This essay is placed within a continuing debate on the appropriateness of a Christian deployment of tragedy. According David Bentley Hart, tragedy legitimates a sacrificial and scapegoating logic that is in contradiction with the Christian gospel. It promotes exclusion and therefore is imaginatively and metaphysically conservative in its import. In the ensuing argument, I hope to show through one example how even Greek tragedy can resist some of these claims. Drawing on the seminal work of Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, I argue that Sophocles’ Oedipus cycle, firstly, demonstrates the inability of nomos to grasp the exception of Oedipus, and that this might constitute a critique rather than a simple legitimation of the civic order. Secondly, the narrative arc of Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus at Colonus point towards incorporation rather than final exclusion, and that his apotheosis could be read as resisting deleterious tropes of a final holocaust of the tragic figure. In the final section, drawing on Rowan Williams, I discuss the problems associated with literary Christologies in general, and whether it could be theologically feasible to talk about the Theban cycle as exhibiting a ‘proto-Christology’.
This article analyzes the dependencies of Donald MacKinnon on Aristotle and Immanuel Kant, particularly as regards to his 'descriptive metaphysics'. MacKinnon remains indebted to an Aristotelian aporetics of 'substance' that at once emphasizes the irrepressible particularity of entities, while simultaneously not resolving the tension between specific description and universal categories of meaning. This insight was contemporaneously mediated for MacKinnon through his reception of G.E. Moore, and especially in the way that his critique of Bradleyian 'internal relations' attempted to retain 'individuality' over against the collapse of objects into relational determinations. Kant's transcendental apriorism had a similar function for MacKinnon, although now with the added novelty of synthetic judgments which are adduced by Kant to grasp those imaginative totalities that were needed to garner 'experience' within the limits of reason alone. The article traces Kant's deepening impression on MacKinnon with respect to ontological analogy, showing through a theological genealogy how MacKinnon gradually becomes disenchanted with the analogia entis-a move which is dependent on a critique of Platonic methexis. In MacKinnon's mind, analogical metaphysics remains predicated on an intuitional account of being that transcends the critical strictures asserted by Kant, and moreover relies upon a questionable reading of 'being-as-predicate'. This constitutes MacKinnon's reception of a Kantian apophatics. The article concludes by suggesting that MacKinnon could have been better served in his attempt to collate historicity and metaphysics by retaining the analogical participation, and by supplementing his realism with a broadly Hegelian approach to the development of knowledge. Moreover, his Kantianism probably does not assist him as regards a re-articulation of the via negativa insofar as it remains in a diastasis between anthropocentricism and a transcendentally-formal sublime.
Despite initial appearances, Tyson’s essay is not about “practical magick,” that is, the kind you might come across upon at a book-handler of esoterica, or perhaps at your local Thelemite support-group. It touches on the persistence of belief in occult phenomena well into our so-called “disenchanted” age, and does give hints as to why “magic” has not died down as of yet. But more basically, this is an intervention of philosophical theology, one aimed firstly at the academic culture of materialist reductionism. The upshot of this reductionism, for Tyson, is that “magical meanings and higher purposes are no longer part of practical reality or academic knowledge,” with the result being that we “have cut qualitative and spiritual wisdom off from knowledge and power” (p. ix). In response to this, Tyson offers a brief, albeit suggestive, proposal for an essentially Platonist metaphysics of “non-scientific truths” (p. vii).
Boccaccio once theorised (in his Life of Dante) that theology could be accurately described as 'poetry' about God. However, one does not always get the impression when reading theologians that such a connection is so obvious. And yet there are Christian writers who have sought to bring together the concerns of skilled writing and communication. One only has to remember Augustine's consummate level of Latin dexterity, or Calvin's infl uence on French prose writing, or Tyndale's translation of Bible to know that the relation between form and content, between the concrete and the evocative is by no means alien to the tradition of spiritual and theological writing.It is for this reason that Benjamin Myers' descriptive and interpretative essay on Rowan Williams is particularly admirable. Besides being a wellresearched and readable work, it is fi lled with a good amount of apercus and insightful bon mots regarding key aspects of Williams' theology, such that in addition to being an accessible work, it is also an eminently quotable one as well. Some examples will suffi ce: regarding Williams' theological method he states in the Preface (p xi) that theology in Williams' view is 'not a private table for one but a rowdy banquet for those who gather, famished and thirsty, around Christ'. Th e overtones of theological dialogue and Eucharistic communion are clearly evident here, expressing in nuce Williams' fundamental hermeneutical orientation, consistent throughout his oeuvre. Th is is reiterated again, towards the end of the book (pp119-120), when he writes (again concerning Williams' theological methodology) that his 'theology is not so much an orderly arrangement of themes as an assemblage of discrete textual performances, a written ensemble, a
After several decades of being out-of-print, it is a fitting gesture that we finally have a republication of Donald MacKinnon's Signpost pamphlets as well as The Stripping of the Altars. 1 John McDowell, Scott Kirkland, and Ashley Moyse should be thanked for their initiative in making sure that these texts-which exist somewhat at the edges of his most disseminated work-are given their theological centrality. They press home the fact, once more, that MacKinnon was a figure who very much inhabited "the borderlands," whether these were the technicalities of moral philosophy or the sometime depressing suasions of Anglican Realpolitik. MacKinnon was a layman well-known for his more abstruse and interrogative explorations, as seen in other essay collections and monographs; but what these texts collected here reiterate is his deep and abiding concern for the nature of the Church and the cruciformity of its persistence. They present MacKinnon simultaneously at his most confessional and polemical, as one who did not shy away from inserting himself into the ecclesiological ordeal, and especially the debate regarding "establishment." In a contribution for The Cambridge Review in 1966, MacKinnon did not hesitate to call the historical "privilege" of the Church of England "sheerly grotesque." 2 In Kenotic Ecclesiology, however, there is a bit more of a measured tone even in the most significant of the texts here collected ("Kenosis and Establishment"), a fact partially traceable to its original audience and its historically grandiose setting. 3 But the overall tensions and tonalities herein, which are by and large conciliatory, probably also reflect MacKinnon's own "outsider" position, that is, his uneasy self-navigation
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