Pure Nature, Antiquity, Postmodernity

Last updated on: January 21, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Milbank argues in Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People that “antiquity by and large knew of no ‘pure nature’, but already referred the natural to the supernatural, albeit this was too confined to intra-cosmic terms. Thus, as Eric Voegelin intimated, any notion (even those sometimes entertained by the high Middle Ages themselves) that Christian revelation simply ‘added’ the supernatural to a ‘nature’ known to the pagans is historically too simple.” This has implications for... Read more

Multiple Enlightenment

Last updated on: January 20, 2014 at 8:39 am By Peter Leithart

Milbank (Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People) points out that the Enlightenment was not simple one thing: “it can bedivided into (a) a Christian and sometimes post -Christian Ciceronian Stoicreaction against the voluntarism of ‘modern Christian’ thought;(b) a perpetuation of Reformation and Counter-Renaissance currentsin a more Unitarian, Arian-Newtonian idiom (most so-called ‘deists’having actually been heterodox Christians) which was often also Masonic;(c) a ‘Radical Enlightenment’ which was Brunonian-Hermetic and Spinozisticand frequently lilcewise Masonic; (d)... Read more

Political anthropology

Last updated on: January 20, 2014 at 8:31 am By Peter Leithart

Milbank’s Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the Peoplepresupposes that there is a homology between metaphysics and politics. He identifies four assumptions of modern philosophy: “(1) the univocity rather than analogy of being; ( 2) knowledgeby representation rather than identity; ( 3 ) the priority of the possible overthe actual; and ( 4 ) causality as ‘concurrence’ rather than ‘influence,’” and claims that they are “all profoundly linked to the equally important inventionof a novel... Read more

Hero systems

Last updated on: January 20, 2014 at 8:08 am By Peter Leithart

Richard Beck (The Slavery of Death) quotes some impressive passages from Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. They’reworthy of re-quoting. “This is what society is and always has been: asymbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customsand rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthlyheroism. Each script is somewhat unique, each culture has a different hero system. What the anthropologists call cultural relativity is thus really the relativity of hero-systeins the world over. But eachcultural... Read more

Denial

Last updated on: January 20, 2014 at 7:55 am By Peter Leithart

Observing that Christians today “sing songs of orientation in a world increasingly experienced as disoriented,” Walter Bruggemann suggests that the church is in a state of denial: “The church is less an evangelical defiance guided by faith, and must more a frightened, numb denial and deception that does not want to acknowledge of experience the disorientation of life. The reason for such relentless affirmation of orientation seems to me, not from faith, but from the wishful optimism of our culture.... Read more

Slavery of Death

Last updated on: January 20, 2014 at 7:20 am By Peter Leithart

I review Richard Beck’s stimulating The Slavery of Deathat the Trinity House site. Read more

Ark of Empire

Last updated on: January 20, 2014 at 4:12 am By Peter Leithart

Jeremiah’s message to Judah is that the Lord has given the earth into hands of his “servant,” Nebuchadnezzar: “I have given all these lands into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, My servant, and I have given him also the wild animals of the field to serve him” (27:6). After Hananiah breaks the wooden yoke that Jeremiah wears, Jeremiah repeats the message: “I have put a yoke of iron on the neck of all these nations, that they may... Read more

Triune Pastor

Last updated on: January 20, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In his book on Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God: In Your Light We Shall See Light, Christopher Beeley takes a chapter to describe the Trinitarian foundations of Gregory’s theology of pastoral care. Gregory’s Orations, he points out, are organized to lay the emphasis on the priesthood: “The extant collection of Gregory’s forty-four orations begins with three orations (1–3) on Christian leadership and the doctrine of the Trinity from the year 362, to which we could... Read more

Fear of Death

Last updated on: January 19, 2014 at 7:34 am By Peter Leithart

Orthodox theologian John Romanides describes in The Ancestral Sin(162-3) how the fear of death leads to evil practices and habits: “Through the power of death and the devil, sin that reigns in men gives rise to fear and anxiety and to the general instinct of self-preservation or survival. Thus, Satan manipulates man’s fear and his desire for self-satisfaction, raising up sin in him. . . . Because of death, man must first attend to the necessities of life in order... Read more

Illiberal liberalism

Last updated on: January 18, 2014 at 7:14 pm By Peter Leithart

TS Eliot presciently warned in his “Idea of a Christian Society” (in Christianity and Culture) that liberalism has the capacity to turn into its opposite: “Liberalism still permeates ourminds and affects our attitude towards much of life. That Liberalism may be a tendency towards something very differentfrom itself, is a possibility in its nature. For it is somethingwhich tends to release energy rather than accumulate it, torelax, rather than to fortify. It is a movement not so muchdefined by its... Read more