It was Ockham, in the library, with the revolver

Since seeing Christopher Nolan's Inception, I've had more consistent and elaborate dreams than I've had in years. Last night I dreamed that I was sitting in a hospital bed with a network of wires and tubes linking my veins to an enormous life support system, pumping and churning away at my bedside. As I explained to my faceless companion, this machine enabled me to read with superhuman speed and attention, abolishing the need to stop for food or sleep. In my lap was an enormous medieval tome over which my eyes were furiously racing. My mission was Dan Brown-esque: there was a "code" I had to break in order to unveil some great conspiracy and save civilization as we know it. All of the catastrophes of the modern age, I said, actually resulted from Ockham's metaphysical errors; so to understand the evils threatening us, I had to unravel the mysteries of his thought and articulate how and why he went so drastically wrong. The fate of the world depended on it (though there were no albino monks trying to kill me).

Apart from reflecting my subconscious desire to make the most abstract intellectual work seem at home in an action movie, this episode may have been influenced by the horde of genealogies in contemporary theology and philosophy that peg Ockham as the root of all conceptual evil. I'm no Freud, but I'll bet it had something to do with me recently reading Mark Taylor's take on Ockham in his latest work, After God (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Taylor's basic argument is, in many ways, a variation on a well-known theme: secularity is an intrinsically religious phenomenon; it has a theological heritage and is coterminous with certain modern forms of religious expression. But as modernity is intimately linked with the secular world, Taylor devotes most of his book to an analysis of the modern subject and the internal divisions it harbors. He does hold that the seeds of the secular lie in the most basic distinctions between natural and supernatural, and thus in some of the oldest theological affirmations; but he believes the real inventor of the modern self is the theological Luther, not the philosophical Descartes. Ockham, however, plays a pivotal role because he is the one who constructs the theological "schema," the network of beliefs about God, man, and the cosmos, in which Luther's invention finds meaning. Ockham's voluntarism, his affirmation of the groundlessness of existence, his opposition of faith to reason, his latent empiricism, etc. are all principles without which the Reformation, and the secularism that mirrors it, would be inconceivable. As time rolls on and the modern subject is compounded in an ever vaster array of forms and frames, it becomes possible to see in Ockham the groundwork of 19th century romanticism, Nietzsche's will to power, Freud's psychoanalysis, British analytic thought, Continental semiology, and postructuralism (After God, p.60). What's most interesting is Taylor's citation of the work of Pierre Alferi (Derrida's son), who draws a direct line from Ockham's "nominalism" to Derrida's deconstruction. Because language for Ockham is general and existents are singular, real entities can't be represented linguistically. The link between words and things breaks down and "in semiotic terms, signifiers, which appear to point to independent signifieds, actually refer to other signifiers" (p.58). Ockham's theory of language unfolds a critique of metaphysics, resulting in a vision of the world as "an ungrounded play of signs," "unanchored by knowable referents" (p.58-59). Hence, Ockham was postmodern before modernity even got going. Eat your heart out, Lyotard.

That is certainly a lot to put on Ockham's plate. I have reservations, but I have to say that I don't think this line of argument is entirely wrong. In fact, I'm more and more convinced that something like this has got to be right, if for no other reason than that so many highly intelligent people with whom I agree on so many other matters say just this sort of thing. Folks like Louis Dupre have at least earned the benefit of the doubt, even if they are still hovering around the most decisive and compelling kind of argument.

Now I haven't read nearly enough Ockham to vindicate or refute accounts like Taylor's (nor, for that matter, have I read enough romanticism, Nietzsche, Freud, Analytic, semiology, or poststructuralism). But what I suspect is necessary to vindicate these kinds of arguments is a very detailed and technical analysis of Ockham's thought in the terms of medieval metaphysics and in relation to the metaphysical alternatives of his contemporaries. This kind of supplement is often the most difficult to give because it is the kind native to specialists and not to the kind of scholars likely to trace shifting ideas across centuries and radically disparate frameworks. It seems you have to become so familiar with the technicalities that if you didn't set out to be a specialist, you'll probably become one in spite of yourself. But how else could one build a truly solid case? How else see exactly what in Ockham's account is common, what is novel, and what the immediate implications of that novelty are?

And so I direct you to James Chastek's recent post on Ockham and the via moderna. In this short piece one sees the kind of grappling with Ockham that gestures in the right direction. He addresses the original Thomist beef with Ockham on a metaphysical matter in all its technicality. James gets points right off the bat for noting how improperly framed Ockham narratives often are: Ockham never identified as a Nominalist and he did not deny universals. We often simply forget why Ockham was charged with denying the objectivity of thought: his denial of the reality of categorical relations. As I understand it, when one follows Ockham in affirming only the reality of relations secundum dici, all relations are reducible to non-relative categories: either a substance or an accident as the modification of that substance. Hence without a real relation, a "to another" in the order of being that the mind's concepts can be patterned on, our signs' ability to "get to" their objects is undermined. Check out James' post for more detailed explanations.

I will quote this short piece of it, though, to support my belief that such grappling certainly can terminate in the same kind of conclusions reached by folks like Taylor and Alferi:

Thus, while Ockham is not a Nominalist, nor does he deny that the mind has true universals, we Thomists still argue that his teaching on relations, if followed to its logical conclusion, leads directly (and almost immediately) to the celebrated modern problem of objectivity, and ultimately to the post-modern denial of the possibility of any non-arbitrary connection between signs and concepts on the one hand and reality on the other.

When we notice the significance of Ockham denying universals, we see more clearly why he is the father of the via moderna. After all, the soul of modern thought is not so much an explicit teaching on universals, but a struggling with the “problem of objectivity”. For we Thomists, this problem is not a pseudo-problem, or a “Cartesian turn” that caught everyone unaware with a deadly objection, or a mental illness that needs to get purged by backgammon, kicking a stone. Most of all, it’s not a problem that we explain away by saying that the objectivity of thought is just obvious or proved by some mysterious intuition of objectivity. Rather, the problem of objectivity is simply the inevitable consequence of the (usually tacit) belief that all that exists is either a subject, or something whose whole being is a modification of that subject. Sad anther [sic] way, it is a consequence of the (usually unproven) denial of the reality of categorical relations.

Even though Ockham-lovers might challenge that characterization, it's the kind of reasoning that makes me feel much more secure in my a priori suspicion of all things Ockham.

Pax Christi,

Carmelizing

As today was the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, I thought it appropriate to write something about my experience with the Carmelite style of prayer. First off, it's important to understand that the kind of prayer the Carmelites have mastered involves a serious vocation; it is a very narrow path that God calls only particular souls to walk. Climbing Mount Carmel, groping through the dark night, and exploring the interior castle are some of the shortest paths we have in the Church, spiritual shortcuts to perfection; but paths that demand a great deal. These are some of the most beautiful forms that the Holy Spirit takes when He graciously allows the baptized soul to experience Christ's crucifixion in a "hidden way." But my dabbling in Carmelite prayer is decidedly different than the experience of those called in a unique way to take the habit and bear its crosses.

However, in general, I like the Carmelite mystics because they transfigure the boring. The desert, the stillness, the aridity of just sitting in the darkness of a "night"- it is so foreign to my mind. My mind is so restless, so used to pondering and tinkering; moving from this point to that. It is a very "Martha" mind, a Heracletian stream that slips through my fingers when I try to hold it in stillness. It is like struggling with a panicked, drowning man. After reading the mystics, I am ablaze with thoughts of contemplation and the paradoxical joy of its darkness- the ideas and the images that flood the mind inspire me. My mind runs and leaps. But flooding the mind with images is exactly what marks the insufficiency of one's contemplation. It is the opposite of the process of Carmelization. There is a nearly infinite gulf between thinking about such prayer and actually enduring in its stillness. It is boring, to put it frankly. To do it right, you can't do much of anything.

I've gotten better at comprehending this- of "getting it;" its shape is much clearer to me now. Which is paradoxical: getting its shape is like tracing the outlines of a shadow. But it seems important, because I've abandoned contemplative prayer time and time again. I simply wasn't clear on what I was doing (or rather, not doing). Drawing wrong conclusions from what I thought the prayer was supposed to be like left me frustrated again and again. Thinking about the prayer simply did not map onto the experience of it. But now I find myself catching those thoughts and correcting them. Slowly, ever so slowly, I am becoming accustomed to the stillness and the aridity. One can repeat over and over again at the level of theory what the darkness of night is in it's purity; but only when one touches that purity (by touching nothing) will it make any sense (by making rather little sense). The wisdom of the Carmelites is that they recognize and articulate how the aridity and deprivation are "signs" that contemplation is happening. This is a preparation for the supernatural; this is what it looks like when grace, the very love and life of the Triune, crucified God, reconfigures nature from the inside so that it has eyes only for God (while never seeing Him this side of the eschaton).

In the concept, it is absolutely gloriously to consider; in the experience, it is profoundly unexciting. One must simply keep at it, allow oneself to slowly cross that gap between thought about stillness and stillness itself. Which again is paradoxical: "keeping at" it is to active a description. But when one spends enough time in the dark, eventually one's eyes adjust.

Pax Christi,

Stylistic Finesse

Beauty herself had taken possession of me as of late, and reading Balthasar and Hart has inspired me to reflect a bit on some of the elements of theological style that they share. Theirs is a certain style of categorical flexibility, of conceptual finesse, that many Thomists find discomforting or even downright irresponsible. Many have warned that such a style is extremely difficult to pass on. while the often despised seminary textbooks in the pre-Vatican II days were arid and lacked narrative color, one of their great virtues was their tradition-friendly quality: they could easily be "traditioned" and form a quasi-universal foundation for theologians (which in fact they did for all the giants of la nouvelle theologie). Balthasar's and certainly Hart's style is more elusive, more playful. But even Thomists- among whose number I am undoubtedly counted- cannot aford to be all analysis and no synthesis. The real passion and creative power in thought- its originality- lies with synthesis (as Thomas exemplified).

What's characteristic of much modern theology is the more adventurous attempt to wed foreign words and traverse remote categories. But what seems unique about thinkers like Balthasar and Hart is that they display a thorough understanding of those distinctions and, in a sense, of precisely what they are not doing (and should not do). They compose a kind of symphony of "voices" (a favorite image of Balthasar's), playing different formal aspects of revelation off of each other: they sing the ontological, the epistemological, the aesthetic, the psychic, the mystical, etc. Though they are not always correct and not always precise, they are nonetheless deeply aware of the hermeneutic precision required to play on all these different instruments at once. They are aware that each formality is to treat the being of their object as "being as__" rather than to drown out all others with a single voice (uni-vocal). And what music they make! By linking Christology (sub ratione dei) with the analogia entis (ontology, qua being), or by linking analogy with beauty (qua delectatione), etc., they attempt, in different ways, to plumb the depths of the analogical resonances across these lenses of reality, across the various "qua"s.

One need only read a bit of popular theology today (popular, that is, in academia) to see just how easy it is to do this badly. Such a style will always tend toward the confusion of categories and the collapsing of distinctions. Catholic and Protestant thinkers alike seem all too willing to engage in such cacophony, perhaps because the distinction-making art of the Scholastics is so often frowned upon and dismissed as extra-biblical; or because concern over "mediation" has tended to shift conceptual burdens to Christ and His categories in ways that don't even make categorical sense. I am reminded of a number of responses evoked in a class I took on late medieval and early modern theology: the kinds of quaestiones the Scholastics addressed, with a great deal of dialectic rigor, were answered with a few trite maxims designed to make Christ do all the argumentative work and thereby pay little respect to the way the mind functions. "Christ is the question and consequently the answer as well"; "Christ is the only freedom we have"; "Christ is the only revelation of God"; "Christology contains everything needed for a doctrine of God"; etc. Is that it? Can this be anything but an exercise in obscurantism, taking advantage of sermonically imprecise rhetoric to generate the illusion of profundity?

The point is not that these statements are incapable of redeeming interpretations. Indeed, there is a sense in which they are quite orthodox and rhetorically rich. But to act as though such statements are their own proper interpretations-or better yet, are the proper interpretations of more precise claims- is to creatively oppress clarity. To put it another way, it is to act as though one formal aspect of the object of faith (in this case, Christology) is the only legitimate one and all others are absorbed by it. It can then allegedly supply insight across a wide categorical range without having to address the complexity of mediation. It acts as though the how is addressed by the what. But how exactly can Christ be a question? Does he have three natures now: God, man, and interrogative expression? How is He an answer? What kind of thing would that make Him? How does Christ reveal God in such a way that nothing else can be said to reveal Him? How can one begin with Christology for a doctrine of God when one still has no idea what could even qualify as "God?" How am I to know that Christ is revealing divinity, what should I look for? How could the hypostatic union make sense if I have no clear sense of how divinity and humanity differ? In short, such rhetoric posing as adequate theology fails utterly to intimate as well as to respect the analogical import of the categories in their differences (in their respective "qua"s). It therefore does violence to human thought; and all theology is, after all, human thought.

Then again, the temptation at the other extreme is a kind of Scholastic caricature: to reduce all thought to categorical parsing, making distinctions into barriers by simply stopping at those distinctions. All the king's horses and all the king's men such thinkers are. They dare not even attempt the venture that the obfuscaters are bold enough to take up. In contrast to the latter, Balthasar and Hart seem to shine. They walk the thin line, cling to the golden mean. They seem to possess (no doubt imperfectly) the sense of precision and hermeneutical sensativity needed for truly creative synthetic thought: thought that blends and mixes but in ways that do not easily dismiss the arguments of tradition.

All this is to say that such a finesse is an appealing ideal to me. In particular the potential to bring beauty into closer proximity with all of the other "qua"s that I routinely think through. For instance, beauty for Thomas is (at first glance) relatively restricted in meaning (Brendan can correct me on this). It is, I believe, entirely relative: not a transcendental in itself but the relation of a transcendental (the Good) to vision (sensible primarily but, more perfectly, intellectual). For Balthasar and Hart, beauty is a transcendental and encompasses so much of what pertains to the Good for Thomas or more generally to basic ontological structures intrinsic to being (analogia or transcendence, and all of the basic harmonies they entail). Clearly, beauty's thematic range is much wider and its import much weightier for these thinkers. And yet when one makes the necessary translation across conceptual languages, to see how their use of beauty incorporates various formalities rather than one, the different approaches to beauty's range are rather paled by all the work that beauty does so conceived. It gives us an idiom, one might say to the Thomist, to think and speak the Good with a particular depth and emphasis, a new twist or intonation. It is to speak of the Good in its primary ontological sense and not simply within the confines of a strictly ethical science. It is the desirability of being , its glory, splendor, and depth; the joy of the primal "it is good." Here Desmond speaks volumes and I dare say his philosophical oeuvre will be the guiding light for the future of this way of interpreting beauty.

Given this stylistic approach to beauty, new and creative approaches to long-standing conceptual problems suddenly open themselves up for experiment. It becomes possible, for instance, (as both Balthasar and Hart do in different ways) to posit the aesthetic as the key to modernity's deepest ontological sins. For the disenchantment of the world, the denial of all transcendence, the "death of God," the myth of "metaphysical violence," and the all-around blindness to the sacramental cosmos are rooted in the forgetfulness not just of being but of beauty. They mark the failure to think being analogously but more so beautifully, with the intrinsic charge of goodness that analogy should entail. I can imagine convincing a modern of the certain basic facts about natural law, the arguments for God's existence, even the structure of reality as such. Still, he could find nihilism in its face. He could still fail to perceive being's primal value, to desire being or God or his fellow creatures; and see only vanity. What he must learn to see is the beauty of being, and we must consign all conceptual barriers to such seeing to the flames. For only this can show him the intrinsic goodness and weight (kabod) of the real. That would be to see being as worthy of desire and awe, with the eyes of "agapeic astonishment" (ala Desmond). In short, being must shine as well as be.

Pax Christi,

Depth

As a thinker, I am comfortable with the First and with the Last; with the spirits that breathe men forth and draw them to their last with inevitable gravity. I think of God. My thoughts are at rest with the Sewer and the thread that spin the fabric of reality. I prefer eyes not naked but well dressed and trained to see those tiny tears where the veil is pierced in fleeting moments of ecstasy. It is as though these eyes lust for what cannot be seen and would find the most vibrant colors a drab and empty pallet. They can see the outlines of the shadow that, in reality, is a blazing sun in a world of shades. And they only cry "Beauty!" when there is a depth of this invisible in the seen.

What we see is never simple and never simply seen. What we see is always the invisible in the visible; the unseen in the seen. Some would have us think the world a shallow pond, so deprived of depth that there is in fact no water in which to wade. But in truth there is only a glossy surface because there are leagues of depth stretching down to where the anglers abide. Some would have a waveless world in which we all walk on our waters, all the bearers of such mediocre miracles. I would rather we float and sink and dare to drown.

I recall with fondness those moments when I first really began to think; when I would gaze at the trees outside my window and see something there I had not seen before. Such moments were Christmas mornings; I didn't see a tree but "a tree!" Each leaf was vibrant with an odd an unnamed vibrancy. All the matter was prosaically arranged, the data undisturbed, not a particle out of place. But now the tree appeared to me as gift; as though my eyes were tearing through wrapping paper. I had reached a point at which I could see these objects in all the fragility of their being, and in this alone is true beauty found. To see the poverty of each thing's appearance is to see the outlines of God in its bark or in its flesh. It is to hear an echo of a divine word uttered before the dawn first broke. And in this very poverty, a paradox: the tree becomes infinitely more than it ever would be were it "simply" seen. Truly, our eyes were meant to see in this shade: to see all things as if each moment were a Christmas morning.

Were this world devoid of origin, it would be deprived of depth. It would be the two-dimensional surface many say it is. But because it has an origin, it is deep. The surface is transfigured and its flatness is that of an icon.

Pax Christi,