Tag: William of Ockham

Solving the Puzzle of Christology

The primary issue in the development of doctrine, as it passed through a variety of heresies and their repudiation, is the identity of Christ. How are the humanity and deity of Jesus to be understood? Is it that Christ is divine only inasmuch as he is not human, or human apart from his divinity? Is His suffering limited to His humanity, preserving his deity from the passion and cross?  Or is it that Jesus in his suffering in Gethsemane and Golgotha is revealing the true heart of God? What is clear, is that Jesus Christ poses a new model, a new relationship between humanity and deity, and understanding how God is at work in the humanity of Christ is the key to understanding how he is at work in our humanity. The key question is, according to Rowan Williams, “how does Christology itself generate a new and fuller grasp of the ‘grammar’ of createdness?”[1]

Recognizing and knowing Christ, gives us a fuller grasp of who He is, simultaneous with recognizing the world in which we live and who we are. What Christology “seeks to articulate presses us to work at the logic, or grammar . . . of speaking about God” characterized by “intelligence and love” and the logic of creation.[2] Talking about God and Christ provides “a credible environment for action and imagination, a credible means of connecting narratives, practices, codes of behaviour;” ultimately it offers “a world to live in.”[3] The refining of Christology is not simply the practice of the individual Christian, but is definitive of one of the primary activities of the Church, with the errors and their correction providing a way forward in knowing Christ.

The manner in which Christology is misconstrued, demonstrates that the primary error is trying to fit Christ into an already realized understanding. God incarnate is made to fit an already existing world pattern, which inevitably denies the reality of God and human brought together in one person. Docetism would deny the bodily incarnation; adoptionism holds that Jesus Christ was not the Son of God from eternity but was adopted by God at some point; Sabellianism and Modalism hold that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are simply different manifestations of God; Arianism teaches that Jesus is not fully divine; etc. etc. In the first five centuries of the church there were some 30 distinct heresies concerning the person and work of Christ. All these heresies share the form of trying to conceive Christ along an already accepted understanding, and if nothing else this is what the early church councils refute.

The focus of the church councils was aimed at countering heresies which would reduce the reality of Christ’s identity. The first council of Nicaea (325) condemned Arianism and defined Father and Son as consubstantial; Constantinople I (381) also condemned Arianism, but also Macedonianism which denied the divinity of the Spirit; Ephesus (431) condemned Nestorianism, which denied the unity of the divine and human in Christ; Chalcedon (451) condemned Monophysitism (or Eutychianism) which denied Christ’s human nature; Constantinople II (553) recondemned Nestorianism; Constantiniple III (680) condemned Monothelitism, which held Christ only had a divine and not human will which arose as a reaction to Monophysitism which taught Jesus had only a divine and not a human nature; Nicaea II (787) condemned adoptionism which held Christ was not the Son of God by nature. The consistent problem was a reduction in the reality of the New Testament portrayal of the identity of Jesus.

There is an expansive understanding of Christ in the New Testament, in which Jesus could in no way be conceived within the received parameters of personhood. He is active in the life of believers, preserving their faithfulness: “awaiting eagerly the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will also confirm you to the end, blameless (1 Cor. 1.7–8); He is “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24). Christ is “alive” in believers (Gal. 2.20); as God’s Son he is restoring relations with God throughout the Cosmos (Rom. 8:21). He has died, and has been raised and is seated at the right hand of God (Rom. 8.34). In one of the most common phrases of the New Testament, believers are “in Christ.” He is the ultimate agent of divine judgment; He puts divine rule into effect, both in his ministry (exorcising demons, healing etc.) and the work completed upon his return; He is the means of the gifting of the Holy Spirit creating a new community through his body and acting as head of the Church. Christ is the identity and ground of this new community.[4]

“Who do you say that I am,” is the perennial question and human language and understanding through the centuries have approached an answer and explanation in a series of false starts, qualifications, and general pointers, such that there is a continual groping toward a fuller understanding of Christ (and through Christ an understanding of the world.) The understanding of Christ individually and corporately, however, can in no way be identified as one of steady progress. Entire epochs, modes of thinking, and developments within theology, have misidentified Christ. For example, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham (if not the Franciscans) found a mode of thinking (nominalism), which denies there is access to God’s eternality. According to Scotus, “the human soul and will of Jesus perform finite acts and those acts must be of finite worth.”[5] Likewise, “Ockham wants to argue that God’s power to bestow grace is always conditioned (as a result of his own divine choice, of course, in the ordering of the contingent universe) by the character of the subject receiving it, so that infinite grace cannot be given to a finite agent.”[6] Everything must be traced back to God’s unconstrained voluntaristic will: “God’s will and purpose were completely free and unconstrained by any created reality – and that must mean that God’s decision to be incarnate could have nothing to do with any quality inherent in humanity.”[7] This pure will on the part of God could make a stone or a donkey, as well as Jesus, the site of incarnation.

What becomes clear by the fifth century, according to Williams, is that speaking about Jesus must involve a new form of thought “in which the complete and unequivocal presence of divine action and human action inseparably united with one another was affirmed in a way that did not diminish the true and active presence of either and did not see them as related ‘side by side’, one of them influencing the other from outside.”[8] The puzzle solving involves recognizing the divine presence in Jesus of Nazareth, and continuing to comprehend the fullness of that presence. The Christological statement from the Council of Chalcedon is typical: a formula aimed at satisfying various perspectives in regard to that fullness, but more of a guideline, than a definitive statement:

We all teach harmoniously [that he is] the same perfect in godhead, the same perfect in manhood, truly God and truly man, the same of a reasonable soul and body; homoousios with the Father in godhead, and the same homoousios with us in manhood … acknowledged in two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.

He is perfect in his humanity and deity, having homoousious with the Father (that is the same in being and same in essence), and also having the same essence and being as other humans; he has these two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation. This statement is a long time in coming, but how do we grasp its meaning? As Williams notes, “Like most or many formulae of settlement, Chalcedon defines an agenda rather than a solution to the problems that have generated it.”[9] The agenda for Christology though, is now more clearly defined: Christ has two natures and two wills in one person.

Chalcedon, like all of the early Church councils, reflects the radical questions posed by the New Testament. The identity of Jesus with God, and the explicit claims of deity in his “I am” statements in John (e.g., “before Abraham was born, I am.” Jn 8:58) can in no way be approached according to some normative model as to how God reveals himself. Paul also provides descriptions that are pointed, clear, yet beyond immediate comprehension. In Colossians alone, Christ is the “image of the invisible God”, the “firstborn” over creation (1:15), with “all things created through Him and for Him” (1:16), “in Him all things hold together” (1:17), in Him “all the fullness of the Deity dwells bodily” (2:9), through Him God “reconciles all things to Himself” (1:20), He is the “head of the body the Church” (1:18), sharing the glory of God with believers (1:27), He has preeminence over all things that “in everything, He might have the supremacy” (1:18), all of this results “in a true knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ Himself (2:2). Jesus Christ in these passages is identified as Creator, sustainer, reconciler, the visible image of God, and in each of these roles the work of the Father and Spirit are evident. It is through Him that the Father is revealed, that the Father reconciles, and that the mystery of God, the Trinity, is revealed. Knowing Christ is the goal, but this knowing involves stretching human understanding and experience.

Perhaps the most radical contemporary statement which comes closest to the radical biblical identity of God with Jesus, comes from the Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson:

What Christology is—or ought to be—about is the Jesus who appears in the Gospels, as he is in fact the Son of God he was accused of claiming to be. Thus, if we speak of a “divine nature,” what the phrase in its way denotes must be this one. If we speak of a “human nature,” what the phrase denotes in its different way must be this one. If we speak of “a single hypostasis,” what the phrase denotes in its yet different way must be this one. And all of this language—as any new language we might devise—speaks truly about this one only as it displays him as the Son, that is, as it displays this one’s relation to the Father in the Spirit.”[10]

Jenson pointedly identifies the story of Jesus with the story of God. Where Williams is eager to distinguish the Word of God from Jesus of Nazareth, Jenson says explicitly these are not two but one and the same: “the second identity of God is directly the human person of the Gospels, in that he is the one who stands to the Father in the relation of being eternally begotten by him. May we now finally say that God the Son suffered, without evasive qualification? It was dogmatically settled before Maximus that ‘one of the Trinity suffered in the flesh.’”[11] This understanding may not be immediately comprehensible or reducible to our present understanding, but here the identity between God and Jesus set forth in the New Testament and the Church seem to take on its most complete form.

Who is Jesus in His divinity and humanity, in His relation to creation and the Church, and how do I come to know him more completely – is the driving question and impetus behind much of the New Testament, behind the various heresies and their repudiation, and behind the formulas arising from the councils, which require continued refinement and explanation. The task of every Christian, the theological task, which is never finished, is to identify the person of Jesus. This is not a task that can be closed out, as if one has fully achieved the fulness of the reality of Christ. Jesus’ identity, his question for each of us (“Who do you say that I am”), is not a mere summing up of his past history but is an ever-present demand.

[1] Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition) 6.

[2] Williams, 7.

[3] Williams, Intro, location 70.

[4] Williams, 48-49.

[5] Williams, 133.

[6] Williams, 134.

[7] Williams, 136.

[8] Williams, Intro location 81.

[9] Williams, p. 88. Unfortunately, as Jordan Wood spells out in some detail, Williams is guilty of the very thing he warns of – trying to fit Christ into preconceived frame. “What troubles me most about Williams’s christology is how keen it is to deny “exhaustive identity” between the Word of God and Jesus of Nazareth (159-60).” Also, “To the extent that Williams’s operative and determinative thought-picture is one of ‘two agencies’ and not, as in Christ, two agencies that are positively one and mutually interpenetrating in one agent, his picture furtively imports the very premise he wishes to deny throughout: that infinite and finite agencies are not to be conceived as two finite agencies that must impinge upon one another to be united.” Jordan Wood, “Against Asymmetrical Christology: A Critical Review of Rowan Williams’s ‘Christ the Heart of Creation’” Posted on Al Kimel’s Blog, Eclectic Orthodoxy (4 August 2019).

[10] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1: The Triune God (second edition), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 134.

[11] Jenson, 137.

The Contrast Between Luther and Maximus

There is a move among Finnish and Scandinavian theologians in general to draw parallels between the theology of Martin Luther and Maximus the Confessor. While such parallels are interesting, it might be more interesting and necessary to first state the obvious differences.

Maximus and Luther are working with two different notions of salvation and atonement, with Luther more focused on the individual and Maximus on cosmic salvation (see my blog explaining Maximus here). Luther holds to an Augustinian notion of original sin and his theology is slanted if not defined by his focus on forensics.

Is his focus on forensics or on law versus grace definitive of his theology, such that there is no ontological understanding or access to divine essence? One might argue the point, but this is not an uncommon conclusion about his theology, which stands in contrast to Maximus picture of access to the divine essence in creation and incarnation. Is imputed righteousness characteristic of Luther’s theology, such that it all is defined in legal or theoretical terms? Some Lutherans might argue otherwise and this may not be fair to the fulness of his theology, and there are those (such as the Finnish theologians) who argue Luther had his own notion of apocatastasis, but what can be said is that Calvin comes in the wake of Luther and Calvin’s theology is forensic (and Luther’s is commonly perceived as being of a similar order). On the other hand, Maximus follows Origen and the early church in his depiction of theosis (perhaps not entirely absent in Luther) – bringing to maturity in the second Adam the race of the first Adam through divinization. Maximus sees this as a present reality unfolding toward the eschaton.

 Luther’s theory of the two kingdoms allows for full participation of the Christian in the necessities of state violence, including the violent suppression of peasants, Jews, and heretics. The peace of Maximus, the enacted theosis in the life of the believer, the cosmic context of virtue grounded in the incarnation of Christ, stands in contrast to Luther’s picture of the Christian life as an unending (violent?) struggle with sin.

Maximus’ picture of salvation is holistic and unified (grounded as it is in the reality of the Trinity) while Luther depicts a split individual struggling with sin, living in two different kingdoms, such that the spiritual and hidden kingdom of God momentarily serves the immediate and practical necessities of the earthly kingdom, allowing this ethic to dictate the lived Christian ethic. Luther affirms the necessity of violence and maintains that people of faith are to be the instruments of violence. After all, “The deviancy of some would call down punishment on all. At a certain point, God even owes it to himself, as it were, to his honour, we might say, to strike.”[1]

Luther tended to demonize his enemies with a violent and abusive rhetoric (which is not to ignore that he often spoke of love), and there is no question that his antisemitism is imbibed by the creators of the Holocaust. Maximus depicts salvation as the destruction of death, and this is the resource and reality out of which the Christian is to live. Monk Maximus would die at the hands of the state and it is not entirely implausible that, given the right circumstance, the ex-Monk Luther might have approved.

But this cursory list of contrasts does not get at the world of difference between Maximus notion that creation is incarnation and Luther’s semi-nominalism. For Luther, God, in his essence is hidden from us, and we do not live with the resource of access to the immanent Trinity. For Maximus, God is revealed in Christ and this is the truth not only of salvation but of the purposes of creation. Luther’s theology lays the groundwork for modernity[2] while Maximus’ theology is the culmination of a premodern theology, pointing toward a very different sort of world order. The enchantment of the world in light of Maximus’ Christo-logic (which is not any old sort of enchantment or magic) and the disenchantment of the world in light of Luther’s direct attack on indulgences and magic, and the secularism implicit in Luther’s thought and theology gets at the fundamental difference. And of course, this is not to attribute (blame/credit) all of secularism to Luther, but again, his theology seems to have enabled secular developments.[3]

As Charles Taylor describes it, Luther reversed the fear factor in his attack on indulgences and on the magic the church could enact (a needed disenchantment):

A great deal of Catholic preaching on sin and repentance was based on the principle that the ordinary person was so insensitive that they had to be terrified into responding. . .. But just this cranking up of fear may have helped to prepare people to respond to Luther’s reversal of the field.[4]

We can locate Luther within the context of nominalism – as nominalism defines both what he is for and what he is against and it is in a nominalist context that he makes these arguments. The father of nominalism, the way of the modern (via moderna), William of Ockham (1287-1347), denied the existence of universals (nominalism indicates we have only the names), which was an underlying foundation for Thomas (1225-1274) and Scotus (1266-1308). Consequently, Ockham would stress the importance of the will (God’s and man’s) over and above the intellect.[5] Luther will challenge the role of human will, attacking what he sees as semi-Pelagianism.

Luther believes that God’s absolute power renders the efficacy of the human will entirely useless. Or in terms of human understanding, it is not as if God can be aligned with the good (as we know it) as God is determinative of the good and so the good must be aligned with the (arbitrary?) will of God.

As Luther states it in the 19th Thesis of the Heidelberg Disputation: “Anyone who observes the invisible things of God, understood through those things that are created, does not deserve to be called a theologian.” God is not grasped through the being of the world (against the scholastics) but God comes to us only on the basis of promise or covenant, and this does not pertain to His essence or the essence of the world. As Taylor puts it, “God must always remain free to determine what is good. The good is whatever God wills; not God must will whatever is (determined by nature as) good. This was the most powerful motive to reject the “realism” of essences for Occam and his followers.”[6]

This sets up a peculiar Lutheran dialectic, in which faith stands over and against reason or in which the theology of glory is opposed to the theology of the cross. The theology of glory clings to works-righteousness while the theology of the cross is dependent on faith alone. Likewise, grace stands over and against law, yet grace needs the law that it might be understood to be a gift and not an accomplishment of the law. If the law “serves no other purpose than to create a thirst and to frighten the heart,” the gospel “satisfies the thirst, makes us cheerful, and revives and consoles the conscience.”[7] The “presumption of righteousness is a huge and a horrible monster. To break and crush it, God needs a large and powerful hammer, that is, the Law, which is the hammer of death, the thunder of hell, and the lightning of divine wrath” (26.310).[8] The greater the paradox, conflict, and struggle, all the better:

“All the works of God are in conflict with His promise, which nevertheless remains completely true and unshaken. . . . The marvelous counsels of God in governing His saints must be learned, and the hearts of the godly must become accustomed to them. When you have a promise of God, it will happen that the more you are loved by God, the more you will have it hidden, delayed, and turned into its opposite” (4.326).

As David Tracy describes it, “Luther’s notion of dialectic … is structured as a conflict of opposites that not only clash but imply and need each other.”[9] The dialectic, like any dialectic refers only to itself, so that what is known pertains not to any necessarily existing reality but to the language of dialectic.

God has his own autonomous purposes which are beyond human comprehension, but what can be known is what God has promised. For Luther, God is the cause of all things, while the human remains a passive recipient of God’s action. There is no free will for man in Luther’s estimation: “We do everything of necessity, and nothing by ‘free-will’; for the power of ‘free-will’ is nil, and it does no good, nor can do, without grace.”[10] According to Roland Millard, for Luther, “The sovereignty of God’s will necessarily excludes any causality on the part of the human person.”[11] Where Maximus describes a synergistic working of human will with the will of God, for Luther human will stands over and against the will of God.

In this understanding, Scripture no longer pertains to ontological necessity but to covenantal promise. Scripture is proclamation and promise so that rather than salvation history or ontological realism, for Luther the Word is a promise. The Word is the means by which God condemns sin and promises salvation (the law and the gospel). But this promise is had, not through the achievement of a real-world defeat of sin, but only on the basis of promise: “Sin is always present, and the godly feel it. But it is ignored and hidden in the sight of God, because Christ the Mediator stands between” (26.133). It is not that sin and the law are ever suspended or surpassed: “There is a time for ‘killing’ the flesh through the law, and a time for reviving the spirit through the gospel. Complacency and self-righteousness require the former, fear and despair the latter. The one ‘who masters the art of exact distinction between the Law and the Gospel should be called a real theologian’ (23.271; cf. 26.115).[12] Though Luther finds the Gospel partly revealed in the Old Testament and he finds the Law mixed in with the New Testament, his primary point is that the Law of the Old Testament stands over and against the Gospel of the New Testament.

Maximus notion of free will, his picture of the whole Bible and the whole world proclaiming the Gospel seems contrary to Luther’s sharp divide between Law and Gospel and between creation and Creator. Whether one agrees with the cosmic (universal) salvation of Maximus and his peculiar Christo-logic, or whether one prefers Luther’s faith alone and imputed righteousness, it would be a mistake to blend these two contrasting worlds without noting their stark difference. The two contrasting orders of salvation, revelation, and the God/world relation in Maximus and Luther represent two very different conceptions of Christianity and the world.

[1] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007) 42. An understanding Taylor links to Luther.

[2] By the same token, we might sight the history of modern Western philosophy as in some sense flowing from within the wake of Lutheranism. Is the dualism of Descartes (between faith and reason), or Kant’s split between the noumena and the phenomena (and the eventual turn to phenomenology), far removed from Luther’s two kingdoms and his interiorized Christianity? In fact, faith alone (sola fide) does not seem too far removed from German idealism. Luther’s focus on a groundless Word (not grounded in metaphysics) will come to resemble phenomenology and the linguistic turn in philosophy and society. While it is too simplistic to chalk this up to Luther, it is doubtful it could have happened apart from the Reformation instigated by Luther.

[3] At least this is the argument of Charles Taylor.

[4] Taylor, 75.

[5] Roland Millare, “The Nominalist Justification for Luther’s Sacramental Theology” (Antiphon 17.2 (2013)) 169-170.

[6] Taylor, 97.

[7] Luther’s Works Volume 23, p. 272 hereafter cited by volume and page.

[8] Stephen and Martin Westerholm, Reading Sacred Scripture: Voices from the History of Biblical Interpretation (p. 233). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

[9] D. Tracy, ‘Martin Luther’s Deus Theologicus’ in P. J. Malysz and D. R. Nelson, eds, Luther Refracted (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 2015): 109. Quoted in Mark Norman, “Luther, Heidegger and the Hiddenness of God” Tyndale Bulletin 70.2 (2019) 302.

[10] Luther, Bondage of the Will, 180.

[11] Millare, 172

[12] Westerholms, 234.

A Genealogy of the Lonely Modern

In the typical scenario, which comes loaded with the modern view of history, the question is posed, “Would you smother baby Hitler in the crib, given the opportunity?” What if we discover, perhaps with the deed complete, it was actually Hitler’s reading of Nietzsche, and that in fact there were many German boys of a peculiar intellect and disposition who, given bad philosophy, could fill the role of Hitler candidates. Smothering baby Nietzsche will not really help, as he too arises with the secular age whose end he envisions.[1] The problem with the scenario is contained in the presumption that Hitler is an isolated, unique individual, and not a product of his time and circumstance.

John Milbank though, has the perfect candidate for smothering. According to Milbank, Duns Scotus is the culprit who created the theological vision that ultimately disenchanted the world which has given rise to both modern experience and modern political structure, with all of its attendant disasters. Milbank would explain the modern and secular, whether modern American evangelicalism or modern global Christianity as a “thinned out version of the Catholic faith” – all the result of the theology of Scotus.[2] In turn, Milbank imagines that if we could recover medieval ecclesial and political structures the root problem would be addressed. He puts on display both a failed understanding of the nature and depth of the human predicament and its solution.

My point here is not simply to indicate the weakness in attaching blame for all of modern thought to one medieval scholar. Milbank, after all, is simply following a long line of modern scholarship (the very thing he is critiquing) which would attach supreme importance to one individual or a particular stream of history. While it is not exactly “the great man theory of history” (in which history is biography), it is something of a “disastrous idea theory of history” which attaches a near sui generis notion to particular ideas, periods and persons. For example, Leslie Newbigin, typical of the previous generation, wrote of Rene Descartes having caused the second Fall of humanity. He presumed that if Descartes had not gone into that warm room on a cold day and composed his meditations (beginning with “I think, therefore I am”) the modern period would not have commenced or would not have been so disastrous. The tendency is to think, “That darn Descartes, he ruined it for all of us.” This, “If it weren’t for that darn Descartes-that darn Scotus-that darn Hitler-view of history,” is faulty, not simply in its simplistic view of history but is attached, I would claim, to a peculiarly thin (modernist) theology which does not presume, as I think the New Testament does, something like a negative unified field theory of sin (addressed in the work of Christ).

It is not that we cannot or should not trace the genealogy of ideas, as we really do live in a world impacted by the thought of particular individuals and there really are streams of thought or historical circumstances that shape our horizons. It is true, that basic human experience is changed up in this secular age and that our world has been disenchanted, no matter our personal (religious or nonreligious) frame of reference. There is no passing over the depth of details to be found in Scotus or William of Ockham and their part in bringing about the secular. The mistake is not in tracing the genealogy of ideas, but it is in imagining that any one individual or any one age or epoch is a realm apart and thus does not share in a common root failure. Milbank’s intense focus on Scotus could and has been argued on the details but the larger error, whatever the merit or lack in the details, is to imagine this failure is a one-off event which can then be corrected by returning the world to something like its pre-Scotus state.[3]

Conceptually modernity, for example, with its turn to nominalism and the focus on divine sovereignty (divine power) in philosophy and theology (something like a pure formalism or legalism), with its juridical-constitutional model of autonomous state authority (the government is secular and the ecclesial powers are now subservient), with its presumption of bio-political control of the human body through the body politic (the biological body is written over with secular law), seems to simply be an aggravated reconstitution of Paul’s depiction of sin as a misorientation to law. The voluntarist conception of God (focus on the will or causal power of God) was secularized in the conception of the state and in the focus on the individual, and this raw power is codified in law and by legal (state) institutions.

The steps that lead to exclusive focus on divine sovereignty (as opposed to divine love or beauty) follows the course Paul traces as the universal predicament, in which the unmediated presence of God is traded for the force of the law. For Paul, the reality of every individual is understood in light of the experience or identity of corporate humanity (unregenerate humanity) in Adam and in Israel. In Eden, the law of the knowledge of good and evil literally displaces God and is made the means to life, and the law of Sinai is made to serve the same end. Part of the point of Christianity, perhaps the main point, is to separate out this obscene orientation to the law (psychologically and religiously) so as to be able to arrive at the law of love. Sin, in Paul’s definition, fuses itself with the law so that one who becomes a servant of the law (as Paul did, and as Adam did, and as, in Paul’s explanation, everyone does) becomes a servant of sin and incapacitates agape love.

The irony is that Christianity has done its work in extracting this condition (orientation to the law of sin and death) from religious enchantment. Now the law is not presumed to have any religious (ontological) ground but is a secular establishment, a bare and open law built upon raw power, that nonetheless reigns in the psychic and social orientation. In this nominalist universe no appeal can be made to an actually existing goodness, as the best we have – all we have – is the mediating power of law and legal institutions. “Might makes right” may have always been the case, but in the medieval period kings presumed they were the channel of a divinely bestowed power (and there was a check on this power), but in the secular realm power is its own legitimating force (there is no ecclesial legitimating power) so that war is the constituting power of the state to which it will need continual recourse. Making war makes the state. In the same way money, in the early stages of capitalism, was a sign of God’s blessing and depended upon this theological construct, now money need not appeal to any outside legitimation. Money is its own legitimating power. Human life is literally and metaphorically put on the market, so that life and time become a commodity to be bought and sold.  

As Charles Taylor has described it, the immanent frame now prevails, or as Carl Schmitt (the famous Nazi jurist) has put it, “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state but also because of their systematic structure.” As Schmitt describes it, “the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver” and with secularization we are left with omnipotent law.[4] It is no surprise then that miracles (due to natural law), become an impossibility, and by the same token, according to Mike Pompeo, there should not even be the possibility of questioning the constitution. The modern constitutional state reigns supreme (in place of the divine). The constitution replaces commandments, the nation replaces the community of faith, and at an individual level human decision and will is the final arbiter of ethics.

Among the many consequences of modern secularism is the rise of an intense and peculiar individualism, in which the organic and communal sense of the subject is displaced by the notion that the individual is a monad – an isolated entity.  It is only with the secular that there needs to be a reaffirmation of a basic biblical understanding and an integral part of medieval culture: humans are constituted as part of a family or group. Hegel hits upon this truth as if it is a discovery. As he explains in the very beginning of “Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage,” self-consciousness could be achieved only through being acknowledged by others. As the philosopher Immanuel Levinas has described it, at the most fundamental level, “self-consciousness is not one-sided action as people assume, but; it necessitates an other to reach it.” Facing with an “other” is not only necessary for the recognition of the self but it is also a must to have a self-consciousness.

The necessity to describe this mutuality would not likely have arisen in a traditional culture. As Taylor describes it, “One of the big differences between us and them is that we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other. We are ‘buffered’ selves.” The traditional porous sense of self came with certain deficits in that the emotional and moral life did not exist in an inner, mental space and was thus subject to a variety of malevolent influences such as spirits, demons, or cosmic forces.[5] But the buffered individual has been removed from this world of fear at the price of a profound sense of isolation. An article in JAMA journal of psychiatry refers to this as an epidemic of loneliness responsible for the death of 1 American every 5.5 minutes due to suicide and opioid overdose, which is chalked up to the root cause of loneliness. An annual mortality of 162 000 Americans is attributable to loneliness (exceeding the number of deaths from cancer or stroke), which is a term that, according to the British historian Fay Bound Alberti, did not exist in the English language until 1800.[6]  

Is not the destructive nature of modern loneliness an indication this is simply an aggravated condition of the objectified “I” which Paul depicts as arising in conjunction with the alienating law? In Paul’s depiction, this ἐγὼ or “I” is not subject to growth and change as it is an object fixed as part of a formal structure under the law, characterized by fear and struggle. The antagonistic dialectic between the law of the mind and the law of the body is, according to Paul, the very thing that produces this isolated ego desperately grasping after life and power through the law. Freud could be quoting Paul in calling the ego “the seat of anxiety” due to its fear of annihilation under the cathected law (the superego).[7] As Lacan will describe the ego (renaming it the imaginary), “Alienation is the imaginary as such.”[8] This fully interior or self-conscious ego, or this “I” which is one’s own is, in Paul’s description (and Paul is commenting on Genesis 3) the Subject of sin.  

This is not an attempt to simply lump together all forms of sin, but it is to suggest that a true genealogy of the modern begins with a biblical diagnosis, which also promises more than a return to the medieval or artificial attempts to reenchant the world.

[1] Enough smothered babies equal a holocaust type strategy – Hitler was, after all, attempting to correct history. It is the strategy of the powers from Pharaoh to Herod to the late modern Democratic Party.

[2] See John Milbank, Beyond the Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of People, (Wiley Blackwell).

[3] If modernity is a turn to the individual, and society is pictured simultaneously as made up of individual monad’s, this is not an error corrected by imagining one individual has reconstituted the whole.

[4] Carl Schmitt,  1928 (2008), Constitutional Theory, transl. J. Seitzer, (Duke University Press, London), p. 36.

[5] Charles Taylor, “Buffered and porous selves” https://tif.ssrc.org/2008/09/02/buffered-and-porous-selves/

[6] Dilip V Jeste, Ellen E Lee, Stephanie Cacioppo, “Battling the Modern Behavioral Epidemic of Loneliness: Suggestions for Research and Interventions,” JAMA psychiatry, 77(6) https://escholarship.org/content/qt47n6790s/qt47n6790s.pdf?t=q7c0kj

[7] Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (Standard Edition), 59-60.

[8] Jacques Lacan, Seminar III, 146