Desire, Faith, and the Darkness of God
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Desire, Faith, and the Darkness of God

Essays in Honor of Denys Turner

Eric Bugyis, David Newheiser, Eric Bugyis, David Newheiser

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Desire, Faith, and the Darkness of God

Essays in Honor of Denys Turner

Eric Bugyis, David Newheiser, Eric Bugyis, David Newheiser

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In the face of religious and cultural diversity, some doubt whether Christian faith remains possible today. Critics claim that religion is irrational and violent, and the loudest defenders of Christianity are equally strident. In response, Desire, Faith, and the Darkness of God: Essays in Honor of Denys Turner explores the uncertainty essential to Christian commitment; it suggests that faith is moved by a desire for that which cannot be known.

This approach is inspired by the tradition of Christian apophatic theology, which argues that language cannot capture divine transcendence. From this perspective, contemporary debates over God's existence represent a dead end: if God is not simply another object in the world, then faith begins not in abstract certainty but in a love that exceeds the limits of knowledge.

The essays engage classic Christian thought alongside literary and philosophical sources ranging from Pseudo-Dionysius and Dante to Karl Marx and Jacques Derrida. Building on the work of Denys Turner, they indicate that the boundary between atheism and Christian thought is productively blurry. Instead of settling the stale dispute over whether religion is rationally justified, their work suggests instead that Christian life is an ethical and political practice impassioned by a God who transcends understanding.

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Year
2015
ISBN
9780268075989
MARXISM AND NEGATIVE THEOLOGY
NINE
The Turning of Discourse
Generous Grammar or Analogy in Ecstasy
CYRIL O’REGAN
Denys Turner would almost certainly acquiesce with the not uncommon judgment that his work evinces a certain promiscuity. Indeed, he would probably relish its aptness, and in a puckish moment might go on to defend the episodic nature of his literary production by insisting on the nonsystematic nature of thought in general, even if he would do so with more civility than most who have had significant training in analytical philosophy. He also would be generous enough to provide cover for those somewhat hapless creatures of different persuasion by confessing that he does not understand system, whether the venue is philosophy or theology, and that in any event the Anglo-Saxon race of which he is a member in some definite respects fails to have any observable gifts for that kind of enterprise which seems to belong to the past and to the Germans. Turner, then, could be read to have installed a three-headed prophylaxis against any quest to espy principles of unity and coherence in his work: (a) confessional/autobiographical; (b) ethnic; and (c) argumentative. However charming Turner is in his various modes of prevention, it is far from obvious that any of these tactics really work. Turner is as alive to authorial fallacy as the next person; since he refuses to support essentialism in general, no case can be made for its support with regard to ethnicity in particular; and as for argument, the claim that the business of theology and philosophy is more or less the sorting out of a limited number of problems, metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical, is hardly confirmed by the practice of philosophers and theologians over the centuries who seem to think that thought was about vision, fundamental orientation, and form of life. Included among these would be Augustine and Aquinas, Aristotle and Marx, all of whom are thinkers Turner deeply admires. To have offered what amounts to little more than stipulation as to the way to combat Turner’s protection from the question of unity might itself seem insufficient, but here I am interested less in a decisive argumentative victory than deflating the impossibility of providing something that might look like explanation or the provision of coherence. If the kind of strictures I identify with Turner fail, or at least do not obviously succeed, he does not have others in his arsenal. His is not the kind of work that would have recourse to such postmodern sophistications as diffĂ©rance (Derrida) or hetorology (Lyotard) to justify why his discourse appears to lack unity,1 for the use of these kinds of postmodern concepts or jargon would themselves smack of being overly systematic, specifically, of having an invariant view of the behavior of discourse and concept formation and their relation.
That impossibility cannot be allowed to reign does not necessarily enhance the real possibility that one can find an equation that makes sense of all of Turner’s work or even his main work, that is, the six books that he has written. Given the massive heterogeneity of the texts, the difficulties are enormous. There is no small challenge to bringing together the book on Marx, Marxism and Christianity,2 and the book on mystical theology, The Darkness of God,3 and either of these with the defense of Vatican I in Faith, Reason and the Existence of God.4 The lore of Herbert McCabe functioning as a kind of covering cherub for the unlikely combinations of Aquinas and Marx, even if a refreshed Aquinas and a somewhat culled Marx, is as much evasion as clue. The difficulty now can be referred to McCabe, which is precisely not to speak to the difficulty of determining the relation between Turner and McCabe. For surely Turner and McCabe are not identical in every respect, and in any event to articulate this relation would presuppose that we have got clarity with regard to how Turner’s own work goes together.5 So we return to the question, can any unity or coherence be espied in Turner’s texts? I answer in the positive, although I prefer the weaker view of “coherence” to the stronger view of “unity.” I will make two passes at answering the question.
First, I would like to extract some of the more salient traits of Turner’s philosophical and historical thinking from his actual textual performance. Specifically, I would like to concentrate on the priority he gives to questions over answers; his view that for certain kinds of questions, for instance, religious, philosophical, and ethical questions, neither determinate nor definitive answers are possible; that this fact does not lead to agnosticism, but through careful analysis of our claims we can come to an understanding that all questions point to a transcendent reality that both exceeds language and concept and provides their raison d’ĂȘtre; and finally that as questions arise from real people, that is, historically and socially situated embodied persons, the questions have as their subtext what kinds of relation and quality of relations are constitutive of human flourishing.
Second, and relatedly, I will argue that Turner’s thinking enacts a particular view of the Christian tradition that is fundamentally “catholic.” This means that however determinately voiced Turner’s work is, in the final analysis what is truly important about it is that it enacts the movement and logic—I would prefer “grammar”—of tradition. Given the variety of meanings of grammar currently deployed in philosophy and theology, I will have to sort out those views that Turner actually rejects and would likely reject from those that he might plausibly support. In any event, I will underscore the generosity of Christian grammar, which allows for maximal plurality and even tension among instances. This is at least in part what I mean in the title by “analogy in ecstasy.” At the same time, the “catholicity” is neither absolutely permissive nor slack: not all putative forms of Christianity can be vindicated as Christian. There are a number of aspects of the grammar that I would like in particular to explore. First, Christian grammar is not readily available for inspection and is more nearly discernible when it is challenged by theological discourses, practices, and forms of life that at first blush seem to be eccentric. Second, there may very well be tension between the real grammar of Christian faith and the sedimented tradition, or what we might call the received or accepted grammar, and thus part of the task of Christianity is self-critique. A viable Christian grammar of belief, but also practices and forms of life, demands sifting. In this sifting process, apparently well-formed grammatical species of Christian thought, practice, and forms of life are revealed to be in fact ungrammatical, and, conversely, apparently not-so-well-formed species of Christian thought, practice, and forms of life are revealed to be grammatical. It is a point with Turner to expose the tension but also the stretch of the Christian tradition by looking to liminal discourses and liminal figures who challenge the received grammar: the negative theology tradition and the philosophy of Marxism are pointed to as liminal discourses; in terms of figures Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, and Marx seem to be some of the more conspicuous examples. Liminality makes sense only if the obverse of centrality also makes sense, and one comes to see that there are expressions that are so exquisitely and complexly balanced that it makes sense that they have achieved a kind of canonicity. Given Turner’s catholicity, there are any number of such expressions of Christian grammar, but it should come as no surprise that Aquinas is held to be a plenary expression.
NOTES OF TURNER’S THINKING
The most obvious note of all of Turner’s books is quite formal. In all cases questioning is in play. One can and should ask questions about everything and anything. The more important the object of inquiry, the more point there is to the question. Ethical, religious, and philosophical questions are rightly held to be important; resting on received assumptions is not something that Turner can affirm. In terms of Christianity he is persuaded that temptations abound with regard to closing off question; the atheist does not show herself immune from this pattern of subintellectual behavior any more than the theist. We are beset by stories, which provide incentives not to do that thing which defines the philosophical mind, that is, to inquire and to pursue the truth wherever it leads us. Although he is allergic to heroizing the enterprise, Turner is totally convinced that it is worthwhile. If inquiry is a game, then it is a serious one—serious, not portentous—and is conducted under the assumption that assumptions matter, those not provided as well as those provided, and with the presumption that there will be disagreement. And if an argument, then, one is required to yield to the better one, although it should be said that Turner has a much more substantively metaphysical view as to what that would look like than Habermas, whose locution I have just used.6
Questions enjoy, therefore, a privilege over any and all answers without prejudice to the probity of the answers. The available answers can be more or less adequate. But even if we sustain these answers in the end, it is our responsibility to vet and to judge. To stipulate that questions be serious in some way serves as a necessary but not sufficient condition for identifying the questioning of Turner. What we need in addition is some sense of the coherence or “analogy” between the kinds of questions Turner asks. Looked at aright, although Turner’s work ranges over ethics, political theory, modern philosophy of religion, and the history of Christian thought, the set of questions he addresses is quite finite. For example, Turner deals with such obviously important questions as to whether Christian faith is rationally defensible in the modern world and, conversely, whether Christianity is or has been throughout its history sufficiently self-critical. Other questions which engage Turner include how factually and normatively belief and practice hold together without one necessarily being the foundation of the other, how also there is a tensional relation in Christianity between exuberant (even exorbitant) saying and unsaying, and how desire can be, and usually is, parsed in a variety of ways in the Christian tradition. If Turner is a philosopher of religion, then he is not one in an unrestricted sense. There are almost no references to non-Christian religions, and his theological canon is by and large a Catholic one. Correlatively, in his work the operation of reason is more craft—whether technē or poeisis or both at once is not absolutely clear—than method, which regulates all inquiry irrespective of the object of inquiry. Turner is irreducibly Aristotelian in this respect rather than Cartesian, and by dint of this fact irreducibly Thomist. Reason operates reasonably only if it is faithful to what is under consideration and is sufficiently apt and subtle to sort out what can be said and denied with certainty, what is probable or possible, what is impossible, and what is undecidable in fact or in principle.7 What Turner states quite generally in Faith, Reason and the Existence of God about the “shape” of reason applies in the particular case of Turner.8 In that text the term shape is used to assure of the incarnate, embodied nature of our reasoning, not only not excluding but also especially involving religious matters. It is a happy coincidence that the common noun turner refers to a craftsperson shaping wood on a lathe, possibly to turn this wood into barrels that hold ale and which thus serve as the condition of celebration. Hopefully what “shaping” is for will in due course get emphasized appropriately, for celebration is important throughout Turner’s reflections on practices (prayer, Eucharist), as well as his reflections on the nature of the tradition of negative theology and even theological discourse considered more broadly. Thinking involves necessarily a skilled “shaping” of concept but also discourse. To practice thinking is to be entirely invested in such shaping. To use the more theological language that Turner sometimes resorts to, it is to have kenotically entered a process, which, however, is rule governed, even if only some of the more explicit rules (such are those of logic) are immediately available.
A number of Turner’s books deal with the issue of the defensibility of faith in the modern world. Faith, Reason and the Existence of God and The Darkness of God are crucial texts in this regard. If in the first named text, the defense is straight up insofar as it is a defense of reason in the modern world which either assumes that reason is unnecessary or that what is required is a more instrumental or utilitarian understanding of its protocols,9 in the case of the second, the argument is indirect and shows how the magisterial thinkers of the Christian tradition, Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius (and not simply Aquinas), offer accounts of the shaping of reason that continue to be fertile and relevant even today.10 In Faith, Reason and the Existence of God, Turner does not shy away from defending the notion of reason advanced by Vatican I that there is natural knowledge of God. Turner is not simply playing provocateur, for if, on the one hand, he sees Vatican I as advancing a very positive view of reason’s reach against the backdrop of the surge of agnosticism and atheism, on the other, he also distinguishes the position being advanced by Vatican I from the hyperrationalistic position that God’s existence and attributes can be demonstratively proven.11 It seems evident that the account of how reason functions in Vatican I would, on Turner’s grounds, provide a precedent for the position that gets articulated in the papal encyclical Fides et Ratio (1998), which affirms reason against the tidal wave of relativism, supported by modern and postmodern philosophies, and insists that with respect to God reason will encounter that which it cannot comprehend.12 Reason and mystery, interestingly, turn out to be correlative. Moreover, mystery is not only an epistemological limit, where the concepts of the finite mind cease to lay hold of the reality, which in Platonic language is referred to as “the really real.” Ingredient in the encounter with the reality that exceeds percept and concept is the intuition that this reality is super-determinate rather than indeterminate.
Turning to the other book under consideration, it could be said that The Darkness of God is best read, not as a short history of mystical theology à la Andrew Louth,13 but as an argument as to how central this two-tracked (Augustinian and Dionysian) tradition was in keeping open the critical potential of Christian discourse to temper its own claims vis-à-vis its object which resists being caught in any conceptual web. In some obvious sense the issue here is one of religious epistemology. But, of course, it is at the same time metaphysical in that God is what Derrida pejoratively refers to as “the transcendental signified.”14 Turner remains unembarrassed by this, and by no means thinks that it is a trick of grammar, even if he does grant that as the intendum of discourse, God underwrites discourse and most certainly its self-transcending character. Throughout this book, Turner is fond of speaking of the discourse of mystical theology as being self-subverting. Turner is not merely pointing to the historical fact that Christian thinkers such as Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart, Bonaventure, and Saint John of the Cross are aware of this, he is also making the point that mystical theology serves the general Christian good by reminding us of this fact.
Although there is nothing inconsistent about Tur...

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