The first book-length study of Schindler’s thought, Being Holy in the World explores Schindler’s Trinitarian theology, ecclesiology, anthropology, and metaphysics in the context of the encounter between Christianity and contemporary culture.
The first book-length study of Schindler’s thought, Being Holy in the World explores Schindler’s Trinitarian theology, ecclesiology, anthropology, and metaphysics in the context of the encounter between Christianity and contemporary culture.
Being Holy in the World: Theology and Culture in the Thought of David L. Schindler
320
Being Holy in the World: Theology and Culture in the Thought of David L. Schindler
320Paperback
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Overview
The first book-length study of Schindler’s thought, Being Holy in the World explores Schindler’s Trinitarian theology, ecclesiology, anthropology, and metaphysics in the context of the encounter between Christianity and contemporary culture.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802865540 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Eerdmans, William B. Publishing Company |
| Publication date: | 06/10/2011 |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
D. C. Schindler is associate professor of philosophy at Villanova University. His books include Plato's Critique of Impure Reason: On Truth and Goodness in the Republic.
Read an Excerpt
Being Holy in the World
Theology and Culture in the Thought of David L. SchindlerWilliam B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Copyright © 2011 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8028-6554-0
Chapter One
Beauty and the Holiness of MindD. C. Schindler
I. Introduction
The call to holiness comprehends the order of being in its entirety. At the heart of David L. Schindler's exploration of the intersection of the theological and secular orders — being holy in the world — lies a particular interpretation of the nature of logos, in both its subjective dimension (as reason) and its objective dimension (as intelligible structure). All thought and action are mediated by a particular conception of order. If the conception of order is inadequate, then no matter how sincere or well-meaning one might be in one's efforts to evangelize culture, those efforts will in profound and — therefore — subtle ways betray just what they seek to promote. If the conception of order is inadequate, then the various institutions — the academy; economic, social, or political forms; the work of science and medicine — that are founded on that conception will foster a problematic mode of being regardless of the intentions, attitudes, and ideas of those who participate in the institutions.
To affirm this, of course, immediately raises the question, adequate according to what measure? And responding to this question returns us again to the center: the conception of order, the nature of logos must be adequate (both subjectively and objectively) to the love of the Father, as revealed in Jesus Christ, but must be adequate to that love in its most fundamental reality, namely, to love understood simultaneously in terms of the drama of the Trinitarian life of God and in its ontological depths as expressing the ultimate meaning of being. The insistence on logos as central is, in short, precisely what allows the Christian claim to be genuinely comprehensive; or, in other words, it is indispensable for keeping those claims from becoming literally superficial — i.e., remaining on the surface of things — no matter how enthusiastically the claims may be lived out. If Christianity is itself a logos, and indeed the ultimate form-giving logos of all worldly logoi, it bears simultaneously on the form and content of what individuals think and do and also on the shape of the horizon in reference to which that thought and action understand themselves; it therefore has an essentially public or political dimension as well as a metaphysical and indeed a physical dimension. This latter dimension is perhaps the neuralgic center in Schindler's position: not because the physical aspect of reality is the most important (for of course it is not) but because, if we do not see that the Christian logos transforms what we commonly mean by time, space, matter, and motion, we will not in fact be receiving it as a logos, but rather as a moral inspiration or isolated and so inconsequential truth claim.
I wish to propose in the following essay that there is a unity to the wide-ranging themes in Schindler's work up to this point. His well-known criticisms of liberalism, of the Catholic Common Ground project, of stem cell research, of fragmentation in the academic disciplines, of neoconservative politics and economics, of feminism, of the "American" style of religion, of secularism in the academy, of the neo-Thomist separation of grace and nature, of the objectivity claimed in "scientific" methodologies, of John Courtney Murray's conception of religious freedom, of traditional "substance" metaphysics, and so forth — for all of the integrity each of these themes possesses in its own right and the sets of problems and concerns that belong properly to each — arguably all turn on a single issue, namely, the failure to take seriously the implications of Christianity as a logos. Though there would be a number of ways of articulating this particular issue, and any number of ways of entering into the problematic it implies, I intend here to engage it in terms of the sanctity of the intellect, for two reasons: first, it allows us clearly to see the connection between Schindler's earliest work on theories of knowledge and the most recent criticisms of embryonic stem cell research, and, second, because inquiring into the relation between two terms that on their face seem to represent radically different orders — the order of the good (holiness) and the order of the true (mind) — brings us directly to the nub of the matter. I intend to show why beauty holds such significance for Schindler's Catholic critique of liberalism: the primacy of beauty is what ensures the integration of the orders of the true and the good, and therefore what makes clear and effective the comprehensive logos-character of Christianity, a comprehensiveness that liberalism systematically, if unwittingly, denies.
Schindler's thesis regarding the intellect can be stated in a straightforward way: to be truly Catholic, the mind must adopt and adapt itself to the form of holiness, not only in its moral activity, but first of all in its logic, i.e., in the conception of order that it presupposes in all of its deliberate acts, the conception that represents, as it were, the medium through which it engages all of its activities; and this logic of holiness requires the integration of the orders of the true and the good, an integration expressed by beauty. While it may seem to address a strictly "academic" issue, this thesis has deep and wide cultural implications. In order to feel its proper weight, it is best to view the thesis as the culmination of a particular line of inquiry, the development of a particular idea. To this end, instead of simply presenting the thesis, we will begin by gathering up the earliest threads of Schindler's reflection as it grew. We will first look at the critique of simple identity in his doctoral dissertation and show how this critique informs a theme underlying all of his work, namely, how to conceive a relation that avoids both assimilation (monism) and separation (dualism). Next, we will present the implications of this view of relation for the structure and operation of intellect with the aim of showing the significance of beauty. Finally, we will suggest how the holiness of mind illuminates other cultural questions and will consider some of its general implications. Along the way, we will try to point out a development of his thought that moves from the more abstract language of metaphysics to the concrete theological language of love, as well as the fundamental continuity that persists through all the developments.
II. Being in Relation
In the address to students that he gave when joining the Great Books faculty of the University of Notre Dame in 1979, Schindler explained that his intellectual autobiography began with a question that arose after high school as he moved away from home for the first time and became aware of the difference between the values and ideas he had formed and those of other people with different backgrounds: How can we know whether the particular judgments we make, which seem to be determined to a great extent by the contingency of the particular circumstances into which each of us is born, are true in a way that transcends their particularity? In other words, are all judgments simply relative, are they simply the products of the unique historical situation in which each of us finds himself? This question matured into a more general question concerning the rationality of Christianity, to which a baptized Catholic is committed, as it were, from birth and thus before deliberately choosing it, and it eventually became the background question for Schindler's dissertation in the philosophy of religion: Can philosophy be Christian, and thus in some respect committed to particular truths prior to the final verification of those truths by critical reason, on reason's terms, without betraying its claim to universal rationality, which means of course betraying its claims to be philosophy at all in a rigorous sense?
The dissertation is called "Knowing as Synthesis: A Metaphysical Prolegomenon to Critical Christian Philosophy," and, as the title suggests, it engages the question at a general metaphysical level by addressing the specific issue of Christianity: What significance does history, and the ongoing movement of difference it entails, have for the identity that founds meaning? If it can be shown that real identities are always-already "shot through" with difference without this internal penetration compromising either their metaphysical integrity as identities or their intelligibility, so much so that the methodological failure to attend to the inherence of difference in identity necessarily implies a systematic falsification of reality, no matter how imperceptible that falsification may be in certain, relatively abstract contexts, then it follows that the a priori significance of history that is explicitly acknowledged in Christian faith — in, for example, the historically revealed dogmas that make an authoritative claim on the believer — is not in principle any less rational than the usually implicit a priori significance of history in all other philosophical thinking, without exception. It is, in other words, true that Christianity implies rational reflection within, and pervaded by, pre-critical commitments, but the same can and must be said about all reflection, even the putatively most critical. If this is the case, then the commonly seen endeavor to "bracket out" Christianity from one's thinking or one's formation of and participation in cultural institutions (with the intention, of course, of reintroducing it at the appropriate moment, namely, when moral questions come to the fore) betrays at once a false understanding of Christianity and a false understanding of understanding. What is particularly remarkable here, though Schindler does not draw the inference himself in his dissertation, is that, precisely because of its explicitly embraced embeddedness within tradition and history, an embeddedness that arises from the movement of the Incarnation that founds meaning, and so does not in any sense compromise the universality of its scope, Christianity proves to be, not just one instance of pre-critical commitment among others intrinsic to rational thought, and therefore, as it were, "rationally justifiable" — which would seem to imply that Christianity is thus measured and judged by, i.e., "redeemed" by, a general idea that is more fundamental than it — but instead presents itself as the paradigm of rationality.
The principal metaphysical foundation of the argument he develops in the dissertation comes most directly from the "rediscovery" of the meaning of being as "super-formal" actuality in the existential Thomism of Étienne Gilson (and to a certain extent Frederick Wilhelmsen). In contrast to the identification of being and form in Aristotle, and, we might add, in Plato, albeit in a different sense, Aquinas affirms a new sense of being in the light of the doctrine of creation, namely, "existential" being — or, as Schindler writes it here, "be-ing," the act of "to be." The implications of this new sense of being are literally endless. If form, and the intelligible identity it specifies, accounts for the whole of reality, then whatever lies beyond identical form strictly speaking does not exist. It would follow in this case that difference is unreal. Now, one might argue that there is no need to affirm the reality of difference qua difference if it is true that all difference, all novelty and history, is ultimately the addition of some new form, and thus can be adequately accounted for at the formal level. But accepting this objection would, among other things, commit one to what Schindler calls here a purely "analytical" view of reality: all things would then be reducible to the sum of the formal identities that constitute them, identities, moreover, that have their being precisely in not being what is other than they, and therefore have their meaning in isolation from, or indeed in logical opposition to, everything else. If this is the case, then there is no concretely existing thing that is not better understood once it is boiled down to its abstract forms considered separately, which amounts indeed to saying that concrete things do not in fact ultimately exist as such, and there is in the end no universe, strictly speaking, insofar as a universe is a unified whole, but only an endless series of finite, isolated forms. The result, in short, is chaos and fragmentation.
Schindler affirms, by contrast, that, if the primary sense of being is an act-uality that lies beyond the intelligible act designated by form, then it does not itself stand in logical opposition to the difference that is other than formal identity. It is not possible, in the present context, to follow the dissertation through its unfolding of the implications — and it ought to be noted that the dissertation is an extraordinarily powerful example of the faithful thinking through of the metaphysical foundations of cultural questions — but we can at least touch on some of the immediate consequences in view of ideas Schindler develops later. We will consider four.
In the first place, we see that this approach implies a sense of being that is inexorably concrete and inescapably analogical. If be-ing transcends identical act, it cannot itself be reduced to a formal identity that would distinguish it from difference. Be-ing cannot, that is, be identified with the synthesis of identity and difference without surrendering its actually synthetic (i.e., real) character. Instead, it is, so to speak, as different as it is identical; it is simultaneously the ground of all identity and difference. At the same time, and for the same reason, we must affirm that the meaning of being transcends time even while it is permeated through and through by history. It is the simultaneity of identity and difference, according to Schindler, that accounts for Aquinas's paradoxical assertion that esse is both what is most universal and what is most unique to each thing. The theme of analogy — which, as Schindler regularly cites from the Fourth Lateran Council, designates an ever greater difference within unity in the world's relation to God — stems from the reality of supra-formal being, as he developed this in the dissertation.
Second, this reality necessarily entails a method: in other words, we entirely misread its implications if we reduce it simply to a new content, a new idea, rather than recognizing how it also "trans-forms" the form or method of thinking. To see this as merely a new content would be in fact to identify being, i.e., to equate being with a particular identity or form, and thereby to undermine exactly what one means to affirm. This point, it seems to me, is one of the most critical, for it protects against what is no doubt one of the most common misunderstandings of Schindler's critique of "substance" metaphysics: the attribution of reality to difference in identity in a formal way, i.e., an identical way, which means taking difference to be another identity within identity, and thus to be always in competition with it. In order to avoid this attribution, it is necessary to think identity instead concretely, and therefore to allow difference to be inherent within identity in precisely a non-identical or non-formal way. Form, in other words, can be inwardly pervaded by what is different from it, form can exist historically, only if being is itself more than simple form. To put it yet another way, only concrete form can have an interiority — be able to relate to what is different in something other than an extrinsic way — and only the primacy of existential being allows us to understand form concretely. We may thus see the intelligible integrity of form as always subsistent within difference; identity and difference need not be opposed to one another in a dialectical way.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Being Holy in the World Copyright © 2011 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. . Excerpted by permission of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Abbreviations vii
Introduction xi
I
Beauty and the Holiness of Mind D. C. Schindler 3
Trinity and Creation David L. Schindler and the Catholic Tradition Peter J. Casarella 30
Theology and Culture Tracey Rowland 55
II
Praeambula fidei: David L. Schindler and the Debate over "Christian Philosophy" Nicholas J. Healy 89
"Constitutive Relations": Toward a Spiritual Reading of Physis Adrian J. Walker 123
Beyond Mechanism: The Cosmological Significance of David L. Schindler's Communio Ontology Michael Hanby 162
III
David L. Schindler and the Order of Modernity: Toward a Working Definition of Liberalism Larry S. Chapp Rodney A. Howsare 193
A Balthasarian Theological Economics: Making Sense of David L. Schindler's Happy Baker D. Stephen Long 213
Freedom, Biologism, and the Body as Visible Order David S. Crawford 232
Donum Doni: An Approach to a Theology of Gift Antonio López, F.S.C.B. 252
The Marian Dimension of Existence Stratford Caldecott 281
Works David L. Schindler 295
List of Contributors 300