Deconstructing Radical Orthodoxy

Postmodern Theology, Rhetoric and Truth

Wayne J. Hankey, Douglas Hedley, Douglas Hedley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351945912
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Radical Orthodoxy is the most influential theological development in a generation. Many have been bewildered by the range and intensity of the writings which constitute this movement. This book spans the breadth of the history of thought discussed by Radical Orthodoxy, tackling the accuracy of the historical narratives on which their position depends. The distinguished contributors examine the history of thought as presented by the movement, offering a series of critiques of individual Radical Orthodox 'readings' of key thinkers. Contributors: Eli Diamond, Wayne J. Hankey, Todd Breyfogle, John Marenbon, Richard Cross, Neil G. Robertson, Douglas Hedley, David Peddle, Steven Shakespeare, George Pattison, and Hugh Rayment-Pickard.

Chapter 1
Catherine Pickstock, Plato and the Unity of Divinity and Humanity:
Liturgical or Philosophical?¹

Eli Diamond

In After Writing, Catherine Pickstock offers a theological corrective to the excesses and evils of secular modernity. As part of the Radical Orthodoxy project, she engages in a rethinking of philosophical, cultural and religious traditions (RO, p. 2) in order to show the genealogy of our rise to and descent from what she calls the liturgical, or doxological, city. In this city, the diverse and dynamic character of material and temporal existence is invested with inherent worth through its manifestation of a supra-rational divine transcendence. The world is the site of the actual unification of the divine with nature and humanity. Yet because God is indeterminate and wholly beyond thought, the presence of the divine cannot be intellectually apprehended, but only ritually experienced. The first step towards a recovery of this insight is tracing the origins of liturgical theory and practice in pre-Christian times, and uncovering the process that has hidden this truth from our contemporary world.

Pickstock’s reading of Plato plays a crucial role in this critical rethinking of the past. According to Pickstock, Plato’s thought, formulated as a theological response to the scientific and sophistic nihilism of his day, offers an example of pre-Christian liturgical theory and practice, anticipating, if only incompletely (AW, p. 169), the liturgical unity of divinity and humanity/nature through his quest to show how the Good is intrinsically present in all reality as its origin and end. Her interpretation of the Platonic philosophy is intended to serve her anti-modern philosophical programme: the subordination of philosophy and reason to theology, myth and ritual, and the deconstruction of the modern subject. This essay aims to distinguish between what is genuinely illuminating in Pickstock’s reading of the Platonic philosophy and what is merely a reflection of her own ambiguously post-modern and pre-modern position.

Her account is helpful in discerning the non-dualistic intention of Platonic thought, and she is right to argue that Plato wants sensible reality to have existence and truth as a manifestation, however imperfect, of the Good itself. She rightly argues that the spirit of Platonic philosophy should not be interpreted as an absolute rejection of temporal reality through a flight to abstract thought objects. Equally helpful is her comparison of the Enlightenment and its post-modern critique with the intellectual revolution in the fifth century BC, which Plato simultaneously developed and criticized.

Yet Pickstock distorts the original meaning of Platonism in several ways in order to support her own essentially post-modern attack on subjectivity and autonomous philosophy and politics. First, her Platonism is a contradictory amalgam of Hellenic and Neoplatonic Platonism which does justice to neither. Second, Pickstock’s liturgical mediation of divine and human destroys the philosophical mediation that Plato sees lying between the Good and the cave of human temporality. Placing the mediation in practical experience as opposed to thought abolishes the difference between pre-philosophical Athens and the Platonic state, thus neglecting the manner in which Plato preserves both the subjective power of sophistry and the Greek enlightenment’s search for objective knowledge in his rationally mediated knowledge of the Good. By employing Findlay’s interpretation of the movement from the middle to late dialogues (Findlay, 1974, p. xii), I will attempt to show how Plato is not satisfied with anything but a logical resolution of how God and the world are inherently related. We shall see by the end of this essay that while Pickstock’s interpretation of Plato can, upon correction of its ideological excesses, help us to understand his philosophical intentions, Jacques Derrida’s reading of Plato, by focusing on the aporiae of Platonism, draws out the result of Plato’s thought. A perspective that can articulate what is positive in each of these readings can help us to appreciate the greatness and continued relevance of Plato’s philosophy as a response to sophistry, and to understand why philosophy did not end with Platonic solutions.

Pickstock’s Liturgical Platonism

Implicit in Pickstock’s appropriation of Plato is an analogy between Hellenic Platonism and Radical Orthodoxy, in that both seek to recover our lost connection to the divine as a response to the secular excesses of scientific enlightenment and sophistic nihilism. Indeed, Pickstock’s understanding of the movement from enlightened modernity to post-modern nihilism resembles Plato’s own understanding of the Greek enlightenment and its necessary decline into sophistic relativism (see Laws, 888e-890d). She understands Plato’s diagnosis of how a materialistic, pragmatic, relativist spirit caused a decline from the height of pre-philosophical Athens, tethered to the Good through immediate, unquestioning belief in and obedience to traditional myth, religion and political authority. Yet she wrongly portrays Plato’s manner of reconnecting secularized society to the Good. Rather than seeking to recover the purely practical, mythical, pre-reflective and religious mediation between humanity and divinity, Plato seeks a relation that is philosophically grounded through knowledge.

Because she sees no positive development in the modern demand that everything other than the subject be comprehended by self-conscious reason, there is nothing inherently modern retained in Pickstock’s return to the medieval liturgical city. Yet for Plato, the drive for a rational comprehension of reality is wholly retained within his critical relation to the abstract rationalism of earlier philosophers, and the scientific/mathematical approach is seen as a necessary precursor to true knowledge of non-mathematical entities. In both Theaetetus and Phaedo, the mathematical training of the interlocutors (Theaetetus, Cebes and Simmias) makes the respondents, who are part of the scientific enlightenment that demands mathematical proofs of everything, receptive to Plato’s reflections on the Ideas and the Good. The movement up the line from the realm of sense-experience and opinion to mathematical objects is the move from the merely subjective into a world of objective principles. Mathematical objects, known through discursive thought (dianoia), are the first stage of objective knowing beyond the cave of sense-perception and opinion, since mathematical truths are not caught in a merely individual grasp of the unstable sensible world (Republic, 510d5-511a1). The sophist, designating himself the measure of truth beyond all authority or tradition, intensifies this demand that the individual know his relation to and difference from the Good. Through Pickstock’s return to a pre-reflective, liturgical relation to the Good and to an unquestioning submission to tradition, enlightenment and the sophistic revolution take on a merely negative significance, having no essential import for a proper relation to the divine - in biblical terms, the Fall in Genesis is pure evil with no divine purpose.

As opposed to Pickstock’s view, Plato sees that in Athenian life the immediate, intuitive sense of the primacy of the divine and the Good through adherence to custom and tradition has been thoroughly destabilized by the sophistic discovery that all reality is ultimately measured by our own subjective thinking. He seeks to restore our original identity with the Good by showing, through a rational grasp of reality, that the spirit of independent inquiry need not destroy society. Pickstock’s view, in contrast with Plato’s, resembles the perspective of the Republic’s Cephalus, who represents the ancient pre-philosophical relation to the Good of the polis. Cephalus does not let the fact that his definition of justice is destabilized by Socrates rupture his own intuitive sense of belonging to the ancient order. He merely walks away to attend the sacrifices, leaving the sceptical question for his son Polemarchus and the subsequent generation, since they are already possessed by the new subjective spirit. If Pickstock’s liturgical interpretation of Plato were accurate, the Republic could end in Book I with Cephalus’ rejection of the subjective demand for rational comprehension in favour of the performance of supra-rational liturgical rites. Pickstock’s liturgical philosophy eliminates the difference between our original intuitive identity with the Good and a restored, rationally mediated identity.

Her liturgical reading of Plato diverges most clearly from Platonic thought in her conception of the mediation, or lack of it, between the Good and the cave. Pickstock suggests that divine and temporal human elements are ‘bound together by the doxological or the liturgical - this is the secret middle term ...’ (JP, p. 280). We are raised to the divine through performance of ‘repeated ritual patterns’ (ibid.) that order the realm of sensible multiplicity so that through our harmony with the natural we can receive the divine mystery. Pickstock’s Platonism relies upon a shortened version of the Platonic Line, in which one moves directly from the indeterminacy of knowledge in sense-perception and opinion, to the self-identical Good existing beyond the division of subject and object, and hence beyond any human knowing. The essential eidetic aspect of Platonism disappears from view, as Pickstock undermines the realm of mathematical objects and Ideas that mediate between the merely subjective character of material, temporal existence and the divine principle. While, on Plato’s account, the intelligible realm provides a stable finitude for human thinking, Pickstock denigrates our relation to the Ideas to the level of a vision of an ineffable and ungraspable eidos” (JP, p. 276), and “genuine intellectual clarity is obtainable only when that which is to be “known” is allowed to remain open and mysterious’ (AW, p. 20).

For Pickstock, creation is unknowable because God is unknowable. The nature of this infinite, divine realm permeates all of creation, and results in the ‘indeterminacy of all our knowledge and experience of selfhood’ (AW, p. xii). Neither the Christian nor the Platonic God is ‘a simple objective presence opposed to supplementation’ (AW, p. 21). Instead, God is the source of all language, and Plato offers ‘an incipient account here of supplementation as the origin and possibility of language itself’ (AW, p. 25). The divine is located in ‘an ambiguous and shifting place beyond our own’ (AW, p. 177). God exists prior to and beyond any rational consciousness of this ultimate reality, and is therefore completely other than thinking. Because everything originates from this unknowable Good, and can only be known through its divine origin, everything in the world remains mysteriously enigmatic and opaque to our rational understanding (AW, p. 12). In fact, responding to the materialist cosmology, Plato makes clear that thinking nous is at the origin of everything (Laws, 888e-890d). In this way, thought is not a later imposition upon the Good and the world, but their true nature.

Pickstock draws the correct conclusions from this revised Platonic ontology: with the supra-rational divine principle cut off from rational investigation, the apparent separation of finite and divine reality cannot be overcome in thought. Since our own existence is inextricably temporal and radically finite, our only access to this supra-rational principle is by going beyond human thinking through religious rituals that bring out the implicit divinity in our world. The identity of the two worlds is thus thoroughly immediate. We experience the Good only through its presence in sensible objects, not through an eidetic knowledge of a derivative sensible reality. Pickstock problematically associates this interpretation with Iamblichean—Proclean Neoplatonism.

While Neoplatonic influence is not explicitly mentioned in After Writing, Pickstock has since explicitly recognized the affinities between her liturgical Christianity and theurgic Neoplatonism in the more recent article ‘Justice and Prudence: Principles of Order in the Platonic City’. In this essay Pickstock identifies two understandings of the soul’s relation to what is above and below it, which she rightly characterizes as Plotinian and Iamblichean—Proclean (JP, p. 270). The first emphasizes the active side of the soul which can ascend towards intelligible realities, since the soul has, through its perpetual union with its highest rational faculties (nous), immediate access to the divine. The Iamblichean—Proclean understanding emphasizes the passive side of the soul’s ascent, since the soul has no independent rational capacity to ascend due to the completeness of its immersion in the body and separation from intelligible realities. Independent human reason, completely embodied and historical, belongs wholly to the dividedness of the many (although, unlike lower realities in nature, it has the potential to rise above itself). So long as this reason remains autonomous, the undivided unity of the First Principle remains forever inaccessible. In his De Mysteriis, Iamblichus explains the necessity of theurgic rituals for the purposes of bringing the human into a proper relation to matter. Only in this way can the individual’s inextricable connection to materiality be transformed from insurmountable obstacle into the only means of salvation. As a result, the whole individual, in both his rational and natural aspects, remains united throughout the soul’s movement, and his materiality is not left behind as in the Plotinian ascent. For Pickstock, Iamblichus, as opposed to Plotinus, moves in a ‘non-dualistic direction’ (JP, p. 269). Pickstock writes that this dominant ‘Plotinian’ understanding of Plato must be supplemented by a ‘Proclean doxological (“theurgic”) and descending interpretation’ (JP, p. 270).

There are several problematic features in Pickstock’s appropriation of Neoplatonism. First of all, like many post-modern interpreters of Neoplatonism, she underplays the essential role of the noetic grasp of reality in Neoplatonic thought (see Hankey, Chapter 2 in this volume, and Hankey, 1998c, pp. 56-7). In its assertion that all knowledge is indeterminate as a defence of the Good’s radical transcendence, Pickstock’s ‘Neoplatonism’ is closer to Megarian thought (see Reale, 1987, pp. 281-5; Reale, 1985, pp. 45-54) than to the thought of Plotinus or Proclus. Second, due to her post-modern quest to escape modern subjectivity, Pickstock’s Platonism mixes Hellenic and Neoplatonic Platonism in a fundamentally contradictory way. In order to emphasize the radically intersubjective character of her ideal community, she rightly points out that the Platonic individual is necessarily a political being, in no way complete apart from its civic engagements in the polis (JP, p. 271). Yet out of her liturgical interests, she defends a Neoplatonic version of Platonism which, as its starting point, assumes a free individual, complete in itself, and comparatively apolitical² in its flight from division to unity. Returning to Neoplatonism to overcome subjectivity is rendered incoherent by the fact that it is in Neoplatonic thought that one finds the origins of the modern subject (see Hankey, 1998c and Doull, 2003). The Neoplatonic discovery of the three spiritual hypostases does not begin with a self radically open to the divine element of the external world, but as a sceptical self wholly free and withdrawn from the otherness of appearances (see Plotinus, Ennead 5.1.10. 1-11). In contrast to Neoplatonism, Plato did not assume this free individual as a starting point: his entire political philosophy attempted to answer the question of the extent to which the individual had any existence apart from the whole.

In placing religion above philosophy, Pickstock unites all the themes of liturgy, myth and doxological language: ‘“Religion” here comprises the necessity of public ritual practice for the attainment of wisdom, and, in addition, the mediations of myth and continuous individual and collective praise of the divine’ (JP, p. 270). In her attack on autonomous philosophy, Pickstock portrays Plato as having so thoroughly embedded theoria in liturgical praxis, philosophy in myth, and thought in doxological language, that they cannot be genuinely differentiated (JP, pp. 277 and 280). We must now examine how Pickstock’s ascription of these three views to Plato constitutes a deeply flawed interpretation of Platonic thought.

Liturgy

The liturgical mediation appeals to Pickstock for several reasons. First, the liturgical union is felt rather than thought (AW, p. 4); second, as opposed to discursive reason, the defamiliarizing ‘stutter’ of liturgy prevents any pretension of having a total grasp of divine mystery, because the rituals themselves remain mysterious (AW, p. 178); third, liturgy is material and incarnate, with an embodied subject participating in the divine through material objects, thus exemplifying a non-dualistic embrace of the sensible, the temporal and the linguistic; fourth, liturgy undermines the sense of a closed, autonomous subject, due to its social and corporate nature. Drawing from the Greek concept of leitourgia, as evaluated by Levinas (see Levinas, 1996, p. 50), liturgy implies a public service...