Procession and Retvrn

A reflection on the Participatory Metaphysic

As the modern world continues to crater, and our culture of material desire caves in on itself, many are jostled from positions of ideological comfort and are seeking a fresh orientation in something more permanent. Something that precedes the moment. One significant way this manifests itself is a large movement away from nineteenth and twentieth century evangelical trends, back toward religious expressions that are more deeply rooted. I myself have felt this pull, thrusting me back into Augustine and Athanasius, the Anglican Divines, first and second generation Lutheran theologians, the Magisterial Reformers, and other traditions within the catholic faith. A few days ago, I spoke for Chronicles Magazine with an old friend who has sought spiritual refuge in the Orthodox tradition.

The question that seemed relevant to my mind was: how do I engage more meaningfully in the Christian tradition in a way that isn’t itself just pure emotion; a catapult of reaction against the dead end of materialist modern secularism, in all its rationalist, scientific, individualist, and nominalist trappings? That is, where do I turn? There’s obviously much to cover if I’m to express the developments of my own faith and its trajectory—people may know my background is Reformed Baptist—but I suppose I could kick things off in the realm of metaphysics.

The reason for this is several-fold. First, it is clear that post-enlightenment Evangelicalism is metaphysically bankrupt. I am completely convinced that the secularization of our world is downstream from the collapse of classical metaphysics. Certainly, this isn’t any particularly novel insight among conservative Christians—there are legions of books and projects being produced in the genre of repudiating the nominalism of early modern Europe. But secondly, one cannot understand earlier meanings of religious symbols and dogmas without first setting them in what is by now a foreign metaphysical landscape. How can I properly interact with the Sacraments unless I first absorb the metaphysical bedrock on which they were developed? Doctrine is downstream from our deepest vision of the cosmos.

One book I read recently that touches on these topics provides a decent starting place for such a discussion. The book is Hans Boersma’s Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry. I can use this book as a foil for discussion, but please note that this post is not a full review or interaction with all its themes.

One of the interesting things that came out of reading this, is that it proved to be the singular area of my thinking where my oldest convictions about some theological topic were reinforced, rather than challenged. In short, Boersma makes the case that the Platonic-Augustinian tradition needs to be kept distinct from the Scholastic-Thomist tradition.¹ This book is, in part, intended to address the crisis of Modernity within the Christian religion; and rather than having us return to Thomas Aquinas to save ourselves from Nominalism, Boersma points to the Neo-Thomists for the rise of Nominalism in the first place.

In this way, clearly, Boersma has been influenced by the work of Henri de Lubac and the French ressourcement movement in the early twentieth century.² For my own purposes, I was interested in understanding the relation of the collapse of the Platonic-Christian metaphysic and the rise of materialist Modernity, especially taking into account the question of the Protestant Reformation. These nouvelle theologie Catholic philosophers were controversial in the midst of Roman officialdom because they refused to lay the blame for the collapse of traditional metaphysics at the feet of the Reformers alone, though of course they were not Protestant sympathizers—perhaps this makes their case more compelling. In any case, in their estimation, such a cheap exercise in finger-pointing was intellectually lazy. In this way, far from embodying any sort of “New Theology” (nouvelle theologie was the label applied to them by their critics), this group sought a sort of philosophical return to the first millennium.

Many of us have heard the meta-narrative offered by Roman Catholic apologists to explain the collapse of Christendom and the rise of twentieth century materialistic modernism: Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformers abandoned the medieval synthesis, built a system on top of the new trend of European nominalism, and everything was downstream from this fatal decision. There are several angles one can take to interact with this narrative, one of the most obvious ones is to recognize that, whatever one can say about Martin Luther’s personal education background, Richard Muller and others have gone to gargantuan lengths to describe the post-reformation Protestantism as a sustained project in the rediscovery of Scholasticism. Imagine, for instance, calling Richard Hooker or Francis Turretin a Nominalist.

The Lutheran popularizer Jordan Cooper has spent a decent amount of time pointing out the blatant nominalism assumed in the most important Roman Catholic philosophers in post-1600s Europe, working as they did to counter the effects of the Reformation and struggling to uphold the Rome’s hegemony in an age of Christendom’s fractioning.

Boersma takes another helpful approach that can be implied in the historical work of Reformation scholars such as Heiko Oberman (who also influenced Matthew Barrett’s Reformation as Renewal). Here, the emphasis is on the fact that Nominalism was born in the context of the Roman Catholic Church. For over two hundred years prior to the Reformation, Thomism was undermined and challenged from within. The Roman Catholic Church was therefore the garden in which the seeds of modernism were planted, sponsored, cared for, and raised; strongly preceding Luther and the Protestants. So why blame Protestantism?

But what Boersma also observes is that Protestants failed to reverse the trajectory that had long been built into the theological cake. The ultimate problems were not yet on anyone’s radar. Instead, the mainstream of Protestants took the metaphysical trends in one direction, while the counter-reformers took them in another. Neither group saw clearly the metaphysical vision that long preceded the rediscovery of Aristotle. The Roman counter-reformers sought to dogmatize Neo-Thomism, and the Protestants spent little time on metaphysics, concerned as they were on more specific doctrinal formulations and practical political-ecclesiastical concerns. Boersma’s approach is not necessarily to scold either party for spending their limited time on the matters of the day, but rather to lament the entire meaning of the dynamic from a distance, from the advantaged standpoint of twenty-first century, looking back on it all.

Boersma states on page 87:

“What the positive effects of the Reformation failed to do was repair the tapestry that the late Middle Ages had unravelled and cut. In other words, the Reformation, while focusing on doctrinal issues and abusive practices that certainly needed to be addressed, failed to address appropriately the underlying problems that had given rise to the need for reform.”

Boersma argues that it was in its very response to the Protestant Reformation that Rome solidified its commitment to (a particular reading of) Thomas Aquinas, when what they should have done was worked to rediscover the Christian Platonists. And at the same time, the Protestants should have ground their own doctrines more explicitly in the pre-scholastic era of the Church Fathers. This latter point strikes me as not entirely fair. While it is obviously true that post-Enlightenment Protestantism—and certainly American evangelicalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—constitute a vacuum of historical depth, reading Calvin and Luther and others of that era demonstrates their fealty to the early Church Fathers over against the Scholastic philosophy of the Late Middle Ages.³ And scholars like Torrance Kirby have gone to impressive lengths investigating the explicit Augustinian-Platonism of the Church of England’s Richard Hooker.

Connecting modern evangelicalism to historic Protestantism serves the interests of both Rome (in their Decline theory of the Reformation) and Modernist Evangelicalism (in their Whig theory of the Reformation). But both interpretations are unsustainable. At the same time, what appears fair to both the modernist evangelicals and the committed post-Trent Roman Catholics, is that Western evangelicals have had, in the post-Enlightenment era, a poor relationship with the Augustinian tradition. That is to say, there is an important line of severance between nineteenth/twentieth century evangelicalism, and the first several generations of Protestant Reformers. But I digress.

The Great Tradition

Boersma advances what has been referred to as the Great Tradition, but does so in a way that precedes and leaves out the rise of Scholasticism, allowing him to look to the twelfth century for the mistakes that were dogmatized during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. For Boersma, the story told by de Lubac and Yves Congar is most convincing; namely, that it was in the twelfth century discovery of nature as self-existing that the world began to be desacramentalized. Max Weber would eventually describe modernity as the disenchantment of the world, but perhaps describing this as a de-sacramentalization is more useful for our purposes.

One Modern who quite profoundly understood the collapse of the Augustinian world picture was C.S. Lewis, who Boersma characterizes as advocating a “Real Presence” view of nature and the world. Rather than sharply distinguishing between Nature and Supernatural, as was done in the Thomist tradition, Lewis would return to Athanasius and the Christian Platonists who emphasized that we can speak of God consisting in all things, penetrating the world in a constant, permeating presence. This is described as the Sacramental Tapestry.

The entire universe, for this tradition, was sacramental. The very concept of human existence was participation in the being of God (“in Him we live and move and have our being”). Church tradition is sacramental time, Truth is sacramental reality, Biblical Interpretation is a sacramental discipline, and, well, the Church Sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist are really efficacious means of Grace. In the framing of Lewis, the symbol contains the thing it symbolizes. We may call this a Participatory Metaphysic.

Thus, we find the relevance of that old Neo-Platonic phrase Procession and Return: all ideas are sourced in God and they emanate outward from God, and all that is reflects the outward flow from God as the Original One. And thence, all ideas eventually return to God, collapsing back into Him as the final sum and destination of all things. The flow of time is that magnificent emanation from Him, to the periphery, and back home. Procession, and Return.

Or, as Paul puts it in Colossians,

“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created… through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. […] For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.”

Beautiful. Procession, and return. Outward to the periphery, and back home again. To know truly is to enter the Mind of God, and to be saved is to be united with the risen Christ.

The Revolt of Nature

Against this Participatory Metaphysic loomed the challenge of the rising Scholasticism. The older participatory ontological framework, Boersma argues, is not the same as that put forth by these Neo-Aristotelians. The story here gets complicated and I can only summarize. But, leveraging the studies of Yves Congar,⁴ Boersma looks at four components of the revolt against the Great Tradition and the rise of the High Middle Ages, which set context for the Reformation:

1. The Juridicizing of the Church - the Church became the vehicle of God’s presence on earth whereas before, all things were emanations from God, and therefore participated in his being.

2. The Discovery of Nature - nature became self-existent and therefore distinct from the “supernatural.”

3. The separation of physical and spiritual meaning in the Eucharist (with Berengar of Tours [d. 1088])

4. The separation of Scripture and the Church - Scripture and Church became their own separate things, whereas before the second millennium, the two were bound up together; the latter being the context and protector of the former.

All these things, Boersma argues following Congar, can be summarized in the “sharp distinction” between the natural and the supernatural. It was this sharp distinction, emphasized in Scholasticism, that undermined the Sacramental Tapestry, the Participatory Metaphysic. Without this distinction, neither the Council of Trent’s Eucharistic or ecclesiological dogmas, could have arisen. Boersma labels these trends as “the unraveling of the tapestry.”

Boersma writes that

Aquinas and others celebrated the goodness and (at least relative) autonomy of the natural order vis-a-vis the supernatural, with the “desacralizing” of Western culture as the inevitable result."

As the natural world gained autonomy, the supernatural was forced into an inevitable retreat. The ressourcement theologians maintained that the sacramental tapestry of the Great Tradition, in which nature participated in the supernatural, made way for a new—and ultimately secular—configuration.

It was in this context of a preceding unraveling of the Sacramental Metaphysic, Boersma and the nouvelle theologians argue, that the Reformation found itself. The tragedy of the Reformation, in light of the unraveling Great Tradition, was that in order to maintain authority in Christendom, “[Roman] Catholic theologians overreacted to their opponents and in so doing exacerbated the problems that [have already been] described.”

The point here, in my mind, is specifically to reject the view that to find meaning in Church history and the Christian tradition one must first call into question the Reformation, because it marked some sort of initial metaphysical crisis. If the tearing of the metaphysical foundation is partially to blame for our modern woes, the Reformation is does not constitute such a tearing. This much needs to be said in light of the number of people that find solace in the Roman Catholic Church, adopting a distorted and dishonest view of the historical difficulties of these questions with regard to the Protestant moment.

Procession and Retvrn

A fundamental aspect of Boersma’s book is to make the general case that ecumenism and the re-uniting of Christendom relies on a Roman-evangelical truce; an agreement to return to the first millennium. This is not here my purpose in pondering these things. It actually strikes me as completely untenable: all that needs to be done is the two parties who have been at war for six centuries should agree with each other! Moreover, one should actually fear that if you push for a new ecumenism, you’d get it good and hard—and it’ll be more Progressive and Left-wing than you can possibly imagine. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but the Institutions have been subverted and are now wholly occupied.

Rather, this is primarily personal and familial: the world that lies directly ahead is one of darkness; the consequences of Man’s revolt against Light, the hubris of Babel as Man flaunts his creations in the face of a God whom he pretends doesn’t even exist. The survival of the soul in the midst of total spiritual collapse depends upon repudiating the foundations of that collapse. In seeking spiritual refuge from the grotesque character of man unhinged from any moral center, there is life in pre-modern ways of thinking that allow us to find gravitas as we move forward into the civilizational unknown.

It is also to bear witness to those that come after, such as our children: take no part in the chaos, there is a better way. Man cannot live wholly in the presentism of this world, for such an instinct drains one of the spiritual nourishment available in prior ages, prior frameworks of the world picture. There’s a sense in which we as moderns have been to the edge of the abyss and seen where it all leads. We have gone out to the periphery from the metaphysical center in which the Christian tradition was once sourced. We have undergone a sort of Procession of our own, outward, and have peered over the cultural cliff.

One may not find much meaning in the practice of attempting to trace out present disarray in the philosophical debates of the early second millennium—though I myself find it intriguing. But the lesson here remains that atomistic materialism has proven to have emptied out the soul of man, and the wisdom of the Great Tradition offers refreshment for all who seek it. The participatory metaphysic is the ultimate repudiation and rejection of every major myth of our age— it flips our entire, sinking, post-cultural civilization on its head and allows us to reorient ourselves toward a cosmos in which God is ever-near.

There’s something elegant in the medieval metaphysic of Procession and Return, challenging us to Participate in God, rather than just scientifically investigate the world as if he gave it for our consumption. I think of the reflections of Richard Weaver when he noted:

Now the return which we propose is not a voyage backward through time but a return to center, which must be conceived metaphysically or theologically.

We are seeking the one which endures and not the many which change and pass, and this search can be only described as looking for the truth. [We] are making the ancient affirmation that there is a center of things, and [we] point out that every feature of modern disintegration is a flight from this toward periphery. It is expressible also, as a movement from unity to individualism.

In proportion as man approaches the outer rim, he becomes lost in details and the more he is preoccupied with details, the less he can understand them. A recovery of certain viewpoints associated with the past would be a recovery of understanding as such, and this, unless we admit ourselves to be helpless in the movement of a deterministic march, is possible at any time.

In brief, one does not require a particular standpoint to comprehend the timeless. Let us remember all the while that the very notion of eternal verities is repugnant to the modern temper.

Procession and retvrn indeed.

1. There is debate in Christian circles about Aquinas’ consistency with Augustine; some take the view that Aquinas fits perfectly well with Augustine, others say that Aquinas marks a path out of the Augustinian framework. I take the view of Etienne Gilson, Father William Wade, Gordon Clark, Christopher Dawson, and Jacques Maritain, that Thomas Aquinas’ views on metaphysics are not those of Augustine. Under this understanding, Aristotle was rediscovered between Augustine and Aquinas, and Aquinas participated in the new absorption of Aristotle, and therefore abandoned the obvious Platonism of Augustine. However, I also consider Aquinas to be a transitional figure whose thinking was truer to Augustine than were those Scholastics who came after Aquinas. In this essay, I’ll follow Boersma in focusing on those who came after Aquinas to characterize the “Thomist” tradition, leaving the search for the true Aquinas to future essays.

2. Jumping in to the contributions of de Lubac and his school of thought of course can be daunting. Not only because de Lubac himself was so prolific, but because in doing so, one finds people like John Milbank and James K.A. Smith and others who have at once claimed a return to Christian orthodoxy and at the same time embrace the most Regime-friendly socially progressive priorities on things like homosexual rights, and so forth. Going under the auspices of “orthodoxy,” it’s very clear that they are post-modern, rather than pre-modern.

I bring this up not reveal that I am perplexed by it all (I’ve been quietly at this for over a year, having yet said nothing), but rather to reaffirm the fact that while I am touched by some of their Metaphysical and philosophical observations, I am at the same time uncompromisingly on the side of historical Christian sexual ethics, and right-wing political priorities. To be clear, there are others who have been influenced by Milbank who have not become completely brainless on sexual ethics and have more of a conservative application—one obvious person here is Peter Leithart; alas there isn’t space here to chase rabbit trails.

3. In fact, a charitable reading of Martin Luther would prove that his outcry against “philosophy” was specifically directed against the anti-Platonic dualism of late Scholasticism, while at the same time he was immersed in the mysticism of St. Augustine and St. Bernard of Clairvaux. Luther was in no way a proto-Biblicist rationalist.

4. The primary Congar books here are Tradition and Traditions and also The Meaning of Tradition.