Reflections on Plato’s dialogues — or, if I break it out as a separate post, links to reflections — to follow below. The order is that of the Ukemi Audiobooks series The Socratic Dialogues, which dramatizes Benjamin Jowett’s translation with a full cast of great British actors (headlined by David Rintoul as Socrates). Jowett’s translation may be “out of date” from a scholarly perspective (which I am unqualified to judge) but in Rintoul’s hands (vocal chords?) is enduringly lucid. Ukemi also organizes the dialogues loosely according to a traditional early-middle-late periodization, which I gather is a contested approach, but it doesn’t seem to harm the understanding for a first pass. (I’m already suspecting that the “dramatic ordering,” following the chronology of Socrates' life as best that may be reconstructed, might be more fruitful… but that’s for a second round, and I’m just beginning the first!)

Early Period

1. Apology. A barnstormer to start in medias res — better, near the end of things. We meet Socrates for the first time as he defends himself, before the assembly, against the charges laid at his door: of being an evildoer and “making the better appear the worse,” of being an atheist and introducing new deities, and of corrupting the youth. He does not succeed, though he is condemned by only a small margin. Socrates here introduces a number of key motives in the corpus: his claim to “know nothing at all” and thus to only be the “wisest” by exposing everyone else’s ignorance (which makes him quite unpopular); the deceptiveness of rhetoricians, who know how to speak elegantly and persuasively, but know really nothing of the Good and therefore of how to make men better; his own role as a sort of “gadfly,” provoking the polis into active self-reflection which it might otherwise neglect, and seeking thus to improve it; the absolute priority of caring for the soul over against all other cares (of property, wealth, body, etc.), and the absolute refusal to employ any tactics unworthy of the soul; the “daemon” or voice of God — or Conscience — speaking to him and infallibly guiding him toward the right course of action, though all public opinion be against him; his real indifference — perhaps, even here, optimism! — in the face of death, but absolute service to the truth. We also get a taste of the dialectic style as he cross-examines his accuser Meletus. It is an extraordinary bit of writing by Plato, moving and sweeping and incisive. Apology thus introduces and crystallizes the brilliant literary paradox of the Socratic corpus: Socrates disclaims all “rhetoric” and “elaborate defence,” portraying himself as a humble and artless seeker of wisdom — using brilliant rhetoric and elaborate defensive strategies to demolish his opponents' arguments. I loved Apology, and expect to revisit it with great enjoyment, but there is undoubtedly something inhuman and irritating (gadfly-like!) about Socrates. One understands instantly why Socrates had so many admirers in his own day (including Plato), and why Plato’s Socrates has been such a titanic figure in the history of thought and culture; and, equally, just why Socrates made so many enemies. Most of all I chafe at his claim that “the life which is unexamined is not worth living.” Is it not the other way round: no life which is lived is worth leaving unexamined?
2. Crito. A simple but moving dialogue, set in prison on the night before Socrates' execution, on the question: “Is it right to disobey an unjust law?” Socrates' answer in this case, of course, is No. The titular Crito (also mentioned in Apology) comes to him in prison and makes one last effort to persuade Socrates to escape his condemnation. But — despite his complaint in Apology that his trial was not conducted with full propriety — Socrates is determined to accept the death penalty meted out by the state. The most curious, and seemingly central, feature of the dialogue is the lengthy portion spoken by Socrates in the voice of the personified Laws of Athens. How, the Laws ask Socrates (and thus Socrates asks Crito), can one who is so personally committed to justice defy the demands and decisions of justice?
3. Charmides. Now we flash back several decades, and get going with our first, though assuredly not last, “What is X?” The X in question is the virtue of temperance.
4. Laches.
5. Lysis.
6. Euthyphro. “What is piety?”
7. Menexenus. A parody of the funeral oration genre, in which the ostensible praise of Athens and of great Athenian heroes turns out to just yield a series of digressions, backhanded criticisms, and trite aphorisms.
8. Ion.
9. Gorgias. Is it okay to really rather dislike this dialogue? It is long, repetitive, and occasionally mean-spirited. The subject matter is of great importance, of course: moving from the more specific question “what, if anything, does a teacher of rhetoric need to know about goodness?” to the general question “what is the best way of life?”. Yet in these early dialogues Plato does not often set up Socrates' interlocutors as particularly compelling or thoughtful — see Euthyphro or Ion and their namesakes — but in Gorgias he seems to regard, and Socrates seems to treat, all three of Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles with barely-disguised contempt. And they are, in differing ways, worthy of contempt (less so, perhaps, Gorgias).
10. Protagoras.
11. Meno.
12. Euthydemus. A merciless satire on sophistry. At first Socrates is baffled, then infuriated, then bemused, then amused by the “method of contradiction” employed by the brother sophists Euthydemus and Dionysodorus; finally he pulls himself together and shows himself a master at it, if he chooses. There is a substantive philosophical point lurking within the mockery, though. Euthydemus and Dionysodorus are boxers who have but lately taken up sophistry (in order to make money and increase their reputation). They have grasped that the key to successful sophistical argumentation is equivocation: exploiting multiple meanings of their opponents' words in order to catch them in apparent contradictions. Of course, as soon as one scrutinizes their arguments, these fall to pieces, so the sophist must keep his opponent permanently off balance and give him no room to strike back. Sophistry is dialectic reduced to boxing: a contest of strength and speed in which one hit is as good as another. The true philosopher, however, cares not at all for victory, but only for the pursuit of truth. And truth requires valid arguments, clear and consistent definitions, and patient exploration.
13. Lesser Hippias.
14. Greater Hippias.

Middle Period

15. Symposium.
16. Theætetus. Fantastic. Far and away the most enjoyable, dare I say riveting, of the dialogues so far. “What is knowledge?” Must revisit and write a longer reflection.
17. Phædo.
18. Phædrus.
19. Cratylus. Some people, apparently, say this dialogue is “tedious.” I had the exact opposite reaction! (Perhaps I am a tedious person…) Admittedly, for the first two thirds, I repeatedly thought, “Surely you can’t be serious!”, as Socrates offered increasingly speculative and unsupportable folk etymologies for all sorts of words (though the more abstract a concept denoted by a word, the less speculative it seemed to me) to supposedly show that the relation between a word and the thing it represents is not arbitrary or merely conventional, but is based on nature… only to experience philosophical whiplash in the final third as Socrates dismisses that linguistic theory and argues that words are given by convention and have no necessary naturalistic aspect!
20. Parmenides. This one is fascinating, and demands revisiting. A precocious, but philosophically underdeveloped, nineteen-year-old Socrates meets Zeno (he of the Paradoxes) and the famous Parmenides. Socrates knows the teaching of the great Heraclitus that all things are in constant flux and motion (“You cannot step into the same river twice”): the One is an illusion, the Many is all. Parmenides and Zeno, on the contrary, propose to show that eternal reality is unchanging and flux is impossible: the Many is an illusion, the One is all. Socrates, mock-naïvely, proposes a synthesis: all earthly things are indeed in perpetual flux, but they derive their thing-ness from participating in eternal unchanging Forms or Ideas. Parmenides, somewhat unexpectedly, dismantles this proposal with six increasingly devastating counter-arguments, exposing all sorts of internal contradictions, absurdities, infinite regresses, and the like. But then… Parmenides flips the script and sets out to show, in tremendous (and occasionally mind-numbing) specificity, how one might after all defend a theory of Ideas as logically coherent. Does he succeed? Can the One and the Many be held together? What is the real point of the deductions? It’s hard to say. I must reread it, and write a longer reflection.
21. Republic. Fascinating, riveting, eye-opening: “oh, that’s where that comes from!” a million times. Must revisit. Must write a longer reflection.

Late Period

22. Timæus. Whatever the opposite of riveting is; I really, really struggled for motivation to keep listening to this one. I know it’s one of the most influential texts in the history of Europe, but even with the capable David Timson reading the part of the eponymous monologist, I found my attention slipping over and over again.
23. Critias. It’s Númenor! Or, really, Númenor is Atlantis: “But even the name of that land perished, and Men spoke thereafter not of Elenna, nor of Andor the Gift that was taken away, nor of Númenórë on the confines of the world; but the exiles on the shores of the sea, if they turned toward the West in the desires of their hearts, spoke of Mar-nu-Falmar that was whelmed in the waves, Akallabêth the Downfallen, Atalantë in the Eldarin tongue.” More seriously, we do get hints — reminiscent of Republic (which takes place, dramatically, just the previous day) — at the Platonic ideal for a political constitution.
24. Sophist. The follow-up to Theætetus is not quite as much fun, though it introduces a fun new hermeneutical device: most of the philosophical exposition is not in the mouth of Socrates, who is a mere spectator, but spoken by a nameless Stranger from Elea (home of Parmenides and Zeno). The bulk of the dialogue consists in the search for a single definition via numerous “divisions” and “classes” — much more similar in some ways to Parmenides (to which it makes reference) than to its ostensible precursor. And of course the sophist as a figure is an unflattering subject. It’s quite interesting, however, after hearing Plato decidedly privilege the One over the Many in Republic, to hear some… back-pedaling, maybe? Perhaps the One and the Many can be held together after all. Dramatically speaking, Parmenides is set at the very outset of Socrates' philosophical career, whereas Theætetus, Sophist, and Statesman are said to take place at nearly the end of his life.
25. Statesman. A direct continuation from Sophist, though Socrates takes over from Theætetus as the Eleatic Stranger’s primary interlocutor.
26. Philebus. At one point near the three-quarters mark of this dialogue, Protarchus, who is Socrates’ principal interlocutor, remarks to the philosopher, “Your many repetitions make me slow to understand.” Socrates responds, infuriatingly, “As the argument proceeds, my boy, I dare say that the meaning will become clearer. Protarchus’ dry response, “Very likely,” sums up my experience of this dialogue. Here is an undoubtedly sophisticated, mature, exacting reflection on a classic Socratic-Platonic theme — the superiority of a life spent seeking wisdom to a life spent seeking out pleasure — whose intelligibility is compromised by its repetitiveness. The argument is just difficult to follow. Socrates multiplies distinctions, which no doubt are useful, in service of the general thesis that the enjoyment of pleasure (and its coordinate, the avoidance of pain — though how, precisely, they are coordinated is one of the many subjects of discussion) is not the highest good in life, but rather a faculty like any other, which admits of distortions and falsities, and which therefore cannot be the highest good of a human life. Here there are none of the dramatic fireworks of the earlier Gorgias which touches on similar themes (and which is referenced occasionally). It was, however, worth listening to this dialogue just for the hilarious aside near the beginning in which Socrates describes those young men who are first intellectually thrilled by the paradoxes of One and Many (15e—16d); not much about Philosophy Bros has changed, it seems, in at least 2400 years.
27. Laws.

One recurrent theme throughout Plato’s work, increasingly prominent in the later dialogues (though I recall it as early as Euthydemus), is the challenge posed for his theory of knowledge by falsehood or false knowledge. The problem goes something like as follows. Everyone agrees that there are things called falsehoods which we can utter. Yet, logically speaking, this should not be possible. After all, we speak using words; the meaningfulness of words depends on their signifying things that really have existence; there are no words to speak of non-existence; therefore, we can never speak of that which does not exist; so also we can never speak falsely but can only speak the truth. Similarly, we can never know anything false, but always and only know things that are true; our difficulties come not from false knowledge, which is strictly speaking a contradiction in terms, but from ignorance alone. The argument sounds persuasive when considered abstractly, yet it yields an obviously ludicrous conclusion! It receives its most extended treatment, if I recall correctly, in Sophist, where the Eleatic Stranger explores the problems raised by the term “non-being”. What does the term “non-being” actually indicate?

There is something here formally similar to — and no doubt influential upon — the evidently unsolvable (in the technical sense, absurd) problem of evil in the Christian tradition. God, Who created all things, is (on the classical-theistic view) perfectly good, perfectly knowledgeable, and perfectly capable. He must therefore have created all things perfectly. Furthermore, as He is (by definition) the unique Creator, no creature can contravene His created design or overrule His will if it wanted to. So where does evil come from? For it is evident to all that something has gone horribly wrong. Does it come from some kind of deliberate possibility for evil which He gave to His creatures as part of their creation? If so, how is He not the creator of evil also? But if that is the case, how can He be perfectly good? For that matter, how would a perfectly good Creator be able to conceptualize the possibility of evil so as to deliberately create it? The limitless perfections of classical theism seem to be in tension. But the alternatives are even less appealing. If evil is somehow inherent in the nature of creatureliness, such that anything with any limitations at all has not only a potentiality for but an actuality in evil, then either “evil” is a fundamentally relativized category with no real purchase, or it might be better to never have been created at all. Or if the Creator is limited in any of His moral goodness, knowledge, or capacity, one must suppose that evil might be able to permanently and ultimately gain the upper hand over Him and His creatures. One could fall back on saying that evil cannot exist, because it is a logical impossibility with no satisfactory explanation — yet we have a strong and near-universal intuition that it does exist.

With the beginning of this year, I have determined to patch some of the (very large) holes in my reading of the classics. I have never read Plato or Aristotle in any sort of panoptic way, let alone later major philosophers of antiquity such as Seneca or Plotinus; my reading of the Church Fathers has been almost entirely occasional and extremely selective; it has been years since I have read either the Iliad or the Odyssey (and I have in fact never read the Aeneid). My major reading for roughly the last two years has instead focused on the characteristic novelties and problems of modernity, as articulated by modern writers: George Steiner’s Real Presences, James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, Lorraine Daston’s Rules, Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge, Jason Josephson-Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment, Erazim Kohák’s The Embers and the Stars, and Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry; in a more explicitly scriptural/theological key, my teacher Jeremy Begbie’s Abundantly More, my teacher Kavin Rowe’s essays on New Testament hermeneutics, Brevard Childs' Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments, Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Ephraim Radner’s Time and the Word, and Andrew Louth’s Discerning the Mystery; and, of course, the granddaddy of them all (by at least volume if not temporality), Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary and The Matter With Things.

If your guiding intellectual question is “how shall we live with integrity as Christians in modernity?”, as I am beginning to suspect mine is, this body of literature possesses obvious importance. I am nowhere close to having plumbed the full depths of this tradition (or complex of traditions), and do not intend to stop reading in this area. My reading project on the nature of tradition will bring me back up to the present age with (at least) Gadamer, Lindbeck, and more MacIntyre, and I have several more major works of twentieth and twenty-first-century philosophy and theology already waiting for me on my shelves (Heidegger, Cassirer, Adorno & Horkheimer, Bultmann, Frei, Jenson, Rosa, and so forth). And I’m currently reading through David H. Kelsey’s Eccentric Existence, which (whatever else, good or ill, I might say about it) represents a one-man (two-volume) masterclass in theological engagement with modernity. So in no way am I withdrawing my attention from modernity. Rather, two things have crystallized my sense that it is time to turn (at least more of) my attention to the Old Things.

The first is that I have found myself increasingly overpowered by what I call in shorthand the “I do not understand Hegel” problem. The great theologians and philosophers of the not-too-distant past — and, still, the greatest in the present — were staggeringly, now almost incomprehensibly, literate and erudite figures. Before publishing his great work on hermeneutics, Gadamer was a noted expert on the pre-Socratics. Karl Barth is sometimes accused of not having read the tradition fairly, but he has never been accused of not having read it thoroughly. Brevard Childs seems to have truly read every book ever written. Part of what makes Hegel singularly difficult is, of course, his ruthlessly abstract and intensely tedious style; but no doubt another part is that very few people today are educated the way that he and his peers were. Take a slightly more recent example: what man of letters teaching at the University of Michigan today would dare assign his undergraduate students a reading list like W. H. Auden’s? If philosophy and theology are the Great Conversation, one must learn to discern and hear the enduring presence of the older voices who have left the room before one can truly contribute or at least understand.

The second is that, despite the immensity of my to-read list and the paucity of my already-read list, I do feel that I reached an inflection point with the turning of the year. That was when I finished reading Karl Barth’s Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century — the bulk of which is actually about eighteenth-century philosophy and theology as the “background” to nineteenth-century theology; and it must be said that Barth appears to enjoy writing about Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and so forth a great deal more than the nineteenth-century theologians who are the book’s ostensible subject — and an unofficial trilogy by Lesslie Newbigin: Proper Confidence, Foolishness to the Greeks, and The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. These, somehow, coordinate in my mind: Barth and Newbigin (who was, not coincidentally, heavily influenced by Barth) together outline the negative space for and sketch the positive content of the properly Christian post-liberal synthesis which we desperately need — or which, at any rate, I need in order to feel intellectually satisfied. In the coming months, as the intellectual dust from my aforementioned reading settles, I may take a few stabs at describing what seem the chief features of that synthesis. But I also sense, if dimly, that in order to know what I really mean by those features, I will need some more pre-modern context and contrast. I can thus leave Barth and Newbigin for a little while, confident that I will return to them better able to understand what is fruitful in what they offer.

It is high time, then, that I actually read Plato and Aristotle (not to mention Seneca and Plotinus); that I (begin to) read through the Church Fathers; that I revisit Homer (and meet Vergil anew). I am doing so as follows. For Plato, I have launched into the Ukemi Audio series dramatizing the Socratic dialogues (in Benjamin Jowett’s translation), with the astounding David Rintoul as an unforgettable Socrates — and intend to write here, for my own benefit, at least a short reflection on each dialogue. For the Fathers, the obvious place to start is Volume I of the old Schaff set, with Sts. Ignatius, Justin, Irenaeus, and their comrades. With the Iliad, which I have at least read before (perhaps more than a decade ago), I have cracked open Emily Wilson’s recent translation. In none of these cases is the point a deep, doctoral-seminar level understanding. Rather, the point is familiarity, breadth, and fresh inspiration: to drink deep from the old and honored wells.

If [you have quoted this passage] because you imagined that you could throw doubt on the [preceding] passage, in order that I might say the Scriptures contradicted each other, you have erred. But I shall not venture to suppose or to say such a thing; and if a Scripture which appears to be of such a kind be brought forward, and if there be a pretext that it is contrary, since I am entirely convinced that no Scripture contradicts another, I shall admit rather that I do not understand what is recorded, and shall strive to persuade those who imagine that the Scriptures are contradictory, to be rather of the same opinion as myself.

— St. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 65 (in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1).

My reading project on the concept of tradition commences in earnest with Origen’s De Principiis (I use John Behr’s translation, with minor punctuation and formatting alterations):

All who believe and are assured that “Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ,” and who know Christ to be the truth, according to his saying, “I am the truth,” derive the knowledge which leads human beings to live a good and blessed life from no other source than from the very words and teaching of Christ. And by “the words of Christ” we mean not only those which he spoke when he became human and dwelt in the flesh; for even before this, Christ, the Word of God, was in Moses and the prophets… And that he also spoke, after his ascension into heaven, in his apostles, is shown by Paul in this way, “Or do you seek a proof of Christ who speaks in me?” [Pr.1.]

Since, however, many of those who profess to believe in Christ differ not only in small and trivial matters, but even on great and important matters — such as concerning God or the Lord Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit, and not only regarding these but also regarding matters concerning created beings, that is, the dominions and the holy powers — it seems necessary first of all to lay down a definite line and clear rule [Gk Vorlage: kanon?] regarding each one of these matters, and then thereafter to investigate other matters. … [Although] there are many who think that they know what are the teachings of Christ, and not a few of them think differently from those before them, one must guard the ecclesiastical preaching, handed down from the apostles through the order of succession and remaining in the churches to the present: that alone is to be believed to be the truth which differs in no way from the ecclesiastical and apostolic tradition. [Pr.2.]

[The] holy apostles, in preaching the faith of Christ, delivered with utmost clarity to all believers, even to those who seemed somewhat dull in the investigation of divine knowledge, certain points that they believed to be necessary, leaving, however, the grounds of their statements to be inquired into by those who should merit the excellent gifts of the Spirit and especially by those who should receive from the Holy Spirit himself the grace of language, wisdom, and knowledge; while on other points they stated that things were so, keeping silence about how or whence they are, certainly so that the more diligent of their successors, being lovers of wisdom… might have an exercise on which they might display the fruit of their ability. [Pr.3.]

A rich, and pointed, passage by Sertillanges on the intellectual’s need to be solitary but not isolated:

[Do] not forget that in association with others, even in ordinary everyday meetings, there is something to be gleaned. Too much solitude would impoverish you. … [You] must feel that you cannot shut yourself up entirely. Monks themselves do not do it. You must keep, in view of your work, the sense of the common soul, of life, and how could you have it if, cutting yourself off from human beings, you had in mind but a dream-humanity? The man who is too isolated grows timid, abstracted, a little odd: he stumbles along amid realities like a sailor who has just come off his ship; he has lost the sense of the human lot; he seems to look upon you as if you were a “proposition” to be inserted in a syllogism, or an example to be put down in a notebook. In the inexhaustible wealth of the real, too, we can find much to learn; we must move in it in a spirit of contemplation, not keep away from it.

— A. G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Condtitions, Methods, 59. “The inexhaustible wealth of the real”: what a marvelous phrase.

Subject for further reflection: Christ’s encounter with His two disciples on the road to Emmaus gives the paradigm for our worship. First, as they walk, Christ expounds Moses and the Prophets, “opening their minds” to understand how the Scriptures show it necessary “that the Christ should first suffer and then enter into glory.” Then, as they sit down to supper (“Stay with us!"), the Lord “opens their eyes” in blessing and breaking the bread, and they learn Who it was that unfolded the Scriptures to them: “Did not our hearts burn within us…?” The order is always thus: Hearing ushers us on to seeing; the Word guides us to the Table; the Scripture prepares us for Eucharist.

If a government or major corporation wants to get serious about mitigating or reversing anthropogenic climate change, it should consider stopping research and development on generative “AI." Think about it:

• A ChatGPT query requires roughly 5x the electricity of a normal Google search — that is, a Google search from the days before Google’s “AI Overview” itself 5xed the energy use of every single Google search you perform. If this is the case for a purely text-based response, I don’t even want to know how much energy an image or video generator like DALL-E — or a “music” generator like Sora — requires per query.
• Furthermore, LLM chatbots — due to both their design and their inefficiency in completing the tasks for which they are designed — invite far more queries per day than your typical search engine. The teenagers who spend hours a day chatting with their LLM “therapists” or “AI girlfriends” may be the high tail of the bell curve, but there is no doubt that they are living right into the technology’s basic affordance. I challenge anyone to find a large number of people who literally spend all day Googling things (well, okay, actually, I do know at least one person like this). OpenAI wants everyone to use GPT-4o for everything, 24/7.
• To keep up with this insane and constantly-escalating scale of usage (think also of how every shopping website is suddenly integrating an AI-powered helper chatbot!), new data centers are being constructed every single day. Worldwide data center energy use probably doubled between 2022 and 2023, probably due in substantial part to the impact of rolling out generative AI tools, and seems on pace to keep doubling annually (in a sickening update to Moore’s Law).
• Note also that server farms and data centers are frequently built in regions like the American West which have plenty of available land but scarce water resources. In energy economics, there is a well-known tradeoff known as the “water-energy nexus:” the more water you are able to use (mostly for cooling), the less energy you have to use, and vice versa. In other words, there is ecologically no such thing as a free lunch: degrade your local ecosystem through water use, or pump carbon dioxide and other more noxious pollutants into the air somewhere else. Furthermore, by all accounts data centers significantly degrade quality of life and health outcomes (through, fascinatingly, steady noise pollution in both audible and inaudible frequency bands) for the people who are misfortunate enough to live near them.
• The easiest technologies to eliminate from the economy are, by definition, the ones which have not been integrated into the economy yet. Unlike the automobile, industrial agriculture, air travel, and the other technological revolutions to which we are constantly hearing “AI” compared, the “AI revolution” has not happened yet. It is incredibly unpopular — the American public views “AI” with something like 70% unfavorability the last time I looked into it, which is more unpopular than Donald Trump was at any point during his first term in office — and consistently becomes more unpopular as people learn more about it and have more experience with it. So why not simply say, with Bartleby the Scrivener, “I would prefer not to”? If you want to be serious about climate change, ban AI.

This, of course, will not actually happen. For one thing, it might not be legal (and certainly would not be legally practical) for, say, the US government to ban generative “AI” development. For another, all the incentive structures are aligned against it. To simply “not develop AI” is, clearly, a step that no currently existing tech company (and many not-yet-existing tech companies as well) is willing to countenance, for fear that they will be left behind by their AI-developing competitors — a classic race-to-the-bottom collective action problem. The incoming administration is filled with unapologetic cryptocurrency boosters (another infamously environmentally degradatory technology). And I should pause to say that I don’t quite wish to launch a Butlerian Jihad against all “AI” tools — I am very optimistic, for instance, about the improvements to weather forecasting which the new AI-based models seem to provide when used in conjunction with traditional computational physics-based models, and if AI tools can effectively replace human content moderators to keep porn off social media, all the better.

It’s also true that ending “AI” development would not come anywhere close to reversing anthropogenic climate change. Automobiles, industrial agriculture, and air travel are far larger contributors still to the problem, and there is no good replacement for fossil fuels in these domains (electric car boosters to the contrary). It is impossible to avoid the truism that if you want 18th-century emissions, you need an 18th-century lifestyle. Nobody in the 21st century is going to voluntarily revert to an 18th century lifestyle. What we need, rather, is a massive and non-fossil fuel source of energy that could not only, say, power AI, but also make planetary-scale carbon capture & storage economically viable. No solar or wind power technology is capable of providing this, for reasons of basic physics, and the ecological costs of resource extraction to make solar panels and their battery packs are so significant that it is not clear to me a solar panel will ever, environmentally speaking, “pay for itself” in emissions reductions. Hydropower sounds great if you have a massive river nearby (not the case everywhere!), but every time we check in on the maintenance requirements and ecological impacts of dams, the answer gets worse and worse. That is why I consider it enormously telling that AI developers such as Microsoft, recognizing that the new product they are shoving down all our throats requires an astounding quantity of energy which the current American grid is simply not ready to provide, are making quiet but massive investments in the future of nuclear energy.

The real proposal, then, might actually turn out to be: anthropogenic climate change, widespread generative “AI”, new nuclear energy — pick two.

Questions the “historical method” might ask about the “laws of leprosy” in Leviticus 13–14: What was this disease, actually? The same as what we know as “leprosy” today or different? Multiple diseases? Surely the same pathogen does not affect humans and garments and structures — are these different sorts of molds? What is the cultural logic of hygiene that generates these regulations?

Questions a literary-theological approach might ask: Why is the leper who is “covered head to toe” in his disease pronounced clean? Why must the unclean leper dwell outside the camp? Why are the defilements of skin, fabric, and structure all referred to as “leprosy”? Why is the cleansing of leprosy accomplished through a sin offering and a burnt offering? What exactly is being “cleansed”? Why does it require a full-body shaving? What are the analogies between humans and houses? The significance of clean garments? How can one make atonement for a house?

Imperial conquest — or “national” unification by force, which is hardly so different — requires first that the army be restructured to be highly legible and loyal to the State, rather than organized according to local customs and loyal to their own localities; then that the government of the empire (or nation) be remade in the image of the army; then, finally, that local society be remade in the image of the government.

1. Any institution, movement, or ideology that appeals to the priors of wealthy, successful, and powerful men and women — especially those who (or whose families) have attained wealth, success, or power via success in business — will, as a rule, be surpassingly better funded than any institution, movement, or ideology that questions, undermines, or contravenes those priors.
2. Success in business, while (in most cases) requiring the development of certain skills and capabilities which bear resemblance to (and may even participate in) important virtues, is not domain-transferable. It offers absolutely no credit or guarantee that the model successfully used — or the businessman or woman who achieved that success — is in any way applicable outside of business.
3. Indeed, success in business may indeed blind the successful to their need for the virtues which enable “success” in other fields of life, by leading them to assume that those fields of life all work on roughly the same principles as the business world. Success in business may thus, absent a deep and thorough process of virtue-formation which cannot originate from or primarily take place in the business world, produce wealthy, successful, and powerful men and women who radically lack insight into what is truth.
4. The support, or lack thereof, of the wealthy, successful, and power for an institution, movement, or ideology therefore has absolutely nothing to do with the truth of such an institution, movement, or ideology’s core commitments or doctrines. Not only is there definitively no causal relation; there is no necessary correlation whatsoever.
5. It is almost defensible, as a result, to say that if one wishes to find truth in an institution, movement, or ideology, one should begin by looking as far as possible from where the wealthy, successful, and powerful congregate — and donate.

this post brought to you partly by a reading of Plato’s Gorgias and Protagoras

A good and tough word from A. G. Sertillanges:

Those who aim at what is beyond their powers, and thus run the risk of falling into error, who waste their real capacity in order to acquire some capacity that is illusory, are also men of curiosity in the olden sense… Do not overload the foundation, do not carry the building higher than the base permits, or build at all before the base is secure: otherwise the whole structure is likely to collapse. What are you? What point have you reached? What intellectual substructure have you to offer? These are the things that must wisely determine your undertaking. “If you want to see things grow big, plant small,” say the foresters; and that is, in other words, St. Thomas’s advice. The wise man begins at the beginning, and does not take a second step until he has made sure of the first. That is why self-taught men have so many weak points. They cannot, all by themselves, begin at the beginning.

— A. G. Sertillanges, O.P., The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods (tr. Mary Ryan), 27.

Goal for the next stage of my intellectual life: Answer his questions. Begin again from the beginning.

We should probably be skeptical of efforts to formulate the correct theological method in the abstract, prior to any effort to formulate and commend particular material theological proposals, as though a theological method could serve as an instructions booklet about how to assemble your very own Christian theological conceptual structure.

— David H. Kelsey, Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology, 12

I’m sure everyone else has already noticed this, but in Exodus 29:38ff the twice-daily (morning & evening) lamb offering in the Tabernacle is offered with bread and wine:

A few stray observations, with no particular ordering:

• The “bread” is composed of flour and oil. One might object that as described it is not bread yet but merely a sort of flour-oil paste. However, this is of course a burnt offering: the bread is baked, as it were, in the fire, as it is being offered.
• There is, of course, no leaven in this bread. The Passover (which of course involves the sacrifice of a lamb) is followed by the seven-day Feast of Unleavened Bread, on the first day of which all leaven is cleaned out of every Israelite house. There is no permanent regulation of which I am aware that prescribes leaven the rest of the year. But the collocation of lamb & unleavened bread recalls this festal season. Dare we infer: the Tabernacle exists in a sort of permanent Passover state, or is indeed a kind of permanent Passover?
• The bread and wine are offered with the lamb. They are not substitutable with the lamb, but are its essential accompaniment in sacrifice.
• Similarly, the description of the daily offering as a “sweet savor” comes not in reference to the lamb, but to the lamb with the bread and wine.
• The covenant language of the LORD’s presence with Israel, “meeting” her and “speaking to” her, sanctifying the Tent of Meeting by His presence, dwelling among her and being their God, is not novel to this passage — but its reiteration in connection with the daily sacrifice is, shall we say, suggestive.
• The “grain and wine and oil” of, say, Joel 2, are all present here: the signs, by the fruit of the earth, that the nation is blessed and enjoying abundance.
• To get (potentially) fanciful: Flour symbolically combines various Scriptural images of judgment, death, and resurrection. A kernel of wheat falls to the ground and “dies” so that the plant may “bear much fruit” (John 12). The wheat must be threshed to separate the chaff (which is to be burned unto destruction) from the kernels. The kernels are then ground up to make flour; one thinks of St. Ignatius’ image of himself, preparing for martyrdom, as the “pure wheat of Christ.” Oil, then, is associated with the Spirit; while wine stands everywhere for blood and thus also for judgment.
• More on leaven: In 1 Corinthians 5, when St. Paul is instructing his wayward congregation to expel the man who has his father’s wife (a kind of symbolic, if not necessarily literal, incest), he appeals by analogy to… the sequence of Passover and Feast of Unleavened Bread. “Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed; therefore let us celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” In expelling notorious evildoers, the churches honor the once-for-all Passover of Christ by keeping a permanent Festival of Unleavened Bread.

A catena of quotations from Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century:

If we ask ourselves how it was that Schleiermacher could become so much our—and perhaps really still our—man of destiny, we are once again faced by the mystery of the great man, which possibly consists in the indissoluble unity of his timeless individual power on the one hand, and on the other of the temporal, historical conditions into which he was placed. … [It] is impossible to consider Schleiermacher thoroughly without being very strongly impressed. Indeed one is more strongly impressed every time one does consider him—by the wealth and magnitude of the tasks he set himself, by the moral and intellectual equipment with which he approached them, by the manly steadfastness with which he trod the path he had once embarked upon right to the end as he had entered upon it, unheedful of the favour or disfavour of each passing decade and by the artistry which he displayed, playfully, and endowing it by this very playfulness with the ultimate gravity of all true art—an artistry he showed in all he did, almost down to his last Sunday sermon. We have to do with a hero, the like of which is but seldom bestowed upon theology. Anyone who has never noticed anything of the splendour this figure radiated and still does—I am almost tempted to say, who has never succumbed to it—may honourably pass on to other and possibly better ways, but let him never raise so much as a finger against Schleiermacher. Anyone who has never loved here, and is not in a position to love again and again, may not hate here either. [412–13]

Anyone who seeks to negotiate between faith and a cultural awareness which at first is assumed to be unbelieving, and then bring about a lasting covenant between them must, at all events while he is doing this, take up a position which is in principle beyond that of both parties, a superior position, from which he can understand both parties and be the just advocate of both. He must, even if he himself belongs to one side, at least carry a white flag in his hand when approaching the other for a parley; be cannot at that moment be engaged as a combatant. To put it unmetaphorically: as long as he is an apologist the theologian must renounce his theological function. In so far as the apologist approaches the educated among the despisers of religion from the standpoint of theology he must not desire to speak only from faith and with only the faith of his hearers in view. He must present himself to them in a part which is provided for in their categories, which really occurs or can occur there. … This white flag, which the theologian must carry as an apologist, means of course for the theologian himself that in so far as he is an apologist he must, as Schleiermacher once more expressly states, take his point of departure (standpoint) above Christianity (in the logical sense of the word) in the general concept of the community of pious people or believers. As an apologist he is not a Christian theologian but a moral philosopher and philosopher of religion. He suspends to that extent his attitude to Christianity, and his judgment of the truth or even absoluteness of the Christian revelation. Together with the other educated people he looks upon Christianity as being on the same level as the other ‘pious communities’, as being subject to the points of view from which ‘pious communities’ are to be regarded here. He therefore regards the Christian Church too as ‘a community which arises only as a result of free human actions, and can only continue to exist by the same means’. … As an apologist he must say the other things, he must regard the Church as a pious community which has arisen and lives from human freedom, and has to demonstrate its possibility and necessity as such a community. [428–29, 30]

He is as a modern man and therefore as a thinker and therefore as a moral philosopher and therefore as a philosopher of religion and therefore as a philosophical theologian and therefore as an apologist and therefore finally as a dogmatist determined on no account to interpret Christianity in such a way that his interpreted statements can come into conflict with the methods and principles of the philosophy and the historical and scientific research of his time. [431]

If we call to mind the entire situation of theology in the modern world then we shall find it understandable that it fastened upon the point which had come to the centre of the entire thought of modern man. This point was simply man himself. This shifting of interest did not necessarily have to mean man without God, man in his own world. It could also mean man in the presence of God, his action over against God’s action. A genuine, proper theology could be built up from such a starting-point. We may ask the question whether it was a good thing that Schleiermacher adapted himself to the trend of the time in this way and took up his position at the spot where he was invited to do so by the prevalence of the Copernican world-picture, by its execution during the Enlightenment, by Kant, by Goethe, by Romanticism, and by Hegel. There was in fact no need for the Copernican conception of the universe to acquire the significance of a command that theology should in future be anthropocentric theology. It might perhaps have been both more spirited and wiser to take up and carry through the Reformed theology of the Word more than ever at this time, in instructive opposition to the trend of the age. For indeed this Reformed theology had not been founded upon and conditioned by the Ptolemaic conception of the universe and, as a pure theology of the Word, it offered opportunity enough to do justice to the tendency of the age by an honest doctrine of the Holy Spirit and of faith. There was ambiguity in the fact that theology took the trend of the times as a command which must be followed as a matter of course, and in its inability to do justice to the tendency of the age other than by becoming anthropocentric in accordance with the changed picture of the universe. The suspicion arises whether this does not betray the fact that theology forgot its own theme over against all world-views. But this reversal of theology’s way of looking at things was not necessarily bound to mean that theology was now no longer theology, or had even become the enemy of true theology. Again, a genuine, proper theology could be built up from such a starting-point. Theology could remain true to its own theme while it went with the times and thus completed this reversal. What Schleiermacher constructed by means of his theology of awareness by planting himself in the centre which for the Reformers had been a subsidiary centre, could be the pure theology of the Holy Spirit; the teaching of man brought face to face with God by God, of man granted grace by grace. If it was this, then as a theology it was just as much justified as the theology which was orientated in the opposite direction, the theocentric, Reformed theology. The fact that Schleiermacher intended it as such (even if he did not perhaps execute it in this way) is revealed by the fact that he is very much aware of a second centre beside his original one, and seeks to grant it its full validity. [445–46]

There is no doubt that Schleiermacher sought to assert something like the absoluteness of Christianity, and continually asserted it. Strangely enough it was in the pulpit particularly that the problem again and again crossed his path: why Christ in particular? Why can we not manage without him? Why can we not manage with someone else? Perhaps with someone else who is yet to come? The answer consists in the constantly repeated protestation that everything we have of higher life we have from him. There can be no doubt about the personal sincerity of this assertion. But it is just this which is in question—whether this assertion can be considered as objectively valid, whether the strength of this assertion can be some other strength beside that of the asserting believer himself, or of the composite life of the community of the Christian Church, from out of whose heritage the preaching believer speaks. Schleiermacher does not seem to be able to say that there is an eternal significance of Christ, an absoluteness of Christianity. At the back of even his most forceful protestations, unrevoked, and irrevocable, unless he is to abandon his basic premise, there stands the fact he established in the Addresses that the basic outlook of every religion is in itself eternal, since it forms a supplementary part of the infinite whole of religion in general in which all things must be eternal. The sincerity and strength of the distinction which pious feeling is inclined and determined until futher notice to accord to Christ in relation to itself stands and falls with the sincerity and strength of pious feeling itself. The original fact of Christ and the fact of my Christianity are links in a chain, and the relationship of mutual determination which links in a chain necessarily have makes it plainly impossible to assume that the effect they have on one another cannot in principle be reversed. [456–57]

“‘Take away therefore the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents. For to everyone who has much, more shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him who does not have, even that which he has shall be taken away.’” (Mt 25)

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit, he takes it away. And every branch that bears fruit, he cleanses it, that it may bear more fruit.” (Jn 15)

[The] course of History is predictable in the degree to which all men love themselves, and spontaneous in the degree to which each man loves God and through Him his neighbour.

— from W. H. Auden, “The Meditation of Simeon,” in For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, 51

In turning away from Hegel the [nineteenth century] acknowledged that, having reached the summit of its desires and achievements, it was dissatisfied with itself, that this was after all not what it had intended. It set Hegel aside and tried again, but did not even reach such a peak a second time, and thus manifestly it was bound to be even less satisfied than it was before, although it pretended to be. Where does the fault lie? In Hegel? Those who study him will not receive this impression. If it is a question of doing what the entire nineteenth century evidently wanted to do, then Hegel apparently did it as well as it could possibly be done. Or is the reason that afterwards the age of the great men was past, that there was no genius present in the second half of the century to carry out the better things which the century it seems had in mind in turning away from Hegel? But it is always a bad sign when people can find nothing to say but that unfortunately the right people were lacking. This should be said either always or never. Every age, perhaps, has the great men it deserves, and does not have those it does not deserve. The question only remains, whether it was a hidden flaw in the will of the age itself, perfect as the expression was that it had found in Hegel, which was the reason why it could not find any satisfaction in Hegel and therefore not in itself, and yet could not find any way of improving upon and surpassing Hegel, and therefore itself. It might of course be possible that Hegelianism indeed represented in classic form the concern of the nineteenth century, but precisely as such came to reveal the limited nature of this concern, and the fact that it was impossible to proceed from it to the settlement of every other question of truth. And that for that reason it was, curiously, condemned.

— Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 374. The whole lecture is an absolute tour de force: elucidating both what, for both philosophers and theologians, makes Hegel such an immensely attractive option — and why Hegel, taken on his own terms (like nineteenth-century thought as a whole), ultimately represents a cul de sac for those disciplines.

• Till We Have Faces is set in a pagan, pre-Christian world: the world of a “barbarian” Balkan kingdom (“Glome”) well to the north of Greece, where pagan religion still holds sway but Greek philosophy, far to the south, has already come to a kind of initial maturity. (During Orual’s reign, Glome acquires a copy of a “long and difficult book” that begins with the line All men by nature desire knowledge; this is Aristotle’s Metaphysics, which is a clever tip of Lewis’s hand that the tale is set sometime in the two or three centuries before the birth of Christ.) The Greek slave and expatriate Lysias (“the Fox”) gives Orual a thorough schooling in the Greek philosophical religion, a narrative device by which Lewis can explore the encounter between the pagan and philosophical views of the gods (or the Divine Nature, as the Fox would prefer to say).
• Orual is drawn to, and sometimes even momentarily persuaded, by the simplistic, naturalistic clarity of the Fox’s philosophy: the gods of the heathens are no gods at all; the Divine Nature is not a thing with passions that must be appeased, but is pure goodness and light; Nature is a great interconnected web of causation, and there is neither “chance” nor the direct intervention of the gods in the natural order (despite the Fox’s periodic thanksgivings to “Zeus the Saviour”), so that things only happen which are “in accordance with Nature”; pagan religion is, more or less, a populist fig leaf for the temple’s political machinations vis-a-vis the palace. This philosophy is particularly useful to her when she becomes queen and shuts her Orual-self up in a small locked space within; it offers her tools for the task of good governance (at which, the concluding lines of the book attest, she succeeds spectacularly), and seems to provide rationalization for suppressing her pangs of conscience.
• Nevertheless, neither does Orual abandon the local pagan religion: it has its own political usefulness, of course, in binding together (the root meaning of “religion”) people and palace, and she must be seen participating in the Ungit-cult; more than that, it provides a sense of holiness as something visceral and awe-inspiring, which the philosophical religion never does, associated with blood and incense and darkness (“holy places are dark places”); the “sacred stories” are of course full of “contradictions” and implausibilities, but they give paradoxical voice to deep human instincts and resonances with the natural world — so the (bastardized) story of Psyche becomes a figure of the cycle of the seasons and the cult thereof; without the shedding of blood there is no expiation of sins. And, of course, Orual does — once, when it is too late — see the god of the mountain, and she never forgets the experience (though she does her level best, so she tells herself, to minimize its power over her) of that momentary encounter with a Being of another order.
• The early drama in which the Priest schemes to have Psyche sacrificed is a perfect example of this. The Priest recognizes, with awful intuition, the need for a “scapegoat” (in the Girardian sense) — one must die on behalf of the many for the whole people to be saved; the power of the paradox that, “in a mystery,” this scapegoat must be both the best that the land has to offer and the worst offender against the gods; the further paradox that — depending on the sex of the Blessed / Accursed — the god to whom the victim is offered may be either Ungit (the Awful Feminine) or Ungit’s son (the masculine god of the mountain), a thing of glorious majesty, and that either may simultaneously be the Shadowbrute, a thing of dark terror; the mystery that being the meal of the Brute and the wife of the God may not be all that different. The Fox has no time for any of this, and attempts to pick apart the seemingly incoherent strands of the mystery. But the Priest recognizes the deep coherence of the mysteries, the coincidentia oppositorum at the heart of reality, and so conquers the Fox: “Why not?”
• One distinctive difference between the pagan religion and the philosophical religion, therefore: the pagan religion inspires faith. Even a shrewd political operator like the Old Priest, who understands perfectly well what he is doing vis-a-vis the power of the palace, nevertheless has absolute confidence (pistis) that what he believes and teaches is true. The Fox, on the other hand, has dissolved his own faith in the gods through philosophical criticism, but as a result no longer has the certainty which he needs to counter the power of the Priest. So, when the old King goes to offer Psyche in sacrifice, he finds that he genuinely believes, if only for the time he is making the Offering. The old pagan Ungit-stone, a dark and shapeless thing, inspires more faith and evokes more holiness than the new Hellenistic Aphrodite-statue, which is recognizably human. (As the peasant woman says to Orual on the day of the Birth-feast: “‘That other, the Greek Ungit, she wouldn’t understand my speech. She’s only for nobles and learned men. There’s no comfort in her.’”) It is narratively ambiguous, I think, whether the Great Offering is in fact efficacious to rescue Glome from its troubles; the Fox of course dismisses it according to his exclusively materialist view of causation (“everything would have had to be different from the beginning”), but it is hard for Orual to avoid the impression that the gods have indeed looked with favor on the sacrifice and sent Glome rain, peace, and good fortune.
• The result of this exploration is a kind of negative-space outline for a genuinely Christological — which is to say, incarnational — view of Divinity. The Fox is right in his own way: there really is an absolute bifurcation, an “infinite qualitative distinction” between the immanent and the transcendent, and the gods are not at all like men. That is part of the power of Orual’s experience on the mountain after Psyche has uncovered her lamp. And yet — holiness is found in darkness and paradox and mystery before it is seen in clarity and light. The transcendent hides itself within the immanent, so that it may be sought by Faith, not merely apprehended by Reason. Psyche is not the slave of a mountain outlaw, but is — or was — the wife of the god. Neither paganism nor philosophy can be simply transmuted, for Lewis, into genuine Christianity; but neither can the genuine insights of either into the nature of things and human experience be dismissed as accidental — and if one believes in an absolutely transcendent Creator who has enfleshed Himself, immanentized Himself, one indeed cannot. Both the pagan religion of Glome and the Greek philosophical religion are, in their own ways and precisely in their interaction, praeparatio evangelica.

Piranesi:

• “I realised that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted, and that if ever we discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery. The sight of the One-Hundred-and-Ninety-Second Western Hall in the Moonlight made me see how ridiculous that is. The House is valuable because it is the House. It is enough in and of itself. It is not the means to an end.” (60–61)
• “The World feels Complete and Whole, and I, its Child, fit into it seamlessly. Nowhere is there any disjuncture where I ought to remember something but do not, where I ought to understand something but do not. The only part of my existence in which I experience any sense of fragmentation is in that last strange conversation with the Other.” (71)

[Both] sides in the Reformation and post-Reformation controversies seemed to conceive of tradition as something comparable with Scripture, either complementing it or a rival to it. Both Scripture and tradition are objectified: they are that which we seek to understand, there is a distance between them and us who seek to understand them. There are a good many hidden assumptions behind all this: the idea, for instance, that what is revealed is a collection of truths, so that if tradition supplements Scripture, what we mean is that in addition to the apostolic witness that was written down in the Scriptures, there are other truths which have, as it were, been whispered down the ages, and not written down [n.b.: this suggests a parallel to the concept of the “Oral Torah” in rabbinic Judaism]. These truths are objective, independent truths, which we who seek them will, if we go about it the right way, come across and recognize. The problem of how we know at all, what it is that is taken for granted when we seek to understand God’s revelation, has not been broached with any very searching intensity.

— Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay in the Nature of Theology, ch. 4. One perhaps tangential question regarding this immensely perspicuous point, which perhaps Louth will go on to address: is this hypothesized “deposit of unwritten truth” not exactly the sort of thing that advocates of “Sacred Tradition” (whether Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox) often appeal to today in their (anti-Protestant) apologetics — a deposit, to be specific, left unwritten by the apostles but codified within just a few generations (unlike the rabbinic notion of Oral Torah, transmitted unwritten for over a thousand years!) in the writings of various Fathers? Sacred Tradition is presented as filling the temporal gap between what can be found in the New Testament writings and the full emergence/documentation of Christian culture and doctrine, in such a way that its acceptance is quite on par with the acceptance of the New Testament itself (e.g., the names of St. Peter’s successors as Bishop of Rome, the continuity of the papal office, and the essential nature of the doctrine of the papacy to salvation). Not to put too fine a point on it, but is this not how (say) St. Irenaeus speaks about the “rule of the truth” which he firmly accepts as apostolic in a sense precisely complementary to Scripture? I take Louth’s main point to be correct, both substantively and as a matter of the history he is discussing: but if so it has, shall we say, rather broad ramifications.

Addenda: Well, perhaps I should not be surprised to find that, at least in the period of the Fathers, Louth does go on to address my question.

Whereas tradition understood in a human sense is perhaps the continuity of man’s search for the truth, and whatever progress there is in such a search, tradition in the sense of the tradition of the Church is the continuity of the divine sending, the divine mission, which the Church has received from her Lord and which she pursues in the world. … The Church’s sending is in the power of the Spirit: the heart of the Church’s tradition, Holy Tradition, is the life of the Holy Trinity, in which the Church participates through the Holy Spirit.

Well and good. What about the content of the tradition? Louth goes on to quote a number of passages from St. Irenaeus, precisely on the point I questioned above, to this effect:

Irenaeus speaks of the character of the Church which is preserved through the succession of bishops… not just the articles of faith handed down by the apostolic succession of bishops, but the whole character of the Christian community, its rites, its ceremonies, its practices, and its life. … [For] Irenaeus the tradition of the Church is not, like the traditions to which the gnostics appealed, simply some message, truth, or ideology, but a life, something lived. … The rule of truth, then, is the faith, the fundamentals of Christian belief… This is the tradition which has been handed down from the apostles and is received in baptism: the fact that it is received is almost as important as what is received — tradition is not something we make up, but something we accept.

To inhabit and appropriate “Sacred Tradition”, then, is to be part of the Church that transmits the tradition that is Christianity — the “tradition” of the whole of Christian life. Finally Louth comes to St. Basil the Great, and returns to the question of the “unwritten traditions”:

The examples Basil gives of such unwritten traditions are all liturgical practices: the sign of the cross, prayer toward the East, the epiclesis at the Eucharist and indeed most of the rest of the Eucharistic prayer, the blessing of water in baptism, of oil, and so on. The secret tradition is not a message, but a practice, and the significance of such practice. We come back to the fact that Christianity is not a body of doctrine that can be specified in advance, but a way of life and all that this implies. Tradition is, as it were, the tacit dimension of the life of the Christian[.] … What this seems to suggest is that ultimately the tradition of the Church is the Spirit, that what is passed on from age to age in the bosom of the Church is the Spirit, making us sons in the Son, enabling us to call on the Father, and thus share in the communion of the Trinity.

That’s a pretty effective rejoinder to my question. This is what it means that the Christian tradition is “living:” that it is, perhaps, the outward expression of the presence in the Church of the Spirit, who is Lord and Giver of Life.

Understood like this, tradition is not another source of doctrine, or whatever, alongside Scripture, but another way of speaking of the inner life of the Church, that life in which the individual Christian is perfected in the image of God in which he was created. Speaking of it as tradition brings out the fact that it is received, that it is participated in, that it is more than the grasp that the individual has of his faith.

I remain curious to see how Louth deals with more contemporary advocates of Tradition who, presumably, remain trapped within the post-medieval object-subject division.

Athanasius’s debate with the Arians was a lectionary-based discussion, if not explicitly, a least in a very practical way: it had to do with how the full range of the Scriptures in their apprehended juxtaposition disclosed the truth of God. I believe that Athanasius’s discussion is, on that basis, more credible than the Arians', because it is more comprehensive of the texts of the Scripture as they are made to perdure side by side. In our own day, it is such contiguity in temporal extent that has drastically shrunk. To that degree, the triumph of Arianism lies in the thinning out of the figural word, and thereby the dropping out of texts as divinely referring in their meaning and power. Heresy is the deliberated withering, far more even than the purported contradicting, of the Scriptures.

— Ephraim Radner, Time and the Word: Figural Reading of the Christian Scriptures, 233

Addendum:

The notion that Christian theology is to be seen as concerned with the mystery of God, the trinitarian God who loved us in Christ and calls us to participate in the mystery which he is, suggests to me that the main concern of theology is not so much to elucidate anything, as to prevent us, the Church, from dissolving the mystery that lies at the heart of the faith—dissolving it, or missing it altogether, by failing truly to engage with it. And this is what the heresies have been seen to do, and why they have been condemned: the trinitarian heresies dissolve the divine life, either by reducing it to a monadic consciousness, or by degrading it to the life of the gods; the Christological heresies blur the fact that it is in Christ that this divine life is offered to us—that it is through him and in the Spirit that we know ourselves to be loved by God himself—and do this either by qualifying the fact that God is who Jesus is, or by qualifying the fact that what Jesus is is truly a man; heresies concerning man’s divinization are no less insidious, as they blur the fact that we are truly loved by God in Jesus and are called to respond to that love, and that in thus loving and being loved we are drawn into a real communion with God.

— Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay in the Nature of Theology

“And Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they were in his eyes but a few days because of his love for her. And Jacob said to Laban, ‘Give me my wife, for my days are fulfilled, that I may go in unto her.’ And Laban gathered together all the men of the place and made a feast.” — Genesis 29:20f

“But forget not this one thing, beloved, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow concerning his promise, as some count slowness, but is long-suffering toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” — 2 Peter 3:8f

“’Hallelujah! For the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigns. Let us rejoice and be exceeding glad, and let us give the glory to him, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his wife has made herself ready. And it was given to her that she should array herself in fine linen, bright, pure.’ For the fine linen is the righteous acts of the saints. And he says to me, ‘Write: Blessed are those who have been invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.’“ — Revelation 19:6–9

Though it now seems like a fairly obvious point, probably already made somewhere by St. Augustine or the like, it has never before today struck me what is the nature of the basic contrast between the false seed of Adam, represented by Cain and his son Enoch, and the true seed, represented by Seth and his son Enosh.

Cain, cast away from the gate of Paradise and alienated from the ground, goes off and establishes a city — which he names for his son, linking the future of his line metaphorically and literally to human civilization (which begets agriculture, technology, and culture). Enoch, it is worth noting, means something like “dedicated” or “disciplined.” As a result of Cainite man’s alienation from the world through sin, he dedicates himself — not unfruitfully, in a way — to the civilizing practices of building, making, growing, and so forth, that will “discipline” the world towards his ends. Nevertheless, since these attempts at civilization began in Cain seeking to escape the consequences of his brother’s murder, they will inevitably tend towards and end in Lamech’s celebration of a young man’s murder.

But Seth stays, it seems, with his father and mother at the gates of Paradise, and continues to worship the true Creator rather than dedicating himself to overcoming creatureliness. And this is just what Enosh means: man, as frail and weak, mortal, yet relationally bound. Sethite man “remembers that he is dust” and “calls on the name of the Lord” — the only name that can deliver from death.

Evangelical theology is trapped in a perpetual struggle between its two uneasily coexisting traditions: biblical theology and systematic theology. The dispute is always the same. It never ceases, never disappears, never makes real progress on genuinely reconciling the traditions, but continues forever. The players come and go, the ostensible matter of controversy shifts, but the arguments never change. This is happening, in one form, right now with John Mark Comer and the New Calvinists; it happened in the last decade with the debate over the Gospel between “Team King Jesus” and “Team Gospel Coalition”; it happened in the decade before that with N. T. Wright and John Piper on justification (funny how the New Calvinists keep popping up here!); and so forth ad infinitum. Squint a bit, and even the early stages of the Reformation outline the same form of controversy: Luther the doctor of Old Testament, Zwingli the advocate of expository preaching, and so forth for the “Bible” side, and Eck, Cajetan, various Popes, et al for the “theology” side. (My personal favorite example of this is the pair of books published by IVP Academic a few years ago, authored respectively by Hans Boersma and Scot McKnight: Five Things Theologians Wish Biblical Scholars Knew and Five Things Biblical Scholars Wish Theologians Knew.)

Here is the general form of the controversy. Note that whenever it wells up and spills over, it can do so under the impulse of either tradition, but really identifying such responsibility is difficult; it is just one perpetual-motion controversy, and so the whole thing (at least when viewed as neutrally as possible) is a chicken and egg problem. However, let us suppose it is (re)triggered by the Bible side:

1. A theologian specializing in Biblical interpretation (which is all that a “biblical scholar” really is) publishes some argument, taking as his (and it is, as we know, usually a he) point of polemical departure some commonly taken-for-granted bit of doctrina, especially as it is popularly preached rather than scholastically described: for example (to pick, almost at random, from N. T. Wright), the gospel is about you “getting saved” so that you will “go to heaven when you die.” This bit of (again, popularly expressed) teaching is then found to be a remarkably inadequate representation of the biblical texts usually adduced to support it: so John 3, Romans 3–8, Revelation 21–22, and so forth actually testify that “salvation” and “eternal life” have a present dimension and reference, and the future hope is primarily for heaven “coming down to earth,” not us escaping earth and going “up to heaven”: not “life after death” so much as, in Wright’s (brilliant) phrase, “life after life after death.” Often the popular misrepresentation is straightforwardly taken to be the responsibility of some major, and beloved, historical-theological figure in the tradition: Augustine, Luther, and Calvin are popular choices here. (Sometimes it is not the (re)originator of the controversy who does this, but some less-cautious disciple.)
2. These warning shots arouse the systematic theologians from their dogmatic slumbers (noodling away over the finer points of Jonathan Edwards' doctrine of the beatific vision, or Kuyper’s theology of church offices, or whatever), and they determine to return fire. The more historically minded pursue lines of historical critique: the representation of Augustine (or whomever) is in fact a misrepresentation, and Augustine was far more careful than he is generally criticized as being. What we most need today, in fact, is not less Augustinianism, but more Augustinian Augustinianism! Or: the biblical theologian is simply and naïvely repristinating a historical error (e.g., the Hellenization thesis) which has been weighed, measured, and found wanting. The more philosophically minded, similarly, take the concepts deployed (again, simply and naïvely) by the biblical theologian and subject them to philosophical-theological critique: this is (or depends upon) univocity repristinated, or Social Trinitarianism uncritically retrieved, or Socinianism resurgent. Sometimes this sort of thing has the genuinely salutary effect of bringing the various parties' philosophical and theological presuppositions directly into view. Often it reads more like an attempt to overwhelm the opponent with force of Weighty Words.
3. Now the biblical theologians sharpen their exegetical tools to reply. There are a number of forking paths here, but they mostly consist of the same basic move: Sure, they say, you may be right about what Augustine said: but was Augustine right about what the Bible said? The systematicians are far too concerned with the neatness of their systems, far too quick to find dogmatic concepts — which took centuries to develop — in the text of the Bible itself. Or they are far too quick to occlude (here enters a historical-theological presupposition) what was imaginable, and therefore mean-able, to the author of a particular book in favor of the Church’s later consensus about what that book must really have meant: the conceptual equivalent of “illegitimate totality transfer” in semantics. This is typically where, in New Testament, references to “Second Temple Jewish” and, in Old Testament, references to “Bronze Age Israelite” thought occur: no Second Temple Jewish reader had such and such a conceptual category as to have been able to comprehend what Augustine later argued, and likewise Augustine had lost some key conceptual categories possessed by a Second Temple Jew. You know, the Hellenization thesis may be discredited in certain areas, but come on, you’re really telling me that by transposing the Biblical subject matter into the language of neo-Platonism there was not an iota, not a jot that passed from the Law’s original meaning? Are we even evangelicals anymore (rather than — horror of horrors! — Roman Catholics) if we are willing to prioritize a later theological development over what the Bible says?
4. The systematicians, of course, cannot abide this sort of suggestion. Naïve (you keep using that word) historicism! is the charge flung at the biblical theologians. You are operating from theological presuppositions just as much as we are, but the difference is a) you don’t know what yours are, whereas we do, and b) yours are wrong. Sometimes there is a historical doubling down, a sort of fighting the historicizing fire with fire: Don’t you know that your same argument about this same text was made in, say, the third century by [checks notes] Paul of Samosata? To reject Paulianist heresy, we must also reject your argument. Or: You have, damningly, overlooked a most critical distinction made in the 17th century by Francis Turretin — which convincingly vindicates our interpretation, and demolishes yours. The more thoughtful and careful systematicians, at this point, are actually usually willing to own that yes, they are willing to prioritize a later theological development (though of course for evangelicals it is that of, say, Martin Luther and not the Council of Trent, for… reasons!) because they believe it more effectively preserves some essential truth taught in the Bible — or which itself must be preserved to in turn preserve some essential truth taught in the Bible.
5. And so on, and so forth, unto the ages of ages. Eventually an individual controversy will run out of steam and settle back down under the surface. But never for long. All this has happened before, and it will all happen again.

This process — which I describe above with great love for both sides, and with tongue firmly in cheek — is a kind of dialectical expression of the basic aporia of the evangelical tradition. Belonging myself, however uneasily, to a stream of that tradition, I believe and affirm unhesitatingly every word of what follows in this paragraph, and thus belong to the realm and feel the force of the aporia. The Bible possesses a unique and singular authority, an authority distinct from and superior to any human tradition. What it speaks to us shares fully in the eternal authority of the Triune God, of Whom it testifies singularly and authoritatively and Who is singularly and authoritatively God (the Shema means more, but not less, than this). It is therefore of supreme importance to understand and obey what it is speaking. However, there is no non-traditioned, perfectly rational position from which any human can interpret the totality of what it is speaking. Add to this that the content and message of the tradition, as we now express it, is derivative from but not identical to the content and message of the Bible: it is, unavoidably, at a minimum that content and message — which was originally imparted in one moment of history — interpreted and therefore translated into a new moment of history. This renders its traditioned re-presentation remarkably contingent when viewed historically, even as such tradition is simultaneously inescapable and necessary. It is only the (theological) confession of Divine Providence which guards for us this sheer contingency from tipping into simple invalidity.

Thus, the Bible’s authority seems to be not just an article of faith but the greatest article of faith, the article of faith on which all other articles of faith depend — but simultaneously the more it becomes an article of faith, the less contact it seems to have with not only reality as historically experienced but also its own text and matter. Thence the divide between biblical and systematic theologians. The biblical theologians protest when the systematicians take the text of the Bible beyond what it presents itself to us as being; the systematic theologians protest when the biblicists set the Bible over against the articles of faith which depend upon it, which it has generated, and are in turn what we live. This dynamic is constantly re-presenting itself at the level of the matter under controversy. Take the doctrine of God. The more that, for instance, under the influence of philosophical criticism, God becomes absolutely transcendent, unqualifiedly impassible, and so forth, the less contact this God-concept seems to have with the God represented in the narratives of Scripture, which naturally invites rebuke — but equally a God-concept simply transposed out of the narratives of Scripture invites this philosophical criticism: if God were not absolutely transcendent and unqualifiedly impassible, could the sorts of exalted things Scripture says (and we are invited to say) about His faithfulness and justice and so on really be maintained?

“As ministers,” Barth remarks in one of his great early essays, “we ought to speak of God. We are human, however, and so cannot speak of God.” Put differently: we must re-present the Bible, but can we — and may we? Everyone wants to live “the religion of the Bible,” but nobody can live “the religion of the Bible” in the strictest sense of the word, because the Bible does not so much present as generate a “religion” which is both greater and lesser than itself. Nobody wants to “go beyond what is written” — but nobody can truly “not go beyond what is written,” because as soon as one asks the question “what is written?” it inevitably comes coupled with the question “how do you read it?” Both parties in the debates are permanently trapped in this dialectic. Everyone involved knows all this, at a more or less tacit level. The debates are almost entered into with a sigh of dismayed recognition, as a performance that must be undertaken yet whose non-outcome is fully known and expected. At times they seem to be an exercise in deflecting our attention from this basic aporia: like the head of Medusa, it cannot be looked at directly, hence it turn us to stone (or, yet worse, to Rome). No new Aquinas or Calvin or Barth has come along, someone who can embody both traditions so persuasively and definitively as to reconcile them and generate a new synthetic tradition of evangelical theology. Is such a reconciliation possible? Where could such a figure come from? Who is sufficient for these things?

And how, then, shall we live? For we must, we cannot but, go on with living even as we theologize, and if our theology — in all its detail and in its grand sweep — has nothing really to do with our living (if, that is, such a thing is even possible) then it is a grand experiment in foolishness, in “wise words taught by mere human wisdom.” The controversy wells up again, and again, and again because all parties recognize that in it the form of our life before God is somehow at stake. There is a way (that is, The Way) and it must be walked in. I am tempted to conclude here on a note of despair for the insolubility of this problem, and yet I cannot despair entirely. For, low and gentle, yet firm, I hear again the voice of The Way, cutting through the noise of the controversies and of my own mind, speaking the simplest words of all, inviting, beckoning, pleading: “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

For this reason I do not and cannot ultimately choose a “side” in these theological controversies. Rather, wherever I encounter them — on either side — I will tend to throw in my lot with those who seek to speak and live the words of The Way after Him. I will trust in His words — His Word — to me, because there is no deeper metaphysical or ontological substrate than this trust. That is why any of us have ended up in these controversies to begin with, after all: Before we ever wrestled with the concept of history, or the hermeneutics of Biblical narrative, or the concept of God, we heard the Voice of the Way and found ourselves irresistibly drawn towards Him, found ourselves convinced that He is the Truth and the Life, came to know Him as the pearl of great value to have which it is worth selling all. And that is where we will still be after the controversies cease, when we will see no longer as in a mirror dimly but face to face.

Here I would like to advance the admittedly speculative hypothesis that the peculiar quality of music lies in its ability to produce a highly specific form of relating to the world, one in which our relationship to the world as a whole becomes tangible and thus can be both modulated and modified. Music in a way negotiates the quality of relation itself, whereas languages and sign systems can only ever thematize one particular relationship to or segment of the world at a time… [Listening] to music has a different orientation than seeing, grasping, or feeling. The experience of music suspends the division between self and world, transforming it in a way into a pure relationship. Music is the rhythms, sounds, melodies, and tones between self and world, even if these of course have their source in the social world and the world of things. The universe of sound consists in its ability to express or generate all manner of different and differently nuanced relationships: strife, loneliness, desolation, resentment, alienation, and tension, as well as yearning, refuge, security, love, responsivity. This pure relational quality adheres to music in all of its manifestations, high culture as well as pop culture, and allows us to comprehend how it is that music and dance have always been so closely linked. …

[95] Only from this perspective can we understand how, on the one hand, music possesses the power to change the way we are situated in the world (our “attunement”), while, on the other hand, we crave different kinds of music depending on our relationship to the world at a certain moment. Even (and especially) music that expresses sadness, melancholy, hopelessness, or strife is capable of moving us, because we are able to experience it as resonating with our own sadness, melancholy, or strife, i.e. with our own relationships to the world. We experience being moved by such sounds as something positive (even and especially when we are brought to tears) and not at all as something that itself makes us depressed. To the contrary, it is when we are no longer touched, moved, or gripped by music that we experience alienation or, in extreme cases, depression, as it is then that we experience the world as mute, even as it is still so loud. …

If my contention is correct that music negotiates the quality of relation (to the world) itself, then we can begin to understand the eminently important function that it is capable of fulfilling in modern society. Music affirms and potentially corrects, moderates, and modifies our relation to the world, repeatedly re-establishing it as the “ur-relationship” from which subject and world origi-nate… Seen from this perspective, the “musicalization” of the world since the twentieth century seems to be an almost inevitable correlate (because complementary in its effects) to the growing reification of our two-sided bodily relationship to the world[.]

— Hartmut Rosa (tr. James C. Wagner), Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (London: Polity, 2019), 94–95

[Our] work is not done simply by distinguishing between good resonance and bad alienation. Rather, it is here that our conceptual problems begin. First, it is possible to identify experiences that exhibit characteristics of “negative” resonance, either because they are directly harmful to subjects or because they have normatively undesirable or even disastrous “side-effects.” Second, the longing for total and lasting resonance with the world itself turns out to be a subjectively pathological and in political terms potentially totalitarian tendency. Third (and relat-edly), we shall see that forms and phases of alienation are not only unavoidable, but also required for the subsequent development of resonant relationships. It will, moreover, prove necessary to conceptually differentiate between brief, often intense moments of resonant experience and lasting resonant relationships, which are necessary to provide a stable and reliable basis for such repeatable experiences.

— Hartmut Rosa (tr. James C. Wagner), Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, 39