Christianity is unique to confront postmodernism, which is why the most relevant theory has resourcessed theological insights.
David Bentley Hart, in his book Beauty of the Infinite engages with the postmodern project and answers it with Christian theological thought.
Hart says Christian thought already is “postmodern”, in the recognition that the dialectical is always essentially rhetorical, it is impossible to do without a narrative in the first place: there is always a “fictional” element to every truth, not least because truth needs to be articulated, but also because every attempt to “purify” or “deconstruct” a narrative ensues ultimately from yet another narrative.
Therefore, choosing a narrative is not an option.
But, says Hart,
“This is not by any means a disheartening prospect. For if indeed God became a man, then Truth condescended to become a truth, from whose historical contingency one cannot simply pass to categories of universal rationality; and this means that whatever Christians mean when they speak of truth, it cannot involve simply the dialectical wresting of abstract principles from intractable facts. “
So, there are experiential and evidential aspects that can be deferred to, while acknowledging openly it’s logic is grounded firmly in a concrete historical event.
Hart acknowledges that , “Of course, every age of Christian thought has borrowed freely from the metaphysical idioms in currency, but every appropriation has inevitably entailed a subversion because of Christianity’s sheer intractable concrete historical particularity, metaphysics are always put under the foot of Christ.
Indeed, Christianity’s fundamental doctrine that God created the world out of nothing is consistent with postmodern philosophy: it presupposes that all reality is without substance and is in flux between nothing and infinity. Theology can therefore embrace its historically conditioned nature without negating its claim to speak of transcendent reality. Theology can ground its claims in the terms of its own language of belief.
Postmodern theory simply confirms theology in its original condition: that of a story, thoroughly dependent upon a sequence of historical events to which the only access is the report and practice of believers, a story whose truthfulness may be urged - even enacted - but never proved simply by the processes of scrupulous dialectic.
What Christian thought offers the world is not a set of "rational" arguments, it stands before the world principally with the story it tells , Christian thought has no stake in the "pure" rationality to which dialectic seems to appeal - the Christian ratio, its Logos, is a crucified Jew - and cannot choose but be "rhetorical" in form.
Christian thought must remain immovably fixed alongside Christ, in his irreducible particularity, and precisely insofar as the temper of "postmodernism" runs against confidence in universal truths of reason....”
With a trinitarian ontology, transcendence is IN imminence, the eternal revealed in the historical, Only Christian trinitarianism has broken the bipolar metaphysical vicious circle of dialectical thought (choosing sides between univocal and equivocal metaphysics, the Ideal Plotonic One/Order vs brute being as difference and chaos, Apollo or Dionysus, Parmenides’ absolute identism, Being, or Heraclitus’ absolute becoming.)
Thus, as Hart says, “offering a radically alternative view on Being: one that demands no suffocation or conquering of the other and, on the other hand, does not dissolute otherness and multiplicity into monism, for in the analogical realm, there are no opposites, no dialectical negativity, and solving the problem of the One and the Many.
For their parts, classical "metaphysics" and postmodernism belong to the same story; each, implying or repeating the other, conceives being as a plain upon which forces of meaning and meaninglessness converge in endless war; according to either, being is known in its oppositions, and oppositions must be overcome or affirmed, but in either case as violence: amid the strife of images and the flow of simulacra, shining form appears always only as an abeyance of death, fragile be- fore the convulsions of chaos, and engulfed in fate. There is a specular infinity in mutually defining opposites: Parmenides and Heracleitos gaze into one an- other's eyes, and the story of being springs up between them; just as two mirrors set before one another prolate their depths indefinitely, repeating an opposition that recedes forever along an illusory corridor without end, seeming to span all horizons and contain all things, the dialectic of Apollo and Dionysus oscillates without resolution between endless repetitions of the same emptiness, the same play of reflection and inversion. But the true infinite lies outside and all about this enclosed universe of strife and shadows; it shows itself as beauty and as light: not totality, nor again chaos, but the music of a triune God.
In every case, though, a faith in the transcendent unity of being and the good (along with the expectation that philokalia, the love of beauty, is the form desire takes when it rises toward that unity) is unimaginable.”
With Pomodernism it is now thought metaphysics is dead, there can be no notion of truth, since truth is always based on historical, contingent things, and truth must be changeless.
Christian thought solves the problem of truth being historically contingent, because for Christians the Truth was a historic person, and theology get out of the grammar of a narrative with real persons and real experiences, 1st century Jews.
In short, its historicity is to be affirmed, although its “content” is eternal.
Christianity in practice somehow affirms its theoria; rather, those historical forms and images it has assumed must be taken as veritable accounts of portraying the infinite.
It is the narrative that informs the language of metaphysics, not the other way around. It can certainly give birth to false interpretations , but the narrative of Christ and the narrative of Christendom are not the same.
So Any Christian theory must 1) be subservient to the historical particularities of Christ's life and 2). Adhere to narrative coherence, it’s not groundless.
Christianity is based on an actual historical event, all metaphysics must be put under this story, and, since every truth must find *adequate habits and rituals for it to be intelligible, the grammar of this truth must involve our participation in it - we share in the creation of Christian Truth in the very means of communication with that truth via ritual, praise, etc, it’s not abstract, and any truth must be decided upon the narrative compatibility of the faith as it is already practiced, sung, and understood.
So, there are experiential and evidential aspects that can be deferred to, while acknowledging openly it’s logic is grounded firmly in a concrete historical event.
Any thought must "fit' into the Story of Christ, as narrative coherence has always ultimately governed tradition and its development.
For example, that Arian controversies showed that each dissident party could quote sources of theology quite evenly, and thus as a singular issue either one could have been vindicated. But it was the narrative compatibility (faith that was already practiced, sung, and understood for centuries) with dogmatic theses that resolved the matter in favour of the Nicene party.
Also, the Trinity serves as a model of a) the constitutive relationality of all meaning, b) the way that any embodied truth gives concrete form to an enabling background of structural potentiality, c) the sense in which potentiality stands in a relation of creative self-fulfilling ‘desire’ to what arises from it, and d) the inconceivability of Being’s nature, from our limited perspective within its embrace.
For Christianity, Hart says,
“Being is not simply a bare category indifferently embracing an endless plurality of arbitrary instances; it is the fullness and unity of all determinacy in the Trinity, unfolding its light in the unity and diversity of beings, composing endless and endlessly coinherent variations on an infinite theme (not, that is, a theme to which the whole is somehow reducible, an "essential" meaning, but a theme in the musical sense, which is itself in its display of supplementation, variation, and difference). If being and truth are conceived as already rhetorical, if truth is ultimately aesthetic - a style, a unity of form and message, having no separable essence or content for dialectic to pry loose - then peace may be the true name of being: the distance of the other, crossed by the rhetorical excess of the other, may awaken one to the truth of the other as long as one can receive that excess as glory.
In reality, subjective certitude cannot be secured, not because the world is nothing but the aleatory play of opaque signifiers, but because subjective certitude is an irreparably defective model of knowledge; it cannot correspond to or "adequate" a world that is gratuity rather than ground, poetry rather than necessity, rhetoric rather than dialectic.”
Hart ends with this :
Nietzsche has every right to be appalled. Christian rhetoric, therefore, offers Christ as rhetoric, as beauty, but also as presence, mediated aesthetically by an endless parataxis of further "statements" for just that reason all the more present (a presence that is rhetoric cannot be estranged from itself or made remote by the interminable deferral of rhetoric, so long as the style of its excess is sustained); the church's only task is to enact and offer this form.
As the story of Thomas's doubt emphasizes, the resurrection of Christ imparts anew the real presence of this same Jesus of Nazareth, and in the power of the Holy Spirit he draws ever nearer, becomes ever more present, in an ever greater display of the various power of his presence. This is a beauty that does not hover over or beyond history, recalled as privation and hoped for simply as futurity, but pervades time as a music that now even the most frenetic din of violence cannot drown out."
Although a bit more complex, Hart notes that creation ex-Nilhio, creation of of nothing, the Christian doctrine, allows true transcendence to be though, because it creates the distance to be able to think the difference of Being from specific beings. It's difficult to think of just Being, because that's all we know, how do you separate it from actual things ? What would it look like ?
Well, usually, as Hiedageer does, philosophers contrast it with nothingness, to throw Being in relief, once again invoking a dualistic dialectics - the 'is' against the 'is not', however with the Christian God a true notion of infinite transcendence arises, overarching both, putting being into relic so it can be grasped in its true contingency....
What would such a theology look like, click here to check out Hart’s rough sketch of what Beauty can do for Theology.
Christian thought solves the problem of truth being historically contingent, because for Christians the Truth was a historic person, and theology get out of the grammar of a narrative with real persons and real experiences, 1st century Jews.
In short, its historicity is to be affirmed, although its “content” is eternal.
Christianity in practice somehow affirms its theoria; rather, those historical forms and images it has assumed must be taken as veritable accounts of portraying the infinite.
It is the narrative that informs the language of metaphysics, not the other way around. It can certainly give birth to false interpretations , but the narrative of Christ and the narrative of Christendom are not the same.
So Any Christian theory must 1) be subservient to the historical particularities of Christ's life and 2). Adhere to narrative coherence, it’s not groundless.
Christianity is based on an actual historical event, all metaphysics must be put under this story, and, since every truth must find *adequate habits and rituals for it to be intelligible, the grammar of this truth must involve our participation in it - we share in the creation of Christian Truth in the very means of communication with that truth via ritual, praise, etc, it’s not abstract, and any truth must be decided upon the narrative compatibility of the faith as it is already practiced, sung, and understood.
So, there are experiential and evidential aspects that can be deferred to, while acknowledging openly it’s logic is grounded firmly in a concrete historical event.
Any thought must "fit' into the Story of Christ, as narrative coherence has always ultimately governed tradition and its development.
For example, that Arian controversies showed that each dissident party could quote sources of theology quite evenly, and thus as a singular issue either one could have been vindicated. But it was the narrative compatibility (faith that was already practiced, sung, and understood for centuries) with dogmatic theses that resolved the matter in favour of the Nicene party.
Also, the Trinity serves as a model of a) the constitutive relationality of all meaning, b) the way that any embodied truth gives concrete form to an enabling background of structural potentiality, c) the sense in which potentiality stands in a relation of creative self-fulfilling ‘desire’ to what arises from it, and d) the inconceivability of Being’s nature, from our limited perspective within its embrace.
For Christianity, Hart says,
“Being is not simply a bare category indifferently embracing an endless plurality of arbitrary instances; it is the fullness and unity of all determinacy in the Trinity, unfolding its light in the unity and diversity of beings, composing endless and endlessly coinherent variations on an infinite theme (not, that is, a theme to which the whole is somehow reducible, an "essential" meaning, but a theme in the musical sense, which is itself in its display of supplementation, variation, and difference). If being and truth are conceived as already rhetorical, if truth is ultimately aesthetic - a style, a unity of form and message, having no separable essence or content for dialectic to pry loose - then peace may be the true name of being: the distance of the other, crossed by the rhetorical excess of the other, may awaken one to the truth of the other as long as one can receive that excess as glory.
In reality, subjective certitude cannot be secured, not because the world is nothing but the aleatory play of opaque signifiers, but because subjective certitude is an irreparably defective model of knowledge; it cannot correspond to or "adequate" a world that is gratuity rather than ground, poetry rather than necessity, rhetoric rather than dialectic.”
Hart ends with this :
Nietzsche has every right to be appalled. Christian rhetoric, therefore, offers Christ as rhetoric, as beauty, but also as presence, mediated aesthetically by an endless parataxis of further "statements" for just that reason all the more present (a presence that is rhetoric cannot be estranged from itself or made remote by the interminable deferral of rhetoric, so long as the style of its excess is sustained); the church's only task is to enact and offer this form.
As the story of Thomas's doubt emphasizes, the resurrection of Christ imparts anew the real presence of this same Jesus of Nazareth, and in the power of the Holy Spirit he draws ever nearer, becomes ever more present, in an ever greater display of the various power of his presence. This is a beauty that does not hover over or beyond history, recalled as privation and hoped for simply as futurity, but pervades time as a music that now even the most frenetic din of violence cannot drown out."
Although a bit more complex, Hart notes that creation ex-Nilhio, creation of of nothing, the Christian doctrine, allows true transcendence to be though, because it creates the distance to be able to think the difference of Being from specific beings. It's difficult to think of just Being, because that's all we know, how do you separate it from actual things ? What would it look like ?
Well, usually, as Hiedageer does, philosophers contrast it with nothingness, to throw Being in relief, once again invoking a dualistic dialectics - the 'is' against the 'is not', however with the Christian God a true notion of infinite transcendence arises, overarching both, putting being into relic so it can be grasped in its true contingency....
What would such a theology look like, click here to check out Hart’s rough sketch of what Beauty can do for Theology.
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