Foucault, as often, gets it...

Nice stuff from Michel Foucault. By exomologesis he means the acts of penance by which you show yourself penitent...

Foucault / HERMENEUTICS OF THE SELF

To justify this exomologesis and this renunciation to oneself in manifesting the truth about oneself, Christian fathers had recourse to several models. The well-known medical model was very often used in pagan philosophy: one has to show his wounds to the physicians if he wants to be healed. They also used the judicial model: one always appeases the court when spontaneously confessing the faults. But the most important model to justify the necessity of exomologesis is the model of martyrdom. The martyr is he who prefers to face death rather than to abandon his faith. The sinner abandons the faith in order to keep the life of here below; he will be reinstated only if in his turn he exposes himself voluntarily to a sort of martyrdom to which all will be witnesses, and which is penance, or penance as exolmologesis. Such a demonstration does not therefore have as its function the establishment of the personal identity. Rather, such a demonstration serves to mark this dramatic demonstration of what one is: the refusal of the self, the breaking off from one's self. One recalls what was the objective of Stoic technology: it was to superimpose, as I tried to explain to you last week, the subject of knowledge and the subject of will by means of the perpetual rememorizing of the rules. The formula which is at the heart of exomologesis is, in contrary, ego non sum ego. The exomologesis seeks, in opposition to the Stoic techniques, to superimpose by an act of violent rupture the truth about oneself and the renunciation of oneself. In the ostentatious gestures of maceration, self-revelation in exomologesis is, at the same time, self-destruction.

Hart on the sublime

I am somewhat frustrated by not yet reaching the theological sections of Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite. One of the problems was the section 'The Veil of the Sublime', which I found quite baffling. I still don't know really what is meant by 'the sublime' other than 'that which is unrepresentable'. For Kant, the subline 'is suggested to us in moments when, presented by an immensity, grandeur, or force that exceeds representation - because it requires of apprehension an 'infinite' activity that surpasses the power of comprehension, which is itself dependent upon the inward synthesis of the sense of time and hence finite - reasons must return from the realm of the sensible...' p. 45-6

Anyhow, why this matters is that Hart goes on to classify postmodern thought under four 'narratives of the sublime':

1 - the differential sublime, 'which might also be called the sublimity of exteriority'. Here he characterises Derrida's differance. Instead of order and classification, the sheer play of difference is celebrated.
2 - the cosmological sublime, 'which is the form the discourse of the unrepresentable can take when the Nietzschean impulse predominates', as it does with Deleuze, and then Foucault.
3 - the ontological sublime, represented by Heidegger
4 - the ethical sublime, whose chief figure is Levinas.

Hart is quite delightfully savage with some of these idols of our time. Chiefly, he attempts something very worthwhile, which is to sure why postmodern philosophers do not succeed even on their own terms. But, I am still left with that rather stupid feeling you get when you read what you don't understand...

Review published in Studies in Christian Ethics

My review of -

Elizabeth A. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). xvii + 335 pp. £26 (hb), ISBN 0–231–12986–6.

has been published in Studies of Christian Ethics 20.1 (2007) p. 125f.

Foucault and pastoral power

A friend and I were having one of those late night discussions - this was about the use of power by pastors in a manipulative way to have control over people. We weren't talking about a context of any actual abuse or sexual seduction - though these things happen too. Rather, for some of us pastors, just the thrill of having the keys to someone's life is extremely hard to let go of. Noticeably, people without strong father figures are extremely vulnerable to this kind of relationship - they tend to hand over control of themselves to a strong male figure, and a pastor often fits the bill..


It struck me that, of all people, Michel Foucault had been most insightful at this point. Foucault invented the term “pastoral power” to describe what he saw as an extremely influential view of government which it inherited from Christianity. This very special form of power is a concern for the salvation of the individual, and seeks to care for the individual; it is not merely a form of power that commands, but is also prepared to sacrifice itself (as opposed to, say, royal power); and it demands that people reveal their innermost secrets and so is therefore is linked with the production of truth – the truth of the individual.[1] In its transferral to use outside ecclesiastical institutions, the concern for salvation has become this worldly and therefore taken up in terms of (to list some examples) health, well-being, security, wealth and sanity. The function of truth-production led to the proliferation of the human sciences, whether as a population or as an individual.

Why do we demand that people confess to us? Or, press them to tell us the details of their inner lives? Is it not because it is exhilarating to have that kind of power over someone? At least, that was my temptation in pastoral ministry...

Reflections anyone?


[1] Foucault, “The Subject and Power.” p.333-4

Secular Western Liberalism in my sights again...

Secular western liberalism is a species of political thought that consciously rejects religious ideas from public consideration. It argues that for peaceful human cohabitation a truce needs to be achieved between conflicting visions of human flourishing.

Postmodern critiques of secular western liberalism expose its weaknesses, especially in the areas of epistemology and anthropology. Lyotard and Foucault have uncovered the hidden metaphysical, even theological, commitments of liberalism, suggesting that its appeal to universal or rational concepts is less compelling than at first glance. However, the postmoderns were themselves guilty of some problematic arguments...

Secular western liberalism trespasses frequently beyond the boundaries of the role of ‘contributing to a social order less unjust’. At least in part this is because of the deliberate step liberalism has taken away from divine authority that it might assert its own (covert) theology instead. It would be preferable for liberalism to name its theological commitments; or at least to assert openly its ‘thick’ moral vision and give up the pretence of moral minimalism. Public discussion of preferred theologies and of the telos of human life need not exclude in this way some of the strongest commitments people have (namely, their religious ones); neither would religious people be asked to frame their public discourse according to the theological and/or moral commitments of liberalism. In turn, the theological and moral assertions of secular western liberalism could be properly evaluated, if at least they were made explicit.

What must be heard is a call to the end of the open hostility of contemporary liberal order to Christianity. We can see in liberalism a prodigal child of Christianity: a millennium of Christendom meant that politics in the west has been moulded out of theological clay. We would not assert, for example, that Freedom and Equality are bad ideas in themselves; rather, that without an understanding of them as they were given birth by Christian theology they lack coherence and may become harmful. Christians can support a vision of liberal order that permits people freely to hear and respond to the gospel of God, which itself calls its hearers to deep concern for justice and peace in the present age while at the same time promising a final divine intervention to ‘shatter the spear’. However, the dominant form of liberal order on the contemporary scene is remorselessly secular...

John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason

The work of John Milbank is a daring attempt to demolish secular social theory from a Christian perspective. This audacious move is a characteristic of the ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ movement, whose other chief protagonists are Graham Ward and Catherine Pickstock. Milbank proclaims nothing less than to prove that the ‘governing assumptions’ of theories like secular western liberalism are ‘bound up with the governing assumptions of orthodox Christian positions’. In fact, it is not necessary to try and relate theology and social theory to one another, for, as Fergus Kerr summarises, ‘theology is already social theory, and social theory is already theology’. What Milbank attempts is to expose the theology (and anti-theology) implicit in the so-called secular disciplines like sociology. Conversely, and with much deference to Augustine, he extrapolates the social theory inherent in theology.

Milbank’s critique of political liberalism shares much in common with those of Foucault and Lyotard. Indeed it is self-consciously postmodern: Milbank explicitly adopts the Foucauldian tactic of an historicizing, ‘genealogical’ inquiry in order to expose the network of power struggles and claims to dominance at the root of liberal thinking. He claims that the discourses of liberalism, from which the secular is first constructed, read the world in terms of an ‘ontology of violence’ – ‘a reading of the world which assumes the priority of force and tells how this force is best managed and confined by counter force’. Violence is assumed to be basic; as a result, political theory is developed assuming that violence has to be forcefully surmounted. Following Foucault, Milbank asserts that any truth claims are in fact a means to assert the dominance of the inevitably clashing centres of power in society. Kant’s liberalism, for example, makes claims about freedom that are really only gestures in a wrestle for power. The liberal move – the ‘Kantian delay’ – only temporarily staves off the nihilism of Nietzche.

Milbank’s scepticism removes for him the possibility of theology building on the foundations of some secular discipline:
Theology has frequently sought to borrow from elsewhere a fundamental account of society or history, and then to see what theological insights will cohere with it. But it has been shown that no such fundamental account, in the sense of something neutral, rational and universal, is really available. It is theology itself that will have to provide its own account of the final causes at work in human history, on the basis of its own particular, and historically specific faith.
Consequently, Christianity does not recognise this ontology of violence but rather thinks of the prime reality as a ‘harmonic peace’: Milbank at this point introduces the triune God as ‘transcendental peace through differential relation’. The meta-narrative of Christianity – its ‘counter-story’ – is at least no less credible than the meta-narratives of violence by which modern social theories (including and especially liberalism) describe themselves, since all alike are unfounded in the traditional sense. The existence of a primal violence is challenged by a counter-history, which is established by the coming of Christ into history; a counter-ethics, in which love becomes the core of virtue; and a counter-ontology, in which true peaceful co-existence is won from violence by the practice of forgiveness. Christianity, for Milbank, is unique in that it
…does not allow violence any real ontological purchase, but relates it instead to a free subject who asserts a will that is truly independent of God and of others, and thereby a will to the inhibition and distortion of reality.

Echoing Augustine, Milbank posits the Church as the political anti-type or counter-society. In the Church there is an ‘ontological priority of peace over conflict’ : there, ‘difference’ is the foundation not for violence but for harmonious peace. Here is one of Milbank’s great difficulties; for the Church as a historical entity has not fulfilled this ‘vision of paradisal[sic] community’. As he rather wistfully admits:
Insofar as the church has failed, and has even become a hellish anti-Church, it has confined Christianity, like everything else, with the cycle of the ceaseless exhaustion and return of violence.
Nevertheless, it is the Christian vision of ontological peace that provides the only alternative to absolute nihilism.

Milbank’s critique of liberalism is dazzling. He is able to show how secular liberalism, like other theories of society, is not secular at all but in fact involves necessarily theological or anti-theological moves. He is able to show how liberal thinking has its own mythos or meta-narrative, despite its pretensions to an abstract universalism; and how it has not finally eluded the gravitational pull of nihilism’s black hole. His introduction of the Christian meta-narrative in response rightly points to the distinctive Christian emphasis on relationality generated by the triune God as an attractive conceptual alternative.

Nevertheless, Milbank’s thesis is problematic for a number of reasons. First, his self-conscious appeal to postmodern thinking enables him to make a devastating critique of secular reason; his own evasion of the critique is less than convincing. He adopts Foucault’s notion of genealogy, by which the power claims implicit in the political discourses he examines are brought to light and exposed as relying on an ‘ontology of violence’. And yet he also claims that his Christian ‘ontology of peace’ escapes this Foucauldian critique. An Icarus flying too near a postmodern sun, he relies on Foucault to prove that Foucault is ultimately wrong.

Secondly, Milbank’s strategy rests on a questionable ecclesiology, which is far too sanguine about the ‘church militant’. His is an over-realised ecclesiology, blurring the traditional distinction between the church visible and the church invisible, focussing on the concrete historical institutions of the universal Church at the expense of its local congregational instances. More recent ‘Radical Orthodox’ writings have tended to make the Eucharist the means by which the ‘ontology of peace’ is realised, following an almost medieval sacramental theology. Christopher J. Insole goes so far as to accuse Milbank of a tendency to theocracy. And yet Milbank seems genuinely baffled by the refusal of the Church to be itself within history. Within the Scriptures themselves, the churches were as much a site of struggle as of peace (the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, to take but one example, or the Corinthian church). Peace with God was declared in the gospel, but by no means automatically or easily realised in ecclesial relationships. God’s once-for-all act of reconciliation on the cross is not continued or repeated in the acts of the church this side of Christ’s return.

Thirdly, it seems pertinent to ask, along with Wannenwetsch, if the only way to defeat the violent ontologies of secular reason is by positing an alternative ontology. Milbank has difficulty, having so successfully deconstructed the ontology of political thought, in convincingly constructing something of the same species. The proclamation of the gospel of peace, which founds the church, is not a counter- ontology, but a promise. Further, the NT describes the cross of Christ as achieving peace through a victory against the powers of sin and evil – depicted in terms of a violent exclusion (see Rev 19-22 for just one example).

This third complaint leads to a fourth, which is that while Milbank offers a virtuoso reading of vast tracts of political philosophy, liberation theology and postmodernism, his method is insufficiently grounded in basic Scriptural exegesis. He offers almost no reflection on Israel’s political life; nor does he offer extensive readings of the relevant NT material – all of which ought to condition his explanation of the Church as alternative polis. Strangely, though he claims to be offering Christianity as an alternative meta-narrative, he nowhere offers his retelling of that story at any depth nor an engagement with the authoritative texts of the tradition he is advocating.

A paper for the NSW Ecumenical Council Theological Reflection Panel:

PROCLAMATION: An Anglican View
by Rev M.P. Jensen

One of the greatest of Anglican preachers, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral John Donne, once wrote:
“if there be discounting or slackening of Preaching, there is the danger of losing Christ”.
Would it be fair to say that across the churches there is just such a “discounting or slackening”? Certainly, within the Anglican Communion there is a trend against the proclamatory aspect of the Christian gathering. The sermon has been shriveled to a perfunctory few minutes and has become instead of a proclamation of the word of God a mere moral rumination or a piece of self-help or the ponderous giving of the preacher’s opinion, a kind of Sunday oral version of Saturday’s newspaper column.
Perhaps it is for the best: if you haven’t got anything to say, then you are probably better off not saying it, or saying it very briefly. Anglican preaching has become a standing object of derision – one thinks of Peter Cook’s famous lampoon or Rowan Atkinson in Four Weddings and a Funeral; and no longer, or very rarely, are the best sermons printed and read. (I was however intrigued to see that the new IPOD technology is being used by church members to listen to recordings of weekly messages downloaded from the church’s website.)
I suspect there are several reasons for the general decline. Certainly, one of them is that there has been an awful lot of boring, overlong, self-indulgent and incompetent preaching! Another is that the evident humanity of most preachers leads us to suspect whether their words could possibly be “God’s words”: they are someone whose frailties we know too well, whose lack of skill with oratory we suffer and who is as susceptible to tears and tiredness as we are. In the midst of a beautiful liturgy filled with sonorous ancient words and majestic music in a glorious building, the utterance from the pulpit feels like a prosaic interruption. With Eliza Doolittle we say “words, words, words, I’m so sick of words.”
But if the humanity of the preacher is not enough to make us doubt the value of proclamation, the contemporary suspicion of words themselves increases the threat to the sermon. This of course resonates with apophatic tradition, and it is no accident that Derrida, Foucault and others were attracted to the writings of Pseudo-Dionysus and others. Words are too susceptible to become the instruments of power or spin; words are too slippery, too inexact, too imperfect an instrument; words are too limited to contain the transcendent Almighty. As Gregory of Nazianzen once prayed:
you remain beyond the reach of speech.
All that is thought stems from you,
But you are beyond the power of thought.

Archbishop Peter Carnley, former Anglican Primate of Australia, pointed out in his recent book Reflections in the Glass that the theology must start from a core Anglican – indeed Christian - belief in the unknowability and sheer transcendence of God. Yet Christian belief must not overbalance in this direction such that God’s revelation of himself in the gospel of Jesus Christ is lost. My observation of Anglican discussions is that there has been a growing embarrassment at speaking about God directly as if he could be known – as if to talk of knowing him implies mastering him in some way.
However: Christian worship is never of a God unknown, but of a God who speaks about himself to us. Have we, or have we not, a gospel: a message that originates from the divine? The contrast between the paganism of the Athenians and Paul’s message in Acts 17:23 is apposite:
23 For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim (katagge,llw) to you.
These are presumptuous words indeed, if human words cannot meaningful speak about the divine. And yet Paul is not presenting his message as yet another attempt fitfully to describe God from the human side, but as a decisive intervention from God in Christ Jesus, the crucified and risen Lord.
The sending of the Logos into the realm of women and men - the incarnation, in other words - is often described as the central theological theme of Anglicanism. The incarnation of Son in the likeness of sinful flesh means that that enormous gulf between God and humanity has been overcome. It means that human flesh is an entirely possible dwelling place for divinity. It also means that human words are entirely possible as vehicles for divine self-communication. Gnosticism – which decried the flesh and emphasized the concealment of a mystery rather than its revelation – has been rejected consistently by Christians since the time of Irenaeus as anti-human. Body is not to be played off against the soul; neither is the intelligible to played off against that which is beyond reason. Paul’s preference for intelligible words over ecstatic tongues in the Christian meeting in 1 Corinthians 14 is instructive.
In the gospel of Jesus Christ men and women are addressed by the God who creates with a word. This mustn’t be understood reductionistically, of course, as if God could be contained or captured by human words. The prologue of John’s gospel sums this up well:
No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart who has made him known. (John 1:18)
God is beyond us and our words. But we are not beyond him and we are not beyond the sound of his voice. Nor is it beyond the people of God to pass on what we have heard God say. As the apostle Peter writes:
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim (evxaggei,lhte) the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light (1 Peter 2:9).
Those who have heard the call of God are commissioned to proclaim his works to the nations as a priestly duty. Just as Jesus himself came to proclaim a message of good news about himself – “the Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18-19) - so his apostles were commissioned to rehearse the life, death, resurrection and glorious return of their Lord in the hearing of the nations. And it is this repetition of the mighty deeds of God in Christ that forms the basis of the act of proclamation that features so strongly in Anglican worship in its Reformed Evangelical expression.
The Anglican tradition, especially in its Evangelical form, has always, therefore, had a very high view of Scripture as the authoritative, God-breathed (qeo,pneustoj 2 Tim 3:16), witness to Christ. This is not the place to present a full-blown description of that theological step; however, this helps us understand John Donne’s comment. Proclaiming the word of scripture is the way for the church to “let the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Col 3:16). In his framing of the Anglican liturgy, Thomas Cranmer put a priority on the reading of the whole Bible in the vernacular language once a year; so that
the Clergy, and especially such as were Ministers in the congregation, should (by often reading, and meditation in God’s word) be stirred up to godliness themselves, and be more able to exhort others by wholesome doctrine and to confute them that were adversaries to the truth; and further, that the people (by daily hearing of the Holy Scripture read in the Church) might continually profit more and more in the knowledge of God, and be the more inflamed with the love of his true Religion. (The Book of Homilies)
At the ordination of every Anglican minister, the Bible is given as a symbol of their authority and task: to minister in word and sacrament. The Bible, not the cup, is the symbol of the ordained ministry for Anglicans.
The ministry of proclamation, therefore, is not merely the giving of opinions or perspectives. It is a recital of God’s word to human beings, and in this derivative sense may properly be called “the word of God”. It therefore requires an attitude of fear and trembling from the one who would so preach. It asks for an unlearning of the hermeneutics of suspicion and for the forming in the proclaimer an attitude of receptive and humble listening. The pulpit in the Anglican church is not merely the preserve of the priest or even of Anglicans: it may be perfectly appropriate for a layperson or even a non-Anglican to speak, as in fact happens frequently. But the pulpit ought to be guarded with some jealousy as the place from which the word of God is proclaimed and taught to the people of God. The Lord our God uses the proclamation of his Word to remind us that his word is
living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. (Hebrews 4:12)