St. Augustine, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Formal Indication
A probing of James K.A. Smith's model of "incarnational semiotics."
Postmodernism has a very poor reputation, especially among those that identify as “conservative.” By the likes of Jordan Peterson and Christian figures such as J.P. Moreland this philosophy is often correlated with “icky yucky leftist academicism.” I definitely think there’s a warrant to this, but a very qualified warrant. The reason I believe that (now) comes down to a study I’ve made considerable progress on, but would consider ongoing (there’s so much to read about this), which is into postmodern theology. I’ve come out of it realizing that so much of what’s been popularly received about postmodernism is incorrect, which wasn’t too hard of a realization for me as I’ve learned that lesson in many other areas (part and parcel of the democratic idol of “education”). Now, the conception of postmodernism is still yucky and icky, and, yeah, there are genuine appropriations of Derrida and Lyotard and Baudrillard which are leftist, but what I learned was (1) how many such misappropriations get the basics wrong about what poststructuralism or deconstruction (less sloganeered terms that “postmodernism” can be broken down into) reveal, and (2) how postmodern theory in se is not strictly pro-Marxist (indeed, Lyotard’s “incredulity toward metanarratives” explicitly condemns Marxism as a metanarrative).1 The findings all have very relevant and sincere implications for advanced orthodox Christian theology, as I’ve observed from reading through the advanced levels of Christian postmodern theology.
One particularly fascinating avenue of postmodern theology I’ve chased down, especially as mediated by the “Radical Orthodoxy” school,2 is that a significant degree of postmodern theologians, and even the (more) secular postmodernist thinkers (Derrida, Heidegger, Gadamer, etc.), quite widely found an intriguing predecessor, even a patron saint, in Augustine of Hippo. Some thinkers, especially those to be found when we move back into more confessional waters, namely John Milbank, have summarized the postmodernist project as “postmodern critical Augustinianism.”3 To read Augustine, especially his introspective (existentialist) Confessions, with this notion in mind really transfigures one’s understanding of historic orthodoxy and of the modern condition. Now, one particular instructor in postmodern theology and interpreter of Augustine, my own “mentor” in these matters, is the estimable
, author of such great works as You Are What You Love (an excellent resource on liturgical theology) and On the Road with Saint Augustine (my first experience in learning “okay, maybe these postmodernists aren’t all complete wackos [although Sartre still is]”), and who’s only the best Christian named Smith along with Christian Smith. Smith has written a lot on postmodernism, a lot, which I know because he’s been my sole source through whom I’ve learned most about it, although I’ve been taking the time recently to finally move onto other figures commended by Smith (like John Milbank, James Olthius, and Amos Yong). Smith’s foremost works have been The Fall of Interpretation and Speech and Theology4 (particularly because they are derived from his Master’s and PhD theses, respectively), although his later Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? is a characteristically witty and conversational primer that was also my own entrypoint. They rehabilitate, apply, deconstruct, and put into dialogue with Augustine the principles of postmodern philosophy as informative and even fundamental to (orthodox) Christian theology. While, certainly, there’s a lot of unconventional and even unnerving propositions such theology makes, (1) when it’s put in dialogue with the Fathers and (2) is unpacked properly the burden becomes much lighter.5With all this background established, I want to jump into one particular aspect of “postmodern critical Augustinianism” that Smith discusses, and lay out my reflections on it. Smith’s Augustinian theology is chiefly set out in chapters 4 and 5 of Speech and Theology, where he demonstrates how Augustine, over a millennium before any of the major modern expositors of postmodern thought, showed a sensitivity and understanding toward the three major contentions of postmodernism: alterity (otherness), subjectivity, and interpretation (mediacy). With this in mind, Smith clarifies the purpose of his writing in the opening to the fifth chapter: “if (1) God is Infinite, and (2) language — particularly conceptual language — is finite, then how will it be possible to speak of God, since (3) speaking requires the employment of language, and theology requires the employment of concepts?”6 This same problem was perceived by Augustine, who wrote at the outset of his confessions that “with all this, what have I said, my God and my Life and my sacred Delight? What can anyone say when he speaks of Thee?” (Conf. 1.4.4).7 Yet, Augustine, as Smith points out, deepens this problematic when he writes in his On Christian Teaching that
I feel that I have done nothing more than desire to speak; and if I have said anything, it is not what I desired to say. How do I know this, except from the fact that God is unspeakable? But what I have said, if it had been unspeakable, could not have been spoken. And so God is not even to be called “unspeakable,” because to say even this is to speak of Him. … And yet God, although nothing worthy of His greatness can be said of Him, has condescended to accept the worship of men’s mouths, and has desired us through the medium of our own words to rejoice in His praise (DC 1.6.6).8
So, while it seems that human words are utterly incapable of encompassing the Divine, even sacrilegious in making the attempt, at the same time the Divine would appear to demand our speech, thus rendering man in a Catch-22. What, then, are we to do?
Smith points out the obvious: “But then should not Augustine have remained silent? If no words could be found which were worthy of God, should not Augustine have been lost for words? And if so, why and how could he say so much?”9 Alterity must be “touched” somehow for intersubjectivity to occur, and if intersubjectivity does somehow occur, then, again, even Augustine’s ruminations concerning the sufficiency of words/language strongly implies an answer. What can that answer be? Beginning from a position of faith, wherein the goodness and veracity of the Divine is accepted, Christian theology can’t give into the “structural pessimism” of secular postmodernism,10 it must accept the goodness and veracity of revelation, in spite of the fact that revelation is necessarily linguistic. This, then, means the question is how to grapple “with the methodological question of how (not) to speak of that which exceeds conceptualization and expression”11 given the Christian faith’s apparent command to speak: “I will bless the LORD at all times: His praise shall continually be in my mouth” (Ps. 34:1).
Over the course of chapters 4 and 5 of Speech and Theology, reciprocated and recapitulated elsewhere in Smith’s corpus, is the answering of this predicament. He begins with a fascinating recounting of a dialogue within Augustine’s early treatise on pedagogy, De Magistro, which is conducted with Augustine’s son Adeodatus.12 In this dialogue Augustine argues that words are “signs,” instruments that point to a “thing” itself, but aren’t the thing itself, and that no-thing is learned without a sign, and challenges Adeodatus to come up with a contrary example. The final and best example Adeodatus conceives of is walking: “what if one should ask what ‘walking’ signifies, and another were simply to get up and pace the floor? ‘Wouldn’t you be using the thing itself to teach me, rather than using words or any other signs?’ Would this not be teaching by means of the thing itself?”13 But Augustine points out “what if one did not know the meaning (definition) of the word”?14 In other words, to explain what walking is by walking to someone who doesn’t know what walking is would be equivalent to answering the question “What is red?” by saying “Red is the color red.”15 Now, one could ask that if in the act of getting up and walking around were the teacher to gesture toward his legs so as to clarify to the student that he is “not simply stalling to come up with an answer” would that suffice?16 But, no, it wouldn’t, because that would constitute the use of a sign!17 Augustine’s argumentation here brings to mind a very random thing I remember from my childhood, which is when I watched a NatGeo documentary about what would happen if aliens invaded. One of the experts interviewed for the episode told a story that exhibited the consequences of cultural/linguistic differences through the interaction of American soldiers and Iraqis during the War on Terror: at vehicle checkpoints set up in the nation American soldiers would address vehicles with an open-hand gesture which signified the command “Stop!” However, what Americans soldiers didn’t realize is that such a sign meant “Come forward” for Iraqis. Likewise, even if a teacher who was asked “What is ‘walking’?” was to get up and walk, gesturing toward his legs, in this thought experiment where the student is completely ignorant of the prerequisite system of signs there’s nothing in that self-exhibiting sign that tells the student his teacher didn’t just randomly get up and begin to braggadociously show off the manner in which he ambulates.
Language, which is fundamentally a system of signs, and contains both verbal and non-verbal signs, is therefore exposed as quite incapable of actually communicating. Where does the system of signs begin? Where does the understanding of what “wall,” or “red,” or “sarabarae” signify begin? While “nothing is learned without signs” yet we are troubled that “nothing is learned by means of signs”18 therefore leaving us with two predicaments: disposing of language as utterly useless, or engaging in an infinite regress of signs that signify a sign which signify a sign which signify a sign, etc. The latter we know we can’t accept on the basis of logic as old as Aristotle, yet the former we know we can’t accept on the basis that we must speak. What gives? This Augustinian restaging of Meno’s paradox is what undergirds Derrida’s reflection that the phenomenon of language “is already there, in advance at the moment at which any question can arise about it. In this it exceeds the question. This advance is, before any contract, a sort of promise of originary allegiance to which we must have in some sense already acquiesced, already said yes, given a pledge, whatever may be the negativity or problematicity of the discourse which may follow.”19 Language requires a certain faith, then, and this is precisely how Smith deconstructs the postmodern predicament, long foretold by Augustine, of language’s (in)adequacy, for “there is a primordial ‘yes’: a ‘wordless word,’ a living logos who was ‘in the beginning,’ who tabernacles with us in flesh and whose spirit resides within us (John 1:1–18). It is this wordless Word, this Who, that we name ‘yes’: ‘For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we proclaimed among you . . . was not ‘Yes and No’; but in him it is always ‘Yes.’ For in him every one of God’s promises is a ‘Yes’’ (2 Cor. 1:19–20).”20 Thus, to place the prayers and tears of Derrida on the Psalmist, “Except the LORD speak the word, they speak in vain that uttereth words” (cf. Ps. 127:1).21 Or again, “If we affirm that ‘we love, because he first loved us’ (1 John 4:19), we can also affirm that we speak, because he has first spoken.”22
But, still, while this proves that speech is possible, given faith, what is to be said about how to speak? Indeed, this problem doesn’t just pertain to God, for to conceptualize the inconceptible is an impossibility and a violence, and even then Derrida as well as Augustine affirm that even man possesses an incircumscribabiltiy, thus complicated speech for “finite” man.23 The way that Smith approaches this problematic is through an exhibition of Augustine’s ingenious model of, what I’d label, “incarnational semiotics.” This builds off a discussion of idolatry/sin, wherein Augustine shows how idols are that which bring down their transcendent/alterous referent (i.e., the Divine) into the circumscribed finitude of the idol,24 but the icon is something which “indicates” or “mediates” the Wholly Other, serving as a sign that while (really) connecting One with the Other doesn’t comprehend the Other. Smith argues how such an iconic, or, employing a Heideggerian concept, formally indicative framework can apply to, and rescue, language.
Words, when constituted as iconic signs, are thus understood as structurally incomplete and therefore referring beyond themselves. Thus they function as “pointers” to transcendence from a sphere of immanence. It is in this sense, then, that Augustine unpacks his incarnational understanding of language. … The Incarnation is precisely an immanent sign of transcendence – God appearing in the flesh. Thus it is a structure of both presence and absence: present in the flesh, and yet referring beyond, the Incarnation – as the signum exemplum – retains the structural incompleteness of the sign which is constitutive of language, for to constitute the Godman as only man is to idolize the body, failing to constitute it as a manifestation of the divine. Divinity, while it cannot be reduced to this body, is nevertheless infleshed in it and thus signaling beyond itself. … This is also why, for Augustine, all signs function as mediators: they are precisely that which both appear and at the same time maintain what they refer to in their transcendence. By referring or pointing to what is other than themselves, signs make knowledge of transcendence possible.25
At once, Augustine rescues not just the adequacy of language but also the logic of Incarnation (per Smith), and shows how the Word grounds our words. Perhaps, we could say, it is the signum signans non signata.
All this is brought home, by Augustine and Smith, in the esteemed bishop’s sermon on John 1:1, where he demonstrates, by analogy, how his very speaking of his own words in that present moment to his congregation correlates to the act of Incarnation: “Here you are then, here’s the word which I now am speaking to you; I had it first in my mind. It went out to you, and didn’t go away from me. It began to be in you, because it wasn’t in you before. It stayed with me, when it went out to you. So just as my word was presented to your perception, and didn’t depart from my mind, so that Word was presented to our perception, and didn’t depart from his Father. My word was with me, and went out into the sound of my voice; the Word of God was with the Father, and went out into the flesh.”26 The word in its original state, in the being of Augustine (who causes the word to have being), was inaccessible to the world, wholly transcendent. Then when spoken it came forth from Augustine and came into the world, becoming present, immanent, to the world. In this coming-forth, however, the word truly remains with Augustine; after all, Augustine still knows the word, He can still call it forth within himself, but certainly it is at the same time truly present in the world. “Before I spoke, I had it, and you did not have it; I have spoken, and you have begun to have it, and I have lost nothing. Why, isn’t my word marvelous! So what must the Word of God be?”27
So, “It is in this way that language functions like the Incarnation of the God-man: when the ‘Word became flesh’ (John 1:14), the transcendent God descended into the realm of immanence (finitude), but without thereby denying or giving up his transcendence.”28 Likewise, the incircumscribability of our selves can be signified to Others, and vice versa, without considering our signs as phantasms, empty platitudes of our interiority, and truly make present to them our selves, through the iconic pointing of circumscribable words. All the anxieties and trepidations with concern to language and alterity contained in the books of the secular postmodernists are then simply the result of their crypto-Docetism, their poverty of incarnational grace; as St. Augustine said, it is that which “these books did not tell me” (Conf. 7.9.14).29
If Smith’s neo-Augustinian model is so promising as to resolve the problem of language, and moreover theology, by allowing us to speak words which at once don’t circumscribe but neither keep absent the thing signified, then the question, of course, is just how workable this model is. Here we get into the nitty-gritty of what I want to press Smith’s “incarnational semiotics” model on. While I enjoy seeing Christianity put in dialogue with worldly philosophy, “bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5), because it testifies30 to the power of the Cross, because it’s the Cross at stake it’s therefore incredibly incumbent upon all participants in this philosophical dialogue to ascertain if we truly have something worthy of the Cross, or which the Cross truly can triumph through. I love what Smith has done, and in his writings he without fail demonstrates himself to be, as the youngins say, a “chill guy,” but here’s where I find fault, not with him, but with any “individualistic” (“Augustinian,” “Maximian,” “Gregorian,” etc.) theology: it doesn’t do justice to genuine orthodoxy.
What Smith has taught me is a new way of looking at what orthodoxy means, and it’s nothing that renders Christian truth in a subjective or emotivist framework, but rather a dialogical and dynamic one. “Orthodoxy” is the tradition of policed interpretation of the evangelical postcard sent out to the world in Peter’s confession: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Mt. 16:16).31 The full significance of the Gospel is born out by the Church, in her life and witness to it, and especially through the communion of saints, not as any sort of individual project, but truly as a matter of dialogue, through the giving of words (-logue) to each other: “Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers” (Eph. 4:29). Hence, the excellence of the Vincentian rule: “Moreover, in the Catholic Church itself, all possible care must be taken, that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all.” This I understand to be an express commendation of the dialogue of the saints with each other “everywhere, always, by all,” producing a consensual orthodoxy. Augustine has a lot of gems, yes, but Augustine is not the Church, and the Church includes every other person who’ve had their contributions to the faith individualized: Gregory of Nazianzus, Maximus the Confessor, Gregory the Great, Ignatius of Antioch, etc., and I take this as being the cause of all manners of heresy and discord, for when you individualize the contributions of the Nazianzen you might end up with universalism, despite the paucity of its validity elsewhere throughout the orthodox canon, and if you individualize the North African you might, on the one hand, end up with determinism or, on the other, Romanidean anti-Latinism.
What I then submit I’ve tinkered with as a “Radical Paleo-Orthodoxy.” How all this pertains to Smith is twofold: first, while all the talk of Augustine is fine, I’m obviously not denying he has import,32 I would like to see how else the cloud of witnesses might inform (1a) the logic of incarnation and (1b) postmodern philosophy; second, moreover I think it still remains to bear out how exactly Smith’s work can meet the demands of post-Chalcedonian orthodoxy.
In other words, I’m most concerned with if the way Smith describes the Incarnation can fit the orthodox interpretation of how the Incarnation is to be signified. There’s a lot of hope at first look in how Smith is clearly trying to explicate how the incircumscribable may con-descend and meet the circumscribable, for certainly one of the main concerns at Chalcedon, and even earlier, was that: just how can the in-finite correlate with the finite, without loss, diminution, or confusion of either? That is, does Smith, too, teach harmoniously with all the Council Fathers
the same perfect in Godhead, the same perfect in manhood, truly God and truly man, the same of a reasonable soul and body; homoousios with the Father in Godhead, and the same homoousios with us in manhood…acknowledged in two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation—the difference of the natures being by no means taken away because of the union, but rather the distinctive character of each nature being preserved, and [each] combining in one person and hypostasis.33
This is all a matter of principle, to be honest, for I think Smith can say so, I just would’ve liked him to have said so.
Moreover, I have this desire as I do think there are some weak points which arise from the Augustinian monologue, which reinforces my desire because it’s harder to see how and if Smith’s model synthesizes with Chalcedonian orthodoxy.34 First, throughout Speech and Theology Smith makes numerous statements that deny “fullness.”35 The reason I find this troublesome is because the catholic orthodox position on Christ’s nature is that He is fully God, and fully man. The only workaround I can think of is that there’s a specific connotation of “fullness” in postmodern philosophy, and it’s this connotation of “fullness” that Smith is rejecting, not the connotation of fullness meant by orthodoxy, which is that every property of divinity was personally united with the humanity in Christ and every property of humanity was personally united with the divinity in Christ. But, Smith should’ve been conscientious of this doctrinal homophony.
Likewise, how exactly do incarnational semiotics correlate to the hypostatic union of Christ’s divinity and humanity? How the philosophy of hypostases and essences pertains to Smith’s model is an excellent question, because this is how orthodox theology fleshed out the dual natures of Christ. In Chalcedonian Christology, a complex philosophy of hypostasis, logoi, essences, and other technicalities help ground the understanding of the hypostatic union, which is the foundation of the Incarnation, but how does this apply to speech? This can cohere with another question I’ve had about postmodern philosophy, which is what really makes something subject to inviolable alterity. For example, must I worry about a pebble being totalized? It would seem, even in the speech of the postmodernists, their concern is primarily with humans, and even with speech their concern is not so much with the words themselves, but with how those words are understood to impact the transcendent alterity of an Other. What I’d suggest is that, and I believe there’s precedent within Chalcedonian orthodoxy for this, is that there is a “selective hypostaticity” among creatures, that only some have a hypostatic identity, which, as defined by Maximus scholar
, is the source of “thatness” in a being, what makes “Paul” Paul and “Peter” Peter despite being consubstantial in the “whatness” of their human essence.36 For example, with the pebble, if I break it into two, or if over many many years erosion does the same, do I have two hypostases, or one “entangled” hypostasis? From what I’ve looked into it seems that there can be non-hypostatic creatures, who’s principle of “differentiation” lies in their logoi, so that the non-hypostatic pebble doesn’t multiply in hypostasis but in logos.37 To cut out the fluff, what I’m asking is how does all this Chalcedonian terminology, essential parts of the consensual orthodoxy, impact the Augustinian model of James Smith? Are words hypostatic, or just logical, if they’re held to be hypostatic is that problematic, how does accounting for these metaphysical details impact the validity of incarnational semiotics, etc.?I’d like to be optimistic and say that the Augustinian model is consistent with the Maximian model presented by Wood (insofar as I can just about understand what Wood is saying in his book, tbh), but both are, one, guilty of individualistic theology,38 and two, because of that, speaking past each other. Despite this initial conundrum there seems to be room for proper dialogue and edification of either model into a truly orthodox formulation. First, despite its inchoate or muted expression, I do believe Smith describes a (Chalcedonian) “fullness” of transcendence (incircumscribability, infinitude, divinity) and immanence (circumscribability, finitude, humanity) within the Incarnate Word (Sign).39 Second, when the question arises “How exactly then does the ‘hypostatic union’ of the incircumscribable and circumscribable sufficiently communicate the incircumscribable through the circumscribable?” Wood’s explication of Maximus provides a possible stepping-stone in his account of the perichoretic energies of Christ:
After a lengthy dispute about Christ’s wills, Pyyrhus, erstwhile patriarch of Constantinople, tenders a thesis about the logically prior question of Christ’s two activities (since willing is a natural activity of rational beings): Christ possessed one “hypostatic activity.” One person performs one activity. Maximus rejects this view, not least because it would require three activities of the one Trinity (here again the Trinitarian-Christological univocity!). He then offers an alternative proposal fitted with a venerable analogy: in actu, Christ’s activities unite in “their complete interpenetration into each other,” like the burning cut and the cutting burn of a red-hot blade.40
Do we find in this paragraph a worthy explanation of how exactly the transcendent “expresses” itself through the immanent, which would complement the “experiential” aspect of signs Smith mentions as integral to the proper function of a sign that moves beyond its own structural incompleteness (“This means that there is a structural incompleteness to the word, such that it must be accompanied by the experience of the thing itself, and sound is only constituted as a sign when the thing is known”)?41
Third, when Smith formulates his incarnational semiotics it can be asked how God, or man, could properly speak at all beyond the historical moment of the Incarnation, which can be answered by the core of Maximian theology encapsulated in the subtitle to Wood’s book “creation as incarnation,” that “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8) has always, ever, already been Incarnate and since “by Him were all things created” (Col. 1:16) Creation is fundamentally “Theanthropocosmic,” which is to say, incarnational.42 Fourth, as I recently discussed in “Some Thoughts on the Maximian Ontology” there are fascinating implications to Maximus’ “ecclesiastical mystagogy,” which can transform our understanding of the nature and experience of Creation and the Divine, especially ecclesiologically, which I know Smith has taken a greater interest in, alongside his mentions of religious experience and critiques of Platonic notions of participation.43
I’m very interested to see where all this might go. My friends in the Orthodox world (
, , ) oft speak of a “neo-patristic synthesis” as a needed revolution in contemporary theology, and I agree, seeing in that term the core of Oden’s Paleo-Orthodoxy and the concept of “consensual [dialogical] orthodoxy.” Further, insofar as Christ “hath made us kings and priests unto God and His Father” (Rev. 1:6) and “the honour of kings is to search out a matter” (Prov. 25:2), I believe the many thoughts kicked up as dirt through this discourse may be truly edifying and sanctifying. I won’t presume to have all the cognitive capacity requisite for that, however!44In this vein, I’ve contemplated a lot of postmodernist principles that I’ve learned which can be equipped for explicitly reactionary purposes, which I’ll certainly explicate in the future.
For two basic introductory works see J.K.A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy; and J. Milbank, C. Pickstock, and G. Ward, eds., Radical Orthodoxy.
Ch. 13 of The Postmodern God, ed. G. Ward, 265-78.
Because it’s clear who this article is about, all references to sources by Smith below will not mention his name, just title and page.
And I do intend to engage in such unpacking sometime in the near future.
Speech and Theology, 153.
St. Augustine, Confessions (2nd ed.), tr. F.J. Sheed, 5.
St. Augustine, “On Christian Doctrine,” Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers 1/II, Philip Schaff et al., eds., 524.
Speech and Theology, 115. Augustine’s complete corpus, represented in modern critical editions such as the Patrologia Latina or CCSL, clocks in at several thousand pages in length.
What Smith elsewhere refers to as the “violent mediation model” (The Fall of Interpretation, 20; cf. 119-33).
Speech and Theology, 115.
This is told on ibid., 117-18.
Ibid., 118.
Ibid.
I’m reworking here the analogy of “sarabarae” (Dan. 3:27) that Augustine himself uses (ibid., 119).
Ibid.
Ibid., 118.
Ibid., 120.
Quoted in The Fall of Interpretation, 193.
Ibid.
See Smith’s article “The Art of Christian Atheism,” Faith and Philosophy 14/1 (1997): 71-81.
Speech and Theology, 155.
As Smith highlights: “Note that for Augustine, as for Husserl (and unlike Levinas), transcendence is characteristic of all things, though certain ‘things’ (God, the other person) are uniquely transcendent, insofar as theirs is an ‘essential’ transcendence which can never be made present, unlike, for instance, the back of the house, which is only ‘accidentally’ transcendent” (ibid., 144n2). Humans, too, have a (created) infinitude that comprises their inner being, and makes us sources of inestimable glory but also inestimable mystery (cf. Pss. 42:7; 130:1; 139:8). Augustine affirms this as well: “the power of memory in me I do not understand, though without memory I could not even name myself” (Conf. 10.16.25).
Which, I’d argue, is absolutely consonant with how the biblical record finds fault in pagan idolatry. I’ll certainly take this up again later.
Speech and Theology, 123.
Quoted in ibid., 124.
The preceding and this quote are from ibid.
Ibid., 125.
Augustine, Confessions, 122; cf. ibid., 154, 170.
Smith, too, has taught me the importance of evangelical terminology illuminated by postmodernism. “Testimony,” “witness,” “story,” these are the terms Smith sees as more robust, peaceful, and adequate. See “Questions About the Perception of ‘Christian Truth,’” New Blackfriars 88/1017 (2007): 585-93; “How to Avoid Not Speaking: Attestations,” in Knowing Other-Wise, ed. J.H. Olthuis, 217-34.
This terminology is inspired by The Fall of Interpretation, 199-221. The full implications (theological and ecclesiological) of what I see in Smith’s Radical Orthodoxy have engendered abundant reflections in my mind, one of the reasons why my study has gone on for so long, and I intend to flesh out these reflections in what I hope will be formally written journal articles.
But, rather, that his import is necessarily and most authentically catholic (of the whole [church]) in nature.
Chalcedonian Definition taken from J. Pelikan, The Christian Tradition (vol. 1), 262-63.
Lest it be considered indicative of my ignorance, or rashness, there is absolutely no mention in any other article or book by Smith of these prominent post-Nicene and neo-Chalcedonian Fathers: Athanasius, Maximus the Confessor, Cyril of Alexandria, Cyril of Alexandria, John of Damascus, Gregory the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil the Great, John Scotus, just to name the heavyweights, among many more.
Speed and Theology, 12, 63n90, 124, 126.
J.D. Wood, The Whole Mystery of Christ, 206.
I’ve noted in Wood’s work that the patristic source material often is collocated with talk of “rational beings,” beings (entities with essences) that have a rational soul (per Aristotelian metaphysics). Is the enhypostatic subsistence of essences corequisite with said essences being firstly rational? If so, only angels, humans, and God must worry about the postmodern condition, and, indeed, those do seem to be what most postmodernists are concerned about.
What does the faith of the whole world (catholic) have to say about incarnational semiotics, subjectivity, hypostasis, etc. etc.?
As Smith borrows from Augustine:
“It went out to you [incarnated], and didn’t go away from me [remained consubstantial with Augustine]... So just as my word was presented to your perception, and didn’t depart from my mind, so that Word was presented to our perception [incarnated], and didn’t depart from his Father [the Father’s being].” (Speech and Theology, 124)
Wood, The Whole Mystery of Christ, 44.
Speech and Theology, 119; cf. 123.
And Smith gets close to this when he correlates Augustine’s concept of the iconic with his concept of the semiotic with his concept of the Incarnation, and insofar as Smith explains Augustine’s view of Creation as iconic then, as A=B=C means A=C, then world = incarnation (ibid., 121-23).
Ibid., 94-102, 125-26, 161-63.
Truth be told, J.D. Wood broke me.