Jean-Luc Marion Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

“ ‘POETS TELL MANY A LIE’: RADICAL ORTHODOXY’S POETIC HISTORIES” Canadian Evangelical Review: Journal of the Canadian Evangelical Theological Society 26-27 (Spring 2004): 35-64. POIÊSIS: CHRISTIAN AND POSTMODERN As my title indicates I... more

“ ‘POETS TELL MANY A LIE’: RADICAL ORTHODOXY’S POETIC HISTORIES”
Canadian Evangelical Review: Journal of the Canadian Evangelical Theological Society 26-27 (Spring 2004): 35-64.

POIÊSIS: CHRISTIAN AND POSTMODERN
As my title indicates I propose to describe and evaluate Radical Orthodoxy where it locates itself, as a form of postmodern Poiêsis. John Milbank connects Poiêsis and postmodern Christianity as follows:

If art as redemption … is modernity’s own antidote to modernity, then poesis may be the key … to a postmodern theology. Poesis ... is an integral aspect of Christian practice and redemption. Its work is the ceaseless re-narrating and ‘explaining’ of human history under the sign of the cross.

In another essay, he tells us:

[P]ractice cannot claim to ‘know’ the finality of what it treats as final. ... We know what we want to know, and although all desiring is an ‘informed’ desiring, desire shapes truth beyond the immanent implications of any logical order, so rendering the Christian logos a continuous product as well as a process of ‘art’.

The end of modernity ... means the end of a single system of truth based on universal reason, which tells us what reality is like. 2. [T]heology .. no longer has to measure up to accepted secular standards of scientific truth or normative rationality. ... 4. ... the point is not to ‘represent’ .. externality, but just to join in its occurrence, not to know, but to intervene, originate.

Before describing Radical Orthodoxy and its poiêsis, we should begin by thinking about poetry, Christianity, and religion in a way that Radical Orthodoxy would generally approve. The divine - human poetry essential to Christianity and, mutatis mutandis, to religion generally is:
a) first, simply liturgy, roughly the prayer of the religious community, which embraces everything from the dance of cultic movement, hymns, and music to architecture, as well as the verbal prose and poetry we ordinarily associate with liturgy,
b) second, the myth-making or story-telling which is reflected in but by no means confined to what is called Holy Scripture, and includes the stories of the saints great and small, and recounting the on-going supernatural or miraculous (the non prosaic), revelation which constitutes the Church,
c) third, making and being the Church, which is everything from entrance into, life in, and extension of the sacred community, the edifying care it extends to its members, to humanity, and to the world as the steward of God’s reign, and even extends to the projection of its appropriate political communities (“states”) both as the secularization of the church and as its antipode.
It is easily seen that poiêsis is the normal and ordinary religious activity, perhaps even the essential character of religious life. Although some of the language I have used here is current, John Milbank is not wrong to see Patristic and Medieval Christian writers representing the life of the Church as poetic in the ways I have listed. Certainly, the Radically Orthodox are right to judge that these forms of poiêsis are united in works of Christian theology within the Platonic tradition like the Confessions of Augustine (especially when the first ten books are considered in light of the last three) and the Periphyseon of John Scottus Eriugena. Radical Orthodoxy is the reassertion of what is normal in the present circumstances. As such it should be and would be unremarkable.
Radical Orthodoxy, however, is neither unremarkable nor uncontroversial because it self-consciously makes this reassertion in the context of what we may generally identify as a Heideggerian understanding of our world, and of the role of philosophy in constructing it. Within the metaphysics of the will to power which, for Heidegger, constructs modernity and concluded metaphysics as a whole, the West witnessed the death of God, and either endeavoured to annihilate religion and the gods as a consequence, or ushered them to the ineffectual margins. Heidegger assumes the death, witnesses to it, and seeks in poiêsis a way beyond it. In fact, we now face the survival of both religion and the gods, and we witness the return of gods who have immunized themselves from the rationality of the old metaphysics. As a result, much at the end of the last millennium and in the beginning of the new may make us ask whether it is poetry as religion, or whether it is rather modernity itself that are the more embattled in the postmodern world, and, therefore, whether the mixture of assertive arrogance and defensiveness which so mutilates Radical Orthodoxy is the right reaction of Christian theology to the present. However, the fact that it may come as a surprise to many that religion generally, and Christianity particularly, count as poiêsis and, indeed, the primary poiêsis, makes Radical Orthodoxy’s reassertion of these against modernity of some real importance and use.