A Language of Stone and Sky (Conclusion)
Conclusion: Augustine
and Maximus for Our Time
Much
was written, but it seems little said.
The complexity of the topic here is betrayed by the limited scope of the
paper and by the fact that in a sense it encompasses the entirety of both
Maximus and Augustine’s thought. We
started this essay out with Jean Paul’s Christ and contemporary atheism’s disillusion
with the concept of God. In part there
is no going back to some pristine time of pure faith (if ever such a time
existed). Our culture’s fascination with
reducing all knowledge to the empirical, the repeated failure of Creation
science in the face of advancing evolution,[1]
the transition of our cosmological imagination from a “closed world to an
infinite universe” to used Alexander Koyre’s phrase, have all led us to find
God less than obvious. If this paper has
done anything it is to demonstrate that both Maximus and Augustine would have
found our confusion—the confusion of Jean Paul’s Christ where God is not found
“in the deserts of heaven,” or below, where the void and the last shimmers of being
foam over into the abyss—as prefaced upon a huge category mistake (or many). Namely that when we say we have not “found”
God, it is fairly certain that we do not even know what we mean when we confess
this. “It is impossible” writes Maximus,
“for the infinite to exist on the same level as the being of finite things, and
no argument will ever be capable of demonstrating that being and what is beyond
being are the same, nor that the measured and immeasurable can be put in the
same class…”[2]
Moreover—and
perhaps even harder to overcome than the thoroughgoing empiricism and
scientism—is that we are a culture both wholly allergic and highly amnesiac to
the idea of what I would call “deep” information. We no longer accept the idea that there are
some things that are difficult to learn not just conceptually, but because our
very habits of discourse and attention need meticulous overhaul—which is to say
we have lost the idea of knowledge as discipleship or craft, ideas obviously
intrinsic both to Augustine and Maximus for one to purify their mind to know
God and the world.[3]
Our idea of knowledge is in a sense purely technical and quantitative, where a
student and a teacher are separated by a distance measurable only in attrition
of time and the reading of enough books.
There is of course some truth in this.
Yet in a culture where we carry in our hands devices that can literally
in an instant access the entire store of human knowledge, our idea of
information reception itself has
become shallow. The creative leaps of
imagination, synthesis, and connection made by a Professor, carrying his
learning lightly, at ease among his research, is, more often than not,
attributed now purely to personal genius or eccentricity in the stead that it
is also the product of certain kinds of tutelage, mentoring. Much as math skills often drop when
calculators are perpetually ready to hand, the information saturation of our
culture has ironically led us to unlearn the very act of a learning which is
more than just memorization, but involves paradigmatic knowledge of how to
organize that information to view some sort of coherent whole. Though often lambasted, the true problem, for
example, with Wikipedia is not necessarily dubious information (it is for the
most part quite reliable) but what after Maximus we might call the mode or tropos of knowledge that it induces. The internet has become in a sense the
sacrament and real presence of a culture so hyper-aware and proud of its
reliance and access to information, that it intentionally (or, perhaps not) blackballed
the concept of wisdom.
What
Augustine and Maximus—and indeed by and large the Christian tradition pre-17th
century it seems—can teach us is that “seeing” is, to use the postmodern
phrase, always “seeing as,”—I do not
“merely” see a tree, or a car, or a woman, but all of these things are always
implicitly being codified and labeled by my habits—not just habits of my mind,
but of my will, of my body. In fact in a
wonderful passage from John Milbank about seeing “just a tree” shows how
settled we often are to accept very shallow descriptions of appearance:
One cannot reduce
all the qualitative aspects under which individual things appear to us simply
to the things themselves in their bare extensional existence. The tree
comes to us sighing, creaking, resistant, concealing, growing, and so
forth. If we tried to identify all these things we would soon produce
nonsense. And why? Because the referent, the tree, is only
available to us under an infinite multitude of senses or aspects, which in
attending to we also intend [that is, the tree
is the thing we decide to see, which could be any level of its multiple aspects
or qualities]. For this reason, the collapse of the attempt to reduce
quality to equality with individual substance entails also the problematization
of individual substance as such [and thus calls into question univocity’s
ability to identify a particular thing to
analyze it]. Phenomenology must thus realize that individual substance
proves intrinsically multiple and self-concealing (like the back of the tree
that always remains however many times we run round it). Instead of it
being the case that there are only atomic things, it turns out (as George
Berkeley already taught) there are only
multiple qualities (in fact multiple shared essences) since the tree has no
monopoly on sighing. Just how it is true that we perceive through all
this annual flurry but one tree, is the really
mysterious thing: what else can one say but that the mind constructs a kind of
analogous holding together than enables it intentionally to reach the real
tree?[4] Once nominalism self
deconstructs, it seems that analogy lies not only between
things but within things as before them, so allowing them to be.
Another way of putting this would be to say that there can be no access to
ontology without a complex phenomenological detour. The tree exists, so
to speak, only as narrated in its aspects. The problem of aspects (as
first opened up by Husserl, but also by both Heidegger and Wittgenstein) seems
therefore to ruin individual substance and to disclose the analogical
infinity of the particular thing in a way that even the older realism
had not…this means [following Pierce] that a counter-nominalism indicates that
if a universal as real is still a sign, then indeed it is only partial and so aspectual
and must always be interpreted by a position which abducts to an absent
indicated thing [in other words in speaking about any given individual we have
to realize we never invoke the thing itself since there is no such thing.
All things are aspects of a thing analogically related together and so seen as
one].[5]
Thus Milbank, I think quite
rightly, points out “without the story
of a tree, there is no abiding tree.”[6] Which is not to say our perceptions are some
willed fictions, but comprehension of experience often requires habituation, and
certain “grammars” to facilitate the processes of interpretation,
understanding, even reception of the phenomenon itself. What Augustine and Maximus show us is that
things “speak” of God when read a certain way—and this “reading” is itself,
while highly intellectual, also a discipline of body and virtue. What they tell us is that we often miss God
precisely because our world has not been reoriented around Christ, the Logos
who situates and contains all logoi,
who in Maximus and Augustine, dictates even the way we understand and think
about how our consciousness synthesizes information through apprehension and
judgment—categories which are like a sort of illuminating light not contained
in the forms themselves but glowing through them from elsewhere. Above all it is the act of love and desire in
which we see and feel God’s goodness.
Scientists who are also Christian often remark that the very
intelligibility and beauty of the world, the fact that we can understand and
marvel at it, speak of God.[7] Maximus and Augustine’s concept are contained
in this sentiment, but with one more: love.
God’s radiance shines through beings not just to make them understood
and marvelous, but their true intent is seen when love in Christ is what
orients them. Bread, in the empiricist
bent, is not “more” itself when given to the hungry, but here, much like
Milbank’s tree, this is exactly what Maximus and Augustine seem to argue. Charity, if we recall in Augustine, must love
something, must love itself loving something.
If this then is a sight of God—loving “your brother in God” to use Augustine’s phrase—then being shows God only to the
sense that it is within the gaze of love and community. Here then the sight of God are sites of finite
love:
If what I love is
lacking, for me who loves…nothing less than the entire world is immediately and
completely struck with vanity…the suspension of love also affects that which
love itself does not affect, at least for the one who loves. The one who loves sees the world now only
through the absence of what he loves, and this absence, for him boundless,
flows back on the entire world;…the world, as opposed to the loved one, does
not disappear; it remains present, here and now; in no way does the
disappearance of the loved one make the world disappear; but this disappearance
nevertheless strikes the appearance of the world with vanity. What marvel can still be found in the fact
that being in general (the world) is—when what one loves is no more…the
disappearance of what one loves shatters a double certainty: that the world is offers no marvels in itself, and that
the loved one is not to be loved
insofar as she is. The proof is that the world, which is, does
not become more loveable for that reason [of its mere existence]—on the
contrary. And the loved one, who is no
longer, does not become less loveable for that reason—on the contrary. That which is, if it does not receive love,
is as if it were not, while that which is not, if love polarizes it, is as if
it were.[8]
Here, albeit in the language
of phenomenology, Jean-Luc Marion touches upon a very Augustinian-Maximian theme:
being only “registers” its truth when in the gaze of love. When vanity strikes it, when—in terms of this
paper—the will because indecisive clings to things for their own sake and for
the sake of egoism—God’s radiance through them becomes imperceptible to us,
both from the darkness of sin and because their “modes” of existence are being
forced to run against their true nature, which is loving God and neighbor. Thus in this paper we have argued that
Christ’s two wills plays a key part in both Maximus and Augustine, that in fact
it is not simply an esoteric doctrine, but both brings to fullness Chalcedonian
logic and is a central orientating concept for the Christian to God and world. Here then we might say that to see God is to
see Christ, and the world through and in Him.
To once again quote Maximus: The mystery of the Word’s incarnation
contains the force of all the hidden meanings and types in scripture, and the understanding
of the visible and intelligible creatures.
The one who knows the mystery of the cross and tomb knows the true
nature of these aforementioned things.
And the one who has been initiated into the ineffable power of the
resurrection knows the purpose for which God made all things.
[1] As a former devotee of Intelligent Design who
slavishly read Behe, William Dembski, and Philip Johnson, I would add, ID
itself has repeatedly failed to convince, especially after the devastating 2005
Dover trials. Though of course I speak
as a layman about his hobbyhorse, not an expert. I wrote a short article called “My Summer
With Darwin,” venting some of my concerns that can be accessed here: http://agreatercourage.blogspot.com/2012/08/my-summer-with-darwin-part-two.html
[3] Alasdair MacIntyre in Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy,
Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1991) makes a lot of this
distinction between what he calls “encyclopedic” modes of knowledge as exemplified
by Modernity, where knowledge is purely a sort of technical accumulation of
data free from traditioned contexts, and “craft” knowledge of tradition which
he argues is exemplified by Thomas Aquinas.
[4] Unfortunately we have not had the space here to develop
Maximus’ elaborate conception of how the mind is related to God in its
synthetic task of understanding the world.
However there is a very interesting parallel with Maximus’ description
of the mind’s ultimate relation to God as the “final synthesis” and Milbank’s
notion of the mind’s “analogous holding together” of images which “produces”
the tree.
[5] John Milbank, “The Thomistic Telescope,” in Transcendence and Phenomenology ed.
Connor Cunningham and Peter M. Candler (London: SCM Press, 2008), 301-303.
[6] John Milbank, Theology
and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Wiley Blackwell, 2006), 358. Here “story” need not imply “not ontology” or
“untrue.” It means to point out that our
perception of being is controlled to large extents by the paradigms employed as
“lenses.”
[7] Particularly relevant for our own purposes is Alister
McGrath’s Gifford Lectures, recently published as Alister McGrath, A Fine Tuned Universe: The Quest For God in
Science and Theology (Louiseville: Westminster John-Knox Press, 2009) who
in fact uses Augustine as his main exemplar of a theological sensibility which
sees God in the very intelligibility of the universe.
[8] Jean-Luc Marion, God
Without Being trans. Thomas Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1991), 136.
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