A dialogue on Covenantal Theology… ah, at last!

[I'm quite disinclined to post dialogues (friendly "fisking", as they're called) like this. I know I've done it before at FCA, but I know as well as anyone else that reading over the shoulder of people having a conversation you may not even care about or follow, is pretty grim stuff, even for a nerdfest like FCA. Nonetheless, I think the substance of Mr. O'Sullivan's comment, and my attempts to reply, warrant some front-page publicity.

Before I begin, however, I want to present the past posts of mine that deal with CT. This may help Mr. O'Sullivan get more of the reply he's seeking, and it should help others get somewhat oriented in this discussion. This page of search results for "Keefe" should be enough for now.

Look out world, here I come! Mr. O'Sullivan's words are in normal font, while mine are in italics.]

… I got the two volume C.T. back then. It doesn’t include the appended chapter that deals with its reception. So maybe the difficulties I mention below are dealt with there.

It will be best for me, at a later date, to review that Appendix in response to critics and then go through it with you in absentia.

…And of course, with that German goblin, “Q” reconciling everything like Einstein’s cosmological constant.

Mr. O'Sullivan, anyone that refers to "Q" as a German goblin is always welcome at my blog!

… Father Keefe’s book, especially in its introductory chapter, and vividly in the notes, sets out to show not only how but why this collapse of the Catholic quaerens happened. For Keefe, I believe, the collapse was inevitable: the result of an insufficiently converted pagan metaphysics that underlay the whole enterprise. I had some reservations about how adequately supported this conversion thesis was but I haven’t the scholarly competence to really specify them for myself.

It might be less rebarbative to look at the collapse as a result of invidious Enlightenment rationalism in modern Catholic discourse, and then see that rationalism as a fruit of the failed stalled conversion process. Calling it simply latent paganism is too otiose, and I don't think Keefe does that, though of course he has no qualms about getting right to what he sees as the heart of the matter. It is pagan for theology to make the fundamentals of a faith rationally respectable in the world's eyes, on the world's terms, rather than on terms of the radically Christocentric nature of Catholicism. That I take to be Keefe's main premise. As he says on pg. 122:

"The theology which identifies the covenantal a priori with this existential intuition of fallenness dominated Catholicism in the Latin West for the nearly thousand years between Augustine and the rise of nominalism; its rationalization set thereafter the problematic with which modern theology has been concerned.

"Out of this pseudo-Augustinian nominalist rationalism arose the critique of religion which preoccupied the Enlightenment; the recent, even current rejection of this critique has amounted to that rediscovery of the Augustinian tradition which continues to be the major preoccupation of contemporary systematic theology."

As I proceeded with further chapters I found it more and more difficult to follow the logic of his exposition. I couldn’t get my bearings in that I couldn’t identify the standpoint or even recognize the context within which he was speaking. Part of it was stylistic, I’m sure. Keefe conducts his argument on so remote a level and with such compression of levels of application that its hard to keep up, especially if you’re not sufficiently conversant with the scholarship he assumes you’ve digested.

Yes, any way you slice it, CT is a head-splitter! But we wouldn't have it any other way, would we? ;)

But it’s also deeper, I think. How does he manage to escape the metaphysical constraints---the cosmological consciousness and its fallen logic, as he calls it--- that bind our thinking? How does he arrive at the Archimedean point that allows him to talk about a free Eucharistic order, so encompassing that it can ground all reality. I’m not saying that he hasn’t succeeded in his endeavor. I’m only saying that I haven’t been able to follow his steps in way that allows me to see things from his position. As it is, his approach seems baffling if not inconsistent.

What I will say in response is only metaphorically apt, but I think it sheds some light on the problem: precisely by positing an Archimedean point, you draw up a vision of some absolute point of rest outside the world. But this is exactly what Keefe will not allow. The world, for him, IS the Eucharistic immanence of Christ; it is the prime analogate of being. Therefore, even the idea of stepping back from it to dissect, analyze, challenge, or modernize it, based on some other prius, refutes its entire hegemony for Catholic covenantal thought.

An essay by James Ross, one of my favorite philosophers, "Musical Standards as a Function of Musical Accomplishment" (PDF warning), makes the point that there simply is no valid place outside the sphere of production, apprenticeship, tradition, and innovative excellence from which music (or any other craft and/or discourse) may be judged. It can only be assessed and appropriated from within the hermeneutic, aesthetic circle. I suspect you, as an artist, know as much. In a way, then, Keefe is refuting in principle any standpoint outside the Eucharistic 'circle'. It is, after all, the living index of divine Revelation and wholly positive in itself, although it does allow for the analogiae entis et fidei––or perhaps I should just say it allows for the former to exist only as a FUNCTION OF the latter. As he says on pg. 440:

"[W]e find in the Eucharist the permanent criterion of metaphysics. … [T]he failure of the conventional Thomist analysis [is] that of implying the necessary and nonhistorical character of … intrinsic intelligibility. That implication has been shown to be explicit in the nonhistorical Thomist prime analogate, the Deus unus who is utterly unrelated to history because absolute, in the nonhistorical analysis of the Incarnation. … The theological prime analogate, the God revealed in Christ, is not absolute in the absolute sense of defying all relation, but is intrinsically and extrinsically related precisely as the Father sending the Son to give the Spirit, which relatedness terminates concretely in the New Covenant."

Take, for example, the fall of man. In C.T. he keeps insisting that the fall is an event simultaneous with the creation of man. But how can Adam be responsible for something that happened to him in the very act of being created and not after he was created? …he relies on a conceptual framework that was opaque to me. … Again the answer was impenetrable.

This just cracks me up. Not at all out of scorn, but out of sympathy. CT is a head-splitter, a crucifixion of the fleshly mind, intellectual ascesis. I feel your pain! Keefe's exposition of the Fall was and is unquestionably one of the most abstruse and rebarbative elements of CT. But if he is right, any less challenging a thesis would be inadequate, since it would, in its palatability, challenge the fleshly mind less than Keefe believes covenantal theology should and does. It's like Heisenberg (?) said about quantum mechanics: if it doesn't startle and baffle you, you clearly aren't getting it.

Now, to address the problem of the fall, I would reverse your statement of it to suggest Keefe's answer: how can Adam be responsible for something that happened to him anywhere or anywhen BUT in his act of being created? How could he be RESPONSIBLE for an order imposed on him before he was created? His substantial independence on the second Adam cannot be a merely temporal sequel, but must be constitutive of either his most fundamental 'option' towards that Adam or towards his own Adamic autonomy. Were the fall from some pristine antecedent order, it would exclude the freedom of the first Adam, precisely in that, only if he were forced to choose in one way over another, would that order remain pristine. The only substantially good order IN WHICH humans exist is one rooted in the integral freedom of the Second Adam, which is only appropriated historically and freely in the Eucharistic synaxis. Once that pristine order is posited as something which excludes the first Adam's freedom, it becomes a Platonic flight from history.

Moreover, the primacy of Christ in creation is coterminous with His primacy in redemption, as the one Mission of the Father by means of the One Flesh. As Keefe says on pg. 235:

"Offered 'headship,' and thus the ability to appropriate integrity for all humanity, the first Adam appropriated fallenness, i.e., existence as sarx rather than as pneuma; his use of freedom is decisive for the totality of mankind, which, by the fact of the offer of headship to him, are in solidarity with him. … Because the Immanuel by his obedience is irrevocably man, he is by the fall of the first Adam historically immanent in fallen humanity, in sarx. His obedience to his Mission by the Father is thereupon redemptive as well as creative; it is directed to the second giving of the Spirit by which sarx is re-created, recapitulated, to become pneuma, first in the Head, then in all those in solidarity with the Head who is Jesus, the Christ.

"We are in an unfree solidarity with the sin of the fallen Adam, whose refusal of freedom eliminates the freedom of our solidarity with his original sin, for that solidarity, as in fallenness, is not integral and not free."

This indicates how we can be 'punished' in original sin (originatum, 'from birth') and yet not actually 'guilty' of the original sin (originans, 'from the start'). Insofar as we are the very flesh of the first Adam, we are literally incorporated in the punishments and woes due to that Adam, yet without actually incurring personal guilt for his individual sin. And yet, even then we cannot plea, "But Adam did it!", as if we ourselves were not involved––precisely because the first Adam is a metaphysical, not a temporal, prius in our very constitution as the children of Adam. By virtue of his covenantally offered headship, rooted even more basically in the trinitarian goodness of the immanent Immanuel, it might be less confusing to replace (or at least parallel) the truth, "In Adam [originans] we sinned all" with the truth, "In us all [originatum] Adam sinned". Fr. Keefe elaborates:

"Inasmuch as the original sin originans could only consist in a refusal to be, its only actuality is that of a responsible refusal to be free: the primordial nonappropriation of the covenantal freedom of the Good Creation, after which there remains to us only servitude. The original sin originans in which we are solidary is then a free refusal of our own free reality as this is offered for free appropriation in the metaphysically primordial moment of our creation. Because original sin in us (originatum) is not voluntary, the original sin in its active sense cannot have been an act of humanity as such, in and by which the responsible freedom of each human being would have been engaged."

Fr. Keefe then examines the 'injustice' of our fallen condition, on pg. 236:

"To be fallen is to be unfree, so that a free solidarity in fallenness would be a contradiction in terms. … [H]ad there been no fall our solidarity in the integrity of the first Adam would have been effective in each of us as a spontaneous, personally free commitment, as finally our redemption must be. … [T]o be integral, unfallen, plena gratia, is to be constituted in the free community of the One Flesh, in Covenant….

"We tend to picture to ourselves an 'original situation' or status quo ante of humanity relative to the fall as a condition of responsible freedom or 'original justice,' whereas our original situation is our solidarity with the primordial refusal of this status, the covenantal ordo of integral free existence, and our solidarity in the diminished human substance that results in this loss of freedom….

"This rejection, or aversio a Deo, in its spontaneity is the external sign, the very utterance, of our schismatic and alienated human substance, whose diminution is in the order of being, of life, of freedom, therefore of decision. It is thus that the refusal of integral because covenantal life … is actual in us without need or possibility of personal decision."

It is precisely because the first Adam's rejection of the nuptial One Flesh of the Second Adam is integral to his headship over mankind that original sin originans is a moral and historical, as opposed to cosmological and rational, primordiality corruption of the Good Creation. Fr. Keefe elaborates on pg. 239:

"It is not enough to speak of our moral immaturity, of the burdens of the flesh, of the 'sin of the world,' or of the iherently [sic] tragic condition of man, unless this unhappy state is also affirmed to be a moral evil, irreducible to any psychological, sociological, physical or whatever other human flaw that is in principle susceptible to human remedy, or to any explanation reducible to a prior possibility necessarily inherent in humanity as such. …

"The doctrinal tradition requires a fallen moral solidarity in a moral event of sin. To refuse the tradition is to refuse the historicity of the problem of evil, and so to fall back once again upon cosmological rationalization of evil.

"However, the historicity of our solidarity in the sin of the first Adam and Eve is secondary to and radically dependent upon our solidarity in the redemption effected by the sacrificial union of the second Adam with the second Eve. We have no other history than that which is signed by the life, death and Resurrection of Christ. Therefore history is a theological category, because all historicity is grounded in Christo, and only in Christ may its meaning, its intelligibility, be appropriated. … "[T]he fall is headship refused, the negation of the integrity which headship appropriates."

…the same densely allusive language that he uses in C.T. I sympathized with the blank expression on the face of that earnest seeker. If Fr. Keefe were a gnostic there wouldn’t be a problem. He would simply be claiming to have a special insight that the rest of us, caught up in illusory ways of thinking, couldn’t share. …

You crack me up, man; I love your candor and way with words. But remember: gnosis is not bad, if it is exoteric, as CT is. Gnosis of Christ is, in fact, one of the most central themes in the NT. Keefe just insists Christian gnosis can ONLY be Eucharistic in form and in content. Consider the disciples who "knew Him in the breaking of the bread" (in Luke), and not before that.

I’ve read Keefe’s book on Tillich and most of his on line articles. I haven’t been able to find many reviews of the book. There was one in America that only superficially engaged his thinking: and a brief notice in First Things. I read Kelleher’s “Knuckleheads Guide”---great title and helpful too, if a bit breathless. The early part on Plato and Aristotle with the clever sidebars was brilliant. The later parts just raised more questions for me; e.g. what does he mean: “there was no ‘before’ before the fall.” The materialist approach of, say, a Pinker is hardly the only strong alternative to Keefe’s approach. The “Skyhook” piece he followed up with, where Dennett replaces Pinker, sets things up equally artificially, I think.

Please elaborate on the artificiality you perceive in Kelleher's essay.

Besides, what makes a term like radical historicity any less timeless an abstract analytical concept than hylemorphism?

See, the thing you have to keep in mind here, is that you are much more erudite than me. This is not just a matter of age (I was pre-born or just-born when you returned to Church!), but also of your obvious amount of learning in these matters.

Now, as for the "no before before before" problem, this is not endemic to Keefe's view. Cosmology has faced this problem for decades. It is not simply an empirical lack on our part that we can't peer back beneath the first nanoseconds of the cosmos. It is actually intrinsic to the coherence of scientific exploration that, as we approach the limits of physical structure, we lose the ability to apply the same categories that guide our inquiry. If we reached absolute zero time, the laws of physical, which are rooted in time and motion, would not apply, and thus our inquiry would shut down. Hence, there is not even conceivably a 'before' prior to the inception of time. St. Augustine dealt with this in his Confessions, as I'm sure you know.

What Keefe is doing, is simply shifting the index from a cosmological prius to a Eucharistic prius. There is no cosmos that began and then saw the historical emergence of this thing called the Eucharist. Rather, the Eucharist is the metaphysical prius not only of substance but also of time. Hence, in CT, there is not even conceivably a 'before' prior to the one prius that is the One Flesh. This means, I venture, that Keefe is not intrinsically opposed to cosmological thought ONCE it is predicated on the Eucharist, but he gives no quarter to the hint of cosmological autonomy. This means that he does not in principle reject analytic categories à la hylomorphism, only that the Eucharist is the only coherent grounds for hylomorphic analysis. St. Thomas, the prince of hylomorphism, followed Aristotle's lead by saying there are no nonsubstantial (i.e., non-existent) forms, but only substances individuated in matter. This however, according to Keefe, immediately opens the can of worms that subjects the Church's theology to Aristotle's autonomous cosmos. Only if we, by antithetical contrast, root hylomorphism (or Platonic Augustinian Forms, for that matter) in the prescribed Event-structure of the Eucharist, can we hope to generate a coherent AND orthodox metaphysics. The Eucharist CAN be analyzed hylomorphically, but the analysis must follow the historical structure of the Eucharist, rather than impose upon it a cosmological pattern. Such an analysis––which, it must be stressed, is not the only way to explore the Eucharist––will show how Christ fulfills the role of form and matter and substantial union; thus, hylomorphism is converted to Christ, rather than pasted over Him as in a lot of Thomism (according to Keefe).

Another essay by James Ross, "God, Creator of Kinds and Possibilities: Requiescant Universalia Ante Res" (PDF warning… and another head-splitter warning), presents powerful reasons why divine exemplarism is incoherent, and this would extend to imagining some divine exemplar for Adam before he actually existed in his possibly integral freedom, which ultimately terminated in his non-integral servitude as fallen caput hominis. Ross's main point is that possibility (i.e., creatable exemplars) are logically subsequent to actual creation. Only if Adam is, in the existentially replete manner of his actual existence, does possibility and contingency coherently apply to him. Only because Christ, the Word, as the Second Adam, was the absolute archetype of Adam, the image in the likeness, as the First Adam, is a divine Person, could He function as an 'exemplar' for actual creation. It just happens, however, that even His archetypal status is only actually and freely possible by the historical Event of His immanent offering, in sarx, in the Eucharist. His archetypal primacy for creation, and for Adam as the head of that Good Creation, is only immanent and actual in the Eucharist. Ross does not go into this, but his anti-exemplarism dovetails nicely with Keefe's so-called Eucharistic actualism.

In any case, let me cite Fr. Keefe at some length (pgs. 429–431), in order to clarify what I mean by his Eucharistic inversion of metaphysics, and how, while it may not 'escape' analytical thought, does at least 'delegitmate' and dethrone it, baptize and convert it:

"[T]he Eucharistic transubstantiation must be seen to be normative for metaphysics as only an a priori can be normative; transubstantiation is thereupon not an exception to metaphysical intelligibility arbitrarily inserted into reality as a requirement of faith, but the very criterion of metaphysical intelligibility. This is no more than the immediate implication of the recognition of the New Covenant as the prime analogate of substantial being. …

"St. Thomas… attempted, without success, to understand transubstantiation within th ea priori context of a cosmological notion of objectivity that he took for granted as already in place, and which controlled a priori what transubstantiation should be. … [T]he properly theological task is that of understanding reality under the Eucharistic criterion of historical objectivity: viz., under the a priori of the prime historical objectivity, the Eucharistic Event of transubstantiation and of Sacrifice. … [T]he problem before us is not that of fitting transubstantiation into a prevailing act-potency system, but of reinterpreting the act-potency analysis of being under the norm of this historical-liturgical a priori….

"To repeat: the task of a Thomist Eucharistic theology is not to develop an account of the Event of transubstantiation in terms of a metaphysical analysis of the intelligible immanent necessity of being, but to develop a historical and theological metaphysical analysis of being as intelligible immanent freedom in the covenantal terms which are manifest and effective in Eucharistic transubstantiation. …

"[O]nly in its theological and covenantal development does the act-potency analysis come into its own, for only in the New Covenant are the conditions of the free intrinsic intelligibility which its analytic and its hermeneutic presuppose actually met. …

"The intrinsic intelligibility of change within a material substance depends upon discovering within that substance its specific formal cause; apart from this… a devolution from act-potency to the universal hylemorphism of Neoplatonic dualism is inevitable, for the formal cause, when understood to be extrinsic to or transcendent to material substance, can only be divinity in some guise… in such wise that all formal differentiation is reductively quantitative, grounded in a greater or lesser materiality. Once again, the sole remedy for this act-potency dilemma is the free immanence in creation of the New Covenant, the formal cause of man and man's world. … [W]hen the analysis is thus normed, the cosmological notion of a substantial human species composed of formally identical but materially discrete members gives way to to that of the substantial New Covenant, membership which is free, covenantal, and intrinsically intelligible precisely as connoting a maritally-ordered and liturgical-constituted community of covenantally unique masculine and feminine persons.

"Finally, the intrinsic intelligibility of the immanence of form in matter, and consequently of the multiplicity of human beings within substantial human unity… depends upon the actuality of, and their participation in, the freely immanent formal perfection of humanity. In cosmological act-potency metaphysics, form is actually immanent in matter only as participated, not in its full perfection, which is actual either nowhere or in some version of a divine idea extrinsic to materiality. But with the conversion of act-potency metaphysics from cosmology to Covenant, this plenary formal cause of substantial humanity is freely immanent in historical human substance by the free historical ordo of the New Covenant."

… It [theology] is an extension of the liturgy and it has the same infallible actuality for the theologian as data has for scientific research.

I take this to be Keefe's most important axiom, though not one exclusive to him. T. Torrance has written a great deal about the analogously objective priority of physical reality in science and divine revelation in theology. In my 1996 edition of CT, I find five references to Torrance in the index. You should begin with Torrance's _Space, Time & Incarnation_. For Keefe, if you are somewhat conversant in general relativity theory, the Eucharist is the speed of light which grounds the whole rest of the project that is Christian theology.

For what it’s worth I think the reason Keefe is so difficult to follow goes back to the nature/grace controversies of the earlier 20th C. with people like Chenu and especially De Lubac trying to redefine or recontextualize the supernatural. But I’ll leave that for another post if you wish to respond.

This again shows how you are my better in this dialogue. But it's so nice to have a dialogue partner at last! You are right, though, considering there are something like ninety references to de Lubac in CT's index.

You seem much more at home in Keefe’s approach. Was it already familiar to you from other theological reading? How does one catch on?

I was completely unaware of Keefe's work until… gosh, I can't even recall how I found it. It must have been Kelleher's blurb about CT as Keefe's "highly abstruse but devastatingly important masterwork," which I must have found just by Googling one day. I'm kind of a masochist for hard books. Plus, when I sensed a connection between Keefe and S. Jaki (there are ten references to him in CT's index), I was like a bloodhound on the trail. I am a major "Jakophile", you see, and even started a Catholic quarterly, inFORM, to broaden awareness to his work (not to mention demystify it for less eggheaded persons than myself). http://informmag.wordpress.com/

Fr. Jaki's relentless emphasis on realism and the singular reality of the cosmos as wholly contingent on God resonate nicely with CT. … And yet, having said that, I am also mindful of the possibility that even Keefe's most important sources/ guides (e.g., John Paul II, Jaki, de Lubac, Torrance, von Balthasar, et al.) would be stunned and repulsed by ways in which their views have been deployed in CT. To wit, I suspect S. Jaki is more cosmological than Keefe would like (although it's not entirely apt to put it in terms of "liking"); Fr. Jaki, after all, is one of the leading proponents of the cosmological argument in a revised fashion. This is only to say that, while I am a huge admirer of Fr. Keefe's work and simply floored by his erudition, I am not necessarily a dogmatic Keefian. In point of fact, I am a very content Thomist, so it was and is hard to sustain the criticisms Keefe applies to Thomism. I am fully prepared to see CT suffer major critiques and blows, once it is given the proper attention by Keefe's theological peers. The fact, however, that his work, like that of Fr. Jaki, has so far been suspiciously under-attended, stirs in my poetic depths an intuition that CT really is a hidden treasure. It is neglected perhaps in the same way the Greco-Roman establishment tried to marginalize the early Gospel: and this because CT is just about as big a ticking timebomb of a skandalon as the Gospel it aims to glorify.

Now, as for how I was able to "take to" CT, I would say two things prepared me spiritually, dispositionally, for CT, if not intellectually and theoretically.

One, in college I had gotten fairly deeply into presuppositional apologetics and, in turn, Reformed epistemology. This made me see just how feeble worldly thought is, when challenged apologetically from a radically Christian foundation. When I had both the founder and president of the campus atheist club literally at a loss for words in a debate we held on faith and reason, I lost all fear of the wisdom of man compared to the authority of God's Word. CT is Eucharistically presuppositional, yet not positivistically, but in a way that shows the flaws in a non-Eucharistic worldview. You might say presupps and Ref. epist. gave me an analogous theoretical prep for CT.

Second, the one thing that really drew me into the Catholic Church––and indeed the only thing I think that should draw anyone––is the Eucharist. Although I am a very shabby Catholic in many ways, I have never and pray I never will lose my bedrock love for and confidence in the Eucharistic Christ as my Savior and Healer. The Eucharist, to be blunt, is just about the only thing that has unambiguous value and meaning for me. So, when I find a book that roots the entire world in the Eucharist, in a way that I find my own entire life is rooted in it, I am all ears.

But trust me: CT was one of the most challenging, humbling intellectual experiences of my life. And I'm still not even really done with it. I've been making my way through the notes for months, between my other reading efforts, and intend to re-read the entire beast again.

P.S. Are you any relation to the Confederate officer at First Bull Run?

I doubt it. My paternal great-grandparents came from Greece in the early 20th century.

Fr. Donald Keefe's Covenantal Theology (reviewed)

[I posted this review at Amazon.com recently. Feedback very welcome.]

At the risk of exploding my carefully wrought veneer of sober scholarship and orphic wisdom, let me just say: this book is freakin' awesome. It takes some doing to get your hands on a copy, but allow me to undercut Amazon a little by saying you can get a nice hardcover one-volume edition of this book for $[...] (not incl. S&H) from a professor at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire. I'd had Fr. Keefe's Covenantal Theology (CT) in my sights for several weeks when I finally found the seller, and then fit it into my reading budget a year later so that, at long last, I could enjoy this true masterpiece of theology. (I don't want to divulge the seller's details without permission, but you can email me at fidescogitactio AT gmail DOT com for the his contact info.)

Lest I sound too over the top in praise, CT's high quality rests on a number of grounds. First, it is a THEOLOGICAL masterpiece because Fr. Keefe rigorously, systematically takes theology serious on its own terms, with a solid grasp on its proper methodological consistency. As Fr. Keefe argues in numerous ways as CT progresses, too much theology is based not on theology's proper object -- the historical Event of the offered Covenant by and in the One Flesh (mia sarx) of Christ and Theotokos -- but instead on either Aristotelian logical consistency, or Platonic (tragic hylemorphic) dehistoricization of the concrete, or the later manifestations of these pessimistic cosmological worldviews. There is no inherent, antecedent, necessary reason for the fall, nor for the creation, nor for our redemption. Rather, the Event itself, in one integral and unbroken act of Gift, is its own self-authenticating, self-explaining, free and thus intrinsically intelligible foundation. Such is history: the realm of moral freedom and moral personhood.

Second, CT is highly commendable because it covers so much ground and connects so many theological dots. The 2nd edition is nearly 800 pages, 231 of which are endnotes, including a meaty bibliography and two indices. (I recommend you read the text through once before going through the notes, as I did, lest you get bogged down in minutiae.) While there are great depths in the body of CT, Fr. Keefe also saves a lot of goodies for these endnotes. I am always pleased when an author cites Stanley Jaki, and Fr. Keefe does so in crucial ways. Indeed, one of Fr. Keefe's more important methodological insights (or caveats) is the noetic parallelism between theology and physical science as objective rational inquiries. Just as science is not necessarily, intrinsically exhausted by formal coherence (cf. Gödel's incompleteness theorems) nor evacuated of progressive relevance by a Platonic flight from the phenomena, but rather tirelessly forges ahead into the depths of material reality, so theology is always on a quest -- a quaerens -- into the bottomless metaphysical riches of the concrete Event of the Covenant of the One Flesh as it is historically, freely manifested and appropriated in the Eucharist.

It helps to have a decent grasp of Platonic, Aristotelian, Augustinian and Thomistic philosophy before reading CT, as Fr. Keefe takes such knowledge for granted in his sweeping discussion of these systems. (It would also help not to cling too toghtly to any one of these theological schools, as Fr. Keefe gives them much due criticism, which might irritate die-hard fanboys of any pet system.) In order to get a taste of CT, as well as to keep a bead on its North Star as you trek through its many pages, I cannot recommend strongly enough reading

1) Fr. David Meconi's article "A Christian View of History"

and

2) John Kelleher's "Knucklehead's Guide" to CT

before reading the book itself. (Mr. Kelleher, on his website W W W DOT catholiclearning DOT com, has a fine essay on Darwinism and Eucharistic realism, titled "Divine Reason and the Skyhook", which could also enrich your reading of CT.)

Third, I can recommend CT because it's not fluff. Fr. Keefe is extremely lucid in his exposition and very explicit about his premises, so he's easy to follow (except for when he's dealing with things that don't lend themselves to snappy slogans, like, oh, say, the coterminously integral nature of the fall and creation, or the metaphysical as opposed to temporal priority of the first Adam in our solidarity with sin, which is itself predicated on and rooted in -- and redeemed in -- the second Adam.) This is a book for serious Catholics, and I don't mean that disparagingly. It is a book for Catholics serious about their faith because it is a book about the most serious thing in that Faith, and indeed in the cosmos which it illumines, namely, our appropriation of the divine life in the free historical offering of the Eucharist. This book is not simply a tour de force theology of history -- indeed, Fr. Keefe calls history itself a theological category -- but a tour de force of specifically Eucharistic history. His greatest influences, as indicated by CT's indices and Fr. Keefe's hat tips in the text, include Henri de Lubac, Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), John Paul II, Fr. Stanley Jaki and Sts. Irenaeus, Augustine and Bonaventure. Under such tutelage, and more, the cumulative vision which CT offers is simply stunning. The tripartite analogies between virtually every aspect of theology have done more to synthesize the Catholic vision than almost any other book I've read (save the latest Catechism, etc.). The senses of Scripture (literal, allegorical-tropological, anagogical), the structure of the Mass (Offertory, Canon, Communion), the ordo salutis (sarx, mia sarx, pneuma) and the historia salutis (Old Covenant, New Covenant, fulfilled Kingdom), Thomistic metaphysics (ousia prote, ousia deutera, sumbebekos; ens, Esse, essentia; etc.) -- when you see all these in concert, the Faith makes a tremendous amount of sense!

CT is a seriously Catholic, that is, Roman Catholic, book, so while it covers a lot of ground, do not expect to find much interaction with Eastern Catholicism and Orthodoxy. In many ways, Fr. Keefe is "cleaning house" for the history and future of Roman Catholic theology. As such, he does not feel inclined, nor perhaps permitted, as it were, to complicate matters with such very distinct theologies. I admit, however, I would have really liked to see at least some rigorous discussion of Palamism and St. Maximus' theology of logoi and the issue of God's "absolute divine simplicity." Fr. Keefe explicitly rejects the (pagan) Deus Unus (as did, for example, Cdl. Ratzinger in _Feast of Faith_), so it would be nice to see how he deals with increasingly shrill accusations that the Catholic dogma of divine simplicity, without the doctrine of a real essence-energies distinction, necessarily entails creation and redemption and thus compromises God's personal freedom. Fr. Keefe would deny this claim root and stock, of course, for in CT "freedom is the prime analogate" of redemption, but all the same, it would, as I say, be nice to see him do so explicitly and formally. (Then again, the objection may be so partial in his sight that it ipso facto merits no refutation. Likewise, he brushes aside the debates of mongenism-polygenism and de auxiliis in a few paragraphs here and there.)

CT is a great book to see in a coherent way the big picture of Catholic theology, and, what's more, to see it afresh. CT's arguments add a lot of weight to the all-too-easily forgotten goodness of the Church's Good News, which stands in perpetual contradistinction to the pessimistic, deterministic, cosmological imaginings of fallen man. Despite how slow-going it was at times, I could hardly put the book down once I got my hands on it. CT will make you think and, in the process, will help you believe. Get yerself a copy and treasure it. The Good News is still good and freedom is historically real, as real as man is historical, for the second Adam is immanent -- yet also transcendent -- at every point in space-time.

The Eucharist as the Church's only ordo theologiae…

[Although I already posted this at Philper, and mentioned here the 'response' to it there, I decided to post it here, not only because I figure it's all for the good to increase the number of possible hits "Keefe" and "Covenantal" can get on the Internet, but also because I was graced with an inebriatingly substantive reply by a Mr. O'Sullivan to my review of Covenantal Theology (CT), which inclines me to give these Keefian matters a more central place of their own at FCA.]

The proper and ineluctable ordo of Roman Catholic theology is the Eucharistic covenant as it thrives in the Church. All theological principles and categories must submit to and be subsumed under this one triune matrix of actual, substantial, concrete, and free––because historical––communion in and through the μια σαρχ (One Flesh).

Hence, predestination is a perversion of the Faith if and when it is imagined as belonging to some higher, antecedent ‘cosmic’ order. Predestination is only orthodox when subsumed under the Eucharist. There is no antecedent rational necessity to account for divine predestination, since God’s providence is only truly real in the historically immanent Lordship of the Eucharistic Jesus. There is no higher ‘reason’ for creation and salvation, but this does not mean they are arbitrary and meaningless realities, since the only grounding of them is the free, coherent, historical action of God in the Eucharistic covenant.

People are not predestined according to some cosmic, pre-incarnate decree, but are predestined precisely in the free, actual, historical appropriation or rejection of the New Adam in the Eucharist. There is no supreme natural order that exists prior to creation’s covenantally grounded structure in the triune work of God. The economy of salvation, therefore, does not take place 'in' nature, but rather generates coherence and meaning for nature precisely by virtue of the historically free and objective concreteness of the Eucharist. All existence is grace, although not all existence is equally graced. History, in turn, is not an absolute, prior category of thought or reality, but is a radically and properly theological concept generated in the human consciousness by the concrete immediacy of the Eucharist as the One Sacrifice for all times and all peoples.

As Fr. Donald Keefe says in Covenatntal Theology: the Eucharistic Order of History (pp. 551, 552):

“When, as often, the Platonic resolution of fallenness by its dehistoricization is mistaken for theology, its self-salvific rationalizing thrust finds a pseudo-Christian expression in theories of predestination; these, whether single, as in Origen’s hypothesis of apokatastasis, echoed by Barth’s systematics and, as has been feared, by von Balthasar’s aesthetics, or double, as from Gottschalk to Calvin to the Synod of Dort, are all led by the same conviction that man’s dignity, his moral freedom, must evanesce before the divine omnipotence, and that the truth and reality of the historical human condition is actual only in a union with divinity outside of time, whether in the world of Forms or in an inscrutable divine judgment. … Augustinianism ineluctably relapses into its pre-conversion condition, that of Platonism, when the sacrificial realism of the Catholic Eucharistic tradition is refused or systematically ignored.”

Fr. Keefe notes earlier, on page 535, that the only thing which keeps Augustinianism from relapsing into unreconstructed Platonism, is St. Augustine's radically sacramental consciousness. From page 535:

“…[St. Augustine] sees the fallen consciousness of man to be integrated historically [not ideally or atemporally] in the Eucharist. … [N]othing further is required for the reconstruction of a realistic Augustinian theology of transubstantiation than the systematic exploitation of Augustine’s own equation of the One Sacrifice, the One Flesh of the second Adam and the second Eve, with the Eucharistic Sacrifice, for it is the freedom of this union that constitutes its historicity. Only the historical density of the liturgical experience itself is able to ground Augustine’s sacramental theology, and to found an Augustinian theology upon any less concrete and historical ground than the Eucharistic Sacrifice is to ignore once again the free historical foundation for Augustine’s on-going conversion of his Neoplatonism to the Catholic faith. This foundation is the Eucharistic liturgy which was his central responsibility over thee nearly forty years of his episcopacy. To ignore this liturgical foundation is to misconceive Augustine’s theology.

"In Augustinian as in Thomist metaphysics we therefore have to do with the concrete, historical, free and objective relation between the event of the Church’s offering of the bread and wine of the Offertory and the Event-presence of the Christ to the bridal Church as Priest, as Victim, and as semper interpellans. This is simply the historical ordo, the dynamically integrating relations of circumincession which we have seen [in the preceding hundreds of pages] to exist between the event of the Old Covenant, the Event of the New Covenant, and the Event of the Kingdom. It is identically the free and intra-substantial ordering of the Offertory, the Canon, and the Communion; it is the historical ordo of sarx, mia sarx, and pneuma, the ordo of the literal, the allegorical and the anagogical sense of Scripture, and finally, the ordo of the sacramentum tantum, the res et sacramentum and the res tantum, radically of the Eucharist and derivatively of the other sacramanets. This is the free order of objective reality, which is to say, the intrinsic meaning of historical substance, the subject matter of any historical-covenantal metaphysics.”

Fr. Keefe's allusion to Thomistic metaphysics alerts us to the fact that the Eucharistic covenant, as the only real grounds of Catholic theology, poses both a similar challenge to Augustinianism and Thomism (vis-à-vis the former's risk of relapsing into Platonism and the latter's risk of relapsing into Aristotelianism), and a similar buttress against such relapse. On page 558 he says:

“‘Form’ cannot then mean in Augustinian theology what the term Logos has generally been understood to mean whether by Thomists or by Augustinians: viz., the eternal Son in some cosmic moment prior to his becoming man. ‘Form’ in Augustinian theology must refer to the Son of God who is the Son of Mary, ‘one and the same,’ and this not as static [cosmic] fact but as covenantal Event. … However thorough the methodological conversion of theology from cosmological to historical metaphysics may be, we still are very largely under the sway of a cosmological imagination, which simply takes for granted a nonhistorical status quo ante as the prius or starting point for all theological inquiry … [which] conforms to a cosmological but not a Christian quaerens intellectum: it seeks always for the God behind the revelation, convinced that only there may be found the quintessential divinity…. The time-honored notion that it is the nonhistorical and cosmological God behind the revelation that is the object of theology forgets that theology is a quaerens directed solely at the revelation, and that the revelation is not information provided in the Old and New Testament about the eternity and the freedom of God, but rather is the Lord in whom the act of faith ‘terminates,’ Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the Son of Mary, ‘one and the same,’ in whom the divine freedom and divine transcendence over history is concretely actual in and by his Eucharistic immanence in history.”

So, even when St. Augustine failed, in various writings or claims, to remain consistent to the sacramental ordo theologiae, which he recognized as paramount, nevertheless it is his fundamental commitment to a “liturgical phenomenology” that can and should correct for his Platonic detours in a stringently Form-based, absolutist predestinarianism.

The vision Fr. Keefe’s places at center is that there is no “world out there” outside the actual, historical Event of the One Flesh being offered triunely. Literally nothing––literally, nihil––exists outside the Event-structure of the Mass. Hence, eternal predestination is coterminous with the historical entry into, or flight from, grace in the Eucharist. The eternal truth that “Christ, the Lamb of God, died for all” is historically coterminous with Christ being received or rejected by all in the Eucharist, as it is offered, historically and actually, to all. Historical worship is thus theologically and Christocentrically antecedent to cosmological predestination. Predestination, in other words, happens now, here, in the Eucharist. Further, because Christ is “pan-historical” by virtue of His covenantal kenosis, as opposed to cosmically “immanent” presence, in fallen humanity, He is transhistorical. His pervasive grounding of history as the arena of grace is what simultaneously makes Him the transcendent Lord of “predestination.” (As for those outside the reach of formal Eucharistic worship, Fr. Keefe’s notes how the trahi a Deo in St. Thomas's thought and the Lumen mundi in St. Augustine's, provide the grounds for personal culpability, since, in any case, original sin is already present, metaphysically but not temporally, in fallen human existence.)

The good creation?

Interesting thread spooling out at Dr. Feser's blog under the Fr. Davies lecture (on the New Atheism) posted there.

The main topic has now become how to reconcile--or not?--the savage pre-history of the Earth, as described by evolutionary biology, with the claim that God created the world good. For if animal suffering, predation, and death precede the rise of humans, it seems the account in Genesis about evil occuring after the Fall of Adam, is either totally false or in need of serious qualifications. The following is the anonymous post which set the ball rolling along these lines:

Do theistic evolutionists such as Davies and many other Catholics believe that violent predation, parasitism, mass extinction, and other forms of animal suffering were part and parcel of God's "good" creation for billions upon billions of years, long before humans beings ever emerged on Earth to spoil creation via an exercise of their free will, as Genesis is typically taken to be saying? Fossils and other data obtained from archeology do seem to indicate this.

If so, I'm having a great deal of trouble believing that this world is the product of the infinite, inner dance of love of the triune God. On the one hand, we have this exquisite conception of God, yet, on the other hand, we have death, pain, and suffering occurring on vast, unimaginable scales. One view of the world is so overwhelmingly beautiful, the other is so overwhelmingly disgusting. My strong intuition is that these things - violent predation, extinction, parasitism, etc. - can have nothing whatsoever to do with the infinite goodness and love of God as described by Christian theology, but if so, here's the rub: How could such a God will anything but infinite goodness and love, since it is his essence? More specifically, since there would have been absolutely nothing hindering him from willing his essence infinitely at the outset of creation, why all the pain and death before the emergence of human beings? Or was there creaturely free will prior to humanity? Was there some sort of "angelic" fall which ultimately led to Lucifer and his ilk spoiling creation? In the end, I just don't know.

What I do know is that this is the only question that poses a challenge to my Christian faith, and that I'm surprised by the lack of thoughtful responses to this question.

Heady stuff and very much to the point.

The two main lines of response have been either that evolution is wrong or that animal suffering is not really "suffering" (or evil). I am inclined to the latter opinion, but I ultimately want to show how a deeper understanding of the dogma of Creation dissolves some of the tension. As I said in that thread:

As for natural evil and evolution, I think this thread needs a good dose of Fr. Keefe's eucharistic theology. According to Revelation, Creation is IN CHRIST and Christ is in the world IN THE EUCHARIST. The world of natural evolution is not "the real world," as some neutral canvas onto which the Incarnation was (much less eventually) spilled, but, in fact, the opposite is true: the Incarnation is the axis of creation and the Eucharist is the axis of redemption as a matter of spacetime reality. Cf. Scotus, St. Francis de Sales, and T. F. Torrance, et al. God willed to redeem the very world which seems unsightly to us in the very agency of His Son made manifest in the Eucharist in the eternal now. God did not will to undo or reverse the rough draft of evolved contingency as science describes it, but in fact to suspend that same order from the self-giving of His Son in the One Flesh at Calvary and at every Mass.

Even so, it must be asked: Is an African mantis "evil" for catching and consuming a field mouse? I should say not. To say it is "evil" or that the mouse's demise is "immoral," is grossly anthropomorphic. We might just as easily lament the death of a ripe gourd when it falls to the ground and ruptures. Animal suffering is a very slippery notion, and while I hardly wish to come off as a "clockwork Cartesian", I think the likes of Peter Singer's animal moralism is at the exact opposite extreme, and therefore just as untrue. A metaphorical hint of the good order, despite its mortal finitude, may be seen in the way certain Native Americans thanked the animals for their sacrifice of life to the nourishment of brother-man. Decomposition and change are integral to corporeality as we know it (and to art, for that matter), but I should say this hardly raises a moral objection to material finitude as such.

Not too surprisingly, this did not get a response from other readers (so far), so I added a few links to add fresh blood to the discussion:

"The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil"

"Darwinism, Animal Suffering and Theology"

Dr. William Lane Craig on Animal Suffering

"The carnivorous nature and suffering of animals"

"Creation, suffering and the problem of evil"

I then added:

To reiterate what I said about a "Keefian" reading of this dilemma, I would like to say again that "the good creation" is IN CHRIST and is to be judged by its pristine metaphysical origin in Him as the Creative Word, not on the basis of how much animal pain allegedly "preceded" Him. His immanence in the world suffuses all spacetime and is radically and wholly present in the Eucharist, which is itself the human mode of encountering creation, which is an eternally present act of the One God by the One Word in the One Flesh. The Triune Creator God is the same Triune God worshipped and received in the Eucharist. Christ was not "deployed" after a few million years to "rectify" the "horrors" God was "watching take place." Rather, the animal pain and entropy we are discussing is inscribed in the very Flesh of the Incarnate Word IN THE PRESENT IN EVERY EUCHARIST (which is of course one with Calvary AND with the descent of the Creative Spirit on a chaotic material world). His redemption informs the very world out of which, presumably, His earthly lineage/linemanets evolved, but at the same time, His divine power as the Logos grounds both the creation and redemption of that same world in one act of the One Flesh. That's awfully dense, I know, but, again, you can search my blog (Keefe, Keefian) for more details and, better yet, read Fr. Keefe's Covenantal Theology.

Another reader then asked two questions about specific problems in theistic evolution, to which I replied:

Without, alas, replying to your questions specifically or in any great detail, I want to present once more my Keefian-patristic "hermeutical" lens for all such questions. If we (all) don't get clear on our basic theological modus operandi, we're just talking past each other. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that…” heheh

The profoundest meaning of creation in Christian revelation is not that it is an autonomous canvas on which God creates the rest of the world (like an eternal chessboard with movable and interchangeable pieces), but that the Fall was a metaphysical dimension of the creation itself by the primal free defection of Adam, as the metaphysical prime analogate for all mankind (mankind which is, in turn, the microcosmal prime analogate of creation itself). Adam's nature was based on and active IN CHRIST and his sin was therefore against the Logos in the one creation wrought by that same Word. Original sin means that the same metaphysical, and therefore transtemporal, loss of beatitude is active in us in our very constitution, which is also rooted in Christ and thus also an (Adamic) deviation from Him. Hence, original sin is not so much a bill of goods we all sign when we are born, but more like a harmonic/holographic defect in our constitution which reverberates throughout our being and the rest of the world into/out-of which we are created.

The point is that the metaphysical order of Adam-in-Christ determines, in an omnitemporal, universal way, the whole scope of manifest activities in creation (i.e., the concrete horrors and woes we are discussing). You could loosely imagine the problem as being 'metaphysically retroactive', in the sense that Adam's corruption of creation, as its head, extended 'backward' from a metaphysical vantage/pivot point to corrupt all of creation in a secondarily temporal way. In the fundamentalist conception, Adam was created at time t1, fell at time t2, and then everything went to shit as we now know it (t2+n). But a theology cognizant of real archeology and basic biological exigencies (the like of which we are discussing), is enabled to see how the ugly pre-history of the world is a reflection of the immanent (not subsequent!) fallenness of creation in Adam-in-Christ. This does not mean that the Church waited for science to give it a sounder exegesis, but it does mean certain exegeses are much less viable insofar as theology seeks the harmony of all truth. Indeed, in a way, it took various sciences this long to catch up with the patristic, cosmic exegesis of creation, but that is a historical point. The philosophical-theological point of interest is that “the world as we know it”, in its temporal and biological lineaments, is but a function of the world as created in Christ and then corrupted by Adam in a timeless metaphysical ‘instant’. Had Adam not fallen ab origine (metaphysically, not temporally speaking), biological pre-history would indeed look like we seem to want it to look: idyllic and vegan. Since Adam’s fall reverberates in a (rectilinear) metaphysical way for all of creation, however, life history looks much more, well, fallen. This is not to collapse creation into redemption, but it is to find them both rooted in Christ and the primal “encounter” between mankind in Adam and Christ in Adam.

As you may know, I have written a fair share about Fr. Donald Keefe's Covenantal Theology over the years at FCA. If you'd like to read more, you can look at these search results for Keefe and Keefian in my archives here.

Worship is sacramental or it is not Christian worship...

"There is nothing in the New Testament understanding of our imaging of God which could justify the monadism we find in the notion of the imago Dei as the contemplative imaging of a monadic absolute, the Deus Unus. This notion of the imaging of God by man ... [is r]adically nonhistorical and Middle Platonic in its origins, [and] is saved for theological purposes only by the recognition, in Origen as in those who follow him, that the human imaging of God is fulfilled only in worship, although since Origen the worship has been conceived largely as contemplative, not as sacramental and historical."

-- Keefe, CT, v. 1, p. 356, n. 13

In non-Keefian terms, this passage demolishes the notion of someone being "spiritual but not religious," because literally every-thing in the world is rooted in the Eucharist; and because the Eucharist, in turn, is irreducibly sacramental (i.e., historical), everything in the Catholic life is irreducibly sacramental. This is why we must not trifle with liturgical worship but must see it as one of the primary ways that we "image" God.

Keefe was not a "traditionalist" but he does at times countersignal the cosmological flabbiness of what Vatican II officially taught, and gives no quarter to the immanentist excesses to which that Council's contested claims exploited.

Suffice to say that the obscurity, if not outright ignominy, of Keefe's genius is itself yet another argument against what post-Conciliar Catholicism has become. 

The present from the past in the future

Reading John Haught's God After Darwin, I have come back once again to the theology of history. This is because Haught makes repeated reference to a "metaphysics of the future" as a means not only of accommodating the neo-Darwinian "story" about the world, but in fact, ultimately and coherently explaining that story on theological grounds. In contrast to both a deterministic "metaphysics of the past" (e.g., materialism) and a static metaphysics of esse (being) (e.g., dehistoricized dualism-idealism qua escape from material reality), Haught argues that only a metaphysics of the future––a theology of hope––does justice to both the authentic biblical-prophetic vision, and the painful, erratic contingency of the neo-Darwinian story. Instead of seeing God as some static, otiose First Cause in the past, or as some impersonal ground of being behind or beneath every object, Haught argues we must see God as the Absolute Future, as the personal field of alluring potentiality that draws the world from its determined past and chaotic present into ever greater harmony. If the world is a mere sequelae of the past atomic state of affairs, or is simply a tiresome palimpsest veiling a deeper eternal reality, then the world as such is a distraction, a mere afterthought. If however the world is a genuine field of novelty and unheralded beauty, then life takes on greater meaning.

As a Thomist I am not entirely onboard with Haught's process, Teilhardian, Whiteheadian, Rahnerian zeal––in particular his offhand disdain for esse, since there must BE something which undergoes any process––because I think classical Thomism has tremendously deep resources for situating God as the intimate-immanent cause of the world, which both sustains and propels it in the same way Haught's Absolute Future does (cf. St Thomas' Fifth Way). I also find weak Haught's argument that, whereas an absolutist, presentist metaphysics motivates oppressive uniformity (presumably by rejecting 'elements' that bar a return to a once-perfect past), since it could just as easily be argued––and, if Marxism at play is any indication, be executed––that present elements must be excised as obstacles to attaining the great and happy someday future.

A major point on which I do concur with Haught, is his denial that there ever was a pristine past which we have fallen from as historical vagabonds. Instead, he argues, we are born into a world-condition that ineluctably leads to "fall backward" from our covenanted promise in God. Instead of having fallen down from a pristine Eden, we consistently fall back from, and retreat from, the future as the field of novelty and hope that God promises to us. In this light, Haught says, "Nature is essentially promise." By this he means that only the promised fullness of God's fecund futurity accounts for the genuine novelty in evolution and in the human spirit. Nature is not constituted exclusively by its past or its present but in fact is "faithfully" formed and potentially reformed by the ever-broadening field of the future in which God dwells. Indeed, insofar as the past is gone, and the present is always on its way out, the future is, biblically and phenomenologically, the most real and dynamic mode of temporal existence. Complexity theory and self-organization are indicators of the cosmic nisus––and I would say, telos––toward ever greater beauty. Insofar as beauty consists in the harmonious balance between disparate elements, even ugly on their own, the Darwinian saga is the canvas on which God allows nature, and mankind within her, to forge its own distinct, integral, free harmony of competing elements. If I begin writing a line of random scribbles on a paper, and then suddenly shift into writing a coherent sentence, two things have have happened. First, there has been no break in the physical, causal chain between the scribbling and the sentence. Second, order has emerged in a non-physical, but rather an informational, way. This is, analogously, how God brings order into the world, without imposing an extrinsic, causally disruptive order upon nature. Information is the "void" around which physical matter attains increasing complexity, as a window "forms" around the empty space in the wall. All this is so, because God, as self-emptying, self-restricting love, allows the world to "be" and become in its own properly natural way, and thus kenotically ratifies the metaphysical space in which the Darwinian saga has taken place.

Reading all this, I am immediately reminded of Fr. Keefe's great work on the theology of history, Covenantal Theology. I think Keefe's work offers Haught a much deeper grounding in the Catholic tradition by showing how the myth of a perfect Eden-cosmos must defer to the truth that creation only exists IN CHRIST. Keefe, like Haught, assaults the millennium-old obsession with a cosmic order apart from God-in-Christ, an order that terminates in either meaningless necessity, or meaningless chaos. For my own part, I would say, anagogically speaking, that a trinitarian schema for analyzing history is such: the Father is the past, the source of ultimate origin; the Son is the present, the source of incarnate divine kenosis; and the Spirit is the future, the source of promise on Whom we always wait for more, more both from the Father's eternal wisdom and from the Son's sacramentally immanent solidarity with us as Theandros.

Good God, man! Good God-Man!

The following was inspired by a thread at Just Thomism concerning James Chastek's post there about atheism and the idea of a good God. Chastek writes:

Let's face it, the claim that God is a loving father to the whole world is a Christian claim. Both authors above are therefore critiquing a Christian claim, but they sever it from its Christian basis and tie it to an interpretation that is downright silly. The Christian argument for the divine love is well known. Finish the following sentences: "God so loved the world that _____" or "Greater love hath no man than that ____". If you are Heather Mac Donald, you fill in the blank with "he attends on us", if you are Medawar, you fill it in with "he looks after small children as a doting schoolteacher". Having written in an obviously ridiculous answer they then- quite reasonably- call the answer ridiculous, and then (of course) see no evidence for it. ... The Christian claim for the fatherly love of God is based on faith. If it is by faith that we hold that God became man, then it is by faith that we hold that God became man to die out of love for us, in order that we might saved.

An atheist named Ben critcized this post for the error he sees endemic in Christianity, namely, that of setting low standards for God's love and then claiming His actions raise no "problem of evil".

It seems to me, however, that what is happening in the thread is the perennial mistake of subsuming God and His creatures under some idealized rubric of categories. This is the presumption of an a-Christological worldview. The key premise for Ben, it seems, is the moral primacy of "individual autonomy." Unfortunately, however, this relies on an assumption that "individuality" not only is coherent per se (which I deny) but also presides over God and creatures univocally. Likewise it is assumed that there is some highest standard of goodness, to which both God and man must submit.

But the Catholic protest to all such pagan "subsumption" is simply the Eucharist. In the Eucharist alone do we find our canon of humanity and divine goodness. In Chrsit alone, as He is truly given to us in the divine litrugy, we find all the treasures of wisdom and goodness. The Eucharist, which is one with the Cross, is not something that happens in some larger "given" field of being (viz., the supposedly "neutral" universe as such), but something which simultaneously grounds creation as stemming from the Father in the Son by the Holy Spirit and elevates it to the same divine persons in common. Ontologically, Christ Incarnate is the basis for there being individual humans at all. Only insofar as a creation suitable for humans is ratified and redeemed in His Incarnation (made present historically and concretely in the Eucharist), can we fathom the creation of humans. Christ partakes of our humanness, not as if it were some antecedent metaphysical category limiting God, but as the ordained pattern for our existence. Thus, our humanity becomes the means by which we find (or lose) God. It is not that Christ partook of humanity qua ideal form, but that humanity is privileged to exist actually by participation in the kenotic glory of Christ Incarnate. God did not look ahead and see "humanity," and then decide that was a fitting way for us to know and love Him. Quite the contrary: He looked ahead at a myriad of ways in which creatures might reflect and share in His goodness, and decided "humanity" was a fitting way for that self-diffusion to happen. Christ is not to be measured by His likeness to our instinct for "the good man," for we are human only insofar as we possess a likeness to Him as the Suffering Servant.

This shows us that our canon for good human conduct is to be patterned after gratuitous suffering on behalf of others who can give us nothing in return. This is precisely why much of "being human" means enduring life for the good of future generations and people we don't even know. This impulse in humans to keep living and to "make things better" is but an analogical reflection of Christ’s own preeminent one-way kenosis on our behalf. As long as the standard for "good conduct" is reified anonymously and pitted against God-in-Christ, the atheist critic is simply not engaging the Catholic Church’s own claims about good and evil. This, I believe, is James Chastek's point. Precisely in the intersection of the gratuitous existence of the world (i.e., nothing need have been the case apart from God) and the gratuitous suffering we can offer for others, we find a clue to the mystery of evil. Ezekiel denies a man will be punished individually for the individual sins of another, but unfortunately, no one exists individually. We exist collectively, derivatively, as members of the human race. Hence, we can individually experience the collective evils of our race, as well as individually add to them. So, if we desire to exist as humans, we have no choice but to exist as the heirs of concrete humans before us. This, of course, entails inheriting humanity from them as much as inheriting the woes of sin. Certainly, if God wanted to "dote on" us individually, so that we would never experience the rotten fruit of our ancestors, He could—namely, by not creating us as humans. We are not punished for the sins of others, but we are subject to the punishments given to others insofar as others are the ontological and psychological basis for our particular humanity.

Along many of the above lines, I highly recommend the reading of Michael Liccione's essays, "Mystery and Explanation in Aquinas's Account of Creation" and "The Problems of Evil" and a reading of Donald Keefe's Covenantal Theology and his other writings on creation, theology of history, and the Eucharist. (John Kelleher has good introductory materials to Keefe's work. Also, Fr. David Meconi, SJ [PDF!], has a good essay on Keefe's theology of history, but it seems to be offline. I have a copy on my computer, which I can send to those who request it.)

Lastly, as for Max Tegmark's surd-omniverse, which Ben cited as a coherent naturalistic explanation of existence, I must interject: if it a) is mathematically-axiomatically formalizable and b) claims to provide a necessarily true description of the physical universe, it is subject to Gödel's incompleteness theorems, and is therefore not necessarily true. Further, insofar as it purports to be a scientific theory, it needs empirical backing. Suffice to say, the empirical backing for the unified existence of every logically possible state of affairs (SoA) is not only slim but also asymptotically hard to come by.

I have to wonder: surely "a purely possible state of affairs" is logically coherent, but can such a SoA be said to exist in Tegmark-space? Likewise: surely "a metaphysically simple cosmos with no parallel universes or alternative modes of being" is logically coherent, but can such a SoA be said to exist in Tegmark-space?

The form of the times…

This week I have been reading through the notes (231 pages of a 784-page book) of Fr. Keefe's profound, and in fact beautiful, Covenantal Theology: The Eucharistic Order of History, and so the theology and philosophy of history have been on my mind with renewed depth.

Yesterday morning, while monitoring a test, I was reading Fr. Copleston's On the History of Philosophy. Copleston was addressing the matter of historical divisions in the telling of philosophy (e.g., classical, medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, modern, etc.). Then I focused on the concept of centuries, as in, 12th-century scholasticism, 17th-century rationalism, 19th-century naturalism, etc. And then, recalling my recent post about the immaterial, transcendent existence of the past and future as an analogy for grasping the existence of God, I was exploded with a question (or a cognate questions):

Do time periods exist? In what sense can we say centuries exist?

I tried to handle the question with my standard metaphysical apparatus: Platonism and Aristotelianism. I'm a hoary onto-realist so I am less inclined to approach things in a purely linguistic way, an approach that might just say "centuries" exist only insofar as we utter the word and refer it to a congeries of concrete past events. It struck me that the existence of time periods is much like the problem of "Plato's beard".

Plato's beard is a term that, I believe, W.V.O. Quine coined in 1948. It centers on the following question:

"Non-being must in some sense be, otherwise what is that there is not? If we say of something that it does not exist, then something exists, otherwise what is the "it" that does not exist? Quine says, "This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor."
(See Quine's 1948 essay "On What There Is," in From a Logical Point of View, Harvard University Press.)

Plato never had a beard, but precisely in saying, "There is no such thing as Plato's beard," we are asserting something about something that allegedly does not exist. By our assertion, however, we implicitly "summon" a non-existent into existence.

In any event, this is how the nature of time-period existence struck me: Is it a verbal illusion? Does "Plato's era" exist only as fictively as "Plato's beard"?

I ended up pondering how a Platonist might answer that question. In Platonism, all existence entities participate in a proper (immaterial) Form. Red cars participate in the Form "Redness", as do all red things. The Form is that which constitutes one entity as it exists.

But can this thinking be reasonably applied to "things" like centuries? Is there a Form called "the 19th century"? I can scarcely conceive of such a thing. Presumably this "19th century" Form would be commonly participable in all events and entities that took place in what we call "the 19th century". Is there really an immaterial, perfect Form of the 19th century, such that all actual "members" of that century-set are but imperfect instantiations of pure "19th-centuryness"?

This strikes me as absurd, primarily because the very nature of history intuitively demands the ontological primacy of real existents over temporal classification. It is not "19th-centuryness" that constituted Heinrich Heine and Sören Kierkegaard as 19th-century thinkers, but the opposite: the "texture" of the 19th century is woven of the "threads" of real people which give the 19th century its manifold, Heinean, Kierkegaardian, etc., character.

I also tried to view centuries as perdurantist trans-persons, perdurantism (PER) being the view that objects have not only length, width, and height, but also time (i.e., objects are discretely 4-dimensional). This means there is really an infinite "stack" or "deck" of time-slices that make up a person. At any time, t, an object or person can be identified based on its spatial characteristics at that time. There was never a single, substantially whole Elvis; there was only the set of time-slices with his actual spatiotemporal characteristics. ("Ah'm all sliced up, uh-huh!")

While PER does have a pre-Einsteinian pedigree (e.g., in the theology of Jonathan Edwards), I think PER's vagrant appeal these days comes from its prima facie "scientific" character, with its impressive emphasis on 4-D spacetime, but in fact it puts the cart before the horse. While it is true that each material entity has 4-D traits, this is no grounds for saying objects only have 4-D traits. The missing element in PER is a substantial reference point for all the time-slices. What makes them hang together as a supposedly stacked-as-one person or object? Hence, I am willing to affirm PER in a material but not a formal sense. Formal PER assumes the easy existence of objects it subjects to slicing into quasi-objects, while material PER only recognizes the spatiotemporal dimensions of substantially whole entities. Sounds like a distinction without a difference, perhaps, but the point is that while both formal and material PER start with formally whole entities, formal PER ends up with sliced cheese, while material PER ends up with melted cheese. Sliced cheese can be measured but not re-conjoined; melted cheese can be quantifiably analyzed while still going back together again as a formal unity.

Being an endurantist, I also think PER is neurologically incoherent, insofar as there is a threshold beneath which the brain cannot sustain a coherent thought. Since spacetime is infinitely divisible, any of the sub-threshold spacetime-slices would be unconscious, and therefore no one can even be said to espouse PER, since even the neurological capacity for thought is dissolved by PER. The same salad-shooter problem goes for speech acts; they can never be said to accomplish a complete articulation of PER, since every time-slice of that hypothetically larger whole speech act is the merest audible blip. This means that PER is bound to limit its ontological slicing, in some cases, to pragmatic thresholds. But surely if PER is true, it should be true at any time, however long or short. Presumably, PER would also imagine the entire world as contiguous time-slices, each time-slice being described by the whole complex of spatial traits (including you, me, Elvis, and every other "thing"). Saving the phenomena has never been so cataclysmic. The one (world) is the victim of the (infinitely) many.

So, on this view, a century would be a stack of events cum persons. Assuming a perdurantist analysis of events and persons is coherent (which I deny, except for commonsense material PER), centuries would be a stack of time slices whose traits are the people and things that inhabited those slices up and down the line between calendar points. Persons and events are to centuries what length, height, and width are to lesser entities.

In any case, to leave PER behind, the same kind of trouble seems to lie in wait for Platonism. Assuming we view centuries as substantial, formal wholes, what dictates each century begins and ends when it does? What happens to a century's formal basis if the calendar is altered or remade, and the current century never reaches a hundred years? It is not, by definition, a CENTury, yet prior to calendar changes was a century. I think the idea of degraded participation will not work for temporal entities, meaning, while Platonist can say a chair only imperfectly instantiates the Form "Chair", and while its deterioration of over time, or its being damaged and altered, only mark its progressive fall from Formal perfection in this fallen world, I don't see how this helps talk about seconds, minutes, days, months, years, centuries, and so on. A second cannot exist except as exactly and perfectly what it is: one second. As soon as it is marked as "fallen from Secondness," it is not an imperfect second, since a sub-second is not a second. It might as well be said a second is only partial, imperfect Minute. But then, why is a chair not a partial, imperfect KTV lounge? The imperfection of temporal entities is incoherent in Platonism because, first, temporal entities are purely quantitative and therefore exist formally wholly or not at all, and, second, the entire premise behind Platonic talk of a superlunary World of Forms is that that realm is timeless. Hence, the very perfection of Platonic Heaven has no place for time, since time is the condition that allows us sublunary mortals to note and assess objects' distance from the Forms.

All the same, I welcome informed Platonists to offer me light on this subject. I am utterly ignorant of how Plato deals with time, so maybe there is a hallowed Platonic treatment of all this I just don't know about.

What I will say in (current) conclusion, is that the train of thought I have slowly internalized––nay, struggled to internalize––in Fr. Keefe's Covenantal Theology, leads me to offer the following analysis of the existence of centuries, months, etc.

Insofar as all history, indeed, the whole cosmos, is coherently integrated (including its fallen tensions both away from and back to "the city of God") only by the Eucharistic Event in worship (and the human responses to that historically transcendent-because-so-immanent Event), our historical categories (divisions) are just freely (but not meaninglessly) apportioned dimensions of the one coherent response to that Event.

I realize that, without having Keefe's book, what I just said is probably all just pops and buzzes. So, let me pare it down: Historical reality is a coherent unity not on account of some higher logic (à la the Forms or Plotinian emanations), nor by meaningless constructions about it, but only as it is ordered as an anamnesis and prolepsis to truth that is concretely and freely (because historically) signed in the present as offering. Hence, while is there no cosmic rationality behind creation that necessarily demands or explains the goodness of creation and redemption, this is not to say there is no meaningful explanation for them as gratuitously established by God. The Incarnation did not HAVE TO happen; but because it has happened, all of time and space find a unifying principle––a focal center––in the Event of the Sacrifice (which is substantially present as one at Calvary and in the Mass). There are no immanent principles in or behind nature that order it as a meaningful whole; its wholeness exists only because there is a Lord freely immanent in history. The nature of history is essentially free, and vice versa. History NEED not have taken place the way it has. So, even though there are no "higher" laws of history (à la Vico, Marx, Toynbee, et al.), nor any rationally necessary logical "structure" behind history, there is an immanent order in history just by virtue of the presence of Christ as the Lord of history in the His One Sacrifice for all times. This Event is the form that integrates and articulates the bare matter of history. Some thinkers would see a connection here between Kähler's, Bultmann's Perrin's, et al., distinction between Geschichte and Historie (i.e., the narratively coherent past and sheer past facts), but Keefe does not use those terms.

So, while there is no inherent logic or metaphysical necessity that grounds centuries as calendric realities, there are pertinent facts of history which order our very sense and handling of time, and thus, far from making history a construct imposed from outside on extra-historical grounds, allows history to be one based on fully historical realities. Centuries thus exist only in subsistent (but not necessary, because free) connection with the entire spacetime configuration of the world when/as the Eucharistic Lord is accepted or rejected. They are, like anything else, neither necessary nor, for that reason, meaningless. Because the Eucharist is the "prime analogate" of history (and being), and because it only takes place in history, an ordered conformation to its freely disclosed and freely appropriated structure integrates history in the same way each Mass is a whole. Synaxis, anamnesis, epiclesis, anaphora, doxology, prolepsis––these liturgical "periods" are the analogates that ground our entire sense of historical periods themselves. History is an icon of the triune Event of the One Sacrifice, or it is nothing at all, being either a deformation of a "higher order" from which we must escape or an incoherent bedlam of intrinsically unrelated starts and stops. The Augustinian (and thus once largely Western) tripartite understanding of man as the imago Dei/Trinitas in memoria, intellectus, and amor only holds good when these three substantially faculties "circumincessionally" unite in the act of worship under their prime analogates, sacramentum tantum ("sacrament itself", the Cross), res et sacramentum ("thing and sacrament", the Eucharistic species as the present Lord), and res tantum ("thing itself", the glory of the Kingdom).

Recently Mike Liccione wrote a post called "Chaos or kairos?" which ties in with some of my point. Aside from saying I think Mike's statements can stand to become even deeper with a more Eucharistic focus, I will give him the last word:

I think there is meaning to be found in the calendar year, and therefore to its end. The meaning comes through the relation of the calendar year to the meaning of other, overlapping years. … As a kid, I did not understand why there were so many different "years" that did not begin at the same time as each other. The school year began in September; the liturgical year began in early December; the fiscal year for the organizations my father worked for usually began in July. And then there was the calendar year, which people pretended was the "real" year but which bore little relation to the actual rhythms of their lives. … to appreciate the essentially religious notion of kairos, that of a specially significant or appointed time, as distinct from chronos, that of clock and calendar time. I was enabled to understand that God's time, sacred time, was not the same as either natural time or human time, but overlapped and interpenetrated both. The temporal rhythms of nature, those of the seasons and agriculture, signify the deaths and rebirths we must undergo so as to grow spiritually; and each highlight of the liturgical year bears an obvious relationship to the seasons. But the plasticity of time in human hands, though limited, also signified to me that we are not limited to nature in how we appropriate spirit. We are of nature, but destined beyond nature.

Homo sapiens darwinus

[The term above has apparently been used by a Professor Fox, but in the sense of a superior, genetically "pure" species of homo sapiens, which is not how I am using the term.]

The title is the name I give, ex hypothesi et arguendo, to humans living in what Keith Stanovich calls the Age of Darwin. This is our age. It is the age in which Darwin's breakthrough has finally begun manifesting its deepest implications and broadest applications in society at large. It is the age in which arguing against Darwin, other than in order to refine his basic theory, is to assume a huge burden of proof and to hear in reply, "Adversus solum ne loquitor."

All I will say, now, about this sea change, as Stanovich would have it, is this:

The universalization of genetics (i.e., "geneticism") has merely biologized the dogma of original sin.

As you walk through any shop or on any street, the people you see may appear (phenotypically) fine and dandy. But what we know of genetics is that, in fact, lurking deep within, on the helical tracks of their very being, there could be any number of genetic disorders waiting to manifest. Everyone is, knowingly or unknowingly, the victim of a great fall from genetic purity and it is only a matter of time until the effects become apparent. Further, this primal corruption, which subjects the individual to the uncaring, unceasing vagaries of selfish nature, is transmitted by propagation, not by imitation (as at Trent, "... hoc Adae peccatum, quod origine unum est et propagatione, non imitatione tranfusum omnibus...."). No matter how virtuous or "integrated" a person may seem, the fact is, in the aetas Darwinum, they are corrupt, like everyone else.

What this shift indicates, of course, is a total demoralization of what the doctrine of the Fall means. Fr. Keefe, in volume 1 of Covenantal Theology, makes this point very clear. If the Fall is not seen as a radically moral, and therefore radically free, occurrence ,it loses its intrinsic intelligibility. The biologization of our fallenness then is but one indication of the intrinsically anti-freedom and amoral dynamic of our age. Our biological fallenness seems as chilling and alienating as any skewed version of the Fall. For unless Adam is seen as our metaphysical, and not necessarily temporal, head, humanity is just as subject to a temporal (i.e., amoral) necessitarianism as a biological one. What Adam did in his own time, a moment integrally coterminous with the Event of Creation, is the metaphysical basis for our own fallenness. His fall is ours, and vice versa, synchronically, and we can see this fallen link in the course of historically discrete diachronic consequences.

[P.S. I make no claims for the quality of my Latin. I use it for my own edification and I misue it, I appreciate being told how to correct it. Also, as the Solemnity of our Lady's Assumption was this week, I hope I can soon post a few thought from Fr. Keefe on that event.]

The Eastern Orthodox Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, Part 2

"[The first part of this study] deals with the first known use of this title [viz., Mary as "prepurified"] during the patristic era, that of St. Gregory Nazianzen (c. 329 – c. 390), the Theologian. The teaching of St. Gregory on this title, clearly an immaculist one, was kept alive by many representatives of Byzantine theology during the medieval period. On this tradition depends the considerably more detailed exposition of the title in an immaculist sense by St. John Damascene (c. 675 – 749). His teaching on this title has notable links with St. Maximus Confessor and the Third Council of Constantinople (680) where the title appears to be a part of the ordinary Magisterium of the Church.* 

I am extremely eager to explore this last claim, and I think Fr. Kappes elaborates on it in this 2016 lecture, which I shall address in a separate post.

As a disciple of Scotus, the Martyr of Charity [viz., St. Maximilian M. Kolbe] stresses not only the "negative" definition of the Immaculate Conception: preserved from all stain of original sin from the first moment of conception, but more so the "positive" in pointing out how the name of Immaculate Conception is name of both the Mother of God and of the Holy Spirit, respectively the created and uncreated Immaculate Conception. This perfect union of wills: divine and human, in the Mother of God and of the Church through the operation of the Holy Spirit, makes possible that mysterious, maternal mediation by which the disjunctive transcendentals: infinite and finite, uncreated and created, are united in the Person of the Incarnate Word. This union, through the maternal mediation of the Immaculate, makes possible a sharing in the divine life of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, for those incorporated into the mystical Body of Christ by Baptism.* 

This latter synthesis is not only breathtaking in its own right, but resonates strongly with prior research I was conducting based on Fr. Donald J. Keefe's magnum opus, Covenantal Theology [also here, here, etc.]. As part of a large, ongoing "ressourcement" of books and research interests I engaged as far back as my college days, I look forward to seeing how much overlap there is indeed between "maternal mediation" of the "disjunctive tranascendentals" in Fr. Kappes's work and the theme of "One Flesh " (mia sarx) in Fr. Keefe's.

* from Fr. Peter Fehlner's preface to Fr. Kappes's The Immaculate Conception, pp. xviii-xx.