A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Faith, rationality and the common good

Fr. Chris has a good post defending Jeffrey Stout from Christian neo-traditionalist critiques. I’m no expert on Stout, but I think I’m overall more sympathetic to what I take to be Stout’s side in this debate.

Call me an old-fashioned liberal, but I am deeply skeptical about this idea of replacing a shared rationality with appeals to particular “narratives” or “socio-cultural traditions.” And this is not, in my view, a sheerly “secular” or “liberal” view: there is a long theological tradition which holds that the logos that became incarnate in Jesus is also the principle of intelligibility in the universe which is, in principle, accessible to all people. And this shared participation in the logos allows all of us to discern something of the true and good.

Each tradition, I would suggest, discerns some aspects of the logos, but at the same time “we see through a glass darkly” which mandates a degree of humility in our judgments about the good. It’s not as though we have a “tradition-free” vantage point which gives us access to pure rationality, but that we each start in a particular place, but seek to find common standards for making judgments about the good.

Keith Ward makes a similar point in discussing Karl Barth’s “Nein!” to natural theology:

Barth accepted the pluralist view that various competing worldviews can be equally rational or justifiable to their respective adherents, but made the invalid inference that no reasons can be given for accepting a particular revelation. He was right to think that the giving of reasons is very largely an ‘internal’ matter of exhibiting the coherence and integration of your own scheme of beliefs. But he was mistaken in denying that there could be a common basis of human knowledge and experience to which your belief-scheme needs to be related, with varying degrees of plausibility. All of us speak from a specific viewpoint, but we have the best chance of approaching truth when we take fully into account the viewpoints of others on what is, after all, the same reality. (Ward, Re-Thinking Christianity, p. 195)

This is the core problem as I see it with certain “postmodern” approaches to Christian belief. Yes, you can make it appear that any worldview is as justifiable as any other if you see them as employing incommensurable and competing “rationalities.” However, once you’ve done that, you’ve essentially undermined any claim for your belief-system to be true. After all, if rationality is sheerly up for grabs, what reason do you have for thinking that your worldview gets at the truth any better than your neighbor’s?

A better starting point – and one that I would argue is theologically sounder – is to assume that all human beings have, in virtue of their innate cognitive abilities, the ability to grasp at least some part of the truth about reality. Now, Christians believe that they have been given a particular insight into the nature of that reality by God’s self-revelation in the history of Israel and in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, but this doesn’t necessarily cancel out other insights or knowledge. Given that God is both creator and redeemer, we ought to expect the opposite: that people’s natural God-given capabilities for knowledge will yield genuine insights.

This ought to encourage a great deal of cooperation and even consensus in thinking about the common good while at the same time allowing Christians (and others) to offer their own distinctive perspectives on that good. I agree what I take to be Stout’s view that, for the most part, whatever consensus is achieved will be ad hoc and empirical, rather than deriving from a priori universal truths embedded in rationality as such, but Christians in particular should expect there to be a great deal of overlap considering that we all share a God-given ability to reason, learn about the world, and reflect upon the good.

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15 responses to “Faith, rationality and the common good”

  1. Eric Lee

    I always find these conversations interesting for two reasons: 1) the amount of mis-characterizations about Hauerwas/Milbank (call them ‘neo-traditionalists’ if you will) that persist despite (failed) attempts to show otherwise and 2) my own slightly changing views in this matter over time.

    Particularly in light of my participation in the Centre of Theology and Philosophy, it seems that at least as far as the RO side of things, you are actually describing a view that they hold, except they wouldn’t take the Stoutian leap into an embrace of the ‘secular’, however ‘chastened’ or ‘humble’.

    “there is a long theological tradition which holds that the logos that became incarnate in Jesus is also the principle of intelligibility in the universe which is, in principle, accessible to all people. And this shared participation in the logos allows all of us to discern something of the true and good.”

    If you get a chance through an interlibrary loan or otherwise, check out the introduction (written by Peter Candler and Conor Cunningham) to the recently-released Belief and Metaphysics volume. At the Belief and Metaphysics conference that I was at in Sept. 2006, the world was erupting in controversies of the Pope’s recent (at that time) Regensburg address, which was all about faith and reason. Fast forward to the upcoming CoTP conference this September in Rome called “The Grandeur of Reason: Religion, Tradition and Universalism.” While the CFP isn’t released yet, the draft that I’ve been sent starts out with this quotation from Benedict’s Regensburg address:

    “While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically falsifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. . . . Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. . . . A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures. “

    And then is followed up with this commentary (you’ll have to forgive the length but it is to prove a point):

    ‘The Pope’s call for a new reasonable communication is nothing less than a call to rethink the nature of reason itself. The first step is to acknowledge the fact that our contemporary notions of reason (whether conditioned by the Enlightenment or postmodernism) have failed to produce that communication and dialogue between divergent interests that can lead to harmonious co-existence and understanding among peoples. Indeed it may be that it is precisely our contemporary conception of reason itself, which is largely responsible for the dialogical breakdown that underpins the hostile fissures that now threaten us (whether between religion and the secular sphere in the West, or between the West and Islam in the global arena). According to the Pope this situation has been facilitated by the hegemony of unmediated conceptions of “truth”: (i) volunteristic conceptions of God that cordoned “reason” from religious “truth”; and (ii) the reduction of reason to the “empirically falsifiable” sphere of meaning, supposedly replete and thus without need of recourse to any “faith”. These unmediated notions of “truth” have foreclosed dialogical communication, and given way simultaneously to the agnostic relativism of the purely “secular” sphere on the one hand, and the fundamentalisms of extremist religion in the “sacred” sphere on the other.

    The Pope’s argument for an enlarged sense of reason is an argument for a re-hellenization of reason. In this context the universalism of Christianity has a concrete role to play as that particular cultural exemplar of the symphonic synthesis of the spirit of rational human inquiry with faith in divine revelation. Therein Christianity’s universalism is a universalism grounded in a cultural tradition that cherishes at once the “grandeur” of human reason and the personal revelation of the One God.‘

    So, while I am less and less familiar with Hauerwas these days (and continually frustrated by people lumping him with Milbank/RO and continued allegations of ‘tribalism’ like you did on that other blog), at least as far as RO goes, the critiques leveraged fail to appreciate the nuance of what is really going on in their thought. The reason/logos that they appeal to is the same one that you appeal to in the Catholic tradition, but the huge difference is that for them this does not equate to an embrace of secuarlism. They have always embraced the universality of the logos (read Milbank’s Theology & Social Theory — this emphasis begins from some of the starting pages) while also embracing the particularities. And gosh, any amount of reading in Pickstock or Milbank often points back to Plato as a kind of loose ‘prefiguring’ of moments this same reason/logos that the Church embraced.

    That very universal/particular dialectic of sorts is what is missed, and it is something that I used to miss myself (hence my point about my shifting stance on some of this). The RO folk really aren’t ‘postmodern’ at all, and they critique the dickens out of it. The fact is that instead of taking the Richard Neuhaus neo-Conservation version of the tradition they opt for more of a post-secular version that eschews any kind of tribalism. These guys debate and have dialogue with everybody that they can, and of course the irony is that oftentimes the ‘world’ with whom they are attempting to dialogue ends up being the one to duck out, as in the recent case when Richard Dawkins ducked out of a public debate that Conor Cunningham was trying to schedule with him.

    Additionally, there is George Lindbeck who has spent a lifetime in Christian ecumenical dialogue but often gets lumped into some sort of ‘postmodern tribalism’ combined with a widespread misreading of his Nature of Doctrine as prescriptive instead of realizing for what he himself has said it is: a poorly articulated attempt at descriptive analysis of ecumenism; as well as and especially David Burrell (who is very sympathetic with RO) who has done a lot of inter-religious dialogue in recent years with those of the Jewish and Islamic faiths, both in personal relationships and in his writings.

    “This is the core problem as I see it with certain “postmodern” approaches to Christian belief. Yes, you can make it appear that any worldview is as justifiable as any other if you see them as employing incommensurable and competing “rationalities.” However, once you’ve done that, you’ve essentially undermined any claim for your belief-system to be true. After all, if rationality is sheerly up for grabs, what reason do you have for thinking that your worldview gets at the truth any better than your neighbor’s?”

    I suppose that I may have sounded like this before, as it sounds like something I used to believe in as far as the ‘unjustifiability’ of our faith, but I don’t particularly believe that anymore, nor do I think Milbank and RO at large would agree with that either. Perhaps because I’ve done a lot more reading of their work as well as met a good deal of these folk and hung out with them and debated with them myself over some beers that I see this better now. [The problematic there regarding justification and what is actually ‘true’ is articulated well by Hilary Putnam in his Reason, Truth, and History, but without any real solution in the end, but I guess that makes sense since it is really the Kantian and moreover anti-Realist positions like his own that falter. And perhaps that is the issue: the secularism that loves to talk about universality is really a Kantian one that misunderstand the universal–in all its general talk of morality (via its inherited imperative)–and what real reason is in the first place.]

    “but Christians in particular should expect there to be a great deal of overlap considering that we all share a God-given ability to reason, learn about the world, and reflect upon the good.”

    I agree, and this is because of the universality of the logos, but secularism and liberalism isn’t the answer! The overlap isn’t one of a supposedly neutral guise (especially since secuarlism is in no way neutral and should never trump one’s baptism), but very much is embraced in the particularities found in the different religious cultures. The particularities always point to the universal and vice versa in a way.

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  2. Eric Lee

    This has gone on too long, but to sum up, I would really want to return to that “rethinking of reason” that I pointed to toward the end in my bracketed meanderings about secularism and Kant which hearkens back to Benedict and the first paragraph of the CFP summary that I quoted which points toward this modern misunderstanding of reason. I think the key issue here is that we have too easily identified the reason that secularity and liberalism (in its various forms) offers with the true reason of the Logos.

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  3. Fr Chris

    Eric —

    I will take full responsibility on my own part for not knowing Millbank as well as I should — but I have read a fair amount of Hauerwas, and seen him speak a number of times.

    My problem with him is that he is so skittish about compromise on the one hand and coercion on the other that I can’t find a coherent public theology in his work. I have asked him point-blank to please explain whether Christians in his mind must give up the field if they are pushed to coercive activity — and I got the most mealy-mouthed answer I have ever heard from a theologian. He has a reputation for being a firebrand, but in my experience trying to engage with him and his work quite seriously, he turns to mush when pushed to talking about the necessary day-to-day work of forming coalitions and governing.

    I think he’s right that the first priority of Christians and the Church should not be to rule. But I think he’s naive in thinking that it can be one of our last priorities to help do so.

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  4. Lee

    Eric,

    Thanks for the great – and thorough – comment!

    I think you’re right to distinguish between the Hauerwasian project and the Radical Orthodoxy project. I also agree with you that a “rehellenization” of reason is much to be desired in the sense of understanding “reason” as encompassing more than instrumental rationality. However, I don’t agree with the Pope and some other critics who see “Enlightenment reason” as a monolithic denial of transcendence. This is, I’m afraid, a straw man which supports other straw man versions of “liberalism” and “secularism.”

    Even in contemporary political theory, it’s not all Kant all the time. Martha Nussbaum is a good example of someone who has felt the need to go beyond Kantianism back to a more Aristotelian idea of human flourishing. Moreover, I often think that criticisms of “liberalism” conflate theories of liberalism (like Rawls’) and the actual practice of liberal societies. Would anyone claim, for instance, that political discourse in the US takes place entirely in dessicated rational Kantian terms? We could perhaps use a little more of that!

    Which, I guess, gets me to the heart of my problem with Hauerwas and (what I’ve read of him) Milbank – they critique liberalism and secularism but you can’t seem to pin them down on a. what exactly they mean by those terms and b. what the think the alternative to them is. So, I’m with Fr. Chris on this point.

    I mean, assuming that Milbank doesn’t want a confessional state, you’re still faced with the need for a framework of some sort which allows people of different particular confessions to co-exist in relative peace and collaborate for the common good. Now, I freely concede that I haven’t read the entire Milbank corpus, and, in a sense, I’m more concerned with how these ideas trickle down to the popular level than with what goes on in rarefied academic discussions (viz. a lot of trendy discussion about “postmodern” theology) but even in, for instance, Milbank’s essay on “Liberalism and Liberality” he goes on this tirade against liberal modernity and all its works and his proposed alternative essentially boils down to…farmers’ markets! Hey, I love farmers markets, but that love hardly requires a wholesale rejection of modernity! 😉

    At the end of the day I simply don’t buy the RO “narrative,” which seems to me to posit an idyllic patristic and/or medieval synthesis between faith and reason followed by a catastrophic “fall” into secularism, modernity, voluntarism, nihilism, etc. I tend to think it’s a lot more complex than that and that modernity brought significant gains as well as losses. (Cavanaugh’s brilliant revisionist account of the birth of the modern state is a good example: he does a great job calling into question Whiggish “progressivist” views of history, but goes too far in the other direction.) Which is not to deny that we need a kind of re-integration of faith and reason; I just don’t think it can be on the same terms as that of the 13th century. Again, I add the caveat that I undoubtedly haven’t read widely and deeply enough in the RO literature to grasp all the the dialectical nuances of their position (and surely there are significant differences between people broadly identified as “RO”).

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  5. Whose faith? Which rationality? « A Thinking Reed

    […] faith? Which rationality? Posted on February 8, 2008 by Lee In a comment to this post, Eric makes the valuable point that “reason” is not a univocal term. He points out that […]

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  6. Eric Lee

    Lee, what on earth are you talking about with farmers markets? The essay in question and the end of it is more of an analysis and a call for something ‘new’ at the end. He gestures at a few things but doesn’t point to one big alternative. Before his ending note, he says this:

    “We need then, in the Europe and the World of the future, a new conception of the economy as exchange of gifts in the sense of both talents and valued objects that blend material benefit with sacramental significance. We need also to encourage a new post-liberal participatory democracy that is enabled by the ‘aristocratic’ process of an education that seeks after the common good and absolute transcendent truth. Finally, we need to see that it is equally enabled by a monarchic principle which permits a unified power at the limit to intervene in the name of non-codifiable equity — the liberal alternative to this being the brutal exclusion of those, like the inmates of Guantanamo Bay, who escape the nets of codes and are therefore deemed to be subhuman.”

    To say that his proposed solution “essentially boils down to …farmers’ markets” is a ridiculously gross mischaracterization. Sheesh! Please use a little more imagination than that. Not only that but nowhere does Milbank or any of the rest of these folk talk about or support a wholesale rejection of modernity! Where on earth are you getting this? And sometimes people wonder why I get so frustrated in these discussions. See the problem is that you base all these claims on an initial misunderstanding or mischaracterization and continue to go off of that so I don’t really know how to address your claims about this sometimes.

    I understand that you don’t buy the “RO narrative”, but what is interesting to me is that what you described as the narrative is a sad caricature of it. You’re right to say that it is more complex than that but I would argue that this is so on other terms which are being glossed over. First of all, you have to admit that the concept and belief in voluntarism actually has a history and it came from somewhere, which has influenced all sorts of Christians. The word Nihilism didn’t even exist until Jacobi coined it in response to the emerging mechanism of his age in light of Kant’s philosophy. So we can be honest about the actual emergence of these things and say that of course there was no self-avowed nihilism as a concept until the 18/19th century. Anyway, as somebody who has studied Conor Cunningham’s Genealogy of Nihilism rather closely, what you are saying about RO’s narrative is something I wouldn’t buy either, because it isn’t even the real one! I know Conor decently well –have hung out with him a few times and have been doing website work and graphic design for him since early 2006–as well as intend to study under him for a PhD starting this Fall if everything comes together, and it’s amazing because I know he 1) flew on a modern airplane to visit San Diego for the AAR last November 2) fully employs the use of websites and other modern forms of advertisement (to a limit: we’re not buying billboards or tv commercials) to spread word about our conferences and books, 3) I mean I could go on with other banal examples of just how ridiculous this is…

    Personally, I’m not that interested in the battles concerning Scotus, but I think what they’re saying in general is mainly true–you even admit to the fact that we need a re-integration of faith and reason:

    “Which is not to deny that we need a kind of re-integration of faith and reason; I just don’t think it can be on the same terms as that of the 13th century. Again, I add the caveat that I undoubtedly haven’t read widely and deeply enough in the RO literature to grasp all the the dialectical nuances of their position (and surely there are significant differences between people broadly identified as “RO”).”

    See, again, to say that they want this “on the same terms as that of the 13th century” is ridiculous. They don’t. Where do you get this? You are right to see that a re-integration of faith and reason is needed but I really don’t understand where you get this nostalgic idea.

    I’m glad that you admit to not being as well-versed in reading RO and realize that there is enough diversity within it, but so many of these claims you are making are based off of misinformation or something, I dunno. (At some point I will read Insole’s book but from what I remember and from the reading I have done recently it doesn’t seem like he is representing it accurately either. One thing in particular that I remember is Insole’s claim to try and fit Milbank “wholesale” into a Foucauldian view when this is clearly not the case. This kind of “all or nothing” approach is a bit weird! Milbank appropriates some genealogical method a la Foucault so therefore he must also buy into all of Foucault’s assumptions as well???)

    Anyway, this has gone on too long again. Sometimes ending with a story is helpful, so I’ll do that. When I was at the conference that Conor Cunningham invited me to back in 2006, while Conor was getting some drinks for us one of his friends told me a story about an encounter Conor had at a bar during another one of these conferences. Conor got into a conversation with a guy who was convinced that Nietzsche was the best thing since sliced bread and was trying to get Conor to agree. The thrust of Conor’s side of the discussion was that Nietzsche is rubbish and that this man needed Jesus. He didn’t try and pan off any genealogy on him (for one who actually wrote an in-depth genealogy!) or tell him to reject modernity or join him at the farmers market (maybe later on that, hah!), but Conor’s point was a simple one.

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  7. Lee

    Eric,

    I appreciate your patience in engaging with someone who’s obviously a lot less well-versed in this stuff. Now, just to point to where someone might get some of these ideas about Milbank rejecting modernity, here’s a quote from the “Liberality vs. Liberalism” essay I referred to earlier:

    “The ‘modernity’ of liberalism has only delivered mass poverty, inequality, erosion of freely associating bodies beneath the level of the State and ecological dereliction of the earth….it has abolished the rights and dignity of the worker, ensured that women are workplace as well as domestic and erotic slaves, and finally started to remove the ancient rights of the individual which long precede the creed of liberalism itself .”

    Now, obviously Milbank is not a primitivist, as you point out, but what can this mean, then? Is this just Milbankian hyperbole? Or does he think the good bits can be separated from the bad? Also, the idea that Gitmo is somehow the logical end point of liberalism is just bizarre since the whole point of liberalism is curtailing the arbitrary power of the state. At some point a thinker has a responsibility to make himself clear and not just complain that the critics are misunderstanding him.

    Of course, in fairness, I was engaging in a bit of (Milbankian?) hyperbole myself with my cracks about farmers’ markets and the 13th century, but I think you have to admit that part of the cache and buzz of RO comes from its proponents making these provocative statements. If it was all measured and sober judgments it wouldn’t be nearly as sexy. I mean, serious scholars (e.g. Thomas Williams and Richard Cross) have basically demolished the RO picture of Scotus (which, in fairness, you say you’re not much interested in), but portraying Scotus as the harbinger of voluntarism and nihilism makes for a great story! This is how academia works, right? You make your name by proposing a provocative new theory or interpretation. Which isn’t to say that Milbank et al. are being cynical in their work, of course. That’s just how the system works.

    The funny thing is, when I read things like the “Liberality” essay I actually agree with a lot of it: I definitely agree that there is a pre-contractual basis to society, I am for the re-localization of economics, organic food, etc. I guess it just rubs me the wrong way in being freighted with all this ponderous continental theorizing and dubious history. I get a lot more out of reading Bill McKibben or Michael Pollan, for instance. But this is what I’m talking about when I make the farmers’ market crack: I’m referring to the outsized rhetoric combined with fairly modest (but salutary!) social goals. It just comes off as pretentious to me.

    Now, a reasonable rejoinder is that I shouldn’t mouth off about this stuff then! Fair enough! But again, there’s this attitude that we Christians are going to enlighten the benighted secularists; I just think Christians need to learn to be a bit more humble considering that a lot of what progress has been made in the last few hundred years has frequently been in spite of the church not because of it. Christopher Insole made this point in a friendly debate with William Cavanaugh: it’s actually the “liberals” who are usually opposing the things that RO blames on liberalism!

    Peace,

    Lee

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  8. Camassia

    I haven’t read Milbank, or Stout, so I don’t have a dog in this fight. However, I will say that reading Hauerwas and some other recent academics of that ilk I have run into the same problem of rhetorical inflation that you do, Lee. A lot of stuff sounds to me like, “Liberalism/Capitalism brings nothing but evil and we must tear it down, now!” but then the acolytes tell me it doesn’t really mean that, it’s just “raising questions” or something.

    It actually reminds me a little bit of that study of a Baptist church that I blogged a couple years back, where the pastor would preach things like “God hates divorce!” but everyone tacitly understands that this doesn’t really mean they can’t ever get divorced. Given the insularity of academia, I can’t help wondering if this happens for similar reasons, namely that it’s a smallish club where people know a lot of things that don’t have to be spelled out. Makes it kind of tough on those of us who just pick up these books and try to read them at face value, though.

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  9. Eric Lee

    Lee, yes, I remember that section from the Milbank essay, and you’ve quoted it before (wonderfully in isolation from the rest of the context of his essay both times) and we’ve attempted to hash this out before. You also accused Milbank of wanting to have it ‘both ways’ in making the following claim he does a few paragraphs down:

    “This is not, of course, to deny that merely ‘liberal’ measures of contract are not ceaselessly necessary to safeguard against the worst tyrannies, nor that we do not often have to resort to them in lieu of more substantive linkages. For these reasons I am not seeking to push a liberal approach altogether off the political agenda. Instead, the argument is that contract can never be the thing that fundamentally brings people together in the first place, nor can it represent the highest ideal of a true distributative justice. So before contract, since it is more socially real, lies the gift, and ahead of contract, since it is more socially ideal, lies once again, the gift.”

    A claim of yours which I think is just a misunderstanding on your part. I’m convinced that you’re just not getting what he’s saying, which is that this is what the worst of it has done but we still need something in place to curtail those excesses (e.g. the contract/contractual society), which is really rather a claim I think you’d agree with. In fact, the last time we went back and forth on that essay in particular I e-mailed Milbank about it and he confirmed what I suspected: that it really just comes to to ordering the gift before the contract; in other words he is not abolishing the contract. Ehem. I got pretty tired of the back and forth pretty quickly and it fizzled pretty quickly so it didn’t seem like it was worth it to share what Milbank had said to me in the e-mail.

    I wasn’t going to re-hash this, but since you brought this up again, I felt like the length of what follows concerning the section you get so offended over is warranted. You say,

    “Now, obviously Milbank is not a primitivist, as you point out, but what can this mean, then? Is this just Milbankian hyperbole? Or does he think the good bits can be separated from the bad? Also, the idea that Gitmo is somehow the logical end point of liberalism is just bizarre since the whole point of liberalism is curtailing the arbitrary power of the state. At some point a thinker has a responsibility to make himself clear and not just complain that the critics are misunderstanding him.”

    Amazingly, this quotation comes from page 10 so he has plenty of context which I will in small part attempt to point out. It is not hyperbole, as much as it sounds like it does to you. I am pretty sure I pointed this out before, but if not, I’ll draw your attention to “the ‘modernity‘ of liberalism” part. He is exactly focusing on what it has become, recognizing that it had other intentions initially, and this all follows a his questioning of some of those initial intentions showing that, despite how altruistic they were, they were still laden with non-Christian concepts of the human person, etc. This is from page 2-4, and while it is lengthy, I am quoting it at length to try and show just how complex this is:

    “Today though, we need to recognise that we are in a very different situation. First of all, recent events demonstrate that liberal democracy can itself devolve into a mode of tyranny. One can suggest that this is for a concatenation of reasons: an intrinsic indifference to truth, as opposed to majority opinion, means in practice that the manipulation of opinion will usually carry the day. Then governments tend to discover that the manipulation of fear is more effective than the manipulation of promise, and this is in keeping with the central premises of liberalism which, as Pierre Manent says, are based in Manichean fashion upon the ontological primacy of evil and violence: at the beginning is a threatened individual, piece of property or racial terrain. This is not the same as an Augustinian acknowledgment of original sin, perversity and frailty – a hopeful doctrine, since it affirms that all-pervasive evil for which we cannot really account (by saying for example with Rousseau that it is the fault of private property or social association as such) is yet all the same a contingent intrusion upon reality, which can be one day be fully overcome through the lure of the truly desirable which is transcendent goodness (and that itself, in the mode of grace, now aids us). Liberalism instead begins with a disguised naturalisation of original sin as original egotism: our own egotism which we seek to nurture, and still more the egotism of the other against which we need protection. Thus increasingly, a specifically liberal politics (and not, as so many journalists fondly think, its perversion) revolves round a supposed guarding against alien elements: the terrorist, the refugee, the person of another race, the foreigner, the criminal. Populism seems more and more to be an inevitable drift of unqualified liberal democracy. A purported defence of the latter is itself deployed in order to justify the suspending of democratic decision-making and civil liberties. For the reasons just seen, this is not just an extrinsic and reactionary threat to liberal values: to the contrary, it is liberalism itself that tends to cancel those values of liberality (fair trial, right to a defence, assumed innocence, habeas corpus, a measure of free speech and free enquiry, good treatment of the convicted) which it has taken over, but which as a matter of historical record it did not invent, since they derive rather from Roman and Germanic law transformed by the infusion of the Christian notion of charity which, in certain dimensions means a generous giving of the benefit of the doubt, as well as succour even to the accused or wicked. For if the ultimate thing to be respected is simply individual security and freedom of choice (which is not to say that these should not be accorded penultimate respect) then almost any suspensions of normal legality can tend to be legitimated in the name of these values. In the end, liberalism takes this sinister turn when all that it endorses is the free market along with the nation-state as a competitive unit. Government will then tend to become entirely a policing and military function as J.G. Fichte (favourably!) anticipated. For with the decay of all tacit constraints embedded in family, locality and mediating institutions between the individual and the State, it is inevitable that the operation of economic and civil rules which no individual has any longer any interest in enforcing
    (since she is socially defined only as a lone chooser and self-seeker) will be ruthlessly and ever-more exhaustively imposed by a State that will become totalitarian in a new mode. Moreover, the obsessive pursuit of security against terror and crime will only ensure that terror and crime become more sophisticated and subtly effective: we have entered a vicious global spiral    .    ”

    I quote this in response to your question above which says, “Also, the idea that Gitmo is somehow the logical end point of liberalism is just bizarre since the whole point of liberalism is curtailing the arbitrary power of the state. At some point a thinker has a responsibility to make himself clear and not just complain that the critics are misunderstanding him.”

    Okay, I’m just going to unfortunately say that dude, you really gotta do the work and put the pieces together. He answers your questions right there at the beginning of his essay 6-8 pages before the part you love to quote with nary a nod to context: his point is that while people will obviously point out that “the whole point of liberalism is curtailing the arbitrary power of the state,” that its underlying logic unwittingly undercuts this very intention. Intertwined with this motive to “curtail the arbitrary power of the state” is a jacked up notion of the self which is extremely self-protective. As Milbank puts it, “Liberalism instead begins with a disguised naturalisation of original sin as original egotism: our own egotism which we seek to nurture, and still more the egotism of the other against which we need protection.”

    And perhaps the other part that unlocks this section is the context directly before it: this section of supposed hyperbole immediately follows a section (i.e. the set-up to this) which focuses on purely contractual forms of democracy. This is absolutely key. The part of the quotation you also leave out says, “and finally started to remove the ancient rights of the individual which long precede the creed of liberalism itself (such as habeas corpus in Anglo-Saxon law) and are grounded in the dignity of the person rather than the ‘self-ownership’ of autonomous liberal man (sic)” (that which is in italics was left out). The point in me bringing this up is to show that Milbank is well aware of ancient conception of rights but makes a distinction between that and what became the liberal notion of the self which wasn’t focused on human dignity as much as it was the “autonomous liberal man.” So, while I have seen such histories of liberalism say that what it is really espousing is the same as ‘rights’ back in the older days, this is really a confusion; “rights” today are not the same thing as the rights the precede liberalism; there is no real continuity.

    In sum, in the context of Milbank’s analysis of liberalism’s misguided anthropology which was–from the start–overly self-protective to the exclusion of the other, such that in combination with a ‘purely contractual democracy’ (remember that he is contrasting the gift with the contract, liberality with liberalism here), a ‘modernity’ of liberalism rather unsurprisingly gives rise to the things that Milbank says it does, viz., the aspects of a tyrannical society, which is exactly the irony lost on all of us, apparently. Good intentions aren’t everything.

    Lee and Camassia, regarding big-huge-wild-claims: yes, actually, Stout himself refers to such wild claims as “the rhetoric of excess.” But I’ve seen so many debates trying to make so much hay about these claims where in almost every case it basically turns into making general claims about supposed ‘generalizations’ or excessive claims about the other person’s ‘excessive claims’ — all of this elides any kind of actual attempt to understand what RO, Hauerwas or anybody is trying to say and just descends into a kind of policing about tone which never seems to get anywhere. Instead we just would prefer to get in a huff about how ‘unreasonable’ the other side is or something. This particularly is infuriating to me when I’ve seen people make absolutely insane and irresponsible claims about something in the most calm and ‘reasonable’ voice either online or in real life and somehow I am the one at fault for getting offended at them! Sometimes such tone/excess policing is an excuse for detached laziness to actually deal with what is being said, and sometimes the person really is making wild claims… I’d rather not make generalizations across the board.

    Honestly, when dealing with RO, it is almost always some unfortunately mix of misplaced impatience and who knows what else. For example, I had a class in “Contemporary Ethics and Theology” where we read through Radical Orthodoxy: a New Theology, the initial volume of the RO book series. I had read it before, but it was good to reassess the claims made by the different contributors. When we got to Michael Hanby’s essay on Desire in light of Augustine’s theology defending Augustine against claims that he is really ‘modern’, at one point the Professor decided to make an ‘example’ out of part of the text. Hanby claims that Augustine really isn’t an ‘early modern’ in articulating a notion of the self. The professor went off for like 10 minutes about how bad of a generalization this was because there are so many different kinds of modern notions of the self: Lockean, Humean, Hegelian, etc. Like, he got really angry with Hanby for making such a wild generalization. I almost bought the professor’s claims but then it occurred to me that this didn’t seem right, so while he was going off, I re-read the relevant section and read a couple pages earlier and Hanby right up front says that Augustine is no proto-Cartesian, so he full-on specified that Augustine is no pre-cursor to the Cartesian notion of the self. Unfortunately I was a bit to timid after the prof’s tirade that I didn’t have the courage to point this out at the time, but this is really like so many other examples that I have experienced. The professor, like Lee, went off on how Hanby needs to really “explain himself” in light of such wild claims…….but really, he did. So again we fall into an unfortunate case of ironic generalization about supposed ‘generalizations’ so that we never actually get to critique the real Hanby, or the real Milbank. Milbank needs to be critiqued in areas, and I don’t buy all of his arguments either, but we need to critique Milbank.

    Pertaining to the rhetorical excess of saying that liberalism/capitalism is ‘nothing’ (?) but evil and we must tear it down now, I don’t know anybody who says this except revolutionary leftists or something, but honestly, speaking for myself, I would never back anybody who says such a thing and then just dodges and then says that’s not what they meant and would rather just crank out rhetorical flourishes without content. As far as RO goes, the people within it, as far as I know, really mean what they say, and if it sounds radical or nuts, I’d challenge people to keep reading (or read earlier in the same paragraph or essay!) to see what that actually means. Nobody within RO talks about ‘tearing down’ liberalism/capitalism because they do not see it (nor have they ever) as some monolithic simple, singular thing. A prime example for this comes right from this same essay of Milbank that Lee and I have been hashing over:

    “Here again, Catholic social thought needs to remain true to its own genius which has always insisted that solutions do not lie either in the purely capitalist market nor with the centralised State. There is in fact no ‘pure’ capitalism, only degrees of this mode of production and exchange.”

    Additionally, Daniel M. Bell (with whom I strongly agree) says that the problem with the problem with capitalism (that repetition is not a typo, and he is referring to the capitalistic desire for more and more — Augustine and many other older thinkers referred to something like this logic embedded in capitalism as ‘concupiscence’) is that it wrongly shapes our desires away from worship of the Triune God (not to mention the fact that as far as I know nobody in RO assumes that anything in particular is totally depraved… most of them strongly reject any kind of total depravity scheme [e.g. Reformed leanings in particular except say Reformed-influenced James K.A. Smith but he mainly just criticizes RO from within for being too ‘participationist’] and tend to lean toward looking for the form in the formless, the love in the hatred, etc., as Conor Cunningham’s book in the RO series ends — again note how such a claim is not saying we must tear down the formless and erect a form, tear down the hatred and somehow ‘create’ love but the very fact that they are attempting to discern amidst the chaos of the world what is in fact good, true, and beautiful and wants to affirm those things and find what is good in them. Although this parenthetical is a bit too long already, this also ties in with a comment that you joking made, Lee, about the ‘nihilism’ of facebook and how it doesn’t seem fitting or right that there would be an RO group on facebook whereas [keeping in mind that you were slightly joking but affirming what you were really getting after otherwise you wouldn’t crack the joke] it is precisely the opposite that would be the case [i.e. RO engaging with such a ridiculous form of ‘community’ like facebook], which is why RO spends so much time reading pagan texts! In fact, Milbank and Zizek [a Hegelian/Lacanian/atheist] are kind of co-writing a book together, and Zizek has written a blurb for us as well as a forthcoming foreword in one of our series…how is that for an ‘alliance’!?).

    Personally, I doubt you can find any examples of people within RO making what is perceived of as a wild claim and then backing of as not really meaning it and just raising questions… so, while I would agree that that would be a really sucky, unrealistic, and academically nepotistic thing to do, I don’t think that’s going on at all. Then again, if that one oft-quoted-by-Lee snippet from “Liberalism vs. Liberality” still hasn’t found any amount amelioration on my part in light of the rest of his essay, Milbank’s e-mail address is published on his school website and y’all could further the conversation with the man himself and take up your quibbles with the perceived ‘excesses’ of his argument. As far as I know he always answers e-mail from those that know him and the one time I sent him a lengthy e-mail he responded kindly and with substance.

    “I just think Christians need to learn to be a bit more humble considering that a lot of what progress has been made in the last few hundred years has frequently been in spite of the church not because of it.”

    Amazingly, if you read Milbank, this can’t be attributed to him (nor to myself). I acknowledge much of those gains, but I’d be rather discerning as especially what gains made in spite of the church can still be used for the Church. Lastly, I would be careful waving around the “us Christian liberals are humbler than thou” flag bro…like much of the claims of liberalism, that tends to undercut itself too.

    Reply
  10. Lee

    Eric, I totally agree with your point that the whole meta-debate about how Milbank (or whoever) should express themselves is really rather a waste of time, and I’m a bit disappointed in myself for getting sidetracked by it. You’re absolutely right: if one is going to critique Milbank (or whoever) one should critique what he actually says.

    That said, I guess I just disagree with Milbank’s reading of the “logic of liberalism.” The “contract society” and the self-protective individual are undoubtedly aspects of one kind of liberalism (I’d call it Hobbesean), but are not exhaustive of the liberal tradition as a whole (Locke, for instance, not to mention “conservative liberals” like Tocqueville). “Liberalism” is a multivalent term and one which can certainly encompass “the gift” (that is, if I understand the concept aright – I take it to mean something like what is given in our social, cultural and political environment and which precedes and contractual-type arrangements).

    So, if Milbank’s argument is that the emphasis on contract and self-determination can, taken in isolation, lead to socially disastrous results, then I would hardly disagree. Whether this can accurately be said to be an necessary aspect of “the logic of liberalism” is at least partly a matter of definition.

    I’ve found that one of the things that makes it hard to carry on these kinds of debates is that it’s often unclear whether we’re talking about ideas or actual social institutions or arrangements and what exactly we’re attributing causal efficacy to. Is it that “liberalism” as an idea somehow has a life of its own that leads to certain consequences, or is it that liberal institutions and societies are incapable, or have difficulty in, sustaining non-contractual arrangements? In other words, what does it mean, exactly to say that the “logic of liberalism” is responsible, at least in part, for “the decay of all tacit constraints embedded in family, locality and mediating institutions between the individual and the State”? What are the causal mechanisms involved and what would count as evidence for or against this hypothesis? It’s all conducted at a very high level of abstraction, if you see what I mean. Which, perhaps, partly explains why it’s so difficult to get down to brass tacks and examine exactly what the claims and counter-claims are. It’s as if we’re inhabiting a Hegelian dream-world where ideas, unfettered by material conditions, determine outcomes.

    So, in the interest of clarity I’ll just sum up:

    1. I agree with the view, which you’re attributing to Milbank , that intermediate non-contractual social groups and structures which exist “between” the state and the market are necessary for social flourishing and liberty. (This observation is a staple of the “conservative liberal” tradition with which I most strongly identify – Roepke, Nisbet, de Jouvenal, Insole, etc.)

    2. I deny that liberalism is necessarily committed (either in theory or practice) to the abolition of such intermediate groups, and am unpersuaded that their supposed decay is attributable directly to liberal theory or liberal institutions.

    3. I don’t deny that there is a phenomenon of what we might call hyper-individualism which results in a lack of attendance to the common good and that reconciling the claims of the common good with a dynamic, liberal, pluralist society is a pressing concern.

    4. I think Christians can be liberals in good standing with “liberalism” understood as above.

    5. I disagree with the view that “either the entire Christian narrative tells us how things truly are, or it does not. If it does, we have no other access to how things truly are, nor any additional means of determining the question” (from Milbank’s essay “The Poverty of Niebuhrianism”) if this means that the “Christian narrative” determines what counts as true or false.

    I’m not going to claim that Milbank would or wouldn’t agree with the claims above since it’s clear from our discussion that I don’t know his work nearly well enough to say so. I admit that I find Milbank’s general style of thought uncongenial – but I do repent and apologize if I’ve misrepresented it.

    Peace,

    Lee

    Reply
  11. Eric Lee

    Lee,

    “It’s as if we’re inhabiting a Hegelian dream-world where ideas, unfettered by material conditions, determine outcomes.”

    Well, this could be part of the problem, too, if you think that has anything to do with Hegel’s thought. I hate to be rough on this score as well, but I’ve been reading tons of Hegel himself as well as secondary sources since this past August and the truth of the matter is that Hegel’s world is in fact a very much embodied world, as Geist (“Spirit”) for Hegel is entirely embodied–in fact it is embodied necessarily. Originally he was very much a revolutionary wanting to mimic the French Revolution (and his early texts reflect this) but he ultimately toned it down a bit connecting his philosophy every step of the way with real political reality (e.g. the master-slave discussion in the Phenomenology) especially also seen in his most political of his later works, the Philosophy of Right where he most clearly develops his thought on moral and ethical society. I don’t have much time to get into all the complexities of Hegel, but it is a phenomenology of Spirit after all.

    The common mischaracterization is that Hegel dealt with only ‘ideas’ and then Marx later ’embodied’ them, but really only Marx replaced Spirit with humanity because Marx, based on his lack of faith commitments, couldn’t allow for a transcendent subject that is both self-positing and posits the world (i.e. Spirit, which is also God for Hegel, but I disagree that God necessarily requires humans/creation in order to be) . I still think Hegel is heterodox on matters of faith (see Cyril O’Regan’s book on this for more), but it would also be entirely crude (because it is) to likewise say that what I (or Milbank) am saying is unhinged from material reality. For Hegel, thought and reality are ultimately identical. And this is neither 1) a Berkeleyan idealism that thinks that ultimately that which is really real are ideas (think: The Matrix, kinda) nor 2) a Fichtean self-positing of the “I” where the objective reality is posited by the subjective “I” which is over against it (a radicalization of Kant). In other words, a Hegelian “Idealism” in no way consists of “ideas, unfettered by material conditions, [which] determine outcomes.” What you’re describing sounds more like Berkeley. For Hegel, he ultimately thinks that objective reality and thought really are ultimately both identical and different (i.e. his bewildering “identity of identity and difference”). I really need to re-read Milbank’s “For and Against Hegel” chapter in TST now that I’ve done all this reading in Hegel, but that would be really interesting to get a refresher in what Milbank (most often via Gillian Rose) affirms in Hegel. Milbank’s upcoming collaboration with Zizek will also add much more on this Hegelian score, from what I’ve heard. Which reminds me — Milbank likes aspects of Hegel, Marx (also a “For and Against Marx” chapter in TST), Zizek, and a bunch of other clearly Englightenment thinkers (i.e. Modern), who, in varying degrees of faith commitments, usually reacted in spite of the Church (both Hegel and Zizek are clearly “Protestants” — Zizek, although atheist calls himself an ‘atheist protestant’).

    That being said, I don’t see this as abstract at all, nor would I doubt any of the ‘founding fathers’ of liberal theory think that their own theory has negligible connection to the actual practices. It is much more of a dialectic that works itself out (but not always necessarily). Milbank is very clearly talking about those original (as well as later) liberal thinkers who embrace a kind of egotism in their thought that is always self-securing and a consequent securing against. Now, I can’t name all of these thinkers, but are you really going to tell me that these consequences of an egotism giving rise to a defense of alien elements like the terrorist, alien, et. al.. isn’t 1) a pretty clear picture of something in reality, nor 2) something that has a consequence (either directly or ‘rather indebted to’) from a mode of thought? It all seems rather embodied to me.

    Pertaining to #5, based on my best guess from the context and what else I know about Milbank, I don’t think that the ‘Christian narrative’ in and of itself would determine what is true; rather, it would be some sort of dialectic between the human and divine cities, i.e. between revelation, i.e. the bible as it gives witness to the truth which is Jesus Christ as this is mediated by the human/divine institution of the Church / apostolic tradition. Milbank often talks about this dialectic both in “Liberality vs. Liberalism” and elsewhere. Additionally, in an earlier essay on “Postmodern Critical Augustinianism,” Milbank says that the Church is a nomadic city and we shouldn’t define the walls of it strictly. I would imagine that this has in part to do with the fact that the Christian narrative actually points outside of itself often enough to make us humble: the good Samaritan, Augustine’s ‘plundering of Egyptian gold’ to find the truth in the pagan world so that we can use it rightly (keeping in mind Augustine’s well-known distinction between use and enjoy), John’s appropriation of the Stoic concept of Logos, the apologetics of Acts 17:28, Thomas Aquinas’ use of Aristotle, etc. Does the Samaritan itself determine what is true and false? Does Aristotle himself determine what is true and false? Does the vague notions of liberalism and secularism determine what are true and false, for however much we can embrace (or not) within them? I mean, for however much one can concede that certain good things came about in spite of the Church it is only our very Christian commitments that ultimately orients our notion of what the good is, is it not? Even if at the end of the day we have a huge list of all the good things that came about in spite of the church…then what?

    Moreover, I think that the quotation from that essay in question isn’t as much about whether or not the Christian narrative itself posits the truth (that quotation just says it “tells us” which is most likely a mediation of some of these things) as much as a contrast of the Christian narrative which speaks of that which is really real and true in contrast with the Niebuhrian realism which posits “some neutral ‘reality’ to which Christians bring their insights” (p. 250, same page from which that quotation is from). And I’m not sure why I missed this before, but on the same page he also says,

    “In the face of the resurrection it becomes finally impossible to think of our Christian narrative as only ‘our point of view’, our perspective on a world that really exists in a different, ‘secular’ way. There is no independently available ‘real world’ against which we must test our Christian convictions, because these convictions are the most final, and at the same time the most basic, seeing of what the world is.”

    So, this answers (I hope) your earlier worry that Milbank is just being ‘postmodern’ about the Christian narrative being just another story. I know you got that idea mediated by Insole who quotes Milbank saying in Theology and Social Theory that the Christian narrative is as “unfounded” as ontologies of difference, but that is not the same thing as “has no basis whatsoever.” “Unfounded” seems to mean “not based on a system of universal reason” or something of the sort. The Christian narrative would by ‘founded’ by Jesus, the apostolic witness, and the Christian tradition that followed. For Milbank, it is the resurrection of the One who is the Truth that, in light of the cross, provides a new optics: “We start reading reality . . . under the sign of the Cross. Of course this must include political reality. The Cross was a political event and the ‘apolitical’ character of the New Testament signals the ultimate replacement of the coercive polis and imperium, the structures of ancient society, by the persuasive Church, rather than any withdrawing from a realm of self-sufficient political life” (p. 251).

    Also, in regards to what “determines what counts as true or false,” what or who would you say determines such a thing? Or would you just say that we can’t? And if so in either case, why?

    Peace,

    Eric

    Reply
  12. Lee

    Don’t worry, I know it’s a caricature of Hegel – “vulgar Hegelian” as we might say, just as we refer to someone who thinks all things are determined by economic relations as an “economic Marxist.” My point was simply that when we talk about these abstract ideas like “liberalism” it’s often unclear what kind of causal influence we’re attributing to them.

    Regarding the issue of egotism, I’m not denying that it’s an element of some liberal though (Hobbes, for instance, makes egotism pretty determinative) but I do deny that it characterizes liberalism as a whole or that positing a kind of “essential” egotism to liberalism is necessary to explain the phenomena you’re referring to. After all, acting in unjust ways in order to defend against alien elements is hardly unique to ostensibly “liberal” societies! It’s as if someone said that the Inquisition was the logical consequence of Christianity: you and I would both balk at such a characterization because we recognize that violations of human dignity in order to “protect” an established order is, by all appearances, a universal feature of human societies.

    I’m going to have to beg off getting too much into the last point, because it’s such a vast issue, but the quote you provide doesn’t fill me with confidence: I think we do need to distinguish between “reality” and the “Christian narrative,” but M. sounds like he might be conflating the two when he says that “There is no independently available ‘real world’ against which we must test our Christian convictions, because these convictions are the most final, and at the same time the most basic, seeing of what the world is.” I could be misunderstanding, but I don’t think our “Christian convictions” have that kind of character – we have to be careful not to confuse the reality of God and God’s world with our narratives about that reality. Could it be this is just a shorthand way of talking?

    Reply
  13. Lee

    Maybe this is what I mean to say: we always have to keep in mind that there’s a “gap” between our convictions and the way the world really is . Our views about reality can always (and likely do) fall short of reality itself. This is a fundamental implication of realism – “I could be wrong!”

    And we do have to “test” our convictions against the world, with one of the ways we do that being to compare notes with others who have very different ways of “seeing.” Not sure if M. would deny any of that or not.

    Reply
  14. Eric Lee

    I entirely agree that there is a gap which is pretty much exemplary of the limitations of our own finitude. We could and can be entirely wrong of our ability to really ‘access’, describe, or account for it. I agree with this view, and I think at times we can –albeit in a humble way– actually talk about reality and what is “really real”, and this will most likely come within the participation of some sort of community of virtue. This is very much like a view Peter Van Inwagen espouses regarding Realism that is humble.

    However, what I find so frustrating in our discussions is that while you on the one hand advocate for a view like this, when I push hard on certain things and it really comes down to brass tacks, you seem to embrace an entirely Kantian view which proclaims that we can never talk about what is really real but only have some sort of shared “phenomena” where we compare notecards with each other. It’s as if you really do posit some sort of noumena which is entirely inaccessible and that is what I find so bewildering: a vacillation between a version of Van Inwagan and Kant himself. (You don’t have to use Kantian language to be Kantian, by the way… something you seem to point at in an earlier post.) Anyway, that’s why I get so confused: sometimes you talk about a gap (which I agree with) and some times you assume an impenetrable abyss (which I don’t!).

    Peace,

    Eric

    Reply
  15. Lee

    Well, leaving aside whether that’s an apt characterization of Kant’s position (I don’t think it is), you raise a good point. I am definitely a realist – albeit a critical one. I haven’t read too much Van Inwagen on epistemology (though I’m a big fan of his writings on the philosophy of religion), but I suspect I’d agree with a lot of what he says.

    I guess what it comes down to is this: I’m very skeptical of our ability to grasp truths about transcendent matters in anything like an adequate way. I like what the philosopher of religion William Wainwright says:

    “My skepticism … is not so much about this or that proposition–the belief in immortality, for example, or God’s providential governance of human affairs–for these doctrines are credible if theism is true. It is both more general and deeper–a sense of the wretched insufficiency of all our reasoning about anything but the most mundane matters.” (this comes from the volume God and the Philosophers, edited by Tom Morris)

    You could call this Kantian (or vulgar Kantianism!), or Pascalian skepticism, but I think it gets at something very correct. Any appeal to community – though I think correct as far as it goes – only really pushes the problem back a step.

    But, as Wainwright, goes on to say:

    “Why, then, am I not a skeptic? Because, for one thing, over the years, the sort of classical theistic metaphysics found in Samuel Clarke or Jonathan Edwards has seemed more reasonable to me, on the whole, than its alternatives.”

    Wainwright’s point, as I take it, is that it’s possible for him to select one view as more reasonable than others, but that this always remains a rather risky undertaking. He also discusses the need to balance core non-symbolic metaphysical propositions about God with symbolic language that can only point us in the right direction.

    So, what I want to say is not that there’s an “impenetrable abyss” but that we do “through a glass darkly.”

    Now, I definitely think that there’s something like a hierarchy of truth here where some truths are more easily graspable than others. In fact, one of the reasons I think Christians, for instance, can and should co-operate with non-Christians in the political realm is because I think we can agree on certain moral truths even if we disagree about the underlying theory or account of morality itself. It’s easier to grasp first-order moral truths than to come up with an adequate account of the Good, say.

    Don’t know if that really sheds any light, but so it goes.

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