Start Making Sense: Murray Jardine’s Turn to Theology

Elizabeth Newman

Abstract:
Murray Jardine notes that since World War II a growing consensus has seen the modern worldview as at least partially incoherent. What, however, is the alternative? Throughout his insightful and provocative work, Jardine argues that any genuine alternative (prognosis) must first come to terms with what modernity actually is (diagnosis). While Jardine engages political theory, history, and philosophy in illuminative and compelling ways, he ultimately argues that modernity is the result of skewed theological convictions that can be traced to Augustine. I shall examine three of the theological threads that Jardine identifies: gnosticism, nominalism, and an Augustinian unitarianism. While the first two have indeed distorted our understanding of nature, human agency, and God, I argue that Augustine’s theology—far from being a source of modernity’s disease—instead offers a needed corrective.

Keywords: Murray Jardine, William Poteat, Colin Gunton, Eric Voegelin, Augustine, trinitarianism, millenarianism, gnosticism, nominalism, unitarianism, political theory, political philosophy, Christianity, theology

Murray Jardine notes that since World War II a growing consensus has seen the modern worldview as at least partially incoherent. What, however, is the alternative? Throughout his insightful and provocative work, Jardine argues that any genuine alternative (prognosis) must first come to terms with what modernity actually is (diagnosis). While Jardine engages political theory, history, and philosophy in illuminative and compelling ways, he ultimately argues that modernity is the result of skewed theological convictions that can be traced to Augustine. We can note at the outset that this is no “pious” argument but rather an analysis of how certain assumptions about God, humanity, and nature have generated modernity’s dilemmas. In what follows, I examine three of the theological threads that Jardine identifies: gnosticism, nominalism, and an Augustinian unitarianism. While the first two have indeed distorted our understanding of nature, human agency, and God, I argue that Augustine’s theology—far from being a source of modernity’s disease—instead offers a needed corrective.

The ambiguity of modernity

Jardine’s engagement with the modern age is not entirely negative. He readily acknowledges significant gains: science and technology have dramatically improved material well-being—people live longer, for example—while political reforms have secured greater freedom for individuals. Even so, these gains, typically understood under the rubric of “modern progress,” have been ambiguous. First, Jardine notes, modernity is also the story of Western imperialism and racism as the gains for some have come at the expense of a European subjugation of others. Second, some of the revolutionary movements that sought to create freedom turned instead into tyrannies never before seen in the premodern world. Third, significant concerns have arisen about how humans are now becoming slaves to machines and impersonal modern bureaucracies. Fourth, many question whether the ongoing development of modern technology is environmentally sustainable. Finally, Jardine states that the philosophical assumptions of modernity taken to their logical conclusion “appear to result in a thoroughgoing nihilism, recognized as early as the late nineteenth century by Friedrich Nietzsche, emerging in spectacular practical terms in the insane slaughter of the twentieth century’s world wars, and now manifested more subtly in the self-destructive logic of postwar consumer culture.”¹ While acknowledging modernity’s legitimate achievements, Jardine thus agrees with Eric Voegelin: “In an hour of crisis, when the order of society flounders and disintegrates, the fundamental problems of political existence in history are more apt to come in view than in periods of comparative stability.”²

The dominant picture

Jardine describes how the modern worldview—essentially mechanistic—imagines the human agent as both determined by social forces and able to create itself anew. In fact, these two apparently contradictory options depend upon and fuel each other. Jardine further argues, as we will see more fully, that a mechanistic worldview relies on a picture of the world as static and created or set in motion by the will of an abstract God.

To develop these points, Jardine describes how various political theorists and philosophers owe a debt to a mechanistic worldview with its implicit understanding of God. Hobbes’s conception of nature, for example, “takes the basic picture of the universe found in John Calvin (i.e., a universe essentially predetermined by God’s will) and replaces God’s action with mechanical forces. These forces, with their mathematical certainty, have the same omnipotence as God, and humans, although they may be capable of controlling their environment, are ultimately still products of that environment.”³ A mechanistic worldview thus generates a paradox. On the one hand, humans are material bodies on which different forces with no inherent purpose act. On the other, they remain somehow capable of creating wealth and government. Later thinkers rely on this paradox as well, Jardine points out, albeit in ways that expose its incoherence. With Rousseau, humans remain determined by nature—in the State of Nature they are not fully human—but can create themselves through social engagement and reform corrupt societies through revolutionary action. Karl Marx will transfer “this tension to a historical and economic context, seeing humans as products of economic forces but possessed of even more radical creativity than Rousseau could imagine, capable of not merely reforming a corrupt system but fundamentally transfiguring human nature.” Finally, “Nietzsche sees humans as so radically creative that the concepts of nature and human nature cease to have meaning: reality is a human interpretation and the only permanent human reality is that of endless new horizons.”⁴ Stated differently, a mechanistic world makes possible the modern dilemma: either objectivism and positivism or a thoroughgoing relativistic subjectivism.

In addition, relying especially on William H. Poteat, Jardine describes how this mechanistic framework promotes and is embedded in a visualist perception of reality. As Poteat states, the Enlightenment has “inclined us to imagine ourselves as being independent of, disentangled from, the world which is depicted as over against us, as an object [machine] to lucid reflection….”⁵ This theater of reflection, Poteat argues, owes a debt to a static visualist picture shaped by a perception of reality as a written text. Poteat relates this static perception of the real to the ancient Greek imagination. Here, logos was “subject to the gravitational pull of the picture of the eternal passage of the planets through their orbital paths, never beginning, never ending….”⁶ In this ancient understanding, an impersonal, cyclical, and eternal logos resides over the universe. Words/facts are true to the extent that they correspond to an extrinsic reality. Stated more fully, ancient Greek thought lacks “a paradigmatic speaker, whose speech makes a world appear….”⁷

Jardine notes that Poteat is not simply pointing to literacy as a culprit. Poteat is rather showing how an implicit reliance on reality as cyclical and unchanging differs from a reliance on reality grounded in the spoken word, the speech-act, before an ultimately paradigmatic speaker. As Jardine states, “On Poteat’s analysis, then, what is needed to escape the nihilism of late modernity is a more complete explication of the dynamic oral/aural logic implicit in the Hebraic worldview and its application to philosophical, theological, ethical, and political issues.”⁸ While Jardine believes that Poteat’s analysis is certainly correct, he argues that it nonetheless relies too much on a one-dimensional picture of God. We return to this point below.

Diagnosis: modernity’s theological myths

We are now in a position to turn more fully to Jardine’s theological analysis. As we have seen, for Jardine, modernity is not so much a secular movement away from a benighted Christian tradition as it is a reliance on key theological convictions, albeit ones that are seriously distorted. Stated differently, modernity’s enlightened rejection of Christianity’s God—and of its replacement of authority/tradition with the individual—is best understood as a rejection of distortions already present within Christian theology.

Gnosticism

The first of these distortions is gnosticism, a movement that retains the significance of the spiritual but at the cost of denying the material. To describe modernity as denying the material might seem, at first sight, ludicrous. Consumerism and an ever-expanding market society easily seem to reduce individuals to what they consume in the material world: experience, food, sex, products, etc. Yet Jardine, turning especially to Eric Voegelin, argues that while modern gnosticism does not correspond exactly to ancient gnosticism, both nonetheless share a core conviction: escaping the present world through a special gnosis. Whereas ancient gnosis was mystical, Voegelin stresses that modern gnosis is immanent, rooted in the perfectibility of this world through, for example, the gnosis of scientism or of a Marxist view of history.⁹ This inability to perfect the world, Jardine adds, has ushered in a consciousness of disillusionment, giving birth to a second form of gnosticism that includes both fascism and expressive individualism: “Whereas ancient gnostics attempted to escape the world through possession of esoteric knowledge, late modern gnostics attempt to do so through sheer will, through an act of (possibly suicidal) aesthetic self-expression.”¹⁰

Nominalism

Influenced by Michael Gillespie among others, Jardine identifies a second theological distortion related to the origins of modernity: nominalism, typically associated most fully with William of Ockham (c. 1288-1348). Nominalism rests on a distinction between God’s ordained power (potentia ordinata) and God’s absolute power (potentia absoluta). Such a distinction ends up equating God’s power with God’s inscrutable will. An inscrutable God is a purely voluntaristic God who is free to do whatever he wants. The good is whatever God commands (a kind of random choice).

Jardine emphasizes how nominalism leads to a voluntaristic understanding of human agency. The subject’s freedom resides in his or her potential to will; it is indeterminate, lacking reference to anything outside its own subjectivity. Rightly understood, nominalism affects one’s understanding not only of human nature but also of all nature: “the Enlightenment tended to transfer the nominalist God’s irresistible will into nature, thus resulting in the mechanistic ontology of modernity.”¹¹ Nominalism underwrites the following paradox: “The contradiction between a mechanistically determined nature and the human agency necessary to understand and even change that nature eventually issues forth in the radical subjectivism of late modernity.”¹² A neutral or objectivistic concept of nature (a machine) both relies upon and produces a thoroughly subjectivistic understanding of human agency, undetermined by anything except its own willed choices.

A unitary God

A third theological strand that Jardine identifies as giving birth to modernity is a unitary conception of God. We see such a God already in nominalism: a singular deity associated with an inscrutable will. Jardine traces this insufficiently trinitarian understanding of God to Augustine, particularly to the influence of Platonism in Augustine’s theology, to which Ockham’s nominalism is a response (embracing particularity over abstract universalism).

To develop his argument, Jardine turns to the English theologian Colin Gunton (1941-2003) who argues that Augustine plays a key role in passing on a Platonic anthropology that denies a person’s particularity. One’s calling, rather, is “to escape the chains of embodiedness [in order] to live in the eternal world of the forms…[thus] cutting off of the mind from its material environment.”¹³ According to Gunton, this anthropology results from Augustine’s conception of God as primarily unitary rather than fully trinitarian.¹⁴ One sees this Platonic God, according to Gunton, when Augustine describes divine creation through Platonic universals rather than through a robust Christology and pneumatology, thus undermining a celebration of particularity: “Not the particularizing will of God, but general conceptual forms come into the centre.”¹⁵ As Jardine describes it, Augustine “sees creation in essentially unitary terms…a timeless conceptual structure informing otherwise shapeless matter.”¹⁶ Abstract form overshadows the particularity and goodness of creation. Gunton thus argues that Augustine elevates the oneness of God and denies the full goodness of creation, both of which contribute eventually to the modern turn inward. This inner self—a key mark of modernity—gives Augustine, according to Gunton, “some responsibility for the development of modernity.”¹⁷ As Jardine summarizes it, “Gunton’s essential argument is that as early Christian theology focused primarily on the Father, only secondarily on the Son, and hardly at all on the Spirit, resulting in a one-dimensional concept of God, seeing him primarily as creator, and as such acting primarily through will; late medieval nominalism, the Reformation, and modernity simply push this concept to its logical nihilistic conclusion.”¹⁸

While Jardine is in essential agreement with Gunton, he does note one place where he thinks Gunton’s argument is weak: the transfer of God’s will to humans. Jardine argues that this oversimplifies early modern theories, Hobbes most importantly. While Hobbes does understand human agency in terms of will, he still interprets it as the product of outside forces. Jardine thus argues, as we saw earlier, that modernity does “not so much transfer God’s omnipotent will to humans but rather to nature,” giving rise to a mechanistic ontology. “This accounts more satisfactorily for the low estimate of human agency in nominalism, Calvinism, and Hobbes and at the same time indicates how an instrumental conception of human action toward nature and other humans (the only conception possible in a mechanistic world) could develop long before the radical subjectivism of late modernity.”¹⁹

Prognosis

How does Jardine go about offering an alternative? He argues, following Gunton, for a stronger trinitarian understanding of God and reality. Whereas a unitary deus absconditus has fueled a mechanistic world of arbitrary subjects, a fuller trinitarian theology can provide resources to imagine a different politics and political community. Jardine describes being as intrinsically relational on analogy with God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Politically speaking, a trinitarian theology would provide resources for putting into practice a truly relational approach to one another and the natural world. “This would imply a politics that, while allowing and indeed encouraging human freedom, would understand that freedom is a more subtle matter than is generally understood in present-day liberal societies, and that in particular, true freedom is possible only within the context of community.”²⁰ For an example of such relational politics, Jardine refers to Karl Polanyi’s understanding of “embedded markets” (versus “disembedded markets”) which remain located within particular communities. An embedded market is not mere “localism” but rather refers to those markets and economic practices where the subordination of community to abstract, impersonal markets is disallowed. “Long-distance and indeed global trade,” Jardine writes, “are compatible with the idea of embedded markets if that trade is structured in ways that serve rather than disrupt the communities involved.”²¹ The relational politics of embedded markets is an alternative both to unrestrained global capitalism and to neo-nationalist populism: both to the totalizing homogeneity of the global market and to the disgruntled embrace of national particularism.

Evaluation

Understandings of nature: always theological

As Jardine acknowledges, his analysis of modernity (theological and otherwise) owes a debt to Michael A. Gillespie and Colin Gunton among others who argue that modernity, tangled as it is in various objectivistic/subjectivistic dualisms, cannot see or even acknowledge its own theological sources, distorted though they are.²² While Jardine departs from Gillespie and Gunton in some ways, he shares their key conviction that all understandings of self, nature, or politics tacitly rely on some prior mythic, theological convictions. Here one also sees Jardine’s debt to Polanyi: all knowing involves a reliance on tacit, communal convictions in order to arrive at explicit knowledge.

Jardine thus rightly seeks to trace which theological convictions have given rise to modernity, particularly to modernity’s understanding of nature. If nature is not a set of static facts, is it then entirely reducible to social construction and human choice, a view that now dominates the modern academy? One of Jardine’s crucial arguments is that a unitary inscrutable God finds its fullest corollary not simply in the individual will but in a mechanistic view of nature. Jardine insightfully exposes as well the gnostic convictions of nature so understood. Devoid of purpose, nature becomes lifeless, a machine onto which one imposes his or her own choices and desires. The modern gnostic “escapes” nature through subjectivism since the real self is the interior self. One is freed to reinvent or recreate nature through technology, the utilitarian tool that now accomplishes one’s self-chosen desires.

Augustine: friend or foe?

While Jardine’s discussions of gnosticism and nominalism are at once insightful and compelling, his discussion of Augustine is less so, primarily due to his reliance on Colin Gunton. While Gunton’s analysis of modernity is rich in many ways (especially his analysis of modern rationalism and subjectivism as an extension of the ancient problem of the one and the many), he takes a wrong turn when he dismisses Augustine as a Platonist responsible for modernity’s radical inwardness. Gunton thus claims that Augustine, failing to be truly trinitarian, posits universal forms in dubiously real matter, locates salvation in the inner sphere, and, at the same time, relegates salvation “to a largely post-temporal eschatology.”²³

Gunton is not without company in his identification of Augustine as a culprit of modernity. Charles Taylor sees Augustine as paving the way for Descartes, and Phillip Carey targets Augustine as responsible for a “Western inwardness” that culminates in John Locke’s isolated self.²⁴ In my view, this almost entirely negative picture of Augustine’s theology is a great tragedy. I call it a tragedy because ignoring Augustine’s theological legacy (or misinterpreting it) is itself a symptom of a modern blindness that cuts us off from how Augustine offers a corrective to modern ills. John Cavadini notes that “there is ample material in Augustine available for disfigurement that is, for constructing a notion of inwardness characteristic of the solipsistic epistemology….” Cavadini points out, however, that Augustine never mentions the “inner self.”²⁵ Rather, he describes the self in many ways. In sin, it is an emptiness and contradiction, “a land of famine,”²⁶ but always, even in sin, the self is a gift. Thus, as Samuel Kimbriel rightly concludes, Augustine “thinks it is impossible for humanity to exist in any kind of an autonomous and ‘self-constituted’ fashion apart from God.”²⁷ Even one’s so-called interiority is not simply one’s own. Whereas the disengaged or isolated modern self believes it can acquire knowledge on its own through self-mastery, the Augustinian porous self receives knowing and being as always a gift of communion (friendship) with God and others.

Rightly understood, an Augustinian anthropology relies utterly on a trinitarian understanding of God who becomes incarnate in the Son and by extension in the church and her sacraments. Augustine acknowledges that the “books of the Platonists” illumined his mind in some ways. He vividly recounts, however, that he did not read in them “that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us…that he humbled himself and was made obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross, which is why God raised him from the dead….”²⁸ The incarnation, not Platonism, becomes the hinge for Augustine’s understanding of the church and the sacraments as the ever-present body of Christ through which one enters into communion with God.

At this point, we can note that Gunton’s interpretation of Augustine shares some similarity with that of Baius (1513-1589), the Belgian theologian who interpreted Augustine as separating nature from grace. Baius’s interpretation was eventually rejected because it was seen as leading to naturalism: opening space for an autonomous nature (with grace an “add-on”). Such an interpretation, however, was seen to be entirely alien to Augustine’s theology. In failing to grasp the fuller meaning of Augustine, says Henri de Lubac, “no one was more dependent on his own century.”²⁹ By not seeing how for Augustine grace is in some sense integral to nature, Baius inadvertently excluded God from human life and veered toward Pelagianism. Does Gunton’s interpretation of Augustine, while decidedly different from Baius, nonetheless unintentionally reveal similar interpretive flaws?

Gunton, in contrast to how he understands Augustine, emphasizes that relationality is constitutive of all creation. He describes all being as being in relation, and he emphasizes that sociality is an “essential concept” in understanding personal beings. While helpful in some ways, Gunton’s analysis of relationality nonetheless remains abstract, particularly in his discussion of ecclesiology. He admits that it would be foolish to separate sociality from institutions but states nonetheless that “for much of our history, the church has been an institution rather than a community….”³⁰ Can the church as community or “sociality,” however, be separated from its historic institutional embodiment in space and time? We surely cannot ignore the ways the church’s members have egregiously failed to be the church. All the same, unless one is working within a supernatural versus natural framework (as Gunton is at this point), the institutional church in time is already, though not fully yet, God’s new creation through water and word.

At this point, we can begin to see how Gunton’s misreading of Augustine most likely prevented him from engaging Augustine’s classic discussion of the heavenly and earthly cities. For Augustine, the heavenly city (God’s new creation)—already present in space and time—reveals how the world (fallen creation) misunderstands its own temporal and spacial reality. Apart from the heavenly city, the earthly city imagines temporal time as the only time there is. Thus it fears death, rather than sin. And it limits the real to the empirical.³¹ Shorn of the heavenly city, the earthly city imagines itself as “pure nature,” living on its own apart from divine grace.

Thus while Augustine, specifically in City of God, does not offer a specific political theory, he does understand the church as a political body, and thus inevitably as an institution, that extends the incarnation in space and time. The “city” as Augustine understands it, however, is not so much a geographical region as it is a “number of people bound together by some tie of fellowship.”³² Augustine’s underlying question about any city or politics is, “what or who are they worshipping?”³³ It is striking that Augustine pursues the same question as Gunton, Jardine, and other theological genealogists of modernity: which theological convictions are sustaining one’s politics? It is also striking that some of Augustine’s key opponents are Platonists, who, as John Cavadini summarizes, tolerate the worship of other gods, deny the resurrection of the body, and see embodiment itself as a problem. The Platonist “refusal to see the link between body and soul as the wondrous work of God empties the bodily world of its reference to God (its wonder) and leaves it to the mercy of the Empire to define.”³⁴ As such, the Platonists are unable to imagine a new society, a genuine politics: solidarity in the love of Christ. Such solidarity provides the ground for reimagining the world now and as it shall be.³⁵

Augustine’s understanding of the church as a political body, a city, is thus an “alternative to Empire…. [It is] a fellowship of love available to people of any nation or city.”³⁶ Though Augustine offers no particular theory of political life, “he shows that God cannot be relegated to the periphery of society’s life.” Such a “neutral secular space could only be a society without God, captive of the lust for power, the libido dominandi.”³⁷ Augustine describes the severe limitations of any imperial or political project that relegates God to a sphere. As such, he exposes the destructive ideology of all false solidarities, including, in our current context, both a homogenized globalization and an insular nationalism.

In sum, Augustine, far from locating a Platonic ideal beyond dubiously earthly matter, instead offers an ecclesial and eucharistic understanding of politics. A blindness to creation and incarnation marks Augustine’s Platonist opponents. Is Augustine then not better engaged as friend rather than foe? To say yes would also be to continue to engage today what difference the eucharistic body of Christ makes for the economic and political life of the world.

William H. Poteat

Jardine describes in powerful and compelling ways the significance of Poteat’s work for understanding modernity and its alternative. Thus, Jardine notes Poteat’s crucial turn from seeing the real as like a static eternal text to rather indwelling an oral/aural world constituted by the presence of a paradigmatic and ever-faithful Speaker. Speaking (ultimately before a paradigmatic Speaker) is not based on a picture of words matching what is eternally out there (cyclical nature, an eternal preexistent text), an understanding that gives rise to numerous dualistic quandaries (real versus symbol or fact versus value). The mythic structure of the real is not the static impersonal but the logos of created being that makes speech possible. There is no preexistent text for Poteat but rather God’s speaking the world into being ex nihilo, which makes communion possible. Jardine is right to note that a trinitarian understanding of God is muted in Poteat’s work. Nonetheless, Poteat’s use of “mindbody” is deeply dependent upon an understanding of the incarnation and is thus implicitly trinitarian. While Poteat tends to use explicitly theological terms infrequently, he does at points describe how God is faithful to his word (dabhar) in radically incarnational and trinitarian ways. Thus, Poteat imagines an interlocuter asking him, “Then you believe in the doctrine of transubstantiation?” Poteat responds,

Well, no. What I believe – and I do not think of it as something I believe, it goes much deeper than that, in fact, all the way to the bone—is that the bread and wine are the presently actual body and blood of Jesus Christ; and that, if they are not, then the Son of God has nothing to do with the concrete person I am in this time and place; and if this be so, the whole of Christianity is but an elaborate system of symbols at no point engaged with the actual fabric of this world.³⁸

One wishes, with Jardine, that Poteat would have more fully developed such a statement. Even so, Poteat describes here a radical alternative to both nominalism and gnosticism, one where the very body of Christ sustains, penetrates, and transforms all of creation. Might Jardine incorporate this aspect of Poteat’s thought more fully into his understanding of embedded markets and relational communities?

Conclusion

Jardine’s work is remarkable, not only for its breadth—crossing political, philosophical, and theological “lines”—but also for its deep and provocative insights. Jardine opens up new and fresh ways to understand modernity. While not dismissing modernity’s positive gains, he offers a complex vision and careful analysis for how to think and live more fully in light of modernity’s many distortions, perhaps the most daunting of which is the relegation of values to a nihilistic and subjectivistic sphere. He persuasively shows how the abstract God of arbitrary will (no longer incarnate in the world) is mirrored in the voluntary modern self whose only option is now self-invention in a mechanistic world. He offers as well a compelling alternative: a politics embedded in relational markets and communities reflective of our creation in the image of a relational, triune God. For all of this, I am deeply grateful, and we are all much in Murray Jardine’s debt.

Bibliography

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_____. 1997. The Confessions, trans. by Maria Boulding, O.S.B. Hyde Park: New York City Press.

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_____. 2013. “Michael Polanyi’s Response to the Crisis of Modernity and Its Relation to Recent Developments in Theology,” Perspectives on Political Science 42, no. 3.

_____. 2017. “Theology, Political Theory and Modernity,” The Henry Symposium of Religion and Politics, The Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics (Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI, April 27-29, 2017).

_____. “Pope Benedict’s Analysis of the (Partial) Failure of Christian Theology,” The Henry Symposium on Religion and Public Life (Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI, April 27-29, 2019), 7.

Kimbriel, Samuel. 2014. Friendship as Sacred Knowing, Overcoming Isolation. New York: Oxford University Press.

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_____. 1994. Recovering the Ground, Critical Exercises in Recollection. New York: SUNY.

Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wilken, Louis Robert. 2003. The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God. New Haven: Yale University Press.