Three unpreached sermons on Faith and Reason

It's an idea, anyway:

1. The Getting of Wisdom

2. The Critique of Reason

3. Taking Every Thought Captive

MacIntyre and the failure of Culture

Every culture is characterised in part by what it conceals and obscures from view, by what its habits of mind prevent it from ackonwledging and appropriating. We err therefore in so largely, sometimes exclusively writing the history of ideas, of science, of art, of culture in general in terms of positive achievement. Culture is present also in failure and it can in crucial respects blind the educated to what needs to be seen. So it was with the failure to understand the work of Aquinas in the late Middle Ages. So perhaps it may be with us... . p. 169

This is a rather a gloomy - characteristically grumpy we might say - assessment of the state of intellectual enquiry! MacIntyre characterises the reception of Aquinas' grand synthesis of Aristotle and Augustine as a rank failure, with the usual suspects - Occam and Scotus - taking a beating on this. And in Meister Eckhart's sermons, the business of theological thinking becomes (for MacIntyre) separated from rational thinking: preaching becomes a matter of rhetorical effect, a 'mere rationalization of the preacher's processes'. This effect MacIntyre sees very much in evidence today.

Martyrdom as communicative act

Sydney's St Andrew's Cathedral.

I have been reading in MacIntyre about different, indeed rival, rationalities. In particular, he wants to show how incommensurate different rationalities are: how it is nigh impossible to understand one from the point of view of the other without translating it into terms that limit and distort it.

Now, what attracted me to martyrdom as a subject was partly the huge dissonance it revealed between two different 'rationalities' (or perhaps 'world views'): that is to say, for the secular liberal, Christian martyrdom can only be understood as a life-denying, futile and possibly violence-perpetuation act. For the Christian, we cannot really see what the secularists concern is. And, it is worth asking at this point whether martyrdom becomes the ultimate 'no' to further communication with the other point of view - 'I am ready to accept death rather than accept your terms of conversation, or to concede anything' seems to be the attitude, or it could be read as that I guess. It is a defiance of rational discussion, apparently. Is martyrdom then merely a point at which the two world-views are shown to be irreconcilable, and that's that? Is it merely a gesture of defiance against the alternate order of power?

But: martyrdom is a remarkably successful form of communication to the non-church world. We cannot forget: the martyrs of Jesus Christ overthrew a mighty empire from within! The note that Christian martyrdom strikes is dissonant to the extent that it exposes the futility of opposition to God. It testifies to the non-ultimacy of human political power - and it testifies to that power itself. Sometimes, it seems, even the rulers and the soldiers get the message. Remember the centurion 'when he saw how Jesus died' said 'surely this was the Son of God'...'The blood of the martyrs' as Tertullian said 'is the seed of the church'. Which is to say, the blood of the martyrs convinces outsiders of the need to become insiders, to say 'I'll have what he's/she's having'.

Question is: what is it about martyrdom that communicates so well? This question asks at a deeper level: what is it in martyrdom coming as it does out of a precisely Christian understanding of the world that is able to be meaningful enough in any world-view?
Is it an exhibition of remarkable courage, or endurance, or some virtue that is found nowhere else in these proportions? Or is the meaning - the story - that the martyrs and their brethren attach to their deaths?

Alasdair MacIntyre continues...

Well, I shoulda read the next chapter before posting! As MacIntyre tells it, Thomas Aquinas was uniquely able to reconcile Augustinianism and Aristotelianism in his thought. This was because he didn't imagine that he was translating one into the terms of the other - MacIntyre thinks this never works. What he was able to do was to inhabit both worlds of though in true bilingual fashion, and so produce a synthesis which was native to both.

MacIntyre doesn't give much detail as yet as to how this actually works out in Thomas' thought. How can he hold together a strong view of original sin and its noetic effects AND also have an Aristotelian rationality?

Alasdair MacIntyre on Augustinianism and its flaws

MacIntyre's analysis of the history of moral enquiry reaches charts the rise of the Augustinian tradition in the middle ages. Augustinianism, as he outlines it, on the one hand, has a strong centre: all knowledge coheres around the divine. Knowledge is only gained from giving oneself over, by an act of faith, to an authority. It is confessional. But (and it is a big but) knowing in human terms is deeply affected by sin's distorting and disrupting effects. Pure knowledge is not possible because of sin.

This might seem contradictory: it is certainly a tension in the heart of Augustinianism, and one that Calvinism (and for that matter Lutheranism) has struggled to resolve. Certainly, that is why Calvin and others give accounts of divine illumination being necessary for even basic knowledge of the world.

BUT: a huge challenge comes with the adoption of Aristotelianism into the Augustinian way of thinking, or the attempted adoption at least. Aristotelianism denies that there is a need for this fideistic first step: it has no account of the genesis of knowledge as an externally given thing. Augustinianism, after all, is Platonistic.

Can the two be reconciled? I await MacIntyre's further analysis: but in the meantime, let me just say this -

it is interesting that Aristotelianism was adapted in so wholesale a fashion by the 17th century Protestants when the roots of their movement were so markedly Augustinian. Could they really make this adaptation without betraying the true genius of Protestantism (as a particularly concentrated form of Augustinianism)?

Alasdair MacIntyre on disagreement

Simon and Sacha at Nantes Chateau, where the Edict of Nantes was signed (so they say).

Alasdair MacIntyre's Gifford Lectures Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry begins with an observation about the experience of delivering the lectures themselves: that the debate elicited responses that varied according to the rational systems deployed by the participants. As he notes:

...nothing is more striking in the contemporary university than the extent of the apparently ineliminable continuing divisions and conflicts within all humanistic enquiry ... p. 6

What we really experience I guess is more like a 'multi-versity', where the clash of theoretical commitments rings out accross the campus. Or, perhaps, as MacIntyre suspects, the only engagements that occur are between people who already share the same rational commitments. This might be accross disciplines - and the disagreements may run through individual disciplines. MacIntyre goes on:

Hence debate between fundamentally opposed standpoints does occur; but it is inevitably inconclusive. Each warring position characteristically appears irrefutable to its own adherents; indeed in its own terms and by its own standards of argument it IS in practice irrefutable. But each warring position equally seems to its opponents to be insufficiently warranted by rational argument.

And then, the interesting bit:

It is ironic that the wholly secular humanistic disciplines of the late twentieth century should thus reproduce that very same condition which led their nineteenth century secularizing predecessors to dismiss the claim of theology to be worthy of the status of an academic discipline. p. 7

This attack on theology still goes on of course...and yet, is political philosophy any different (for example)?