“CE” is ironically to say “AD” all the more emphatically.

“I would assume that Zizek would agree with me that to say with political correctness “CE” is ironically to say “AD” all the more emphatically.”

John Milbank, in Monstrosity of Christ, 116

Easy, good

“There is also a strong tendency in modern moral philosophy to say that if I need to make a mental effort to act well, then my action is more praiseworthy, because I have had to make the effort, whereas Thomas would say exactly the opposite, that if it has required an effort of will, then you do not have the correctly settled habit, and therefore you do not have the correctly oriented will to the good. So the fact that one does something habitually is actually an indication of a settled and good will. The business of moral philosophy as deliberative moral reasoning is indicative of the fact that we do not have good moral characters.”

Simon Oliver, “Interview and Conversation with John Milbank and Simon Oliver: Radical Orthodoxy and Christian Psychology I – Theological Underpinnings”

Self-reliance

“Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he’ll assume you’re imposing some sort of weird father-son dynamic on your relationship and, true to form, will start resenting you and harboring murderous Oedipal urges.”

“SELF-RELIANCE” via McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Teddy Wayne’s Unpopular Proverbs: Self-Reliance.

Science does not deliver ethics

Marilynne Robinson argues this point persuasively in her essay “Darwinism” in The Death of Adam. She writes:

History is a nightmare, generally speaking, and the effect of religion, where its authority has been claimed, has been horrific as well as benign. Even in saying this, however, we are judging history in terms religion has supplied.

The proof of this is that, in the twentieth century, “scientific” policies of extermination, undertaken in the case of Stalin to purge society of parasitic or degenerate or recalcitrant elements, and in the case of Hitler to purge it of the weak or defective or, racially speaking, marginally human, have taken horror to new extremes. Their scale and relentlessness have been owed to the disarming of moral response by theories authorized by the word “science,” which, quite inappropriately, has been used as if it meant “truth.” Surely it is fair to say that science is to the “science” that inspired exterminations as Christianity is to the “Christianity” that inspired Crusades. In both cases the human genius for finding pretexts seized upon the most prestigious institution of the culture and appropriated a great part of its language and resources and legitimacy. In the case of religion, the best and the worst of it have been discredited together. In the case of science, neither has been discredited. The failure in both instances to distinguish best from worst means that both science and religion are effectively lost to us in terms of disciplining or enlarging our thinking.

These are not the worst consequences, however. The modern fable is that science exposed religion as a delusion and more or less supplanted it. But science cannot serve in the place of religion because it cannot generate an ethics or a morality. It can give us no reason to prefer a child to a dog, or to choose honorable poverty over fraudulent wealth. It can give us no grounds for preferring what is excellent to what is sensationalistic. And this is more or less where we are now.

Marilynne Robinson, “Darwinism” in The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought,  70-1

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Theological eras

“‘Modern’ theology emerged, in my view, at the point at which (on the one hand) church-based theologians ceased trying to defend and protect the received orthodoxies of the past against erosion and took up the more fundamental challenge of asking how the theological values resident in those orthodoxies might be given an altogether new expression, dressed out in new categories for reflection. It was the transition, then, from a strategy of “accommodation” to the task of “mediation” that was fundamental in the ecclesial sphere. In philosophy, as it relates to the theological enterprise (on the other hand), the defining moment that effected a transition entailed a shift from a cosmologically based to an anthropologically based metaphysics of divine being. The transitions I have in mind, insofar as they registered a decisive impact on Christian theology, were effected by means of a few very basic decisions in particular.

Every period in the history of theology has had its basic questions and concerns that shaped the formulation of doctrines in all areas of reflection. In the early church, it was Trinity and Christology that captured the attention of the greatest minds. In the transition to the early Middle Ages, Augustinian anthropology played a large role—which would eventually effect a shift in attention from theories of redemption to the need to understand how God is reconciled with sinful human beings. The high Middle Ages were the heyday of sacramental development, in which definitions of sacraments were worked out with great care, the number of sacraments established, and so on. The Reformation period found its center of gravity in the doctrine of justification. In the modern period, the question of questions became the nature of God and his relation to the world. Basic decisions were thus made in the areas of creation, the being of God and his relation to the world, and revelation, which were to become foundational for further development in other areas of doctrinal concern. It is to a consideration of these basic decisions that we must now turn in our efforts to understand what it means to be “modern” in Christian theology.”

 Bruce McCormack, ”On “Modernity” as a Theological Concept” in Mapping Modern Theology

St. Basil’s dirty mouth

In their introduction to the text, Mark DelCogliano and Andrew Radde-Gallwitz give a taste of Basil’s amusing slash polemical tone in his treatise Against Eunomius:

The polemical character of Against Eunomius is most appar­ent in the sarcasm and ad hominem attacks on Eunomius, inter­twined with real engagement with his opponent’s ideas. While such invective typically featured in polemical texts from antiq­uity, Basil displays a certain gusto in his vitriol. According to Ba­sil, Eunomius is nothing more than a scheming, impious char­latan who attempts to trick people into denying the divinity of the Son of God. He is “lying, stupid, wanton, dissembling, and blasphemous,” Basil blasts Eunomius again and again for the arrogance he displays in so many ways: for wanting “to be prolaimed the pioneer and the patron of the entire heresy,” for having an overblown sense of self-importance, for introducing innovation into the faith of the fathers, for claiming to know the substance of God, and so forth.

Basil attacks Eunomius with biting sarcasm. For example, he calls Eunomius’s apology “brilliant.” He refers to Eunomius as “an unconquerable and clever writer” and addresses him repeatedly as “the wisest of men.” He mocks him with such declarations as: “How noble he is for providing us with this theology of the begetting of the Only-Begotten!” and “There is no thought that you don’t have a knack for expressing!” According to Basil, Eunomius is a liar in whom the devil speaks. Basil over and over again accuses Eunomius of stupidity, craziness, insanity, madness, derangement, and utter foolishness. On one occasion, Basil even goes so far as to call Eunomius a “whore,” though in this case he couches his abuse in the words of scripture. Perhaps he did so to forestall criticism for using such a nasty expression.

Some modern readers of Basil may find such insults and sar­castic language unsuitable for a person whom some consider a saint and father of the church. Others, however, may find Ba­sil’s vituperation, or at least some of it, effective and even hilari­ous. But, more to the point, Basil’s depiction of Eunomius is a willful distortion of the truth, and his ancient readers, familiar with the polemical genre, would have known this, not been sur­prised by it, and in fact expected it. If Eunomius were so per­verse in as many ways as Basil’s caricature makes him out to be, it would be hard to account for Eunomius’s many successes and his appeal to his followers.

Mark DelCogliano and Andrew Radde-Gallwitz. Against Eunomius. (39-41)

Marion lecture: “Is There a Christian Philosophy?”

via “Is There a Christian Philosophy?” on Vimeo.