of the real and our knowledge of it consists ultimately of form.  Basically this means that it belongs to the essence of the real to appear, rather than to hide, and to appear in an orderly way.  By envisioning the real as such as harmonious appearance, the Greek view displays a uniquely aesthetic quality, expressed as much in architecture and sculpture as in philosophy.  That appearance, however, derives not from our subjective perception of the real; it is the form itself that shines forth. (18)

A couple thoughts as I work through all this.  Firstly, is the fact that the essence of the real is to appear a direct reflection of the fact that it is the nature of God to create?  The notion of logos which, according to the Greeks, was the “ideal quality of the kosmos that renders its rule intrinsically intelligible” (23).  Logos is the quality of the real that invokes it to reveal itself by virtue of its reality.  Thus, human art was as capable of apprehending the truth as philosophy was because the real was something fundamentally revealed in the cosmos.  However, for the Greeks, the real did not depend upon a transcendent deity for its existence as it does with Christian theology.  As Dupre notes:

In sum, for the Greeks, the principle of form contains the definitive justification of the real.  The decisive question was not why something existed, but how could it exist meaningfully, that is, in orderly form.  Real being begins with intelligible form, with a multiplicity rendered harmonious through unity.  In this respect the fundamental question of Greek metaphysics differed from the Christian one.  Having deprived the form of its intrinsic necessity, the Christian doctrine of creation evoked a further question: Why does form exist?  Even if the Greeks had raised that question, their gods would not have provided the answer.  The gods’ own being had to be justified by the form principle. (22)

In other words, for the Greeks, reality was self-justifying because it exists and the essence of the real (form) by nature was to appear.  By locating the logos within the kosmos, the Greeks absolved themselves from having to consider the “why” of what exists.  But Christian theology, of course, does not locate the logos within reality, but located reality in, from, by, for, through, and to the logos which is Christ.  And by locating the logos within the Godhead, it becomes characteristic of God’s nature to create the universe according to an intelligible and orderly form.  The existence of the real is justified by God’s creativity which is due to the divinity of the Logos.  But there is more to this.  Since the Greeks conceived of the logos as being the quality of the kosmos which yielded its intelligibility, the forms that were displayed therefrom were as ultimate a manifestation of the logos as possible.  However, as Logos is not merely a quality but rather a Person, the second member of the Trinity, while it is true that Creation is yielded from his divine nature, it is the nature of the Logos himself as a Person to make himself intelligible and the all-encompassing revelation of the real is not completed until the manifestation of the Person of the Logos.  The Incarnation, therefore, is the means by which “all things consist” by Jesus Christ as stated by St. Paul in Colossians and represents the Christian revolution in metaphysics.

Postscript

Part of my goal in these posts is to receive all manner of correction and fine-tuning.  So I ask my readers who are more versed in philosophy and theology to offer their thoughts and opinions for the betterment of my study.  Thanks!

No Friend of Dichotomies

I’m obviously no theological heavyweight who’s spent decades contemplating the inner recesses of truth so I state this with a few grains of salt, but it appears to me that as a general rule, Christian theology is no friend of dichotomies — or rather, good Christian theology is no friend of dichotomies as you’ll find plenty of them in flawed theologies.  My proof of this is entirely anecdotal and based solely upon the stuff I’ve happen to ponder for the last 5 years or so but it seems like every theological dichotomy I’ve encountered has turned out to be a false one.  Among other things, Peter Leithart’s Against Christianity almost reads as a treatise against false dichotomies that currently plague your average evangelical’s assumptions.  But I recently set out to consider why this may be.  Why do so many of the theological dichotomies we construct turn out to be false?

It then hit me that it may be because the foundation of all theology, the Triune God, is comprised not of dichotomies, but of paradoxes.  And paradoxes almost seem to be the complete opposite of dichotomies.  Think about it.  A dichotomy takes two elements which, on the surface, seem to be mutually exclusive and then systematizes their exclusivity, abstracting the concreteness of their opposition into a maxim.  A paradox, on the other hand, looks upon those two seemingly exclusive elements and embraces them both, proclaiming both to be not only true in part, but necessary for truth together.  Paradoxes then accept and celebrate the mystery of how the compatibility actually works out.  So, you’d be reasonable to suppose that a rather bullet-proof dichotomy exists between God and man, but then the Incarnation happens.  You’d be reasonable to suppose that there’s a dichotomy between God being one and God being Three, but God is Triune.  If we put our heads together, we could probably keep thinking of more examples for awhile.  The point is that paradox, not dichotomy, seems to characterize the objects of theological inquiry and therefore theological inquiry itself provided that it is in alignment with the objects thereof.

Bringing this down to the practical, I have found that I usually approach theological dichotomies with suspicion, a guilty-until-proven-innocent attitude.  And if a certain theological house seems to be constructed with a lot of dichotomies, well, I have a hard time feeling safe inside if you know what I mean.  So, as an example, let’s consider a false dichotomy, kids!  Robin Phillips already addressed this quote from PCA pastor Ligon Duncan sufficiently, so I’m just going to add a few thoughts of my own.  The quote from Duncan in reference to Eastern Orthodoxy goes like this:

There are only two systems of salvation in Christian history: the sacerdotal system which depends upon the dispensation of the sacraments by the Church and there’s the evangelical system which acknowledges the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the sinner, drawing that sinner to Christ, uniting him to Christ by faith.

So what you have here is a proposed dichotomy between the “evangelical system” and the “sacerdotal system” with the former being that which depends upon the Holy Spirit for salvation and the latter being that which depends upon the sacraments for salvation.  In other words, it’s either salvation by the Holy Spirit, or salvation by sacraments; take your pick.  And under this definition, I would most surely be one of those wretched “sacerdotalists”.  But Duncan presents this dichotomy as if it’s a general feature of theology describing them later as “the two main alternatives” in Christian history implying that his distinction is self-evident and would be agreed upon as accurate by both sacerdotalists and evangelicals.  Unfortunately, it’s not general at all; in fact, the distinction itself is a product of the evangelical system.  The fact is that no one labeled as a “sacerdotalist” under Duncan’s definition would ever say that, “Yep, evangelicals trust the Holy Spirit for salvation and we sacerdotalists trust our sacraments.” and its incredibly careless/ignorant to even suggest that.  Both sacerdotalists and evangelicals believe that salvation comes from the Holy Spirit’s activity, the difference pertains to the nature of that activity.  So, if Duncan said that the sacerdotal system believes that salvation comes from the Holy Spirit’s work through the sacraments of the Church and the evangelical system believes that salvation comes from the Holy Spirit’s work through absolutely nothing, then that would be a fair distinction.  But Duncan’s caricature of sacerdotalism does nothing more than showcase his evangelical lens as he has already assented to the premise that grace and salvation cannot be mediated through physical means or institutions.  Therefore, when he looks upon the “sacerdotal” churches who have the sacraments at the center of their ecclesial lives, he then concludes that they must not trust the Holy Spirit for salvation since “trusting the Holy Spirit” means that one places no efficacious significance to sacraments or the Church.  But again, that is not a universally accepted definition of how the Holy Spirit operates in salvation and thus, Duncan’s dichotomy is basically worthless except for its accurate description of the evangelical system (which, since it was given in the presence of evangelicals, wouldn’t have been needed in the first place.)

It is because of dichotomies like these that are constructed according to evangelical assumptions that I have eschewed the label.  I am not an evangelical precisely because being one leads to conceptions of important matters like salvation described by Ligon Duncan above.  I go for paradox instead, the paradox that God became man, Body becomes bread, Blood becomes wine, and Water becomes regeneration.  And I guess that makes me a sacerdotalist.

The Dismemberment of Physis & Kosmos

According to Louis Dupre in Passage to Modernity:

“Only when the early humanist notion of human creativity came to form a combustive mixture with the negative conclusions of nominalist theology did it cause the cultural explosion that we refer to as modernity.  Its impact shattered the organic unity of the Western view of the real.” (3)

And in describing this “early humanist notion of human creativity” that was destroyed by nominalism, Dupre references “the earliest Ionian concept of physis” which “combined a physical (in the modern sense!) with an anthropic and a divine component.” (3)  Thus, the origin of early humanism rested upon a holistic understanding of human nature, one which not only possessed the basic constitution of the human body (physical), but also a universal form of man (anthropic), and an imprint of the divine (a soul or the Imago Dei).  This organic unity of human nature was also a direct reflection of the organic unity of the universe itself as expressed by the classical notion of kosmos which, according to Dupre, “preserved the idea of the real as an harmonious, all-inclusive whole.” (3)

For my purposes, if the organic physis of the human person is epitomic of an equally harmonious kosmos, then there is an interplay of intelligibility between the human physis and that which corresponds to it in the kosmos.  The activity of this interplay can be attributed to the human imagination which, above all else, actively perceives the nature of God as manifested and declared by the created order.  If this is true, then at the moment the notion of human creativity animated by the classical physis was coupled with a dismembered kosmos stripped of its intrinsic intelligibility at the hands nominalist theology, the human physis also suffered a similar fate and was fundamentally changed.  For the West, the consequences of this dismemberment are darkly summarized by Dupre when he concludes that “Only what it [the human mind] objectively constituted would count as real.” (3)

A Preview for 2012…

Greetings to you all on this Feast of the Circumcision which this year also happens to be known as New Year’s Day!  I hope the festivity is still going strong with you all as we still have a few more days left of Christmas.

As it is the beginning of the year, I thought I’d give you all a sneak peak into a new trajectory this blog is taking, one that is more structured than the random musings I’ve put up here since the blog’s inception.  I have set a goal to enter graduate theological education somewhere beginning in the Fall semester of 2013 which gives me the entirety of this year to prepare for the application process.  Of course, that includes a writing sample which I will be writing from scratch and using this blog as a sort of storyboard for the research and study I’ll be doing for it.

It would be difficult at this point to even detail a tentative topic but I do know that I’ll at least be looking into Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jacques Maritain, and others perhaps juxtaposed with the development of modernity, nominalism, etc in the general realm of aesthetic theology.  Perhaps some discussion of apprehension vs. comprehension in relation to all those elements/people above.  So to kick it all off, here are the first two books on the docket waiting to be worked through:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here on the left is Imagination and the Playfulness of God: The Theological Implications of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Definition of the Human Imagination by Anglican Priest-in-Germany Robin Stockitt which is pretty self-explanatory given the title.  Over on the right is Yale’s Louis Dupre’s Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermenuetics of Nature and Culture which I first heard of on an interview of the Mars Hill Audio Journal wherein Ken Myers read this intriguing quote from the book that I penned down in my notebook as to not forget it.  To share the intrigue with you all, here is that quote:

“At the end of the Middle Ages, however, nominalist theology effectively removed God from creation.  Ineffable in being and inscrutable in his designs, God withdrew from the original synthesis altogether.  The divine became relegated to a supernatural sphere separate from nature, with which it retained no more than causal, external link.  This removal of transcendence fundamentally affected the conveyance of meaning.  Whereas previously meaning had been established in the very act of creation by a wise God, it now fell upon the human mind to interpret a cosmos, the structure of which had ceased to be given as intelligible.  Instead of being an integral part of the cosmos, the person became its source of meaning.  Mental life separated from cosmic being: as meaning-giving ‘subject,’ the mind became the spiritual substratum of all reality.  Only what it objectively constituted would count as real.  Thus reality split into two separate spheres: that of the mind, which contained all intellectual determinations, and that of all other being, which received them.” (3)

Whew.  Back to you all soon.

Poetic Connectivity

In chapter one of the Russian director Andrey Tarkovsky’s book Sculpting in Time, a book laying out his meditations on aesthetics and filmmaking, Tarkovsky defines poetry (and perhaps art in general) as “an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.”  And since he talks elsewhere of man’s poetic awareness as the sense by which we apprehend the true, the good, and the beautiful, for Tarkovsky, this poetic awareness is of the essential consciousness of man perhaps even transcending his sensual and rational faculties.  Therefore, when one perceives an art form, his poetic awareness is stoked such that:

Through poetic connections feeling is heightened and the spectator is made more active.  He becomes a participant in the process of discovering life, unsupported by ready-made deductions from the plot or ineluctable pointers by the author.  He has at his disposal only what helps to penetrate to the deeper meaning of the complex phenomena represented in front of him.

Both art and the world are “complex phenomena” that stand in front of us, both possessing a “deeper meaning”, with art being an epitome, a microcosm, of the cosmos itself.  Since the “process of discovering life” happens independently from judgments or “deductions” that could be intellectually ascertained, Tarkovsky suggests a trans-cognitive or trans-rational element of man’s nature, one that senses the really real, the real that mysteriously animates the reality we immediately experience with our senses.  For as Tarkovsky notes, our “poetic visions” are not things that are normally perceived in the “framework of the patently obvious.”

We know from St. Paul that we now only see “through a glass, darkly“, that this present world is anticipating the final coherence and culmination of all things when we shall see “face to face” and know ourselves even as we are truly known.  And if Tarkovsky is right, our poetic awareness and connectivity is of the essence of the Imago Dei and through it, the image creates an image and knows that image.  And in that image we create, we can perceive more clearly the nature of the Image which we ourselves embody and live within, having recapitulated the creative act of God.

Art is then knowledge of that which now abideth: faith, hope, and charity.

Image Credit.