Having replied at considerable length to the two most substantive critical reviews—those of Plested and Bieler—I turn here to a smattering of others, a few of which are quite good, several of which are short.
Well, Jordan, this is very fine. Thankfully, I am not a patristic scholar, but a fairly well-read literary fellow. My praxis is often largely guided by my vocation as a novelist. I believe that robust engagement with the gospel always brings us to narrative, which goes beyond our conceptual antinomies. I think your understanding of Maximus’ vision advances our capacity to tell the one, unique Story, both Christological and Triune. Incarnation founds every local instance of that ever moving eternity. A few very quick points that are doubtless tangential to the scholarly debate, but so rarely do I find someone whose ambitions and interests are congenial to my own, I take the opportunity of your substack post to emerge from the silence of my reclusive habits.
I’ve liked what little I’ve read of Anne M. Carpenter’s reflections on Balthasar and poetics, so I’m sorry to see her objections. Maybe I misconstrue their nature, but I have always read Balthasar’s assertion of the fragment against the whole/system as precisely wariness for the pretensions of any kind of totalizing rationalism that would preemptively absorb the Mystery of depths in method that supposedly achieves comprehensive inventory of reality. “Fragment” is also the stipulation that we come upon the Whole as finite, historical participants in a symphonic and synthetic narrative that is open-ended. The drama concludes in a flourishing that is epektasis, so it is simply a category mistake to oppose fragment and whole as abstractions. The Whole that Balthasar abjures is the product of philosophical hubris that rejects or is unaware of the experience of revelation. Conversely, the fragment that he acknowledges is dynamically part of a teleology that moves towards a fulfillment that enhances, rather than annuls the qualities Carpenter wishes to defend.
Honestly, I am rather dubious when I hear “Christian supersessionism” raised as an objection. It’s the sort of modern anxiety that too often seems to me weak tea. Your pal, David Armstrong, is very bright and erudite, but when he dismisses the likes of Benedict XVI and John Paul II as proponents of a form of Christian fundamentalism, I start to wonder if an abundance of subtlety and awareness of historical complexity has not resulted in granular perspicacity that has lost the forest for the trees. I am very keen to preserve the delicate and unique, as well as the validity of human traditions. If Christ and the Triduum is actually the founding of all times and places, naturally grace is “always already” presencing, even in the occluded existential anguish of our finite lives. Time coheres because of the kenosis of divine care, it’s “flow” of becoming rooted in divine, perichoretic dance. Yet surely, the “Christ event” means that at the measure of ultimacy, Christ and the Church announce a superlative clarity that cannot be relativized without somehow implicitly returning to some form of structuralism by which a kind of abstract universalism is smuggled in. Otherwise, why speak of Christ as both the alpha and omega of Creation? Why not just employ God-talk as the narrative of spiritual journey, the hero with a thousand faces, of which Jesus of Nazareth is simply one manifestation of countless others of perhaps equal profundity and merit? When a fella like David Bentley Hart appears to put in question the perdurance of the Church, and openly speculates on whether Christianity “deserves” to continue, given its contemporary obfuscations and recalcitrant elements – this in a podcast in Australia last year – it appears frustration with the hoi polloi has resulted in an ideological reductionism that conveniently applies the label of Christendom to whatever is odious or backwards to an idiosyncratic sensibility.
Your response to Korb adverts to the unique Christo-logic that both founds and heals a becoming that can derail into the multitudinous false narratives of sin. The gospel is not merely the tale of a happy ending, but the announcement of co-inherence and co-creativity that emerges from theo-drama. I am reminded of Balthasar’s little work, The Christian and Anxiety, where he maintains that any kind of static opposition supposedly overcome by dialectic between existential angst and the Passion of the Cross is fundamental misunderstanding. Christ is ever the deepest interior and spring of reality that husbands the errant spark lost in “false fire” towards the house of the Father. And this care is never an iterative occasion of “forms and completion,” but of love as disclosure of the intimacy of Persons, which is ultimately Triune bliss. By way of analogy, it seems to me that Iain McGilchrist’s acute and intriguing The Matter with Things helps explicate the basis of some confusions. Forms and completion can be a reflection of a conceptual mode of attention that is necessarily abstract, even when apprising the relation between nature and grace. A distorting reification results where something closer to Desmond’s metaxological “in-between” is required. A more dexterous touch attempts a metaphysics with a poet’s feel for levels of being that evade univocal approach. I suspect the Maximian awareness you evoke is best articulated in a poiesis that goes beyond the philosophical, or like the best of Plato, ends in the song of the poet purified from “representation” that stops short of the vatic ecstasy of divinized unities.
Very stimulating reflections here, Brian. As for Carpenter's objections, I've read a fair bit of Von Balthasar, but her knowledge of him is far vaster. And so I defer to her. I do wonder, though, if Von Balthasar himself is the cause of the slightly divergent readings on this theme of the fragment and whole. On the one hand, what you say seems right: the accent on the dramatic, the horizon of a telos nonetheless, the worry over philosophical hubris. On the other hand, sometimes Von Balthasar seems to settle with a sort of "mere apophaticism," if you will. Here the anxiety about "system" is countered with a mere non-system, with vagaries and meanderings and side-glances at this or that theme. Perhaps the clearest instance is in his own indictment of Augustine's and Origen's eschatology. He deems both equally "certain" and thus "prideful," and offers his own "hope" that he compares with the hope that his friend will recover soon from sickness: "But do I therefore know it?" Scripture offers two sets of apparently contrary pictures of the end: the infernalist "two ways" and the universalist final reconciliation. Von Balthasar's answer is to resist "synthesis" and read both as paraenetic. Here again the antidote to "system" is to "wait and see," a suspension of certainty and closure for the sake of negative openness. This, combined with the (sadly typical) aversion to Hegel--and recall that Von Balthasar initially called Maximus the "Hegel of the Greek Fathers"--tends to support the sort of worry Carpenter has. In fact, Von Balthasar himself openly worries about Maximus's thought at several points in Cosmic Liturgy, including Maximus's use of "identity" language. From my vantage, Balthasarians could stand to learn some more here from Maximus and even from certain Hegelians that might help disarm them of the knee-jerk prejudice they frequently indulge of Hegel (Gillian Rose's *Hegel Contra Sociology* alone should suffice). And they should realize that suspension is just another form of synthesis, even if a "dramatic" one (for isn't "the dramatic" also theorized?). Better to admit our unavoidable orientation toward the whole, and that perhaps God can reveal himself *as whole* in fragments, and that the act itself might disclose something of its own peculiar conditions to us apart from whatever abstractions we might have had beforehand, abstractions that may well indeed have been provisionally necessary as a preparation of sorts. At any rate, Carpenter resides within her rights to sense that Von Balthasar would worry over my work, whatever sympathies he might have also had for it.
As for supersessionism, I of course admit that it is a real problem in many theologies of every era. And I have no problem critiquing this or that cherished authority over this (and other shortcomings). But I also think it a charge that can be used glibly, a kind of "gotcha" signal that conceals its own questionable intentions. I just read a fascinating article about the political origins of the term and charge of "supersessionism" written by Arab Orthodox Christian (Michael Azar), and he makes the compelling case that sometimes this charge effects a supersessionism of its own, especially against "Oriental" Orthodox and Arab Christians. Today's political situation only intensifies this trend (witness the near-deafening silence of otherwise progressive biblical studies scholars regarding what the ICC has, for all intents and purposes, conceded to South Africa is approaching "genocidal intent"). So the seemingly innocent act of insinuating a problem here risks its own flavor of epistemic colonialism.
I really like your insight that "suspension" can be just another form of synthesis. That's good and quite right. And you know I stand with Bulgakov and Origen on the eschatology of the Whole. It's amusing, however, to note that Przywara thought Balthasar was too "cataphatic" in his proclivities, though in the context you discern, I agree he is unduly hesitant.
Well, Jordan, this is very fine. Thankfully, I am not a patristic scholar, but a fairly well-read literary fellow. My praxis is often largely guided by my vocation as a novelist. I believe that robust engagement with the gospel always brings us to narrative, which goes beyond our conceptual antinomies. I think your understanding of Maximus’ vision advances our capacity to tell the one, unique Story, both Christological and Triune. Incarnation founds every local instance of that ever moving eternity. A few very quick points that are doubtless tangential to the scholarly debate, but so rarely do I find someone whose ambitions and interests are congenial to my own, I take the opportunity of your substack post to emerge from the silence of my reclusive habits.
I’ve liked what little I’ve read of Anne M. Carpenter’s reflections on Balthasar and poetics, so I’m sorry to see her objections. Maybe I misconstrue their nature, but I have always read Balthasar’s assertion of the fragment against the whole/system as precisely wariness for the pretensions of any kind of totalizing rationalism that would preemptively absorb the Mystery of depths in method that supposedly achieves comprehensive inventory of reality. “Fragment” is also the stipulation that we come upon the Whole as finite, historical participants in a symphonic and synthetic narrative that is open-ended. The drama concludes in a flourishing that is epektasis, so it is simply a category mistake to oppose fragment and whole as abstractions. The Whole that Balthasar abjures is the product of philosophical hubris that rejects or is unaware of the experience of revelation. Conversely, the fragment that he acknowledges is dynamically part of a teleology that moves towards a fulfillment that enhances, rather than annuls the qualities Carpenter wishes to defend.
Honestly, I am rather dubious when I hear “Christian supersessionism” raised as an objection. It’s the sort of modern anxiety that too often seems to me weak tea. Your pal, David Armstrong, is very bright and erudite, but when he dismisses the likes of Benedict XVI and John Paul II as proponents of a form of Christian fundamentalism, I start to wonder if an abundance of subtlety and awareness of historical complexity has not resulted in granular perspicacity that has lost the forest for the trees. I am very keen to preserve the delicate and unique, as well as the validity of human traditions. If Christ and the Triduum is actually the founding of all times and places, naturally grace is “always already” presencing, even in the occluded existential anguish of our finite lives. Time coheres because of the kenosis of divine care, it’s “flow” of becoming rooted in divine, perichoretic dance. Yet surely, the “Christ event” means that at the measure of ultimacy, Christ and the Church announce a superlative clarity that cannot be relativized without somehow implicitly returning to some form of structuralism by which a kind of abstract universalism is smuggled in. Otherwise, why speak of Christ as both the alpha and omega of Creation? Why not just employ God-talk as the narrative of spiritual journey, the hero with a thousand faces, of which Jesus of Nazareth is simply one manifestation of countless others of perhaps equal profundity and merit? When a fella like David Bentley Hart appears to put in question the perdurance of the Church, and openly speculates on whether Christianity “deserves” to continue, given its contemporary obfuscations and recalcitrant elements – this in a podcast in Australia last year – it appears frustration with the hoi polloi has resulted in an ideological reductionism that conveniently applies the label of Christendom to whatever is odious or backwards to an idiosyncratic sensibility.
Your response to Korb adverts to the unique Christo-logic that both founds and heals a becoming that can derail into the multitudinous false narratives of sin. The gospel is not merely the tale of a happy ending, but the announcement of co-inherence and co-creativity that emerges from theo-drama. I am reminded of Balthasar’s little work, The Christian and Anxiety, where he maintains that any kind of static opposition supposedly overcome by dialectic between existential angst and the Passion of the Cross is fundamental misunderstanding. Christ is ever the deepest interior and spring of reality that husbands the errant spark lost in “false fire” towards the house of the Father. And this care is never an iterative occasion of “forms and completion,” but of love as disclosure of the intimacy of Persons, which is ultimately Triune bliss. By way of analogy, it seems to me that Iain McGilchrist’s acute and intriguing The Matter with Things helps explicate the basis of some confusions. Forms and completion can be a reflection of a conceptual mode of attention that is necessarily abstract, even when apprising the relation between nature and grace. A distorting reification results where something closer to Desmond’s metaxological “in-between” is required. A more dexterous touch attempts a metaphysics with a poet’s feel for levels of being that evade univocal approach. I suspect the Maximian awareness you evoke is best articulated in a poiesis that goes beyond the philosophical, or like the best of Plato, ends in the song of the poet purified from “representation” that stops short of the vatic ecstasy of divinized unities.
Very stimulating reflections here, Brian. As for Carpenter's objections, I've read a fair bit of Von Balthasar, but her knowledge of him is far vaster. And so I defer to her. I do wonder, though, if Von Balthasar himself is the cause of the slightly divergent readings on this theme of the fragment and whole. On the one hand, what you say seems right: the accent on the dramatic, the horizon of a telos nonetheless, the worry over philosophical hubris. On the other hand, sometimes Von Balthasar seems to settle with a sort of "mere apophaticism," if you will. Here the anxiety about "system" is countered with a mere non-system, with vagaries and meanderings and side-glances at this or that theme. Perhaps the clearest instance is in his own indictment of Augustine's and Origen's eschatology. He deems both equally "certain" and thus "prideful," and offers his own "hope" that he compares with the hope that his friend will recover soon from sickness: "But do I therefore know it?" Scripture offers two sets of apparently contrary pictures of the end: the infernalist "two ways" and the universalist final reconciliation. Von Balthasar's answer is to resist "synthesis" and read both as paraenetic. Here again the antidote to "system" is to "wait and see," a suspension of certainty and closure for the sake of negative openness. This, combined with the (sadly typical) aversion to Hegel--and recall that Von Balthasar initially called Maximus the "Hegel of the Greek Fathers"--tends to support the sort of worry Carpenter has. In fact, Von Balthasar himself openly worries about Maximus's thought at several points in Cosmic Liturgy, including Maximus's use of "identity" language. From my vantage, Balthasarians could stand to learn some more here from Maximus and even from certain Hegelians that might help disarm them of the knee-jerk prejudice they frequently indulge of Hegel (Gillian Rose's *Hegel Contra Sociology* alone should suffice). And they should realize that suspension is just another form of synthesis, even if a "dramatic" one (for isn't "the dramatic" also theorized?). Better to admit our unavoidable orientation toward the whole, and that perhaps God can reveal himself *as whole* in fragments, and that the act itself might disclose something of its own peculiar conditions to us apart from whatever abstractions we might have had beforehand, abstractions that may well indeed have been provisionally necessary as a preparation of sorts. At any rate, Carpenter resides within her rights to sense that Von Balthasar would worry over my work, whatever sympathies he might have also had for it.
As for supersessionism, I of course admit that it is a real problem in many theologies of every era. And I have no problem critiquing this or that cherished authority over this (and other shortcomings). But I also think it a charge that can be used glibly, a kind of "gotcha" signal that conceals its own questionable intentions. I just read a fascinating article about the political origins of the term and charge of "supersessionism" written by Arab Orthodox Christian (Michael Azar), and he makes the compelling case that sometimes this charge effects a supersessionism of its own, especially against "Oriental" Orthodox and Arab Christians. Today's political situation only intensifies this trend (witness the near-deafening silence of otherwise progressive biblical studies scholars regarding what the ICC has, for all intents and purposes, conceded to South Africa is approaching "genocidal intent"). So the seemingly innocent act of insinuating a problem here risks its own flavor of epistemic colonialism.
Anyhow, thanks for reading and for the comments!
I really like your insight that "suspension" can be just another form of synthesis. That's good and quite right. And you know I stand with Bulgakov and Origen on the eschatology of the Whole. It's amusing, however, to note that Przywara thought Balthasar was too "cataphatic" in his proclivities, though in the context you discern, I agree he is unduly hesitant.