Browsing by Author "Griffiths, Paul J"

This dissertation traces the ethical and conceptual connections between Weil’s account of attention and Kollwitz’s artistic practice of attention, especially attention to suffering. Attention, in Weil’s view, is a strenuous surrender to things as they are, which involves the difficult work of letting those things be other than we desire (or even need) them to be. For both Weil and Kollwitz, attention is the only meaningful way of engaging human suffering, one’s own or that of others. My dissertation explores their ethically risky claim, and argues that attention is not only interesting or valuable but necessary when it comes to suffering: any genuine attempt to engage with suffering must begin with a discipline substantially similar to the one Weil writes about as attention and Kollwitz practices in her art. I show how Kollwitz visually extends Weil’s philosophy and theology of attention to suffering in two distinct ways: first, by attending in her art to her own suffering as well as the suffering of others; and second, by investing her art with a wholehearted and tactile focus on the human body.

For Weil, it is attention (as opposed to the will) that is at the heart of human agency. Meaningful action is, for her, impossible without attention. This means that actions intended to alleviate suffering cannot be effective unless they begin (and remain grounded) in attention. This is true especially because one of the effects of suffering (especially the extreme suffering Weil calls malheur, or affliction) is to disfigure the sufferer so much that she is no longer recognizable (even to herself) as a human being, and becomes invisible. Weil writes that attention, which is a form of love, is able to see sufferers even when suffering has made them invisible. Because attention is an exercise of the image of God in human beings, and is a participation in God’s work in the world, it can restore to those whom suffering has reduced to the status of objects a sense of their own human value and dignity. When it comes to our own suffering, the discipline of attention involves accepting it rather than attempting to evade it by passing it on to others. Weil argues that because of the way God entered into suffering in Christ’s incarnation and passion, the nature of suffering has changed: suffering is no longer empty, but is instead a place where we can meet God.

Kollwitz’s two first series of prints (A Weavers’ Revolt and Peasants’ War) show her drawing on many of the strands of modern art that surround her in pursuit of one central goal: to attend to human beings, and to help her viewers learn such attention through her work. The many states of her prints show the rigor of her revisions and the resonance between her artistic process and Weil’s account of attention. Over the course of her career, her aim of seeing humans accurately becomes more and more an aim to see those who suffer. On the one hand, Kollwitz turns toward the industrial poor among whom she lived, whose sufferings tended to make them invisible to others. On the other hand, she turns toward her own suffering, particularly her grief over the death of her son in WWI. In a late series of woodcuts called War, and in her bronze sculpture Mother with Dead Son, she connects the two. Both the print series and the sculpture serve as an invitation to hesitate in a way that lets us attend to the crushing and disorienting reality of suffering. I argue that the series War shows humans meeting their own exposure to the possibility of affliction, and that Kollwitz’s self-described calling “to voice the sufferings of people” fits into a theological account of lament, which presents human suffering in the context of God’s hearing and care.

My dissertation contributes to theological aesthetics by proposing attention as a generally commendable practice of perception, and by offering Weil and Kollwitz’s way of engaging with suffering as an alternative to theodicy.

In this dissertation, I argue that the conceptual grammar of Augustine's thought provides a way of re-thinking the public/private distinction as it has been developed in modernity. The dissertation consists of two parts. The first part is a conceptual analysis and a genealogy of the distinction through focus on specific private characters produced in both antiquity and modernity. I focus on the characters of the "woman" and the "refugee." Conceptually, I argue that the public/private distinction can be seen both as an anthropological distinction and as a socio-political distinction: claims about the structure, nature, and history of selves have implications for how society ought to be organized, and claims about how society ought to be organized have implications about the structure, nature, and history of selves. I show how Christianity changed society by creating new character scripts and with them, new socio-political possibilities. The second part of the dissertation provides one Augustinian conceptual "grammar" that makes sense of the revolution Christianity effected possible, and it responds to problems raised by the genealogy in the first half by providing a close reading of Augustine's texts relating to God and creation, interiority, salvation and beatitude, and the Virgin Mary. I display the logic in Augustine's thought by which, in God, domestic and public come together, how God's relation to creation changes how to think about interiority, what that means for how Augustine understands salvation as a restoration of proper inwardness, and how the character of the Virgin Mary condenses the grammar as a sacrament of human salvation. I draw out the ways that Mary shows how Augustinian thought provides resources to think "beyond" the public/private distinction both as it was given to her in antiquity and how it has been received in modernity.

This dissertation contributes to contemporary scholarship on the historical and theological significance of Christian iconodulia—the appropriate veneration of holy persons, places, and things. By accentuating the economic aspect of the Byzantine image debates it illustrates how the concerns raised by those defending the holy images in the eighth and ninth centuries proved to be precisely the issues that would accompany the resurgence of Christian iconoclasm in the Protestant Reformation. What should be clearer from the standpoint of this study is that debates concerning the legitimacy of the production and veneration of holy images touch on the fundamental claims of the Christian faith as at the heart of the theological defense is the mystery of God-made-man and the implications of this mystery for how God continues to seek union through his own body, that is, in the sacrifice of the Eucharist and in the Church itself. Attending closely to the economic aspect of the theological defense of iconodulia, we can see that the “economic appropriation” of the incarnation funds theological claims about the ontological stability, or unicity, of the Church. That is to say, to speak about the history and theology of iconodulia in the Christian tradition one must acknowledge the ecclesiological claims inherent to the orthodox defense. Therefore, this dissertation also contributes to contemporary ecumenical discussions and challenges some of the presumptions at the heart of that discussion.

This dissertation contributes to contemporary scholarship on the historical and theological significance of Christian iconodulia—the appropriate veneration of holy persons, places, and things. By accentuating the economic aspect of the Byzantine image debates it illustrates how the concerns raised by those defending the holy images in the eighth and ninth centuries proved to be precisely the issues that would accompany the resurgence of Christian iconoclasm in the Protestant Reformation. What should be clearer from the standpoint of this study is that debates concerning the legitimacy of the production and veneration of holy images touch on the fundamental claims of the Christian faith as at the heart of the theological defense is the mystery of God-made-man and the implications of this mystery for how God continues to seek union through his own body, that is, in the sacrifice of the Eucharist and in the Church itself. Attending closely to the economic aspect of the theological defense of iconodulia, we can see that the “economic appropriation” of the incarnation funds theological claims about the ontological stability, or unicity, of the Church. That is to say, to speak about the history and theology of iconodulia in the Christian tradition one must acknowledge the ecclesiological claims inherent to the orthodox defense. Therefore, this dissertation also contributes to contemporary ecumenical discussions and challenges some of the presumptions at the heart of that discussion.

Pope Francis’ 2015 social encyclical Laudato si’ provides a challenging, helpful, and timely lens through which to view this cultural moment. By analyzing the reception of this encyclical, its structure and sources, and its resonances among others, this thesis argues that Pope Francis’ target of his critique of the current state of our world is what he calls “the technocratic paradigm.” This paradigm, with its historical antecedents and metaphysical underpinnings, is incongruous with the way of seeing and acting that is more rooted in our Christian tradition. Pope Francis entices the Church to live out its distinct tradition with a renewed rigor. With the guidance of this encyclical, this thesis wrestles with the power and ubiquity of the technological paradigm and the saturation of our everyday lives with its products, procedures, and practices. Neither option of blessing the technocratic paradigm as a gift from God nor rejecting it as pure evil is plausible, but providing a constructive lens to think through the current cultural moment is necessary. Many of the faithful remain distracted and abstracted from the places where they live and the people with whom they interact, and as a consequence, many express a hunger for a deeper and more meaningful engagement with life. Through dialogue with a number of contemporary authors, this project will point to some specific practices that might comprise a new spirituality for today.

Against dominant interpretations of Thomas Hobbes that ignore or downplay the place of theology in his work, this essay aims to show the centrality of theology to the account of politics Hobbes offers in Leviathan. By attending closely to the case Hobbes makes to his Christian readers to see the world and its history as he narrates it—a case that entails several modes of suasion: scientific demonstration, appeals to intuition, theological and scriptural argumentation, all of them seasoned with Hobbes’s distinctive rhetorical flourish—this essay displays the subtle way that he incorporates the nascent modern nation-state into a Christian account of salvation history, thus urging his readers to accept its total claim on their lives.

This study approaches Óscar Romero by attending to his intimate involvement in and concern for the problematic surrounding the reform of Salvadoran agriculture and the conflict over property and possession underlying it. In this study, I situate Romero in relation to the concentration of landholding and the production of landlessness in El Salvador over the course of the twentieth century, and I examine his participation in the longstanding societal and ecclesial debate about agrarian reform provoked by these realities. I try to show how close attention to agrarian reform and what was at stake in it can illumine not only the conflict that occasioned Romero’s martyrdom but the meaning of the martyrdom itself.

Understanding Romero’s involvement in the debate about agrarian reform requires sustained attention to how it takes its bearings from the line of thinking about property and possession for which Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum stands as a new beginning. The enclyclical tradition developing out of Leo’s pontificate is commonly referred to as Catholic social doctrine or Catholic social teaching. Romero’s and the Church’s participation in the debate about agrarian reform in El Salvador is unintelligible apart from it.

What Romero and the encyclical tradition share, I argue, is an understanding of creation as a common gift, from which follows a distinctive construal of property and the demands of justice with respect to possessing it. On this view, property does not name, as it is often taken to mean, the enclosure of what is common for the exclusive use of its possessors—something to be held by them over and against others. Rather, property and everything related to its holding derive from the claim that creation is a gift given to human creatures in common. The acknowledgement of creation as a common gift gives rise to what I describe in this study as a politics of common use, of which agrarian reform is one expression.

In Romero’s El Salvador, those who took the truth of creation as common gift seriously—those who spoke out against or opposed the ubiquity of the concentration of land and who clamored for agrarian reform so that the landless and land-poor could have access to land to cultivate for subsistence—suffered greatly as a consequence. I argue that, among other things, their suffering shows how, under the conditions of sin and violence, those who work to ensure that others have access to what is theirs in justice often risk laying down their lives in charity. In other words, they witness to the way that God’s work to restore creation has a cruciform shape. Therefore, while the advocacy for agrarian reform begins with the understanding of creation as common gift, the testimony to this truth in word and in deed points to the telos of the gift and the common life in the crucified and risen Lord in which it participates

A fundamental problem in Christian theology has been that of determining whether God is available to us in experience, and if so how to account for the nature of that availability and the role that putative perceptions of God have in informing and justifying our theological claims. In addressing this matter, it has become widely assumed amongst Christian philosophers and theologians that this problem - the problem of Christian religious experience - cannot be adequately addressed without also confronting some problems about the nature of perceptual experience per se. How does our ordinary perceptual experience manage to make the world available to our thinking, such that what we think, say and do manages to reach out to the world - to be "about" it? Conversely, how does the world manage to "reach in" to impress itself on us in our experiences, such that our experiences manage to be "of" it? In what way does the world's bearing on us in experience determine whether what we think, say or do is correct?

These have all come to be regarded as thorny philosophical worries about perceptual experience per se, and they all cluster around the fundamental question of how it is that experience makes possible the rational answerability of our intentions to the world. Clearly, it would seem, we cannot address the theological problem of God's perceptual availability to us without also confronting the philosophical "problem of perception." Accordingly, contemporary Christian philosophers and theologians have invariably appropriated various theories addressed to the problem of perception in the course of accounting for how it is that our theological talk manages to be "about" God.

Such theories are then incorporated into one of two kinds of stories, either a cataphatic one in which God's bearing on us in experience is mediated into our language in a straightforward and ordinary way or an apophatic one in which God's entry into thought and speech in experience is an exception to the ordinary situation. The thesis I defend in this dissertation is just that our theological interest in the question of God's perceptual availability can and should be thoroughly disentangled from the problem of perception. Prima facie, that claim seems utterly counterintuitive. If there are difficulties that attend the concept of perceptual experience itself - difficulties about how any mind-independent realities can be made available to us in experience - then any question about what it is to perceive God must confront those difficulties. But the central claim I entertain is just that - contrary to all appearances - there in fact are no such difficulties. Rather, the assumption that we are in fact confronted with genuine philosophical worries about how experience can possibly inform and guide our thinking is false. Moreover, this has led to theological claims about the nature and modes of God's self-revelation which are not merely correspondingly false, but instead they have failed to be so much as coherently intelligible.

In order to address the problem of the nature and theological significance of the perceptibility of God, therefore, we must first free it from the philosophical problem of perception. Chapter 1 sets up this problematic and identifies the aim of disentangling our theologies of religious experience from the problem of perception as an exercise in theological "therapy." That therapy involves five steps, which occupy the remainder of the work. The first is to offer some reasons for thinking that the philosophical problem of perception is in fact a pseudo-problem and that the theories addressed to it are necessarily incoherent. Here I look to John McDowell's recent deconstruction of the problem of perception, on whose strategy I elaborate in Chapter 2. McDowell argues that the problem of perception is ill-conceived just insofar as its various formulations require a solution of one of two sorts, what he calls a "Givenist" or else a "Coherentist" solution. Givenism names the world's giving or impressing of a mental content upon the norms of our thinking which is itself independent of those norms, while Coherentism claims no need to acknowledge any standards of correctness as inhering in the world itself in any sense independent of humanly established norms. Instead, the rational answerability of our thinking to the world in experience can be accounted for precisely in terms of our irreducibly norm-governed dispositions to respond both to it and to one another.

But neither Givenism nor Coherentism can possibly succeed in characterizing "experience" as making us rationally answerable to the world, McDowell argues, because Givenism necessarily requires that our answerability fails to be a properly rational one, while Coherentism necessarily requires that our rational responses fail to be properly answerable to the world, rather than merely to our own responsive dispositions. Since each view has what the other lacks in order to minimally make sense of "experience" as a kind of rational answerability to the world, they have been locked in a vicious and "interminable oscillation." To hold together both Givenism's conception of answerability and Coherentism's conception of the irreducibly rational constitution of that answerability in the most minimally consistent way, however, does not yield a new philosophical theory of "experience" so much as simply returning us to our naïvely held view that in experience our thinking is capable of directly taking in or being presented with the way the world is anyway, the way it would be for humans even if no humans were in fact equipped to recognize it as such.

Having singled out the problem and entitled ourselves to ignore it as failing to surface any genuine philosophical worry, my second task is to show that contemporary approaches to the problem of God's perceptual availability to us in experience are in fact essentially wedded to the pseudo-problem, and as such that they are inheritors of its incoherence. In Chapters 3 and 4 I deploy the McDowellian strategy to critique some recent and influential accounts of our perceptual relation to God, both cataphatic and apophatic. Accordingly, I argue that Jean-Luc Marion ought to be regarded as offering us a theological Givenism of an apophatic sort, while William P. Alston relies on a theological Givenism of a cataphatic sort. Victor Preller and Kevin Hector, on the other hand, present us with theological Coherentisms of an apophatic and cataphatic sort, respectively.

Once we manage to see how these theologies of religious experience are implicated in the incoherence of the problem of perception, however, we can turn from the more critical and ground-clearing deconstruction to a more positive direction in Chapter 5. My third task is therefore that of determining just what we must minimally affirm in order to avoid falling into the oscillation between Givenism and Coherentism. Here again I follow McDowell in holding that such a minimal empiricism is best captured by what he calls a "naturalized platonism." Having "backed into" a naturalized platonism, however, we can see that it simply articulates our naïve realist conception of experience as directly "taking in" the world itself as a normative standard of correctness for our experiences of it and responses to it. This raises the question, however, of how we were ever tempted out of this "naiveté" and into the compulsion to theorize the world's presentations to us in a Givenist or Coherentist way.

The fourth task I take up in Chapter 5 is therefore that of giving a broad sociological explanation of the wide cultural impact of that compulsion, not only upon philosophers, or even theologians, but across diverse registers of society in the modern Western and secular social orders. McDowell, for his part, gestures toward a Weberian genealogy of the problem of perception as a particularly modern prejudice which arises from a disenchanted conception of nature that arose in and around the birth of the sciences. That genealogy however, is inadequate to account for the nature and scope of the problem of perception as a religious problem. I therefore look to Charles Taylor to show how his narrative of disenchantment offered in A Secular Age can serve to correct and buttress McDowell's genealogy. Integrating McDowell's story with Taylor's turns out to have a mutually chastening effect on one another which helps us to distinguish between a genuine freedom from the characteristically modern problem of perception in our theological reflection and the nostalgic fantasy of a return to the "innocence" of a premodern conception of nature as a desirable or achievable aim.

Fifthly and finally, we must be able to see how the newly clarified freedom of theology from the problem of perception secured in the foregoing chapters actually reorients us toward the titular question which the problem of perception has served to obfuscate: the theological question of how to properly characterize our perceptual relation to God. Chapter 6 offers a critical retrieval of Gregory of Nyssa's theology of the "spiritual senses" as a performative display of how we might theologically account for our perceptual relation to God in a way cut free from the problem of perception. In Gregory I find a viable contemporary theological empiricism - an account which characterizes both tasks of theological contemplation and spiritual formation in terms of a receptivity and responsiveness to the perceptible presence and agency of God in the world. The constructive account I appropriate from Nyssen requires further elaboration, but my aim in articulating it is not so much to demonstrate its correctness as to show how it manages to surmount a minimal obstacle that the most influential accounts do not manage to clear - that of consistency with a minimal empiricism which is neither Givenist nor Coherentist.

This dissertation investigates the origins of death. It does so by drawing on Augustine of Hippo’s theology of creation, especially as expressed in his De Genesi ad litteram. It argues that recovering Augustine’s theory of the rationes seminales as presented in De Genesi ad litteram is a useful tool that allows contemporary theology to engage with modern cosmology and evolutionary biology without compromising on Catholic magisterial teaching regarding the connection between sin and death. The work consists of five chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion.

The first chapter is methodological. It explains how one might read the text of Genesis ad litteram in the sense Augustine uses the term. To do this, it draws on the resources of Ordinary Language Philosophy. Chapter two investigates Augustine’s use of the term ‘rationes seminales’ and provides a speculative account of what they are. Chapter three connects the speculations on the rationes seminales to the fall of the angels, examining scriptural and doctrinal evidences concerning the nature of the demons. Chapter four remains focused on the angelic fall, but from a literary perspective. It uses Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and Milton’s Paradise Lost to flesh out a theology of angels, their fall, and the effects this has on the created order. The last chapter examines how the effects of the angelic fall play out in time. It connects the speculations about the angelic fall to the human fall, showing how the doctrine of original sin as taught by the Catholic magisterium is compatible with discoveries in evolutionary biology and modern cosmology.

This dissertation investigates the origins of death. It does so by drawing on Augustine of Hippo’s theology of creation, especially as expressed in his De Genesi ad litteram. It argues that recovering Augustine’s theory of the rationes seminales as presented in De Genesi ad litteram is a useful tool that allows contemporary theology to engage with modern cosmology and evolutionary biology without compromising on Catholic magisterial teaching regarding the connection between sin and death. The work consists of five chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion.

The first chapter is methodological. It explains how one might read the text of Genesis ad litteram in the sense Augustine uses the term. To do this, it draws on the resources of Ordinary Language Philosophy. Chapter two investigates Augustine’s use of the term ‘rationes seminales’ and provides a speculative account of what they are. Chapter three connects the speculations on the rationes seminales to the fall of the angels, examining scriptural and doctrinal evidences concerning the nature of the demons. Chapter four remains focused on the angelic fall, but from a literary perspective. It uses Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and Milton’s Paradise Lost to flesh out a theology of angels, their fall, and the effects this has on the created order. The last chapter examines how the effects of the angelic fall play out in time. It connects the speculations about the angelic fall to the human fall, showing how the doctrine of original sin as taught by the Catholic magisterium is compatible with discoveries in evolutionary biology and modern cosmology.