Andy

[Andy @McNeil87A]

@eigenrobot One issue seems to be that the trinity is basically 'tacked on' to a wider system for thinkers in the analytic tradition. It becomes a far more compelling idea when approached through question of the process of individuation. Adrian Pabst is good on this: https://t.co/09vojlHjrE

[𝑮𝒊𝒏𝒈𝒆𝒓 𓍢ִ໋♡ @CopperCation]

The horrific multiple rape of two young girls at knifepoint has resulted in sentences that are shockingly lenient.
If you're as angry as the rest of us, please take two minutes to submit an Unduly Lenient Sentence referral. An excellent and well written example is posted below, just click and complete it - it takes 2 minutes. 🙏

My heart is sore tonight for those girls.
I can't imagine their pain at the injustice here.
Enough is enough.
Let's make our voices count.

💔

[Andy @McNeil87A]

@sherlock_comms Jean-Pierre Depuy has a nice study focused on the cybernetics part of this process: https://t.co/YuyZbopo7x

[Andy @McNeil87A]

"We are Christian enough that scapegoating no longer holds its sway over us, but we are not Christian enough to embrace the radical demands of the Gospel."

[john milbank @johnmilbank3]

Girardianism at best half true. Yes, Christianity unleashes worse violence than ever if it is not accepted, but it also offers good mimetic practice and good re-direction of desire through the church and spirituality. Idea that mimesis and desire are bad in origin is heterodox.

[Anna K. Winters @tenshi_anna]

I fully agree with John here—in fact, I would directly compare Badiou’s critique of Lacan to William Desmond’s Christian heresiological critique of Hegel.

So, reading that delightful blasphemer Jacques Lacan on my way to church this fine Sunday morning, I came across this passage from Seminar XX that is really incredibly telling regarding Lacan’s ultimately incoherent critique of Christianity; in a quasi-Hegelian way, he seems to accuse the Christian God of Love as being inferiorly “abstracted,” as Hegel would put it, from the Real of hate. This is really where René Girard is needed to put Lacan in his place—in texts like “Things Hidden from the Foundation of the World” and “I See Satan Fall Like Lightning,” Girard shows that Christ’s Incarnation is in fact a direct divine condescension to DISRUPT the Satanic economy of mimetic desire and hateful scapegoating; especially if you affirm some form of “fish hook atonement,” it is perfectly clear that no one knows the depths of hatred better than God and specifically Christ, because He is nothing other than the ultimate Act revealing hatred’s vain betrayal of humanity’s providential telos. Lacan will certainly always be a brilliant phenomenologist of concupiscence, but he can’t seem to grasp the possibility of an infinite act of love turning hatred against itself and entirely disarming it in an ascetic manner; he speaks about the figure of the saint and even specifically Saint Thomas Aquinas as a model for his “cure” in Seminar XXIII, but as long as he forecloses, with Hegel, what William Desmond calls “third transcendence,” he is certainly doomed. This is where Badiou’s insistence on an actual infinity which entirely transcends the subject is essential, and a structurally Christian turn away from dead-end Left-Hegelianism.

[Anna K. Winters @tenshi_anna]

One thing that I do think is worth recognizing from the outset of any serious Christian engagement with “continental philosophy,” however, is that the tradition running from German Idealism through French Theory, via phenomenology, is in many profound respects a re-emergence of ancient Gnosticism in a modern context. It entails a radical re-narration of the comparative simplicity of Christian gnosis in terms of a “translation out” into a kind of pneumatic cosmology which is variably presented as “dialectical,” “mythological,” “noetic,” “existential,” “linguistic,” etc. and which is approached with a discursive style that sets a certain openness to apprehension of this questionable “gnosis” as the condition of entry for any respectable engagement with its terms. Nevertheless, I think we learn much from critically “taking the bait,” with the classical exercise of turning such Gnostic refinement around on itself being St. Irenaeus’ Against Heresies. As someone taken in by the continental tradition, the only critiques that I ever really found effective were precisely these heresiological ones, because the only thing that can conceivably satisfy its ambitions is true religion, not special pleading for a spiritually indifferent mundanity.

As with ancient Gnosticism, continental philosophy, at least in its European roots (its American co-opting by “woke” being an entirely different beast), is essentially an initiatory social club for people who can demonstrate a requisite pneumatic sensitivity, setting them apart from people whose teleological priorities are directed towards worldly things. I would now tend to argue that this itself is by and large a kind of loveless perversion of the encounter with divine grace, such that rather than setting one’s spiritual sensitivity to work in serving God and neighbor, it instead prioritizes testing the sensitivity of others in order to see if they are “worthy” to discuss certain matters that not everyone is unworldly enough to apprehend. I will still defend aspects of this exercise and obviously still indulge in it plenty myself, even simply for logistical reasons; it’s good to be able to communicate with people who understand why you do what you do, what sort of pneumatic patterns you are observing that guide your actions and judgments, etc… some people really do just prioritize this way of engaging with the world, whereas most don’t.

The problem is that without putting Christ first and without subordinating all pneumatic refinement to the law of love, you just end up with worldly debauchery with extra noetic steps. This is what the early heresiologists understood.

I can sympathize with the hysteria of the “effective altruists” as people who just want to skip all the pneumatic attunement and go straight to “help the poor, dammit!”, which itself has something Christian about it. The problem there is the inverse of Gnosticism; as the conciliar anathema on Pelagius states, Pelagianism, for example, overcorrects against Gnosticism by overestimating the strictly human will shorn of pneumatic receptivity and, I would add, effectively eliminates the gratuity of grace in favor of an economy of fully substitutable exchanges, effectively dissolving the actual humanity of love in an indifferent quantitative flattening of “having enough.” This doesn’t just target the greedy, but also even the ascetic who recognizes that “the world is not enough”; and it is strictly this recognition that I would argue is the only possible Christian condition for truly serving the poor with love.

[Andy @McNeil87A]

@rwalterrust @thezachloeffler Although my preference is the 'full English' theology option.

[Andy @McNeil87A]

@MrDFox42 @ABondExchange 'It's a new world, with new enemies, and new threats. But you can still depend on one man. . .'

[Andy @McNeil87A]

@rabbriansamuel You might enjoy Adrian Pabst's work. He makes a similar point that Trinitarian thinking really starts to make sense when understood against the background of philosophical questions around what causes individuation: https://t.co/KMQRf0K1ff

[Fergus Butler-Gallie @_F_B_G_]

Some thoughts about the Canterbury graffiti.

I think it’s facile, inappropriate and embarrassing. Why? Well not because it’s transgressive, but because it is smug, unchallenging and safe.

[Anna K. Winters @tenshi_anna]

Experience is privative; everyone is under a spell at all times to fill out that privation. These spells vary widely, and undermine each other as they are confronted by alien ones; this provides an opportunity to converge towards either a) a collapse of higher teleology through hypostatization of the privative “nothing” (the “nihilist” option which is the secular default) or b) a deepening of faith which works to undermine both the partialities of prideful illusion and the indifference of nihilistic abstraction, by refining the meaning of the conviction that there is an ultimate Love.

Hence the “ἀρχάς” (Archons or rulers or principalities), “ἐξουσίας” (Powers or authorities), and “κοσμοκράτορας” (Cosmic Rulers or cosmic powers) famously addressed in Ephesians 6:12. This Pauline cosmology doesn’t imply that we live in a false world created by a wicked demiurge, but rather that we are deprived of full actuality in a world tainted by sin—still created by God, but only partially actualized due to a corruption of its order, one which we are obliged to take responsibility for overcoming, under pain of simply naturalizing our despair.

[Paul Embery @PaulEmbery]

The Graham Linehan arrest must represent a line in the sand. I don't think I've ever seen a more egregious example of state over-reach. Enough is enough. Things must change.

[Andy @McNeil87A]

@parhypostates Conor Cunningham has a cracking book which explores this in detail: https://t.co/VMteBWK9BR

[Graham Linehan @Glinner]

If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.

[Andy @McNeil87A]

https://t.co/n16aK1T4GD

[Andy @McNeil87A]

I attended a Christian summer camp once where the girls were encouraged to seek their true worth in God. I thought it was very cringe. But when I read about a woman pushing her own daughter into starting botox in her 20s I realise I was wrong.
https://t.co/1LfNXBApwz

[Andy @McNeil87A]

@poudre_rose_ Marcel Detienne's 'Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society' is a great read that sheds so much light on this if you get the chance.

[Andy @McNeil87A]

@hermenewtics You may be familiar with it already but Chris Insole's work is good on exploring Kant's thought in relation to God: https://t.co/AxsH7xdvMO

[Anna K. Winters @tenshi_anna]

Doing “theory” is kind of impossible now, because the illusion of a “shared intellectual conversation,” sustained by the postwar liberal consensus of the past 80 years, has shattered. Contrary to my old Hegelian hopes, there are really no discursive protocols, no matter how rarefied, that can keep different partisan narratives “in touch” with each other, since even staging that mediation is itself a partisan narrative, one which now has to avow its own position.

Our situation really is an “apocalyptic” one in the literal (though not necessarily biblical) sense, in that normative checks can only really be cashed theologically, and any attempt at crafting a shared cultural vision is thrown by default onto the terrain of the Weberian “warring gods,” with allegiances determined by extracting shibboleths on matters sacred. All “theory” is theology now—either you reconcile with some old orthodoxy, or you reinvent some old heresies. The crisis of liberalism is also, finally, the crisis of modernity, which even more fundamentally is the crisis of heterodoxy.

Nick Fuentes rules the discourse now, because his job is to emerge as the grotesque, clownish shadow of the repressed catholicity which every conjugation of modern pluralism is founded on perpetually re-enacting its conversion away from. In this sense, modern heterodoxies are really just odd satirical re-enactments of the primal scene of Christian conversion, with secular salvation of various sorts found in whatever pocket of negative freedom from sacred obligation or supernatural concern can be presented as sufficiently “healthy” and seductive.

Still, I agonize over making the full transition from “theory” to theology. I don’t feel adequate to it yet at all, but its ineluctability also just exposes the sheer pridefulness of theory. To go on under these conditions, I have to learn to kill my pride, which also means being wary of preserving it behind cowardice (or “false humility”).

It’s easy to gloss the claim of Christian truth as mostly just so much “good news,” and of course, it’s called the “Gospel” for a reason. But if we really do take Christian orthodoxy completely seriously as truth, it’s hard not to sense how absolutely dire the implications of that actually are for modern society at large. Points of genuine dialogical continuity between secular sensibilities and Christian orthodoxy are comparatively few and far between; by and large, what we’re looking at is a radically discontinuous reckoning, and one that secularists will prefer to keep avoiding as much as possible.

So if you’re as invested in trying to open up a space of dialogical continuity as I am, arriving at this point inevitably thrusts you into a position of radical loneliness and darkness. This darkness really testifies to the abiding truth of the image of “the blind leading the blind”; it’s entirely my fault here that I resist being more deeply nourished in the light of faith, no doubt partially because I fear the same sort of reckoning that the secularists do.

[Andy @McNeil87A]

@ostrachan You should have a read of Douglas Campbell's work if you get the chance: https://t.co/Seia2dFoFC