Theological Aesthetics Part Two

In my last post I outlined some scriptural support for theological beauty and I highlighted the necessity of adopting a specifically Christian conception of beauty that can reconcile “the father of lights” and the transfiguration with the ugliness of the cross and the humility of Christ. In Part Two I want to consider Allen Tate’s incarnational poetics.

Who was Allen Tate?
Allen Tate (1899-1979) was a poet and literary critic from Kentucky. He went to Vanderbilt University, where he met Robert Penn Warren. He was a member of the Fugitive Poets with John Crow Ransom, and is most often labelled a Southern Agrarian, along with Caroline Gordon, his sometime wife, and the previous two, Warren and Ransom. Wendell Berry is considered a contemporary descendant of this literary movement.

What were Allen Tate’s views on Aesthetics?
I’ll make Balthazar proud and first assert that Tate’s Catholicism is the most important facet of his aesthetic theory. Of the Southern Fugitives in general, Francesca Murphy writes: “The history of the ‘earth’ of the South became the archetypal image through which the Fugitives perceived the transcendentals. This earth acts on its inhabitants as a concrete given: a fence, and a boundary for the imagination, as well as a means of transcendence. To imagine it is to be drawn into a dense, singular fact” (Christ the Form of Beauty 70). For Tate, the particulars of a location are as important to the theological view as the universal. In fact, the particulars are the door through which the universal may be encountered. Siding with T.S. Eliot, as a voice of conservative modernism, Tate et al were ticked off at the Scopes Monkey trial, and though they didn’t hold to literal 7 day creation, they thought there was more at stake. I see them envisioning this trial as an influx of northern liberalism on a political level, which took the right to free thought, as a right to conquest. The trial represented “colonial” aggression from the north that was about to wipe away what they saw as the sin of tradition. To Tate, tradition represented something else: the memory of a history of encounters with a place, with particulars. Tradition in this sense is a house of the memory of interaction with God. To scrap tradition and move on with the modernity of the northern eastern seaboard was not an option. Somewhere during the debates about civil rights and racism in the 60s, we have lost the secondary argument, that liberalism has a way of undermining local particularities while it extends the rule of individual rights and “equality”.
Tate would call this impulse “The Angelic Imagination”, in an essay of that title, bearing the secondary clause: “Poe as God”. The distinctive mark of this imagination is that it: “Surges toward essences without touching upon the mater in which they are enclosed... Poe’s disembodied mind is said to parallel that of the Cartesian dualism. Poe’s imagination is an absolute: it flies directly up into beauty, without crossing the material world” (Murphy 95)
In Tate’s words:
“The reach of our imaginative enlargement is no longer than the ladder of analogy, at the top of which we may see all…that we have brought up with us from the bottom where lies the sensible world. If we take nothing with us to the top but our emptied, angelic intellects, we shall see nothing when we get there. Poe as God sits silent in darkness. Here the movement of tragedy is reversed: there is no action” (Murphy 96).
In Poe, Tate sees Descartes. In Tate we should see Jacques Maritain. In Maritain we should see Aquinas and Dante (not to mention Beatrice). Back to Poe: Tate’s problem: like Descartes, the angelic imagination “ends in solipsism” (96). Where Descartes’ skepticism lead him to doubt the very existence of the world, Poe’s angelic imagination does away with the world so as to live in thought. Descartes’ had a crisis; whereas Poe’s nationals see an economic opportunity. To quote David Bowie ( but it's Kurt Cobain I hear): “You’re face to face, with the man who sold the world”. The second stanza highlights the predicament that Tate feared:
I laughed and shook his hand,
I made my way back home,
I searched for form and land,
Years and years I roamed,
I gazed a gazely stare,
We walked a million hills -- I must have died alone,
A long long time ago.
The death of the world, the real, leads to the death of the self. What is the fix? Murphy leads us to Dante and Beatrice: “The radiance which shines through this feminine figure (Beatrice) gives its beholder a sense of reality, but only when the witness binds themselves to this one, single form” (97).
The theory of being-in-the-world that pre-figures much of this conception is decidedly anti-cartesian, anti-Kantian, pro-Thomistic. For Maritain, we engage the world through the intellect. We see a flower. Our mind forms a phantasm or an image of that flower. Our illuminative intellect then activates the phantasm and the intellect-in-act encounters the phantasm of the flower-in-act, revealing a glimpse of the essence, or form of the flower (for more on this see Maritain’s Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, p. 70-74, or Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, q. 84). Catherine Pickstock calls this process “hylomorphism” : “the form of the thing is already synthesized before it ‘informs’ the mind (even though the active intellect must bring out its full coherence)... the thing fulfills itself in and through its comprehensibility. Such a view regards the knowing of a thing as commensurate with the known thing’s own constitutive repetition. For when the species is formed in our mind, the thing perceived happens again (since being is an event), or repeats itself, though in a different mode” (After Writing 131). What all of these thinkers are defending is the convertability of knowledge to being and to beauty. One will notice that using the post-modern variants of Kantian representation, beauty becomes disengaged with reality, the real, God. Beauty is purely cultural, and not the penetration of God in culture, the incarnation. Tate and others were attempting to preserve the Thomistic tradition of essence, participation and analogy, which, as we all know, is assailed from all sides.

In Part three of Theological Aesthetics I will consider Karl Barth's contention that Beauty is not a front running concept of God.

Critiques of Pickstock's reading of Duns Scotus

Mary Beth Ingham has sought to correct Pickstock's reading of Duns Scotus in After Writing and other essays. Pickstock has blamed modernity on Scotus. What an absurd sentence. But he certainly plays the Judas to her Christ (Aquinas). What an absurd sentence. At any rate Modern Theology thought this debate about Scotus was so important that it merited an entire issue in 2005. I've selected quotes from Ingham's article "Why Pickstock is bad and Scotus is Good", I mean "Re-situating Scotist Thought". At any rate, I can see why equivocation becomes an appealing alternative to univocity and analogy. Everybody is as they are, forget about it. I think that is the logic of capitalism isn't it. Have a coffee my friend, forget about politics! But remember your cup was made with oil products. Ok, here are some highlights from Ingham's article. I especially found the part on formal-modal distinctions helpful, as I have never really understood was was going on there (though like other philosophical problems, I knew this problem innately, I just didn't know what symbolic code matched up to what I already thought. You know somewhere deep inside, I've got most of it figured out...).
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Ingham maintains:

In their respective disciplines (logic and theology) the concept being functions differently. In the domain of logic it functions univocally (since the alternative offered by Henry of Ghent was equivocation disguised as analogy). In
the domain of theology, and particularly in regard to the names of God, the term functions analogically. (611)

Christocentric Theology of Scotus:

The first key element in Scotus’s view of reality and of the relationship of philosophy to theology is the centrality of the Incarnation. Because his vision
is so predominantly Christocentric and so affirming of the sui generis nature of Christian revelation, Scotus both critiques the natural capacity of human reason to grasp everything about God and moves his consideration of creation (both in its contingency and in the logical categories used to discuss it) to a secondary status. Thus, he would not hold (with Aquinas and Aristotle) that this world is the only one possible, nor (with Aristotle) that its unique existence points to a single, necessary prime mover. Nor would he hold (with Aquinas and Aristotle) that the life of natural virtue and the philosopher’s goal of happiness (felicitas) are sufficient reasons to demonstrate immortality. This is not because he holds that reason cannot demonstrate the soul’s immortality. Rather, he holds that natural reason cannot
(alone) demonstrate the sort of immortality promised by Christianity (cf. 1 Cor. 2: “eye has not seen nor has ear heard . . .”). (613)

Univocity

The final element of Pickstock’s critique of Scotus is the affirmation of the univocity of the concept being and its lethal consequences for any defense of
transcendence and a spiritual ascent. This point deserves a more careful treatment. Scotus sets forth his argument for the univocity of being in Ordinatio I, distinction 3, question 1.12 The text deals specifically with the possibility of knowledge about God and, by implication, of the existence of theology as a science. Here, the Franciscan develops his position on the univocity of being in tandem with a discussion of scientific knowledge of God. Together, both constitute the sine qua non condition for any possible theology: human cognition must have some natural basis from which to reflect on the divine. This natural ground is, in Scotist thought, the univocity of the concept of being. If, in his argument, Scotus can show that the human mind has foundational access to reality, and if that reality provides adequate basis for natural knowledge of God, then theology can be understood as a science,
whose content does not exhaust the truth about God.

Scotus reasons from the discussion of language about God to the deeper consideration of the sort of foundation that would explain how such language is possible (namely, that being rather than quidditas is the first object of the intellect). In this, he follows his usual methodological procedure, moving from experience to what grounds the possibility of that experience. In addition, Scotus bases his argument upon the Aristotelian cognitive model, where sense knowledge, mental species and agent intellect form the constitutive parts. Finally, the Subtle Doctor rejects Henry of Ghent’s proposed illumination theory, along with its argument from analogy. For Scotus, Henry’s position on analogy without an underlying univocity of concepts is
simply equivocation. The Franciscan argues that when we conceive of God as wise, we consider a property (wisdom) that perfects nature. In order that we might do this and in light of the cognitive structure Aristotle provides, we must first have in mind some essence in which the property exists. When we consider properties or attributes such as wisdom, we do not understand them as pure abstraction, but as belonging to an essence. This more basic, quidditative concept is a type of conceptual whatness that grounds the act of cognition. Were such a concept not univocal, theology could not be a science, nor would language about God be meaningful.(616)

Formal Modal Distinction

The formal modal distinction is key to understanding the way in which Scotus presents the relationship of cognition to the natural world and then to language about God. The formal modal distinction is related to but not identical with the formal distinction. This modal distinction applies not to different attributes or aspects of a being (as does the formal distinction), but to the distinction between a subject, such as intelligence in humans, and its mode, such as finite. The significance of the formal modal distinction becomes clear when we understand its role as foundation for those concepts that are predicable univocally of God and creatures. Consider, for example, the concept wisdom as predicable of God and creatures. Scotus asks, “How
can the concept common to God and creatures be considered real unless it can be abstracted from some reality of the same kind?”13 In response, he explains the difference between the modal distinction and the strict formal distinction. A perfection and its intrinsic mode, such as infinite wisdom, are not so identical that we cannot conceive of the perfection (wisdom) without the mode (infinity). We can, indeed, conceive of wisdom independently of whether it is finite (human wisdom) or infinite (divine wisdom). The perfection and mode are not really distinct, however, because they cannot be separated in reality; nor are they formally distinct, because they are not two formalities each capable of terminating a distinct and proper concept. Nonetheless, they are still not identical, because the objective reality signified by the perfection with its modal intensity (infinite wisdom) is not precisely the same as that signified by the perfection alone (wisdom). The formal modal distinction, then, actually safeguards the reality of those concepts, such as being, that are predicable of God and creatures. Without the mode, these sorts of concepts are common and imperfect. They function semantically in a confused manner, designating in a general way. With the mode, the concept is called proper, and has a more focused, specifying role. The referent (that is, the being designated as infinite) emerges more clearly within the field, like a figure against a background. The formal modal distinction, in a manner similar to the formal distinction, is linked to the activity of abstractive cognition. The modal distinction’s specificity can be clearly seen when we reflect upon the experience of the beatific vision. The blessed in heaven, states Scotus, perceive the infinite perfection of divine infinite
wisdom intuitively, not as two formal objects, but as one.14 By contrast, no intuition in heaven erases the formal distinction between the divine persons and the divine essence, or between the divine intellect and the divine will. In short, the formal distinction is such that it remains even in the beatific vision, while the formal modal distinction does not.15 (616-7)

Footnote 7
Aquinas’s insistence on the light of glory (lumen gloriae) needed for the beatific vision is challenged by Scotus as a diminishment of the natural powers of the human person. When he presents and defends the key role of intuitive cognition, Scotus notes that it follows from the natural constitution of the human person as created by God. It was known to Jesus and thus belongs to human nature. With his Franciscan insight of viewing the person as imago Christi (a perspective shared by Bonaventure), Scotus does not hesitate to attribute to the human person any perfection that does not contradict Scripture or right reasoning.
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Now let's all hold hands and kiss. Right, we've done away with kissing. Pick up your gun instead...

Quote of the Morning

"In the Roman Rite, as we have just seen, the worshipping "I" is both designated and realized by self-dispossessing acts of doxological impersonation which displace any sense of enclosed autonomy in the subject in favour of that which is impersonated. However, this does not result in a radically discontinuous subject, but rather intensifies his continuity to reside in God. This liturgical impersonation is not a matter of arbitrary mimicry across a lateral plain of untimely interchangeable identities, but an altogether more radical and redemptive mimesis which transgresses the hierarchical boundaries between the worldly and the other worldly. Unlike the random mimetic arts with Socrates expels form the city the transcendence of that which is imitated in the Roman Rite ensures that mimesis does not remain a purely extrinsic act. By impersonating angelic voices or the Trinitarian persons, the worshipping impersonator cannot but participate in that which he emulates, and so, to travel in another's name becomes the nomination of the traveller himself. In consequence, he does not ashamedly conceal his inadequate and stammering voice by assuming divine voices, in the cover manner of ventriloquist substitution, but boldly asserts that he acts "In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti." He borrows this name not in order to deny its own speaking, or to silence its declaration, but in order to disseminate it still further. For, the borrower of the name is also that name's ambassador." (Catherine Pickstock, After Writing, p 208-9)

Quote of the Afternoon

So I just finished my first article for Books in Canada, titled Newfoundland in Letters, and I have been asked to take up another on short fiction in Atlantic Canada. I'm glad to do this. It keeps me abreast of the new writing in the region, while helping me to fill out my CV and become a better writer.

But now that the article is off, I can focus on my comp reading again. Here is the quote that hit me this afternoon, Pickstock, After Writing again:

In contrast to the "urge" of Derridian differance, liturgical language is neither autonomously in command of itself, nor an instrument controlled invisibly by a lurking and manipulative power. Rather, its language is in several ways "impossible". For liturgy is at once a gift from God and a sacrifice to God, a reciprocal exchange which shatters all ordinary positions of agency and reception, especially as these have been conceived in the west since Scotus. Moreover, liturgical expression is made "impossible" by the breach which occurred at the Fall. This breach is the site of an apparent aporia, for it renders the human subject incapable of doxology, and yet, as I have suggested above in my analysis of the Phaedrus, the human subject is constituted (or fully central to itself) only in the dispossessing act of praise. However, the aproria is resolved in the person of Christ, whose resurrection ensures that our difficult liturgy is not hopeless, and enables us to rejoin the angelic liturgy taking place in an ambiguous and shifting space beyond our own. (176-7)

I heard "impossible" used as it is above, in a presentation by Alison Milbank, who was a reader of After Writing before it was published. She was speaking about Huysmans' decadent and satanic images of Christ which, she implied, were "impossible", yet which led him into the Church. I was trying to get at what impossible meant in that context and if she was playing on Pickstock's usage of it, then I think I know what she is about. Pickstock's very theory of the subject is constructed on an impossibility, that of opening to God, which is already transcended by God for us. Not too shaby: she takes Paul and makes him relevant to contemporary theoretical gobily-gook. I like it.

Pickstock critiques my post on represention and the thing in itself

So now that I have a pretty good handle on the Kantian conception of representation and synthetic imagination, Catherine Pickstock goes and messes everything up for me by telling me that this is attached to a nominalist conception of ideas, which thinks being univocally, rather then analogically, and which devoids the space between subject and object of divine participation (mathesis):

“In so far as the “real” is now determined by the intellect, and the first object of the intellect is now Being, it seems that Scotus anticipates the modern invention of the object and its distinction from the subject. …In consequence, the object is now defined on the basis of the concept, as representation. This departs from Aquinas’ Aristotelian theory of knowledge, whereby the form of a thing disengages itself from its matter and becomes a thought or “species” in our mind…[Scotus] opens up the possibility of an empiricism which thinks of material reality in terms of isolated atoms of information streaming in from the outside world, which the mind must then synthesize, since they act upon the mind in the mode of merely efficient causality. This involves a departure form the traditional hylomorphic view that the form of a thing is already synthesized before it “informs” the mind (even though the active intellect must bring out its full coherence), and that the thing fulfills itself in and through its comprehensibility. Such a view regards the knowing of a thing as commensurate with the known thing’s own constitutive repetition. For when the species is formed in our mind, the thing perceived happens again (since being is an event), or repeats itself, though in a different mode. Knowledge, for Aquinas, is therefore akin to an ontological event. In contrast to this, post-Scotist representation is equivalent to a de-ontological process, for the perceived object is reduced to an empirical exigency which simply happens to facilitate or occasion an act of cognition”. (After Writing, 130-1)

So instead of composing the cat from a bunch of sense data, Aquinas would encourage me to see the cat as a form already composed before it “informs” my mind. Now that it is in my mind, the active intellect must bring it to full coherence. When the “species” is formed in my mind (the ‘cat’ of Chloe, I’m suspecting), it is an event, not unlike being itself. This is how Aquinas demonstrates that knowledge is divine participation. In a way, God forms the cat as a whole, and sends it into my mind, at which point I must use my intellect to fully reveal the cat to myself (I suspect this is the inward light of Christ that fully reveals the cat as Chloe). And this revelation is an event, like a party. Have a beer. No, I insist.

So where Kant’s process emphasizes the assembly of the whole only by observance of the parts, Aquinas tells us that God creates the whole, which we must reveal to ourselves. I suspect this has more to do with waiting for the Polaroid picture to reveal itself, then it would connecting the dots of the image. Aquinas is a proponent of Gestalt psychology…and Kant believes in constructivism. I hadn’t realized that these 20th century debates fell along realist-nominalist divides.

Okay, here is something to think about: How does this relate to pointillism (and the TV colour matrix) and the previous preference for whole forms, say in a painting by Delacroix, or David? How does this relate to Alex Colville’s method? Is pointillism Kantian painting?

Now think about the camera. The camera doesn’t expose an image to parts. It captures the whole image. Even when the composition is of a part, say half of a face, the whole is presupposed, and it asks us to fill in the rest of the image, such that we are active viewers. Why would the mind assemble parts, if the film doesn’t? Is reality (what ever that is), really as partial as Kant suggests? Or is there a deeper order running through it all?

And a final thought: I can see that structuralism was a type of heuristic that sought out the logos, but which did so on univocal terms. I think we can revive the search for coherence, the logos, on analogical terms, without ever thinking that we have the logos cornered with any type of positivism.