MAKING THE ARGUMENT FOR CHRISTIAN ORTHODOXY (2)
[Part one]
Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing and the Difference of Theology [London: Routledge, 2002].
Por Manuel Sumares
Of course, at bottom everything is simple, indeed divinely so. The problem consists in getting our minds around to seeing it as such. It appears to demand a great deal of doing and saying to get even close to it. In what follows, I hope to do justice to Conor Cunningham’s Genealogy of Nihilism as an effort to work through the tangle of dominant philosophical discourse to approach the divine simplicity that orthodox theology affirms as coincident with the real. In other words, I hold that Cunningham’s book is about ontology and is particularly helpful as a guide for intellectual pilgrims. To speak of a Pilgrim’s progress, with all that John Bunyan’s wonderful story suggests about alluring temptations and pitfalls, but also delectable mountains and a final homecoming, is in fact an appropriate way to describe what happens in Genealogy of Nihilism. But we shall get to that and eventually expand on it to the extent of at least suggesting an opening for a fuller discourse that reflects the idea of the suspended middle, i.e., the idea of theologically informed ontology argued for with philosophical rigour. The notion of the suspended middle, which actually came about as a description that Hans von Balthasar gave of Henri de Lubac’s position, became the title of John Milbank’s short but revealing work on the debate over the supernatural and a theme of an article on Maurice Blondel of my own (1). It might be worth underscoring Cunningham’s close tries with Milbank’s significant theological project and the fact that my own reading of Blondel took its cue from Milbank’s thinking about de Lubac and the latter’s view of the Church. This confessed, it is the notion of the intellectual pilgrimage, as outlined in Genealogy of Nihilism, that needs retaining, for, curiously, it also constitutes a transgression of sorts. And this is especially so, for the orthodoxy that it advances.
No one has ever mistaken Gilbert Keith Chesterton for a theologian, but his wit and his uncanny capacity of conjoining depth and the sense of dynamic balance in his defence of orthodoxy are nevertheless striking. Much of what he said about the paradoxical character of orthodoxy provides an appropriate introduction to what we shall be endeavouring to bring to the fore in our discussion of nihilism. For example, Chesterton takes issue with the conventional wisdom that orthodoxy is fundamentally boring. But actually, in its saneness, it is thrilling, dangerous, and daring. “It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and sway that, yet every attitude having the grace of statuary and accuracy” (2). What the Church Fathers had before them as a task of developing doctrinally the fullness of divine revelation in Christ in conjunction with the liturgical life of the believing communities. Neither decidedly unworldly, nor immersed in worldly passions, orthodoxy could not but be at odds with the worldly conventions or with the nay-saying about the goodness of creation. Through it all, orthodoxy seeks restoration and it is precisely in this that it is revolutionary, thrilling. “To the orthodox there must always be a case for revolution; for in the hearts of men God has been put under the feet of Satan. In the upper world hell once rebelled against heaven. But in this world heaven is rebelling against hell” (3). In view of what we shall be seeing below, some of Chesterton’s remarks near the end of Orthodoxy are particularly telling. Again, always arguing in the paradoxical mode, the author remarks how divine grace is apparently ungracious, how the unpopular features (ethical abnegations and a priestly class) that constitutes its visible side actually provides support for the people and, within its interior life, gives reason for dance and festiveness: “for Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom” (4) On the other hand, modern life and thinking projects an image of an ardently sought after emancipation and creativeness, but despair resides at its core. Once again, paradoxically, emancipation and creativeness would look different if brought within the spiritual disciplines aimed at developing the theological virtues. Indeed, Christianity becomes the frame, at once comprehensive and transformative in its intent to restore that which is now lost and despairing. We find ourselves with so much debris and fragmented reality around us; divine restoration of the real’s original goodness speaks directly to that condition and wholeness becomes the aim.
What remains interesting for our subject in Chesterton’s sprite apologetics is the commingling of orthodoxy and paganism. They – quite like the two cities in Augustine’s reading of salvation history – are fundamentally contentious toward one another and have distinctive inner logics that are supportive of worldviews that diverge. Yet they cannot be conceived apart from one another. That is, each is implicitly questioned by the other; it will be their responses that will differ. Orthodoxy will offer a kind of homecoming, something that can be thought of as a matrix that consists in the pattern that means to render fully intelligible and realised the visible and palpable reality that human beings inhabit. On the other hand, the nihilism that underlies the neo-paganism dominating modern and post-modern secularism represents, as Chesterton intimates, a possibility directly associated with the endowment of freedom granted to the human species. Human beings and their societies may set upon a course that takes them away from their originating religious life-forms. Nevertheless, the declaration of independence that this implies can offer a kind of critical challenge capable of putting orthodoxy on guard against self-enclosure. Indeed it endeavours to give orthodoxy its true meaning as a quest within divine mystery, as a developing tradition constantly explicating the as-yet-not explicated potential for meaning that the matrix possesses.
In his thinking about the rationality of traditions, Alasdair MacIntyre has proposed that a tradition be seen as a long argument. But as arguments are built over against counter-arguments, the side that will eventually prevail will need to both absorb the criticism from the opposition and find the recourses to demonstrate that what had been before insufficiently integrated can nonetheless be so and with greater effect. These challenging criticisms provoke “epistemological crises” – an idea that he takes over from Thomas Kuhn but applying the term to the broader horizon of the criss-crossing of civilisations – that need to be overcome by rendering more agile its narrative potential. After all, arguments are made and promoted with success in mind. Prevailing in the end becomes the goal and, it seems evident, between the theologically supported orthodoxy and nihilism the arguments are currently in full operation as traditions that have their point of departure in distinctly different ontological commitments. Let us delve further into this.
One of the lessons that we shall garner from Cunningham’s study of the logic of nihilism is how much it presupposes a cultural drift toward a reading of reality in univocal terms. To that we shall return. But one of the features of the drift is that, in spite of the wide diversity of the authors who contribute to it, the underlying logic is curiously the same and it constitutes a tradition of its own. That is to say, a tradition of interpretive commentary with a high degree of mutuality can be noted and rendered in narrative form. Thus, for example, Nietzschean perspectivism, Heideggerian “Destruction,” and Derridean “Deconstuction” not only are manifestly sequential in regard to a certain development of its own, but also (along with a constellation of thinkers who prolong and cultivate a univocal and nominalist view of ontology) make a third way between theism and nihilism impossible. There is either participation in a theistic metaphysics, supportive of orthodoxy and the tradition that conjugates faith and reason through analogical thinking, or one participates in a consequent naturalisation of the religious impulse in human nature and the achievement of secular reason and autonomy. Humanist, or liberal, proposals (be they theological), derived from the Enlightenment Project, are dragged into the logic of nihilism, precisely because of their underlying univocal positioning. Either we relearn to think analogically, or we drift into nihilism.
Though he did not concern himself with the ontological as such, at least in the manner that the Catholic tradition does, Kierkegaard did outline the nature of the problematic in his proposals of the either/or schemes throughout his work. As we know, Kierkegaard’s anti-system bias does not make it easy to give a rounded out version of what he finally meant. But in the posthumously published, “The Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle,” he does give us a clue and offers an opportunity to succinctly make the point. Centring his attention on Paul, he notes that the Apostle has come to be treated in liberal theology, strongly marked by the Hegelianism of the epoch, as a genius. His metaphors have become an object of admiration. The net effect of this sort of assessment is to fall into the quantitative trap: the judgment is based on “how much” genius, on the judgment depending on the aesthetic consciousness of the critical reader who ultimately will compare Paul’s metaphor-making with that of other geniuses. But, on the contrary, the Apostle does not belong to himself: he is obedient to a higher call, the import of which cannot be understood according to worldly standards. A qualitatively different status is given to the one who has been singled out to bear witness that that which is radically given from a Transcendent source. Thus, whilst the liberal theologian who stands in judgment of the New Testament writings on the basis of his literary acumen, the apostle cannot be absorbed into the patrimony of human culture. Seen in this light, the aesthetic impulse invades that of the universalising ethicist.
In this late expression of Kierkegaard’s thinking, it is the paradox that is distinguishing. Religious thought can attempt to dilute the strange power of scriptural revelation and bring it down to earth, making it comestible for public consumption and a good source for social harmonisation. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard called this Religion A. Important ethical demands are implied in this form of religiosity and one indeed that is important for advancing toward Religion B, i.e., the religiosity that admits the paradox of eternity in time in the person of Christ and the reality of human sin. Yet it remains childish expression of the faith. As in the aesthetic stage, personal commitment is weakened by Religion A’s formal, or rationalised, schema. This lack of commitment and risk translates in the loss of content and real participation in divine action. Hence, the drift toward nihilism is noticeable in the weakening of the ontological bond. In its place, concepts and universalising rationalization become the main focus. They become an ersatz expression of the real, whereas – as Blondel describes it – true metaphysics as for its substance a will-in-action, un vouloir agissant. The ontological question concerning “why something is rather than not” must not evolve into an endless delving into the wondering of the nothing behind the something.
A more promising meditation would fix its attention on the “is,” or act, by which human wondering is taken up into the richness of the given being constantly given – as we are ourselves. Whilst negative theology is part and parcel of the questioning process in order to avoid premature characterization of donating power, it is the donation that realises and invokes a response. Speaking ontologically, the matter resides in the dilemma for human thinking that Cunningham raises in his Preface in regard to what is thinking about and whether or not philosophy can effectively deal with it without creating endless expressions of dualisms. This seems to be the fate of philosophy, working from the primitive dualism within the noetic operations themselves, to wit, the fact that thought, or the process of thinking, can be the object of thought, or part of another process of thinking (5). Paraphrasing what Cunningham says there, we might pose questions like, “Is the content given as significant by the thinking subject to what it is being thought more fundamental than the negating instance that creates an ever-renewable distance between thought and thinking? Is that “third thing” that mediates between thinking and thought ultimately an absence of reality, a determinant nothing?” This being the case, nothing has taken upon itself the role of creator, rejecting all the while that thinking may be part of a divine gift. In effect, the nature of the mediating factor becomes immensely decisive in establishing just where philosophy might do well in seeing itself as a part of a larger theological undertaking.
As we shall see, nihilism will have to be read against the backdrop of a theistic metaphysics that does not begin as a logical conceptualisation of the real but a total movement of life, or that which constitutes the bond between thinking and thought. Ideas can indeed related to being but being is more fundamentally related to action. Whatever argument may be elicited for such metaphysics cannot be truly separated from what instigates the will to bring together a reading of the real with an action engaged with the demands of the real itself. For this too, Blondel had an expression: théergie, i.e., the creative dynamics of the supernatural as deployed in the real and the creative engagement of the human will that answers it. In following Cunningham’s exploration into the logic of nihilism we shall find that its “presence” is unmistakeably operative in our cultural tradition as fundamentally a refusal of theistic metaphysics, or the logic of action as Blondel conceived it. But, quite like in Kierkegaard’s thinking about Christianity, the accommodating must be in the direction of theism, for nihilism might have something to say, but the deeper reality that is at once ever-lasting and self-giving constitutes the substance of things hoped for. The “aesthetic” mode of existence must yield its prerogatives to that of the sustaining force of supernatural. Nevertheless, its character can be fore-grounded and seen for the a-theological tradition that it has become on the basis of a consequent refusal of the structuring potential of theism and the rationality that it bears with it.
I. The Logic of Nihilism
Conceding the consequent
In order to bring to light the logic of nihilism as Cunningham sought to understand it, I suggest using an “if, then” form of making inferences. We shall begin with the consequent, i.e., what Cunningham sees as the current situation, i.e., the “case,” that stands in need of explication, and then work back to the hypothetical subsequent clauses that might account for the consequent. Here the subsequent clauses will involve three key notions that cut across the series of authors seen as drifting toward or actively cultivating nihilist ontology, to wit, provision, onto-theology, and meonto-theology. The three together will provide the inferential justification for the consequent, or what is currently the case. And all together they will represent the logic of nihilism. In so proceeding, Cunningham’s argument may be best appreciated, assessed, and integrated in the larger tradition of theistic reading of reality, which is manifestly Cunningham’s intention. Thus, following each clause of the “if, then” proposition, an explanation of its terms will be given.
a.
The consequence, or what is the case: an a-theological doctrine of creation ex nihilo has begotten, for both its true believers and those who are not, a post-apocalyptic reality.
Creation is just where nihilism gets off track in relation to theology. It is also – and this is Cunningham’s particular contribution to the subject – where nihilism is most like theism, its “dark twin” (6): its attraction consists in its proposal to provide a creativity that comes from the power that human beings may buy into and extend. It constitutes, in short, a creation ex nihilo, a notion that is essential to the Jewish and Christian sense of creation, but now given a separate world to indulge in the possibility of creating out of nothing and no-one transcendent. In an older but ever relevant language, this tendency can be subsumed under the category of idolatry, a constant worry for the Jewish prophets. These drew the lines between the demands of covenantal fidelity, the provisions of which held out the promise of blessings for obedience to the One who chose them to be a blessing to the nations, and the terrible propensity to sacrifice (human lives included) to fabricated deities in the high places so that, fundamentally, the worshippers might have their own way. Though not referred to as such by Cunningham, the place that idolatry has in the story is more than evident, especially in what it suggests as an alternative theology that claims to provide blessings of a sort and as implying the autonomous operations of human beings to control their projections of the possible. Once again, it is a matter of having their own way and on their own terms.
The contemporary philosophies of difference would see the theme magnified in the exercise of the human will that accompanies the posture of persistent critique. Dissolution is liberating and, in that regard, the advance of the work involved in “making something nothing” does not longer look toward an apocalyptic denouement but is now “post-apocalyptic.”
Nihilism is postapocalyptic in more than one way. First of all, nihilism declares that nothing is. Second, and more importantly, nihilism reads this assertion with a particular strength, which is to say that nihilism is. /…/ Nihilism is postapocalyptic, because it is past being apocalyptic. That is, it is otherwise than merely negative. The apocalyptic, which is passed through, or passed over, is that of the disaster. /…/ This is a disaster which is itself always postapocalyptic, because /according to Maurice Blanchot/ ’when the disaster comes upon us it does not come’ (7).
Just what Blanchot is getting at and just why Cunningham is intent on using Blanchot’s idea will involve a measure of interpretive speculation. But the overall context of the argument laid out in Genealogy of Nihilism will help.
As a theologian Cunningham is aware that the apocalypse refers to a decisive revelation about the end of the old order and the beginning of a new one. A post-apocalyptic situation would likely be that of the different order, coming after the one that failed. In principle, at least in biblical terms, it would be a good thing, to wit, new heavens and a new earth; the former creation would have elapsed, self-destructed. But the long practice of nihilist thought has by itself transported us through a kind of apocalypse and into something “post,” perhaps something akin to post-modern, a mode of living that has collapsed under the weight of its own pretentions – or, in Cunningham’s terms, its own provisions. As post-modern is not necessarily that which comes after a fixed period of time that we called modernity, the post-apocalyptic is not exactly a time that follows a world that shows all the signs of pointing to its proper end, the reading of which is not entirely without great, hopeful expectations based on divine promise.
What we have is a disaster that has come without coming; it has simply silently, ineluctably arrived as a consequence of itself, as a forbidding of metaphysics understood as onto-theology. We would, after Heidegger, rather have an ontology at once immanent and whole, in which nothing has the transcendental function of providing being. In still other words and in reference to the more Nietzschean strain of thought, we have nihilism and, paradoxically, a universalistic doctrine of perspectivism, operating against the dark background of nothing. Disaster installed, these post-apocalyptic times mimic the theological virtue of hope: somehow, not God but nothing will provide. And this will also go to suggest that the latter day nihilists do no more than take to their ultimate consequences a dominant propensity in Western intellectual history to render infinite the finite space of secularity – as Milbank demonstrated in Theology and Social Theory, the general argument of which stands behind that of Genealogy of Nihilism. The attempt to provide the promises of realisation, associated with theological discourse, within the bounds of naturalising discourse has engendered intellectual excitement and the exuberance of transgression, but also a passionate ambience voided of value. Yet, because creation is ex nihilo, dreams of the possible abound. However, “/…/ every creation from nothing remains nothing; nothing as something”(8). If creation cannot provide the good whilst communicating ideas (or essences) into an existing order that truly effects that good, then the resulting reality will reflect to some degree the absence of good. The question hangs on the goodness of the creating reality: it can only provide in accordance with its nature; it can only give what it has to give. Creation from nothing and in the absence of good will cultivate a post-apocalyptic present.
b.
The antecedent, which if true, confirms the consequent: if the provenance of nihilism is found in the will to provide before provision, to enable us to be without being…
Underscored as such at the outset of Cunningham’s thesis, the terms, “provide” and “ provision,” play a key role in situating the logic of nihilism. Quite simply and suggestively, he goes to the etymology of the word to stress that it is a combination of videre (to see) and pro (before). In a nihilist context, it translates into saying that some idea or thing is proposed beforehand as capable of producing what it does not have; the result is non-production, or – ontologically speaking – leaving us effectively, “without being.” For my part, I should accentuate the aspect of the will. For reasons that would need to be situated ultimately in the particularity of a life-story, the will-to-provide might well be correlated with self-creative will-to-power. Though not given a chapter unto himself in Cunningham’s book, Nietzsche’s sense of self-affirmation does find its way into the argument and shadows its movement, as it necessarily must especially as it approaches the more contemporary philosophies of difference. The least one can say is the power of the will has been loosed from Transcendence and is now deployed on the immanent plane of possibility, of all choices. Nevertheless the background discourse remains theological and the gradual rendering of the world as independent from the divine essence constitutes a rupture with an ontology read analogically. In sum, it reflects an original compulsion of rebellion in the name of self-sufficiency:
We ‘moderns’ continually betray the operation of a given within our discourse. It is this given which re-enacts the logic of the fall: to have a-part of the world apart from God. This given expands to include all creation and here lies the foundation for the development of a negative plenitude which issues from the sides of this virulent immanence (9).
The desire to exist apart from a positive plenitude finds, Cunningham argues, a very early expression in Plotinus’s idea that the One wishes to be alone and without being. Yet it will produce a finite other from which it endeavours to lateralise, to not be a part of, and, in such an operation, Plotinus creates the form of nihilism that will represent the Fall in Western intellectual history: “The One and the finite are both within the belly of the other, each generated by way of contemplative provision. The fall away from the One is a fall within the One. This fall is designed to recall that which is fallen before it falls. So it is always a fall within immanence”(10). We are left with a curious monism in which finite being is produced, provided for, by a non- being that is at once One, univocal, yet nothing.
Thus, if the provenance of nihilism is found in the will to provide before provision, to enable us to be without being, then an a-theological doctrine of creation ex nihilo has begotten, for both its true believers and those who are not, a post-apocalyptic reality.
The embarrassment of postulating such a negative plenitude found its way in modern times, for example, in Hegel’s idea that there is a passing into being from indeterminate reality, i.e., a nothing that is pure immediacy, and in need of a differentiating mediation. That which proceeds from such a ground is a transition from no-thing to some-thing. Importantly, the process takes the place of the Transcendent and provides us with formal differences that deliver neither goods nor reality. “The actuality of nothing as something is enabled by Hegel’s system because everything is nothing, but the nothing qua nothing is provisional (in both senses of the word)”(11).
Keeping our attention on the theistic ontology that operates provisionally in the argument, the negative plenitude with its own infinity is “diabolic,” for, like a heresy, nihilism is reactive and works on the premise that it can provide all those features that theology used to be able to do. This would include intelligibility and a proper axiology. This is another way of saying that nihilism is competitive to the kind of orthodoxy in search of a developed doctrine based on the natural and revealed givens. These givens are, however, not based on choice, a choice that provides a reality. Theology’s givens do involve interpretive labour to correlate and eventually comprehend, but they are deemed foundational, or formative, and sets one on his way – to return to the pilgrimage motif with which we began. Orthodoxy is a task that assumes humility, but it presumes a good will come of it. Provision comes from something other than self-will.
[[Part two to follow in the next issue ]]
Notas:
Mark John Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the debate over the Supernatural (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005). M. Sumares, “Blondel, the Idea of the Suspended Middle, and the Church” in International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church vol. 9 number 1, January, 2009.
2 G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, (Colorado Springs: Shaw Books, 2001), p. 149.
3 Chesterton, p. 163.
4 Chesterton, p. 239.
5 Cunningham, p. Xii.
6 John Milbank, The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2009), p. 161. In his earlier Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), Milbank recognised the import of reckoning with nihilism in this fashion: “Yet the capacity of nihilism to deconstruct antiquity shows that there can be no going back; only Christian theology now offers a discourse able to position and overcome nihilism itself.” (p. 6) Here too, we are instructed that nihilist presuppositions spread widely in contemporary thought and effectively mask – as we shall see below -- behind their provisions the postulation of no-thing.
7 Cunningham, p. 239-40. This passage inspired in Blanchot has a complement in another quote from him: “our suicide precedes us.” p. xv.
8 Cunningham, p. 247.
9 Cunningham, p. 172.
10 Cunningham, p. 8.
11 Cunningham, p. 124.