Orthodoxy With a Hint of Radical

Once upon a time, there was no secular. And once upon a time, that thought roused me from my dogmatic slumber of theological indifference. Years ago I was intoxicated by Radical Orthodoxy and considered myself an unwavering Milbankian. The sheer energy of the movement and the boldness of its claims imbued Christianity with an intellectual prestige I never imagined it had or could ever attain. I remember reading everything in the series I could get my hands on and not understanding a word of any of it. Many of my notes that are still in the margins testify to the utter paucity of my comprehension. But it all just seemed so beautiful.

Eventually the mystique began to fade as I was exposed to Milbank's critics. And man were they critical. Reading Milbank and kin with a bit more maturity and in light of their opponents has sobered me a great deal. Now that I have a better sense of the problems that characterize the movement, I strongly resist identification with Radical Orthodoxy. I've come to think that much of what it gets right is better said by figures in the Catholic tradition (the nouvelle theologie specifically). What it gets wrong has often more adequately resolved in a Thomist idiom. Honestly, I've found orthodoxy to be radical enough without the added qualifier.

On the other hand, I have to acknowledge the influence that Radical Orthodoxy continues to have on my intellectual development. I may no longer be on the band wagon, but I am still walking in the same general direction. While none of the radically orthodox answers have satisfied me, the radically orthodox questions continue to fascinate me and inspire a great deal of contemplation. A few years ago I tried to pin down in what sense I could still be considered "radically orthodox." I came up with the following list of things that I still find meaningful about RO theology:

• Analyzing the origins of secular modernity at it's theological roots (Michael Gillespie offers similar narratives)
• Chief among these developments: the sundering of faith from reason as a distinct and utterly autonomous subject matter. Emphasizing the conceptual problems with nominalism, voluntarism, univocal metaphysics, etc.
• A theological understanding of nihilism (in a sense inverting Nietzsche): secularism of modernity, in its peculiar way of articulating distance from God, is ultimately nihilistic; any such "zone" apart from God can only be reduced to nothing
• A conception of tradition and development of doctrine that allows us to articulate the inspired authors of Scripture, the Church Fathers, and the Medieval theologians as part of a coherent and ordered (though symphonic) enterprise of faith seeking understanding (a "Biblico-Patristic matrix")
• Seeing oneself as a heir of the “la nouvelle theologie” in attempting to reclaim the Biblical,Patristic, and High Medieval voices as resources to overcome modern errors
  
• Concern for the influence of modern theological decadence for philosophy and wider culture
• The need to, in opposition to the divisions of modern secularism, redefine the theological value of ontology, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, economics, social sciences, politics, culture; that is, to articulate once more how each of these forms of inquiry (and every creature) is ultimately ordered to God (though I believe the best approach to this is Thomas's)
• “Suspending” these aspects of life and thought by upholding their worth over and above the void (of meaninglessness) within a central theological framework of participation, posited as the only true alternative to modernity’s territory "independent" of God; the logic of participation and ordering to God necessarily implies that all meaning and value can only derive from being properly –and I mean properly- understood as oriented to and participating in God
• Thus the material dimensions (bodies, sex, art, society) which modernity supposedly values, can only really be valued by identifying their participation in the divine (though this has to be done with proper attention to the precise way in which that participation and relation to transcendence is realized)
• Sympathetic to Balthasar’s placing of transcendental of beauty at center of theological method, and as means to overcome modern divisions between subjective and objective
• An eye for unsung figures in the theological traditions who began to articulate opposition to the major currents and trends leading to modern theological perversion (Hamann and Jacobi are big for Milbank, but others are far more helpful in showing how resistance and alternative to modern forms can be constructed now)
• The attempt to analyze modernity in terms of the pagan and heretical categories: as theological perversion as well as the rearticulation of pre-Christian philosophical forms (atomism, atheism, materialism, etc.)
• In general, the emphasis on Christian Neoplatonism as providing the resources to successfully overcome the perversions of secular modernity and modern theology; even possibly articulating the rise of modern thought in terms of deviation from the best of an essentially Christian Neoplatonic worldview (here Milbank, Hankey, Marion, Desmond, show similarities)

I also recorded a few of the reasons why I part ways with RO:

• Over-reliance upon or sheer imprecision in historical declension narratives: leads to self-fulfilling accounts of figures in the tradition that often warp charitable and hermeneutically precise interpretation. Duns Scotus is an example; de Lubac; perhaps Nominalism; Thomas of course. Though the historical narratives are still indeed essential to any such project of genealogy, there must be far more attention to detail, to the utter complexity and messiness, to the qualifications and limits of what and how much such narratives can do to prove a point, etc. A much more rigorous historical hermeneutic needs to be in play
• Theological epistemology: resurrection of the Augustinian illuminationism and thus the potential conflating of the orders of reason and revelation is a danger; fails to address the Thomist reception and criticism of this tradition in its integration of a more Aristotelian epistemology into the ontology. Perhaps a generally greater distinction between the dynamics of ontology and epistemology is needed. But the dependence upon illuminationism certainly places RO proponents beyond the careful distinctions of Thomas and his school, as well as beyond much Catholic theology
• The imprecision with regard to the spheres of nature and grace: relies upon a somewhat exaggerated account of de Lubac in holding him to be a founding father. While de Lubac’s project is, in my opinion, salvageable, and his theological supremacy in the 20^th century demonstrable, Milbank radicalizes him at all of the places where he was mistaken. The denial of the distinction between nature and grace follows from a mistaken perception that all such distinction translates into the modern separation of subject matter. The theological and philosophical consequences are not hard to show, ironically undermining Milbank’s very own concerns
• Over-reliance upon post-modern philosophy: failure to carefully draw the line between what is useful in the war against modernity and what is adopted as simply an extension of it, thus committing one to the same heretical and pagan notions that Milbank wants to overcome (most evident in The Word Made Strange and parts of Theology and Social Theory). Basically cf. Wayne Hankey and Frederick Bauerschmidt on this
  

Pax Christi,

Rock and Role

Barth has that famous quote that the only non-trivial, non-short-sighted reason for refusing full communion with the Catholic Church is the analogia entis. Recently, I've had some fascinating discussions with my Anglican comrades, and for them the only non-trivial, non-short-sighted reason for refusing full communion is Vatican I. Petrine primacy is the stumbling block of stumbling blocks. Actually, the idea of papal primacy is not nearly as unpalatable to them as the idea of papal infallibility. That is a related ecclesiological and pneumatological issue, but not the same issue. Nonetheless, the question of papal primacy more generally has been on my mind of late. As per usual, I've found Balthasar's thoughts on the matter to be illuminating. Particularly interesting in the following passage from In The Fullness of Faith: On the Centrality of the Distinctively Catholic is Balthasar's claim that some sense of Petrine primacy is presupposed not only by the Evangelists and Fathers but also by all of the "differing views" that hold Rome's papal theology to be "unevangelical and intolerable" on any given point:

Notwithstanding all the problems connected with the papacy throughout the history of the Church, two things speak in favor of its recognition within the Communio Sanctorum and its apostolicity.

In the first place (and we have already touched upon this) the Petrine element is taken for granted, so to speak, right at the beginning, in the Petrine texts of the New Testament. And of these the most impressive is not the passage in Matthew but rather the overpowering apotheosis of Peter at the end of John's Gospel of love, which begins with the choosing of Peter in the first chapter and contains, at its center, the Apostle's great confession of faith in the Lord.

The Lukan text, in which Peter is commissioned to strengthen his brethren, is no less striking than the passage in Matthew. Then there are the very many other places in Gospels, letters, and in the Acts of the Apostles. How can anyone who claims to adhere to the Word-the Word alone-fail to be profoundly struck by these texts?

In addition there is the fact that, since the first and second centuries, an undisputed primacy of the Apostolic See has been attributed to the Bishop of the Roman community. Rome had no need to demand to be recognized; rather, it was unquestioningly acknowledged, as we can see from the Letter of Clement, the Letter of Ignatius, from Irenaeus, from the sober Admonition to Pope Victor, etc. The principle of primacy had long been established by the time Rome allegedly began to put forward exaggerated claims when starting to develop its own theology of primacy. There can be many differing views as to when these increasing claims began to be unevangelical and intolerable within the context of the Church–in the fourth or ninth or twelfth century–but the "unhappy fact" had already taken place.

One can only try to restore an internal balance within the Church, as the Second Vatican Council saw its task to be; it is impossible to abolish the principle without truncating the gospel itself.

One of the major points of difference with the Anglicans has been the role that of the Petrine office in the maintenance of Church unity. Here is Balthasar on that aspect of the teaching:

The second argument for the Petrine principle is the qualitative difference between the unity of life and doctrine within the "Roman" Catholic Church and the unity that exists within all other, Christian communions. For, if we begin with the Orthodox, no- ecumenical council has been able to unite them since their separation from Rome. And if we turn to the innumerable ecclesial communities that arose from the Reformation and subsequently, even though they are members of the World Council of Churches, they have scarcely managed to get any further than a "convergence" toward unity. And this unity, as we see ever more clearly, remains an eschatological ideal. Christ, however, wanted more for his Church than this.

If we look only from the outside, the Petrine principle is the sole or the decisive principle of unity in the Catholica. Above it is the principle of the pneumatic and eucharistic Christ and his everliving presence through the apostolic element, i.e., sacramental office, fully empowered to make Christ present, and tradition, actualizing what is testified to in Scripture.

Above it, too, is the Sanctorum Communio, the Ecclesia immaculata, concretely symbolized by the Lord's handmaid who utters her Fiat. But these deeper principles could not exercise their unity-creating power right to the end without the external reference of the Roman bishop. And the more worldwide the Church becomes the more threatened she is in the modern states with their fascism of the right and of the left, the more she is called upon to incarnate herself in the most diverse, non-Mediterranean cultures, and the wider theological and episcopal pluralism she contains, the more indispensable this reference-point becomes. Anyone who denies this is either a fanatic or an irrational sentimentalist.

Pax Christi,

Balthasar on Bonaventure

This summer I'm taking another crack at reading through Balthasar's aesthetics (a truly Sisyphean task if there ever was one). I don't intend to leave more than a dent in it. However this time around I'm reading Aidan Nichol's The Word Has Been Abroad (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1998) in tandem, which makes the yoke easier and the burden ever so lighter. As anyone reading this likely knows, Balthasar wrote with such a combination of breadth and depth that it is frighteningly easy to lose oneself in a single paragraph of profundity; and at the same time his arguments stretch over hundreds of pages and texts from the tradition. My typical experience reading him is like walking a straight and narrow way, then being suddenly tempted to stray down all of the ever widening paths branching off from the main road. I will often go twenty pages before I turn back and realize I have followed a siren and completely lost sight of his argument. Fortunately, Nichols does a good job playing Virgil in this journey through Baltahsar's mind: he gives accurate synopses of all the tangential meditations and keeps you moving on the straight and narrow.

Anyhow, it was only when I read through Nichols' summary of Balthasar's chapter on St. Bonaventure in GOTL vol. II that I realized what a major source the Seraphic Doctor is for Balthasar's vision of theological aesthetics. One does not need to read the Centuries or Balthasar's own Cosmic Liturgy to see traces of St. Maximus all over his work; nor does one need to read the Church Dogmatics or his own The Theology of Karl Barth to see how Barth-haunted his Christology is. But I suppose I just never realized until now how important Balthasar's appropriation of Bonaventure seems.

Overall, Bonaventure's theology is aesthetic by emphasizing both the objective and the subjective aspects as Balthasar dissects them: the Trinity is where beauty truly subsists and it is by encountering this beauty in Revelation that the soul is transformed. The revelation of the form always corresponds to the ecstatic elevation of the soul, making an aesthetic dimension intrinsic to the economy of salvation. Here Balthasar is fleshing out, through Bonaventure, his conception of "Christian experience" as introduced in GOTL vol.I. It takes on a peculiarly Franciscan flavor in Bonventure's theological understanding of Francis' stigmata: "In seeing the seraphic Christ, Francis grasped that, since he was consumed by spiritual fire, he would be changed into the 'expressive image' of the Crucified" (p.86) Envisioning the form of Christ crucified enables the very particularity of Francis' worldly flesh to become the concrete form through which the Crucified God expresses Himself. In other words, Francis' experience of grace is understood as the encounter with and simultaneous transfiguration by the form of God's beauty revealed in the crucified body of Jesus. As Balthasar writes (and Nichols translates), "the stigmata were impressed on the soul's body precisely in the soul's ecstatic excessus: just as it was there that the divine beauty was glimpsed, so it was also there that the same divine beauty took on its 'worldly' form" (p.86; GOTL II, p.273). Here, Bonaventure is simply doing aesthetics in the sense that Paul is in 2 Cor 3:18: beholding His glory transforms us in glory.

Even more enticing: according to Balthasar, Bonaventure's entire understanding of the Trinity is aesthetically conceived. The expressive relationship between archetype and image subsists first and foremost in God's Triunity, as the relationship between Father and Son. The bonum diffusivum sui is, as it were, made a constitutive element of God's very Being. Thus, as Image and Beauty of the Father, the Son is the perfect expression of the Father. Balthasar writes: "If the Father has really given expression in the Son to his whole being and capacity, then in the Son everything that is possible through God has taken on reality: if anything else outside God is realised through God, it can have possibility and reality only through the Son and in the Son..." (p.88; GOTL II, pp.292-293). All finite expressions of beauty then are fundamentally copies and intimations of the beauty exhibited in the relation between Father and Son. Christ then is "both the condition of possibility and the means to full actuality for any and every created self-expression of God in the world" (p.87). We have then the "framework of an ontology of expression" grounding Bonaventure's understanding of beauty, just as Balthasar has (p.88; GOTL II, p.287). It is a rationale for explaining the structure of finite creatures in terms of the Trinitarian relations, tracing them back to their ultimate origins. All creation is in its nature an expression of God, but one that follows and presupposes a more perfect and timeless expression in God Himself. Every expression is therefore directed to the end of God's perfect self-expression in Christ. This is, as Balthasar notes, the highest degree of Christocentrism. (p.87; GOTL II, p.283).

These themes of "Christian experience" and Trinitarian aesthetic go hand in hand, the latter grounding the former. It is in Christ Crucified that the Son's supreme beauty is revealed to a fallen world, and it is in beholding the cross that this beauty draws every finite form into God's perfect self-expression. What we have here is a unique theological light shed on the relationship of imitatio intrinsic to creation (the analogia entis). According to Balthasar, for Bonaventure the analogia entis only finds its true destiny in this transfiguration. Because God is His own Beauty and perfect Image, the analogical relations instrinsic to being itself are dynamically ordered toward a Christological consummation.

More so than with Pascal, Hamann, Dante, or John of the Cross, Balthasar's treatment of Bonaventure seems to give him so many recognizably Balthasarian themes to work with. What I find fascinating is how close this picture of Bonaventure comes to Przywara and some of the other figures that Balthasar invokes to construct an authentically Catholic Chrisotcentrism in response to Barth. With Bonaventure we see that there can be no more comprehensive Christocentrism then that which upholds and transfigures the analogical relationships of created being: it subordinates those relations to Christ's Trinitarian expression, but it does not negate them. There is Maximus here, there is Barth here, there is Denys and Przywara. What value then might Balthasar's reading of Bonaventure have for understanding and legitimizing his attempts to combine the analogy with Barth's Christology?

Pax Christi,