Backing Down from Gregory of Nyssa’s Ascent

The early Church’s appropriation of Greek philosophy is easily caricatured as an exchange that left Christianity intellectually enriched but spiritually impoverished. In reality, the Church Fathers converted Plato before they baptized him. That is, they found Greek metaphysics useful, but they used it for their own purposes. Still, the question remains: Christians changed Plato, but how much did Plato change Christianity? Continue Reading »

Multiple Enlightenment

Milbank (Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People) points out that the Enlightenment was not simple one thing: “it can bedivided into (a) a Christian and sometimes post -Christian Ciceronian Stoicreaction against the voluntarism of ‘modern . . . . Continue Reading »

End of Dialogue

Rosenstock-Huessy points out in one of the letters collected in Judaism Despite Christianitythat Kant worked out his entire philosophy in conscious dialogue with Rousseau: “While he himself wants to stand metaphysics on its head, just as Kepler and Newton stood physics, yet he compares for his . . . . Continue Reading »

One Flesh

Rosenzweig (Judaism Despite Christianity: The 1916 Wartime Correspondence Between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig, 115) says that “Only what belongs to both man and woman belongs to all men, and everything else has only sectional interest.”Rosenstock agrees, and elaborates: . . . . Continue Reading »

Giving Descartes his Due

In Desire, Dialectic, and Otherness: An Essay on Origins, recently reprinted by Wipf & Stock, William Desmond concedes that “the modern self has been excessively subjectivized” (45). But he thinks that, for all its faults, Cartesianism focused attention on an inescapable . . . . Continue Reading »

Derrida the Tactician

O’Regan (Theology and the Spaces of Apocalyptic, 113-4) deftly captures the limits and use of Derrida.Limits first, and there are severe: Derrida is not “adequate for Christian theology,” he argues, because “as theo-logy, there is presumtively a reality whose very nature it . . . . Continue Reading »