Oino-theology

This post is an extension of my previous post, picking up where it left off. The very next passage in The Beauty of the Infinite elaborates on the idea that Christianity, properly understood, is not a retreat -- spiritual or physical -- to some far-off world, but is rather a joyful celebration and affirmation of God's good creation, made possible by the earthly ministry of Jesus Christ. While Nietzsche sees in the Dionysian the joyful embrace of life -- in all its terrible, majestic power and splendor -- that Christianity rejects, Hart wishes to instead pit Dionysus against The Crucified using a typology of wine, and the riposte is brilliant.

"Verily I say unto you, I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine, until that day I drink it new in the Kingdom of God" (Mark 14:25; cf. Matt. 26-29; Luke 22:18)—wine clearly appears here as the perfect and concrete emblem of the beauty of creation and the joy of dwelling at peace in the midst of others: not the wine of Dionysus, which makes fellowship impossible, promising only intoxication, brute absorption into the turba, anonymity, and violence, but the wine of the wedding feast of Cana, or of the wedding feast of the Lamb. The wine of Dionysus is no doubt the coarsest vintage, intended to blind with drunkenness […] the wine repeatedly associated with madness, anthropophagy, slaughter, warfare, and rapine. The wine of Scripture on the other hand, is first and foremost a divine blessing and image of God’s bounty (Gen. 27:28; Dt. 7:13; 11:14; Ps. 104:15; Prov. 3:10; Isa. 25:6; 65:8; Jer. 31:12; Joel 2:19-24; 3:18; Amos 9:13-14; Zech. 9:17) and an appropriate thank offering by which to declare Israel’s love for God (Ex. 29.40; Lev 23:13; Num. 15:5-10; 18:12; 28:14; Deut. 14:23); it is the wine that cheers the hearts of men (Judg. 9:13); the sign of God’s renewed covenant with his people (Is. 55:1-3); the drink of lovers (Song 5.1) and the very symbol of love (7:2, 9), whose absence is the eventide of all joy (Isa. 24:11); it is moreover the wine of Agape and the feast of fellowship, in which Christ first vouchsafed a sign of his divinity, in a place of rejoicing, at Cana—a wine of the highest quality—when the kingdom showed itself “out of season.” Of course Nietszche was a teetotaler and could judge the merit of neither vintage, and so it is perhaps unsurprising that his attempts at oino-theology should betray a somewhat pedestrian palate. (pp. 108-109)*

Just like Hart to punctuate an insightful, eloquent theological discourse with a devastating polemical right hook!  Vintage Hart, if you'll excuse the pun.

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*This is a shortened version of the passage, in order to make it blog-friendly, but if you're so inclined you can read the full version at Google Books.

Christian Otherworldliness

A common critique of Christians and Christianity by secular critics today is that the Christian focus on the significance of another world -- a spiritual world and/or future world, fundamentally 'apart' from this reality -- causes Christians to withdraw from the world; to disdain the world; to -- if not celebrate -- at least downplay the significance of decay, destruction, and death; to defer responsibility and actions in the troubled world around them. The critique finds its most robust, vibrant articulation in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, and he isn't entirely wrong. There are certainly some bitter fruits associated with just such a Christian Otherworldliness, to the extent that it exists. The question becomes whether it in fact exists and to what extent, and whether it is a particularly Christian Otherworldliness that is really at issue, or otherworldliness as such which just happens to have a Christian variant.

Re-visiting David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite, this passage stuck out to me, in which Hart addresses the issue, and traces the true genesis of this otherworldliness to pre-Christian sources, which in turn infected elements of Christianity, but which was never proper to its essence.

[H]owever just [Nietzsche's] condemnation of pious otherworldliness  may be -- and the church has seen no end of it -- it is the unambiguous renunciation of gnosticism, and not the paradoxical renunciation of classical Christianity, that would correspond most nearly to his account. Indeed, no one familiar with late antiquity and the world in which the gospel was first preached can be unaware that a prevailing spirit of otherworldliness had long been moving inexorably through the empire: not only gnosticism, but every variety of etherealizing devotion, mystery religions, Eastern esoterica, mystical Platonisms, and the occult; the contempt for the flesh expressed by Valentinus, Ammonias Saccas, Plotinus, the Mithraic mysteries, or even the sanctimoniously ungroomed Emperor Julian was more bitterly world-weary than any of the exorbitant expressions of spirituality to which the church fell prey.

One may agree with Nietzsche that this atmosphere of acosmic and incorporeal religiosity defames the world, and one may acknowledge that it infected every institution and spiritual aspiration of its age, including those of the church; but one should also recognize it as first and foremost a pagan phenomenon. [...] Christianity suffered from this contagion in some considerable measure. [...] But it was also into this crepuscular world of transcendental longings, of a pagan order grown weary of the burden of itself, that the Christian faith came as an evangel promising newness of life, and that in all abundance, preaching creation, divine incarnation, resurrection of the flesh, and the ultimate restoration of heavens and earth; a faith, moreover, whose symbols were not occult sigils, or bull's blood, or the brackish water and coarse fare of the ascetic age, but the cardinal signs of fellowship, feasting, and joy: bread and wine.

[...]

And surely there is something almost tediously wrong in asserting Christ's crucifixion has ever figured in Christian tradition as a repudiation, rather than ultimately an affirmation, of the fleshly life Christ was forced to relinquish (pp. 106-107)

The Christian faith, uniquely, provides the resources for "renarrating the cosmos from the ground up", and affirming the goodness of creation -- in all of its glorious materiality -- while also providing a metaphysical account of evil. Hart continues:

The orthodox doctrine of creation out of nothingness, and its attendant doctrine of the goodness of creation, led the church (more radically than even Neoplatonism) to deny evil any ascription of true being, to define it not as an essence or positive force but as mere negation, reaction, a privation of the good, a perversity of the will, an appetite for nonbeing -- but no thing among things: all things had to be affirmed, with an equal emphasis, as God's good creation. (pp. 106-107)

One take-away from all this, on a meta level, is that we need to avoid being so reactionary that we immediately reject everything critics of the faith have to say out of hand; we need to recognize the nuggets of truth that may be contained therein, but to shed the full light of truth on them, separating the wheat from the chaff. In this case, Nietzsche and his modern ideological descendents are right to be wary of otherworldliness, but the solution is not to turn away from Christ and the orthodox Christian tradition, but toward them.

Beauty, Postmodernism, and Christianity

While the ground sought by modernity proved to be elusive, thereby yielding the postmodern critique of modernity, the Christian claim to reality welcomes the postmodern critique. Not so that our particular metanarrative can sit comfortably alongside other metanarratives and live in harmony with them, but because our metanarrative is comparatively so robust, so compelling, so sensible and necessary in the light of all relevant experiential and evidential data -- in other words so beautiful. Strict relativism is an illegitimate position to deduce from the premises of postmodernity; the fact that there exist a plethora of metanarratives -- none of which can be its own objectively justified grounding -- does not mean that all metanarratives are of equal value or quality, or that one can't be present which is the metanarrative that supersedes and subsumes all other metanarratives. Christian truth, properly understood, always has been a rhetoric which presents itself aesthetically, first and foremost. The truth of Christianity can't be divorced from its beauty.

None of this is a concession that the object of Christian worship, the Triune God of the Bible, is anything (or really Anyone) less than absolute Truth, only that He can't be conclusively shown to be such in the interaction between finite minds (some currently imbued with the Holy Spirit and some not). Instead it's to say that the vibrancy and beauty of the Christian metanarrative, and the relative impoverishment of all others, is a signpost that points to the probable Truth of the Christian claim. Or, more precisely, that its truth and beauty have a dialectic relationship which testifies to its supremacy over all other metanarratives. Claims that some other rhetoric has comparable or greater force I dismiss, not out of hand, but out of the knowledge obtained in my investigation of the matter. If there really is no Capital-T Truth, then beauty will ultimately only be in the eye of the beholder, of course, and then those alternate claims are just as valid as mine; but if Truth is out there, then that Truth will be Beauty itself, and it becomes possible for one rhetoric to rise above and absorb all others into itself. The postmodern turn in philosophy doesn't answer the question of whether Truth is out there, but only says that there is no dispassionate, objective position we can occupy to access this knowledge and demonstrate that we have done so. The latter postulate is what seems to be forgotten often.

Incidentally, even some highly influential non-theist thinkers such as Hegel -- and some contemporary Hegelians, such as Slavoj Zizek -- seem to accept the supremacy of Christian rhetoric. While they don't make the move that I do here -- claiming that the nonpareil beauty of the Christian rhetoric is an overwhelming testament to its Truth -- they do affirm its beauty and its potency as a means for understanding the world.

As I've hinted at, modernity need not remain entirely silent on this issue; the popularized version of the postmodern triumph in epistemology and philosophy is a catastrophist model, meaning that it envisions postmodernity counteracting modernity and overturning it; in reality the postmodern project was really inaugurated within modernity all along, and postmodernity is really just its consummation. With this in mind, the internal coherence of the Christian story can still be examined by traditionally modern methods, and how well (or poorly) it fairs under such scrutiny will testify for (or against) its Beauty, which in turn will comment on its claim to Truth. If it patently fails, for example, this would obviously severely cripple its aesthetic appeal; conversely, if it stands up as well as can be expected, this fact either acts as an element of the rhetoric of the Christian story itself, or at least something that acts as an adjacent support structure for it.

With this position laid out, the only task that remains is actually presenting the rhetoric in question. Though it's of course too large a task for this trifle of a post, or for any individual, I can at least point you to the location of the current development of that rhetoric, which is Christ's church on Earth, inhabited and empowered by the Holy Spirit. The church, the Body of Christ, is a furthering of the rhetoric which begins with the loving God of creation making Man in His image for His pleasure, and then reconciling the fallen world to Himself through Christ, the second person of the Trinity. This is, of course, a terribly inadequate thumbnail sketch of the totality of the staggering beauty of Christian rhetoric, which can only be fully appreciated by partaking in that rhetoric, but can also be seen (to some degree) from the outside, if approached humbly, thoughtfully, and prayerfully.

My (self-imposed) task here wasn't to demonstrate the beauty of the rhetoric itself -- though I do earnestly implore anyone reading to investigate the matter for themselves -- but only to make the case that, within a postmodern framework, Beauty becomes a primary concern which can present a more powerful and potent case for one metanarrative's supremacy over others, which in turn can become an argument for its Truth.

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This post was inspired entirely by David Bentley Hart's Beauty of the Infinite. I make no claims to originality, but my thoughts on this subject were flitting through my head and asking to be transcribed in my own words.

'Beauty of the Infinite' - Review

I finally completed Beauty of the Infinite. As I've mentioned in other posts, it was a difficult read for me in terms of my lack of familiarity with the works of many of the philosophers and theologians -- and the epochs of thought -- which Hart's argument builds upon. Though, I imagine it's also partially due to Hart's style, most notably his unrestrained erudition and massive vocabulary (spanning multiple languages), though this could be a false perception. In any case, the read became much easier as the book progressed, though I'm not sure if the latter half of the book is "objectively" less difficult, or whether I just became accustomed to the language and style of thought by that point.

This text doesn't seem to be intended for a lay audience at all, but it was an extremely rich, rewarding and perhaps revolutionary read for me. I never really thought that Christian tradition was lacking in theological richness, or in philosophical resources, but Beauty of the Infinite took my appreciation for that tradition to new heights. Much of that richness was undoubtedly already present in tradition, and I had just never encountered it. This is evident in the sections where Hart merely summarizes the thought of various theologians -- such as Gregory of Nyssa and Athanasius -- and those mere summaries of their thought gave me a greater appreciation for the Christian intellectual tradition.

On top of this mini-revelation are Hart's own theological and philosophical contributions which -- again from my vantage as a member of the laity -- are thorough, brilliant and enlightening. Hart's discourses on the analogia entis (the 'analogy of being'), Trinitarian dogmatics and the aesthetics of Christian truth particularly opened my mind just what it is that fundamentally differentiates Christian thought from other forms of thought, and the radical possibilities that open up as a result.

Specifically, the notion of the supremacy of surfaces and rhetoric (over and against 'essences' and 'dialectic') in Christian thought was something I had never fully grasped and which this text clarified for me. That the 'form' of Christ -- in all his particularity and beauty -- is fundamentally everything that Christianity has to offer. And how contrasting this style of thought to both the reductionist tendencies of modernity, as well as the nihilistic totalizing of postmodernity, reveals how Christian thought can accept that it is a kind of rhetoric, only one without peer.

This elevation of rhetoric -- the rhetoric of the Father as incarnate in Christ -- leads directly into the idea that Being is an expression of the Trinitarian God, as opposed to it being a 'univocal' expression. I had never fully considered the consequences of this. For if Creation is a truthful expression of its Creator then that Creation should express certain characteristics in its very fabric, and a 'univocal' expression of being would be very different from a Trinitarian expression. The Trinity possesses an internal dynamism, a life, an intrinsic grace, and when this conception of God is analogized to Creation, Creation should take on a certain form which also contains an irreducible dynamism.

So many discourses on being -- virtually all of them, even some Christian ones -- according to Hart, fail to completely grasp the implications of this "theological interruption" and what it consequently makes possible. In other words, Christian thought can, in many ways, consider itself immune to the critiques of modernity and postmodernity, once the critiques are properly understood. Not that it can evade engaging those critiques, but that it can answer them in a way that other forms of thought can not. Once the project of modernity -- to dissemble and distill reality into sets of self-evident truths, by way of "disinterested rationality" -- failed, Christian thought knew that this was inevitable because Truth is contained in the surface. And that surface is a a reflection of the Trinitarian God who similarly can not be reduced to principles or 'truths' that are more essential than (and therefore less than) the totality of Himself, as expressed in the form, the surface, the particularities of Christ.

This is a very inadequate summary of some aspects of Hart's arguments, but hopefully you get the general idea. This understanding of Christian truth was a revelation for me as the implications of this understanding have actually proved to be quite extensive. For anyone with any theological or philosophical training, Beauty of the Infinite is essential reading. For any lay person with a fairly intense intellectual curiosity and dogged persistence, the text can prove extremely rich and rewarding as well.