These two monographs are the products of the work of the “Centre of Theology and Philosophy” at Nottingham University. The Centre, whose director is John Milbank, attempts to offer something different in the theological landscape: to “engage questions of pressing concern to both philosophers and theologians in such a way as to reinvigorate both disciplines with a kind of interdisciplinary desire.” The books under review achieve that by, in one case, comparing Alvin Plantinga and Charles Taylor, and in the other by bringing together Jacques Lacan and Søren Kierkegaard.
Deane-Peter Baker respects the “Reformed Epistemology” of Alvin Plantinga, but believes it only takes us so far in answering the de jure objection to religious belief –“the idea that it is somehow irrational, a dereliction of epistemic duty, or in some other sense epistemically unacceptable, to believe in God” (p.1). Concentration on this de jure objection leads us to a negative apologetic. A Charles Taylor-inspired argument that morality itself leads us to Christian belief helps us to a more positive apologetic.
Baker deals first with other “Reformed Epistemologists” (Nicholas Wolterstorff and William Alston) and details Plantinga's critique of their positions. This then leads him to Plantinga's own version of Reformed Epistemology: and the idea of Christian belief as “properly basic”.
The problem with seeing Christian belief as properly basic is not that it is a position that cannot be defended – it can, particularly with a mind as tenacious and inventive as Plantinga's. The problem is more that, in the end, it is a counter-intuitive argument that doesn't seem to accomplish enough. It cannot guard very well against the “Great Pumpkin” objection, which Plantinga himself acknowledges: if Christian beliefs are properly basic, what about other beliefs (such as the belief in an all-powerful Great Pumpkin) however outlandish? The de jure objection to Christian belief, from Bertrand Russell to Antony Flew, whilst set down in individual essays and volumes, was never in practice a de jure objection in isolation from the de facto. Plantinga taking it in isolation only leaves even his supporters (like Baker himself) frustrated.
So Baker turns to Charles Taylor, and an argument from morality, to shore things up. Baker's reading of Sources of the Self is oddly influenced by critics of Taylor. Oddly influenced, because what these critics object to in Taylor's work is a muted argument for theism which they wish to make explicit and reject. Baker wants to make the argument explicit and accept it. All this robs Taylor's work of a carefully structured nuance, built up by massive historical research, and turns him into a Philosopher of Religion in the manner of Richard Swinburne. Baker follows Melissa Lane, who in a 1992 paper, “God or Orienteering: a critical study of Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self” set out to strip away some of this historical foliage and get to the root. This root, according to Lane, is a transcendental argument for God, absent from the text. Where Lane denounces this absent argument, Baker defends it: and, it must be said, with some success. Taylor has built into his work arguments Lane misses that would counteract her naturalism: but these arguments are surely inseparable from the historical panorama of the text.
Baker's final argument goes something a bit like this. We have a sensus divinitatis that gives us basic knowledge of God. However, damaged by sin, it requires the ministrations of the Holy Spirit to restore us to full understanding. The Holy Spirit's work takes place through our phenomenology. We “view” the world in moral terms. These terms lead us to see a certain structure or framework of “the good” which is definitive of our moral identity. This moral framework is dominated by those goods which Charles Taylor calls “hypergoods”– goods against which other goods can be judged and measured. What leads us to these “hypergoods” leads us also to their source: God. If the point of Baker's book is to make it “more difficult to respond ‘So what?’” to theistic claims, then he may be disappointed. But it remains a thought-provoking work, and one which equips us for the contemporary struggle for veritas– if only by sending us back to the magisterial Taylor.
Baker's work seems out of step with the general philosophical assumptions of a programme directed by John Milbank. Marcus Pound's work, however, is Milbankian through and through. Assured by Milbank of the centrality of theology in intellectual history, Pound sets himself “to explore the way psychoanalysis is already a theology and thereby encourage theology to think of itself as already psychology, and liturgy as psychoanalysis” (his italics). This is in response to the question at the beginning of the book: “How can one speak of transubstantiation today, in the twenty-first century?” The response proceeds, as outlined in Pound's Introduction, by a series of steps.
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1 Pound believes that not only do postmodernists “present the greatest challenge to the intellectual life of the Church – the loss of grand narratives, death of self, and reduction of institutions to power” they also “define our cultural milieu”.
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2 Pound notes that Aquinas used the Aristotelian categories of substance and accident to defend transubstantiation. And because “psychoanalysis is today as Aristotle was to the Middle Ages” (p.xiii) psychoanalysis should be central to any modern defence. This will be easier because psychoanalysis occupies “a privileged place in contemporary thought, having taken root across the humanities in fields stretching from philosophy, politics and theology to film studies”.
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3 With postmodernism as the greatest challenge, and taking into account the pre-eminence of psychoanalysis in contemporary thought, we come to the conclusion that the would-be defender of transubstantiation should take a postmodern approach to psychoanalysis – as practised by Jacques Lacan.
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4 In order to theologize Lacan, Pound decides on Kierkegaard as a conversation partner. We should not be too worried that it “might appear initially that Lacan and Kierkegaard are diametrically opposed … Lacan is an affirmed atheist while Kierkegaard is a fideist theologian”. This is because “one should assert that when things seem most apart they are often closest together.”
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5 The link between psychoanalysis and theology is trauma: the psychoanalytic account of trauma is “indebted to theological accounts of the Incarnation, historically mediated by Kierkegaard, through Heidegger, to Lacan.” But it is the doctrine of transubstantiation in the Eucharist that stands as both trauma and counter-trauma to the world. Just as traumas such as the killing of innocent men united soldiers in Vietnam, so the trauma of the Eucharist bonds the Church. And “only the Church's counter-trauma is able to hold good on Freud's desire to see psychoanalysis as revolutionary practice.”
The conclusion of the argument is that the Church offers a more valuable form of psychoanalysis to the world by “relating to everyone primarily as a member of the enacted body of Christ, rather than a self-seeking individual.”
It is an attractive conclusion – one you can also find in Catherine Pickstock or, to be even more radically orthodox, the epistles of St. Paul. But Pound's energies in coming to this conclusion seem somewhat misplaced. He spends a lot of time on stages 4 and 5 of the argument; and hardly any time laying any groundwork. Stages 1–3 are simply statements from his preface and introduction. We have a great deal of explication of Lacan and Kierkegaard, and not a lot of justification as to why this might command our attention. This problem surely stems from the fact that this is transparently a DPhil thesis, where the urgency to study specific figures with a combination of originality and depth means that wider questions (such as might have to be addressed for the benefit of a more general reader) are ignored. The book is called Theology, Psychoanalysis and Trauma, which covers the sprawl of material. But surely a more focussed argument about the Eucharist and transubstantiation would have to eschew some of the hard-won research – the comparative reading of Abraham in Kierkegaard and Antigone in Lacan in Chapter 4, for example.
Both of these books are to be recommended: Baker's to philosophers of religion, Pound's to those interested in Lacan and Kierkegaard. But both books suffer from the hyperbole of branding. The “Veritas” series has much in common with “Radical Orthodoxy” beyond its editors and directors – namely, hubris. The self-importance of the series introduction is matched by the bafflingly expensive production and packaging of these books –£60 each. If only scholarly argument was allowed to speak for itself, without the intrusions of marketing, both books might be more widely read – but that seems a forlorn hope.
