Reframing God-Talk

On the other side of Blumenberg, Dupre and Gauchet.

Dr Gregory J. Moses

Brisbane, Australia

International Process Network

Abstract: The contention of this paper is that God-Talk, spirituality, theology, religion, philosophical talk about God-Talk, and indeed the whole enterprise of philosophy of religion needs to take careful account of some of the Historical deconstruction of so-called Western Modernity brought about by scholars in the last third of last century, in particular of people such as Hans Blumenberg, Louis Dupr� (Yale), the French author Marcel Gauchet and the theological movement which calls itself Radical Orthodoxy, plus some work also done by people in the University of Leuven, Belgium. After delving into the main lines of such research, we then go on to examine four options for God-Talk, theology, spirituality etc., in the present day situation thus clarified for us by our scholars, arguing eventually for a combination of the first two options..

Introduction

Let me begin with a story told to me about Australian Aboriginal bark painting. I am told that in its original setting Australian Aboriginal bark painting functions symbolically on at least three levels. The painting will have a geographical functioning, mapping the lay of the land, waterholes, where food is to be found etc. On another level it will have a sociological, individual and communal narrative identity functioning: this is my country, this is our country, where I am conceived in it determines my totem and my place in the community vis a vis other people. On yet another level it will have what we would call a �religious� functioning, tapping into the Dreaming and events in the Dreaming about Rainbow Serpent or whatever which produced the lay of the land and determined the sociological and the individual and communal narrative identity constructive functioning of the land. Not that the levels are separate: they are inextricably interwoven, one story, one pattern, it is we who make the separation.

We can�t do this. Or if we try, it will inevitably have an artificial, not to say �arty� feel about it. For us, religion is a separable part of life, with its own language game, different from sociological or geographical language games. And this seems to be characteristic of Western �Modernity� as such.

How did we get this way? Are we stuck with it? And ought not this affect the way we do our philosophy and phenomenology of religion? Indeed, in respect of this conference, there might be some question as to the very idea that there is a nice little separate realm of language called �God-Talk� for philosophers of religion to delve into in the first place or whether this is restricted only to so-called Western culture.

Interestingly enough, there have been some profound studies on these very points lately, which this paper intends to delve into.

Indeed, the main contention of this paper is that God-Talk in the present day, as well as theology, spirituality, religion etc., philosophical talk about God-Talk and the whole enterprise of the philosophy of religion need to take account of some of the Historical deconstruction of so-called Western Modernity brought about by scholars in the last third of last century, scholars such as for example Hans Blumenberg, Louis Dupr� (emeritus professor of philosophy of religion from Yale), the French author Marcel Gauchet and the theological movement which calls itself Radical Orthodoxy, among others¹.

The main concentration of the research, as it turns out, will have to do mostly with a certain deep �binary� apparently involved in the early construction of typically Western culture, namely that between the positivistic interventionist supernatural on the one hand, and the purely natural on the other. The positivistic interventionist supernatural and its binary counterpart, the purely natural, are the notions deployed, for example, in the 18^th deistic definition of miracle, but also in a lot of thinking and speaking, in what has come to be called the West, about faith and reason, grace and nature, sacred and secular, prayer and sacraments and revelation and biblical inerrancy and authoritative papal teaching as involving or potentially involving interventions from another realm, seemingly magical, albeit often secretly so. It suffuses the self-concept and the real practice of late medieval and post-medieval and even some present day Church authority and structure generally. It used to suffuse the sacred authority of late medieval and post medieval emperors and princes. So it turns out to be quite important, and not just theoretically.

This notion of supernatural presupposes another notion, that of the purely natural. Indeed it seems, going on the work of our scholars, that they are a true binary, mirror images, they live off each other, and they emerged together to start with, for religious and socio-political reasons initially within theology, in Western Europe only, in the late Middle Ages. The process of emergence gets cemented irrevocably (for the time being) into our �Western� culture already by about 1650. This passage, meanwhile, had a lot to do with the passage to Modernity, helping to define the complicated situation for spiritual life of any kind in a secular age. It also helps to explain why most people in the so-called West don�t understand cultures which have not been subjected to this particular ideological-cultural and socio-political transformation.

The rest of the paper will need two parts:

1. Stepping Back: How we got to where we are (in the West);

2. Where to go from here? Four Options.

Part 1: Stepping Back: Blumenberg, Dupr� , Radical Orthodoxy and Gauchet

(A) Hans Blumenberg²

With the German philosopher and historian, Hans Blumenberg already, the origins of modernity get pushed back beyond the Renascence, beyond the period 1500-1700 with its three science producing paradigms. According to Blumenberg, the modern self-understanding - modern science, modern philosophy, modern art, individualism and so forth - is a particular, and in the circumstances �legitimate� historical and cultural response to the all determining emphasis in theory and in practice, upon the theme of the omnipotence of God in the nominalistic thinking of the late Middle Ages. It was this theme, consistently pushed through, that finally destroyed the credibility of the ancient and high medieval cosmic order. The actual, finite world becomes totally contingent, no longer the embodiment of the full range and variety of what is possible with human beings as microcosm in the centre and the whole suffused by the divine. Ethics becomes contingent, dependent entirely on the divine will, as does, eventually, both salvation and damnation and indeed the whole of theology. Modern �self-assertion�, science, art, individualism etc. emerges as a response, and a legitimate response to a human situation deeply determined by this emphasis, by way, it seems, of the ultimate working out of a �solution� developed by Christian Fathers, esp. Augustine, to the problem of Gnostic dualism (though no one seems to bother much with this detail: see next paragraph for a summary). The threshold is crossed already sometime in the early Renascence, with the unusual but still orthodox Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) on one side of this threshold and on the other side the unorthodox Giordano Bruno of Nola (1548-1600) who has already left it behind.

The massive emphasis on the sovereignity of God in the late middle ages lead to a situation intolerable and impossible to live with, making the senselessness of human self-assertion, the immanent self-assertion of reason through the mastery and alteration of reality, all but inevitable. Thus the inner logic of the connection between self-assertion and the �disappearance of order�: as Nietzsche says later on, �If the universe has no concern for us then we want the right to scorn it.� This became, then, the only tolerable response to a kind of inhuman order. After all, submission as such is still not a condition of salvation: God is too sovereign even for that, there is nothing we can do in that direction. (Pp. 131-154) Modernity then results as a way of coping with the new radical insecurity of man�s relation to reality, �the constant and unrelieved pressure of confirming a relation to the world that is established within the horizon of metaphysical conditions that leave no way out, neither outward nor inward� p. 188. The ghost of this God makes a final appearance, then, in Descartes� genius malignus; but Descartes never quite manages to get rid of his malign genie, and his failure spells the final destruction of the medieval concept of reality. (pp. 185-187).]³

Louis Dupr� �s Passage to Modernity is meant in part to be a sometimes critical response to Blumenberg, while learning from his work Also, he adds a lot of detail and a particular emphasis which to my mind turns out to be rather crucial to understanding the present situation of both theology and religion, namely that the very conception of the positivistic supernatural and the split between natural and supernatural, with concomitant splits between faith/revelation and reason, nature and grace and such are all late medieval constructions. This gives a positive and not just a negative problem setting role to moves in late medieval Christian theology.

(B) Louis Dupr� ⁴

For Dupr� , Modernity seems to have had its origins, more than anywhere else, in a �fateful separation� towards the end of the middle ages between the supernatural and the natural, with the latter itself dividing up into the knowing and acting, meaning-constituting autonomous human subject on the one hand and the totally objectified, de-sacralized natural world on the other.

The story starts already with Aquinas. For Aquinas however, �nature�, at best, is a �remainder concept�, a purely theoretical entity, in the way of a counter-to-fact speculation which never ever existed, what would have been if God had not called us, from the beginning, to intimacy with God-self. The word �nature� in the natural desire for the vision of God on the other hand is as in Augustine, human nature as it really is, in its full existential reality, human nature in the concrete, the only nature there is. Healing and intimacy with God requires the divine grace, but it is a grace which is very much in touch with nature as it really is. Grace heals nature, restores it to its true integrity, rather than grace builds on nature. �Supernature� is as with the Fathers, another name for God the �Super-Natural� source of the �Natural�, reality apart for God, rather than a realm within our world, built on top of the natural, the second layer of a two-layered cake (cf. PM, 171). Indeed, the term �supernatural�, according to Dupr� , �did not begin to refer to a separate order until some sixteenth-century theologians clearly distinguished a natural human end from humankind�s revealed destiny� (PM 171.)

Aquinas also makes what looks to be a fairly clear distinction between philosophy and theology, recognizing the autonomy and integrity of each. However, in Aquinas himself, philosophy, including human science, is taken up into the very heart of theology, for the sake of the achievement of its goal, namely the salvation of human beings, the same as preaching. But this does help to sow the seeds for a more serious split.

The story continues with Duns Scotus, with his theology of the Incarnation, including his invention of a notion of human nature neutral between being taken up by a divine person or a human person called to grace, a kind of natural nature to which something then gets added.

But it really gets going with post Ockhamist nominalism with its theological voluntarism and its overpowering emphasis on the omnipotence of God � as in Blumenberg, but with a twist. Moves in theology get to be positively, not just negatively, related to the emergence of modernity. Having put so much emphasis on the omnipotence of God, a distinction is then made by the theologians between God�s absolute power and what God has in fact willed. We finish up with two kinds of laws, both imposed by the arbitrary will of God. In natural science, this leaves us with a nature of divinely imposed laws irresistible except by the power of God and knowable to some extent by human reason, which, among theologians in the sixteenth century, eventually turns into a doctrine of pure nature. The supernatural, grace, revelation etc. is now read as an addition to and, where it seems necessary, an intervention into or suspension of this purely natural realm. The notion of a purely natural realm of course has to be presumed in order for the positivistic interventionist supernatural even to make sense � which is what makes them a true binary. Whatever about this, the relation between God and creation is now reduced to no more than a contingent, increasingly external relationship of efficient causality and the human being ceases to be a kind of microcosm at the heart of the real and now becomes its human, increasingly objectifying interpreter and actor. Finally this gets combined with Renascence human self-assertion, albeit in a more complicated fashion than in Blumenberg, for an explosive mixture which eventually gives rise to modernity, in spite of various late medieval and renascence attempts to keep it all together.

The early Renascence religious naturalist pan-en-theistic visions of Nicholas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno, rather than events on either side of a threshold as in Blumenberg, are now interpreted as final attempts to keep it all together. Renascence humanist religion (e.g. Erasmus), the early Reformation and Jansenist theology are then to be read as three major attempts to overcome the theological dualism modern culture inherited from late medieval thought; with the devout humanism of people like Ignatius and Francis de Sales and the Religion of the Heart of the Reformation, as providing for people a provisional synthesis in practical spirituality though not yet in theological theory, and even the Baroque as a kind of last gasp. But then it is all over bar the shouting, a mechanistic world picture, a classicist aesthetics and an increasingly irrelevant theological scholasticism all going their own way.

Conveniently for us, Dupr� himself gives us a two paragraph summary, as follows (see M&C pp. 43-44):

The kosmos had functioned as the integrating factor of Greek culture. It included physical nature as well as men and gods. The Christian worldview, though more strongly emphasizing divine transcendence and thereby separating the divine from the human and cosmic counterpart, nevertheless achieved a new synthesis through the idea of creation. At the end of the Middle Ages nominalist theology transformed this relation. The Creator appeared as an inscrutable, inaccessible God withdrawn from a nature with which only a bond of efficient causality continued to link Him. The intrinsic intelligibility of such a creation could no longer be taken for granted and the task of conveying meaning to it fell entirely upon human reason. The source of meaning became the mind, rather than the objective order of reality. Henceforth it depended exclusively on that mind to define the limits of the intelligible and even of the real.

The impact of this intellectual revolution here so briefly sketched (footnote reference to Passage to Modernity) did not fully appear until much later. The unity of the integrated culture on which Western metaphysics once rested became fragmented into isolated spheres: nature, the meaning-giving mind, the inscrutable God. The transcendent component gradually withdrew from culture. That process now appears to have become completed. It is, of course, not the case that contemporary culture denies the existence of God or of the divine. But transcendence plays no vital role in the integration of our culture. The fragmentation, it ought to be noted, has not halted at the ultimate principles. Once the human subject became solely responsible for the constitution of meaning and value, tradition lost its former authority. Each group, if not each individual, eventually felt free to advance a cultural synthesis of its own, ransacking the tradition for spare parts��

So what�s the solution? Dupr� points us in the direction of two strategies which seem at first sight to be somewhat opposed but which Dupr� himself manages to combine together.

On the one hand we can accept and maintain the division, recognizing and affirming the legitimate autonomy modernity has gained for the three components of culture, but trying to bring the ingredients into a better balance with each other. From this perspective, �the modern program appears not so much obsolete as unfinished. Its completion will require a more equitable recognition of the meaning-and-value-giving function of all three of the component factors than the absolute dominance of the subject has hitherto admitted� Nor ought the one-sidedness of its past realizations discourage us about its future prospects. That one-sidedness may in the end matter less than the autonomy modernity has gained for the three components of culture: the spontaneity of a freedom recognized as an ontological principle, the sufficiency of a self-supporting cosmos, and the distinctness of a transcendence perceived as wholly encompassing the finite realm while intrinsically sustaining its autonomy.� (PM 251)

On the other hand we can strive to develop a comprehensive vision (351: �a comprehensive synthesis�) which restores transcendence and overcomes the split, but in a modern way following the example of Cusanus, Telesio, Bruno and later Spinoza (PM 352), also Erasmus and the Baroque philosophers such as Pascal and Malebranche (M&C 58-59) and lately some major thinkers of recent times from Hegel to Whitehead (PM 253!, the last page). We need �to revise the accepted idea of transcendence in a way that transformed the concept of power hierarchically transmitted from beyond into a source of power within the universe whereby God�s presence permeated all parts at once� (PM 352), working towards the recognition of a more fundamental givenness that includes the creative subject itself with its central, meaning giving role (M&C 56-57) while also recognizing that the physical cosmos contains more meaning than a reduction to pure objectivity reveals.

This is in addition to a strong emphasis on modern and contemporary versions of devout humanism as a holding pattern while we wait for other strategies to take effect.

Thus Dupr� , all too quickly. The two strategies can move in different directions and even be elaborated in opposition to each other; but I also provisionally opt for a mode in which they can well combine and re-enforce each other, namely deploying a version of the second which by both its non-totalizing and non-dogmatic manner and self-conception and its content enables us to do the first.

(C) Radical Orthodoxy⁵

Radical Orthodoxy seems to be consistent with and possibly to have absorbed the Blumenberg and Dupr� diagnosis of our current predicament and its causes in late medieval times, but with rather more emphasis on the role played by Duns Scotus rather than Aquinas who now gets to be almost completely exonerated. This is partly as a result of Aquinas being given a more Augustinian-Bonaventurean neo-Platonic interpretation than is usual in 20^th century Thomist scholarship.⁶

The problem, it seems, starts with Duns Scotus with his univocal notion of being, a form of idolatry in so far as it puts God and creatures in the one category, this reinforced by his definition of metaphysics as concerned with being which comes in two varieties finite and infinite. Over against Scotus and with Aquinas, we need to affirm the created world as continuing gift, as still in Aquinas, otherwise God is brought down to our level, just a matter of more or less. And when this is conflated with power as in Ockham it becomes an arbitrary will, opening the path to modernity�s demand for human self-assertion (thus Blumenberg). (Post-Secular Philosophy, pp. 6ff., introduction by Blond, cf. RO pp. 5, 7). God is now a supreme, untrammelled individual Will rather than that esse ipsum in which mere existences come to share. With the Ockhamists, this is then conjoined with the pious conjecture that God might so dispose things that what appears to humans has no connection to the truly real itself, which opens the space for the emergence of the modern �epistemological� focus. (Cf. RO, pp. 5-6)

In response the Radical Orthodoxy people seem to be going for yet a third strategy, similar to the second but both more aggressive or bold and self-confident and more conservative. It seems to be an exercise in the hermeneutics of recovery or of critical retrieval of the patristic and medieval vision, including the neo-platonic and Augustinian themes of knowledge as divine illumination, beyond �the modern bastard dualisms of faith and reason, grace and nature�, and the Christianized platonic notion of participation which refuses any reserve to created territory while allowing finite things their own integrity. (RO 2-3) It is however a critical retrieval to the extent of admitting that we do have to rethink the tradition, �to �re-envision� a Christianity which never sufficiently valued the mediating participatory sphere which alone can lead us to God�, to correct some of its late medieval �otherworldly piety upholding a centralized tyrannising politics�, this itself being the result of late medieval theological deviation. (RO, pp. 2-3), to recover the historic roots of the celebration of exactly what the moderns value in a participatory philosophy and incarnational theology, even if it can acknowledge that the pre-modern tradition never took this celebration far enough. (RO 4). Beyond this, having recovered the vision in this critical fashion it then seeks �to deploy this recovered vision systematically to criticize modern society, culture, politics, art, science and philosophy with an unprecedented boldness.� (RO 2)

Their scholarly time is thus deployed in two directions, towards a critical recovery

of the past in the tradition of the great Christian critics of the Enlightenment, and towards a critical boldly and explicitly theological overcoming of the inadequacy of secular rationality in the present. However, in spite of the orthodoxy or even because of it, they have no time either for either Protestant Biblicism or post-tridentine Catholic positivist authoritarianism: �both Protestant Biblicism and post-tridentine Catholic positivist authoritarianism are seen as aberrant results of theological distortions already dominant before the early modern period.� (RO 2).

Thus Radical Orthodoxy, equally inadequately. It is all very interesting, and lots of hard scholarly work has been going into it. The important thing for us to acknowledge is that they are already operating in a post Blumenberg post Dupr� space, where I argue process theology and indeed the rest of theology also has to go. Whether it is also post Gauchet is yet another question.

(D) Coming to terms with Marcel Gauchet⁷

Gauchet finds the potential for the separation already in the rise of monotheism within Judaism, as filtered through the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation esp. in its Chalcedonian form, the potential being realized in the West (rather than Eastern Christendom) because of certain contingent political factors at the dawn of the Middle Ages in the West. The time table for the actual ending of religion in its full social and political life sustaining form however is much the same, the game over in the advanced countries in Europe already by around 1700, with the end game being played out from the High Middle Ages on.

The full story starts with so-called primitive religion, which for Gauchet is religion at its most complete, full dispossession with nothing to worry about, all determined from the Dreamtime, another time, beyond us, which constructs our lives and which we ourselves cannot affect seeing that it is past.

Monotheism already tends to amalgamate all spiritual forces and the totality of the sacred into a personal being separate from the world, turning the world into an object firstly of the divine gaze and after that of other intelligent beings both in thought and in action. But this was not enough by itself, is reconcilable with hierarchical thinking and capable of going other places than where it went, eventually, in the West.

The event of Christ and the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation especially in its Chalcedonian form firstly cut off certain escape routes. The fact that the Word was made flesh in a person at the bottom of the ladder rather than at the top, a kind of inverted messiah, radically calls into question hierarchical thinking, the top of the political pile as the mediator of the deity notion. [Here is a Son of Man who must suffer, a Logos/Sophia Incarnate, Word Made Flesh at the bottom of the hierarchy, a fatherless male from a backward country village. There are all sorts of attempts, starting perhaps already with Paul, to restore the hierarchy, but the seed has been planted, it can�t work eventually, it is already too late.]

The fact that not only is the world God�s creation but that in addition God has become one flesh with it, also cuts off the option of complete escape from the world into the beyond: henceforth the Christian will always be caught in an irresolvable tension between this world and the beyond, with a need somehow to stand in both.

On the other hand, Christ is one person in two natures without mingling or confusion, each kept in its integrity: thus Chalcedon. Eventually the two natures will give rise to the two realms, the two orders, each with its own integrity. (See below.)

The Church, meanwhile, puts itself forward as a mediator of the divine, doing its best to control personal interpretation and to determine what people believe even in their heart of hearts, but what it is mediating is personal, inner conscientious faith in the one and only mediator in a religion in which unlike in Islam interpretation is of the essence and has been from the beginning. The Word made Flesh in Islam is the Koran itself, whereas in Christianity it is a concrete person and a concrete life, and the gospels and epistles are already so many different interpretations and even then a later selection of the currently available interpretations. We have been into interpretations since, in spite of manic, sometimes bloody attempts to control it, which attempts in Gauchet�s view are in the way of a less important witness to this more important fact. It is particularly important at the moment in so far as it means we have at least the intrinsic potential to adapt so as to survive, with makes Christianity, so to speak, potentially but so far only potentially the religion of the end of religions.

But getting back to the main story: finally there were certain contingent features of the western political landscape which brought the full potential to fruition only in the West, cutting off the more or less comfortable compromise achieved in Eastern Christendom. After the fall of the Western Empire and at the time of the eventual emergence from the so-called Dark Ages there was a large political gap to be filled. The Church, the Spiritual Power, moved into the gap, tried, effectively, to take over and dominate the political realm, cutting off any easy accommodation between the two realms. This caused a reaction, with the political powers, first the emperors, eventually the monarchs of emerging nation-states, claiming their own unmediated sacral legitimacy, with full legitimacy in their own sphere eventually with an all-encompassing integrity of its own. Democracy as we know it was an eventual child of this monarchical governance, once the legitimation from the sacral outside dropped away: the democratic reversal was inherent in the premises of the absolute State. And so Christianity became the religion which eventually made possible the ending of religion: we are all thus children of Christianity, laiics no less than clerics, states no less than church, atheists and agnostics no less than remaining believers.

On the other hand, as Charles Taylor notes in his Forward to the English edition, and as Gauchet himself makes clear, while religion in Gauchet�s sense goes, the problems it was intent on solving still remain. Religion as a species of all-embracing culture pre-empted all those difficult questions about who we are and where we fit in and what is the meaning of things. With the end of this culture, these questions now cannot be avoided and each individual is faced with them. The need for a spirituality thus still remains, indeed is much greater if anything, with the culture no longer providing one ready made. But whereas spirituality was once a byproduct of religion it is now the other way around, with religion now remaining very much as a personal option and in the service of spirituality, in the service of people finding their way in a world now constituted outside religion itself.

Indeed, Gauchet comments at one point (p. 164):

�Furthermore, why exclude the possibility of a regulated renewal of the jaded Old World Churches which would deliver them from their old demons of authority, a conversion that would give them strength and stamina by allowing them to regroup on the basis of the original collusion between Christianity�s spirit and the West�s destiny?�

But he then continues:

�But can we imagine that in the long run the disappearance of the �infrastructure� would not have any effect on the �superstructure�? Should not the disappearance of the basic social function of the religious provoke a slow but inexorable fading or erosion of the very possibility of a belief?�

So the question is left undecided.

This indeed is our challenge: but how to respond to it?

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Part 2: Where To Go From Here? Four Options:

I thought here we could start with the two different strategies already implicated in the work of Louis Dupre, but now allowing them at least the appearance of opposition, and then add a few more options including Radical Orthodoxy and a continental philosophical alternative to the same. I will then argue for a strategy combining the first two alternatives, by way of an exposition and response to a certain version of the first alternative.

1. The neo-Humean, Wittgensteinian, Strawsonian option of keeping the components apart, rejoicing in their difference and in their modern autonomy and the differentiation of their discourses, but striving to keep them or get them into a better balance. This latter is usually to be accomplished via a species of philosophical anthropology. This I propose to expose in the version of the strategy adopted by Prof. Herman De Dijn from the University of Leuven. In advance one needs to say that this is something other than just a form of fideism. (And having made this comment, I think D.Z. Phillips might perhaps belong here.)

2. The world-view constructive option, to use the Whiteheadian language: to come up with a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience might be interpreted and might be at home, including the religious interest. This is the position represented in Leuven by Professors Jan Van der Veken and Andre Cloots, presently in retreat, Jan having to work from the position of emeritus. This could be further divided provisionally, into anti-supernaturalistic theisms including process theisms, open religious naturalisms (cf. Willem Drees, at least sometimes) and closed religious naturalisms (e.g. Don Cuppit, this life and this world as co-extensive and completely outsider-less). For the sake of completeness we could also add

3. The Radical Orthodoxy option, to revive, in a suitably corrected modernized form, the integrating vision of patristic and high medieval Christianity as it existed before the late medieval distortions eventually led to the split, and then to use this to critique modernity and overcome its deficiencies.

4. A continental philosophy Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas, Marion recovery of a sense of transcendence with God as Gift and human life as poised �in the Between�, as espoused e.g. by some of the more theologically inclined philosophers in Leuven, including William Desmond head of the English Program, and Ignace Verhack. This overlaps with the 3^rd strategy with a lot of sympathy for each other but is coming from another direction and with no particular intention to revive the patristic and medieval way of doing things.⁸

I would like now to explicate the first option in the fairly straightforward form taken by Herman De Dijn before mounting an argument as to why and under what conditions the first two options can be combined.

Prof. Herman De Dijn⁹ as an example of the First Strategy:

As with Dupre, and Gauchet for that matter taking account of definitional differences, for Herman also the distinctions between religion, science, art, philosophy etc. are all modern distinctions, the result of a process of differentiation unique to the emergence of a modern society.

Nor can we go back: any attempt to go back could only involve the dominance of one domain over all the rest, either a scientistic takeover or one from the side of fundamentalist religion, these being much more alike each other than either suspects.

Within this new division, properly understood, however, religion and science are so different that they cannot possibly come into conflict: how to comport myself meaningfully in the midst of life with its limitations and finitudes, how to respond personally to happiness or misfortune, sickness or death. Given the differentiation in interest, the reporting of facts functions differently also in the different domains, as does testimony. So also is truth and validity as defined in the different domains, defined in terms of the different interests. They are so different that they cannot conflict.

The problem we face in late modernity is not with religion and science itself, but with the �scientism� of certain philosophers, but this works no better with religion than it does e.g. with erotic attraction: they both belong to a different realm, the realm of everyday life. Science teaches us how things fit together, not what objectives we should be aiming at. Nor are scientists on the whole better people than the rest of us, nor do they have a monopoly on self-knowledge and balanced judgment. People into scientism, indeed, are rather similar in their attitudes to religious fundamentalists. Nothing human is foreign to religion � but one could say the same about modern science or the family. At its best religion can help people come to terms with the uncontrollability in life, to respond in a more or less appropriate way to the vicissitudes of life, with thankfulness, strength and consolation.

The struggle in the 21^st century will not be struggle between science and religion, already outdated, but between inhumane outgrowths of both science and religion on the one hand and those groups of individuals and groups both religious and non-religious who resist such outgrowths.

Compare this with D.Z. Phillips: it is not an extension of other familiar discourses but a different discourse, another way of being human, open to philosophical contemplation and perhaps some correction around the edges. So also for Herman.

Coming to terms with Herman De Dijn�s Alternative

�Religion� is being used in the sense of Dupre rather than Gauchet for whom the end of the unified complex meant the end of religion. But Herman is right: �religion� as a separable component of culture only came into existence around the middle of the 17^th century.

What I would argue is that there might be more than one way to keep science, ethics, religion etc. in a healthy relationship, at least so far as protection from scientism is concerned. I would like to explore two possibilities here.

Neo-Humean Playful Metaphysics: one way to draw the teeth of scientism might be to engage in a kind of �playful� metaphysics, constructing world-views in which all our interests, not only the scientific ones, might have a home and which are at least as likely to be true as those extrapolated by scientistically inclined types. This is following the example of Hume in the Dialogues where the character Philo uses a similar strategy to destroy the machine-consisting of an infinite number of lesser machines and requiring an external designer God type world view, something which us Process people surely would have no problems with. But there is no reason why we can�t use it positively. Nor, in respect of practices in which we already have an interest, is it necessary to prove them true, just to do enough to show them to be just as likely as their closed naturalistic or scientistic alternatives. As Herman himself argues in some of his later work, following also Blumenberg: we need myth, can�t do without it. Either we take it in hand and construct it ourselves, allowing at least a modicum of rational control, or we just open ourselves to be a prey of the myth of the moment.¹⁰

Peter Forrest�s Speculative Metaphysics: This is rather similar, based on what seem to be factual limitations on what speculative metaphysics can deliver. Once again, it is not necessary to prove our metaphysical constructions true, merely to do enough to demonstrate their �epistemic possibility� (Peter Forrest). This is more than just logical possibility: the kind of thing that one could believe with precedent in the familiar or in the sciences. Having established the �epistemic possibility� of his anti-supernaturalistic theism he then goes on to engage in an inference to the best explanation apologetics for the superiority of his anti-supernaturalistic theism over its naturalistic and supernaturalistic rivals.¹¹

In this context, then, perhaps Jan Van der Veken and Herman De Dijn are in fact on the same side but working with different strategies. The danger will be that we will take it all to seriously, engaging in metaphysics in a na�ve, dogmatic fashion, rather than as another strategy for protecting practices in which we already have an interest. But Jan is well aware of this and of how little can be established on the basis of generalized reason alone. Whatever we need to avoid totalization, while still going about justifying our practices, to protect our �epistemic rights�. On the other hand it may be that the human project itself is in serious trouble, at least in the advanced West, with even its humanist strand in crisis, and that we can do with anything that helps even if seemingly epistemically unsophisticated.

Herman may however be right in another respect: world-view building will have another function in fact to what is sometimes its self-conception, it will be a defensive function or a health-preserving function, albeit a defensive function whose best form is sometimes attack.

Where to fit Radical Orthodoxy? This takes the Blumenberg-Dupre critique for granted, though with more emphasis on the role of Duns Scotus than that of Ockham. Once again trying to undo the natural-supernatural split, but in a way which takes account of modernity and is duly critical of late Medieval aberrations. With the split, the supernatural in the old sense disappears? It must, in so far as it is a result of the split. So Radical Orthodoxy reinvigorates transcendence making genuine immanence and contingency possible, but it doesn�t restore Christendom. On the other hand it would probably look to Herman like too much in the way of a religious takeover rather than an attempt to keep the components in balance, in spite of his expressed preference for Radical Orthodoxy over the World View Construction option. My own view is that a renovated Process Relational Theism can do better than Radical Orthodoxy in this latter respect, but I will not go into the matter here.

Conclusion:

Even big books are not infallible. But from what we�ve seen it would seem that the modern bastard dualisms are fairly recent constructions and that movements in high to late medieval theology had a lot to do with their construction. In these End Times of Modernity we ought not to feel especially bound by them; though there definitely are certain achievements of modernity that we want to keep.

Radical Orthodoxy may offer one way through the thicket beyond the binaries, already outflanking both fundamentalism and classic secularism still caught in the binaries. I�ve argued elsewhere that Process Relational Theology is well equipped to offer another way, more in touch with what we�ve picked up since medieval times, and with certain amendments even a superior way. Process Relational Theology can well be a participant within a 21^st Century Devout Christian Ecological Humanism beyond Conservative and Liberal grounded in a strong comprehensive background theory which restores the continuity of culture while maintaining the autonomy and integrity of its components.

Whether either approach turns out to be viable, it would seem to be necessary for the long-term cultural future of God-Talk in the West and in Western influenced cultures that something like this be tried.

I leave it up to my conference co-workers to decide whether and to what extent and in what places any of this applies in India.  Return to Welcome Page