Janet is a member of the SoF North West Group Philip Knight writes a special review of The Predicament of Postmodern Theology:
Radical Orthodoxy or Nihilist Textualism by Gavin Hyman Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001, pp.176, 4 pb. £15.99, ISBN 0 664 22366 Gavin Hyman How do we do theology when what we do is pile interpretation upon interpretation rather than describe what is ‘really real’? How do we do theology when our interpretations are not of anything, but responses to other interpretations; when we know our interpretations to be fallible and historically contingent and that equally plausible, but different, interpretations are also available? How do we do theology when the world has become plurivocal and fabulous all the way down; when ‘rational’ and ‘true’ are but empty compliments we pay to interpretations with which we agree rather than guarantors that suggest we are slowly getting reality right? How do we do theology when logos is interminably, eternally deferred and theos is impossible? To phrase the question in the style of John D. Caputo, how do we do theology when doing theology is to do the impossible?
To ask these questions is ask how we do theology after the collapse of foundationalism and metaphysics, after 'the death of God' and the advent of nihilism, after the de-centring of the self and the ‘de-tourisation' of a linear account of history into errant wandering traditions that have neither arché nor telos. To ask these questions is ask what follows the demise of representationalism. In short, to ask these questions is to ask a single question, one which Gavin Hyman's lucid and informative book takes to be the crucial question currently facing theology: 'How do we do theology today under the conditions of postmodernity—that is, under the conditions that fracture modernity's desire for rational mastery and self-present knowledge?’ Hyman contrasts two contemporary answers to this question.
Both regard postmodernity as a theological opportunity. One, Radical Orthodoxy, can be traced to Rowan Williams among others but is primarily associated with the English theologian, John Milbank. The other, which Hyman primarily associates with the later work of Don Cupitt, he calls ‘Nihilist Textualism’. Critical of both Radical Orthodoxy and Nihilist Textualism, Hyman outlines a third position which he calls 'Fictional Nihilism’. (1) Radical Orthodoxy holds that a theological narrative is a live option today because postmodernism has highlighted the fractures in modernity's attempt to establish universal reason. This attempt owed much to Descartes and Kant but can be traced to the beginning of the Fourteenth Century with the shift from Aquinas's account of our necessarily analogical knowledge of God (necessary because of God's ontological difference from that which exists) to Duns Scotus's univocal conception of being which placed all reality, including God's existence, within the compass of universal human reason. In this early shift toward modernity, ontological difference was collapsed. God became an infinite object accounted for in human reason and subject to human decisions about what can and cannot (the infinite) be known. (pp.3138). In modernity, Hyman notes, "God's ontological transcendence became an epistemological transcendence." (p.35) The more epistemology became dominated by secular reason the more God was pushed out.
According to Radical Orthodoxy, it is this which postmodernism undermines. The failure of modernity's project of universal reason and the consequent turn to narrative allows us once more to re-tell the narrative of pre-modern (patristic) theology. From the perspective The Predicament of Postmodern Theology The book explores, in depth, two antithetical schools of postmodern theology, namely the "radical orthodoxy" of John Milbank and the "nihilist textualism" of Don Cupitt. The text also offers a sustained and comprehensive critique of Milbank's influential project from a “nihilist textualist" perspective. Although this critique shares a number of themes underlying Cupitt's project, it also identifies major difficulties with Cupitt's approach and concludes by mapping out a "third way" that leads beyond the responses of both Cupitt and Milbank. In an extended special review of this difficult book, Philip Knight considers postmodern theology and its exploration of themes of discourse and the ‘other’. of this Christian narrative, understood by Milbank as ontologically structured around the inclusion of difference as difference, peace and harmony, it becomes possible to offer a Christian critique of the violence that structures the ontology of both modern and postmodern narratives. For Milbank, any narrative that does not allow a place for God as ontologically transcendent will be fundamentally nihilistic—a violent struggle of all against all. According to this metanarrative, the Christian narrative simply out-narrates all other (fundamentally secular, heretical and nihilist) narratives.
Hyman agrees with Milbank that postmodernity makes a commitment to narrative tradition unavoidable. He also agrees that metanarratives (narratives which position and order other narratives) are equally unavoidable because to claim not to have one is itself a metanarrative. However, against Milbank, Hyman wants to problematise the unavoidability of metanarratives and, thereby, situate his own Fictional Nihilism. He argues that the unavoidability of metanarratives does not allow us to articulate a new theological absolutism for that would deny the inherent instability of metanarratives. Adding 'meta' to ‘narrative’ does not take us out of story and into ontology, as Milbank seems to suggest, it just gives us more stories—more narratives. Hence, Hyman notes, "a metanarrative is as impossible as it is unavoidable". (p.117) Furthermore, Hyman's critique continues, Milbank's move from the Christian narrative to his own metanarrative is a rather ‘modern’ gesture that relocates authority from the former to the latter in such a way as to absolutise the latter. (pp.88-89) And, since Milbank allows only two metanarratives—the Christian and the nihilist, these are set in opposition in a struggle for supremacy. It is precisely this conflict which his theology was supposed to have left behind in favour of inclusion, peace and harmony. Significantly, at this level of metametanarrative, Milbank has no criteria, other than his own fictions, for deciding between metanarratives. (p. 92) Thus, like all narrative, Milbank's is inherently unstable and resists its own particular drive toward absolutisation. Indeed, Hyman argues that in order for it to be stated, Milbank's Radical Orthodoxy must rely upon that which it represses. Namely, a ‘modern’ and a nihilist supplement which simultaneously shows Milbank to be "more 'modern' than ...[he] ... would have us believe" (p.88) and, at the level of his meta-metanarrative, more nihilist than he would believe himself to be. (pp.6, 85-86, 88-94) Next, Hyman argues that Milbank (mis)represents nihilism as violent and totalitarian because he (mis)construes it as a metaphysical doctrine: the doctrine that nothing—the nihil—is all there is and so, ultimately, everything is only what we have made it. But, properly understood, Hyman argues, nihilism is just another fiction and this prevents it from taking on a metaphysical outlook. This ‘Fictional Nihilism'—the story that everything is only a story—is accomplished nihilism. It is nihilism applied to itself. It moves from story to story not because this is ‘all there is' but because, in the historical event of postmodernity, a narrative about a process of reduction, diminution and weakening of being emerges as one narrative among others Sof 57 January 2003 which calls our attention to the multiplicity of fictions and narratives as only fictions and narrative and nothing more. (p.113) Milbank correctly warns us against metaphysical nihilism but, Hyman argues, this has no bearing on nihilism in its accomplished form as fiction: a fiction which, at the level of his meta-metanarrative, Milbank employs but represses in his own work. (pp.91-93) (2) Unlike Radical Orthodoxy's rather ambivalent attitude to the postmodern—turning against the postmodern after it has cleared the way for a return to a re-telling of the pre-modern Christian narrative—Nihilist Textualism, the second way of doing theology under the conditions of postmodernity, positively embraces nihilism, making a theological virtue out of modernity's failure to overcome radical contingency and the ceaseless deferral of signs. Identified with the anti-realist project found in the (later—post 1990) work of Don Cupitt and the a/theology of Mark C. Taylor, Nihilist Textualism claims that there can be no extra-linguistic reality; no meaning that is not also a sign, no worldly reality that is not a language-formed event. Our life-world stands out against the void because it is language-formed all the way down. It is contingent, in continual flux and outsideless. Divine creation is now the power of language. God is indeed the word incarnate.
Language is now theology's inescapably suggestive since theology has always had dealings with alterity. Theology is best placed to tell the untellable story of otherness because theology has always had to do the impossible: to speak of God. Nevertheless, to 'move through’ this narrative also makes theology impossible for we must also depart this narrative in the name of the unnameable ‘other’. "If heterological concerns repeatedly call us back to the theological narrative," Hyman writes, "those very concerns also call us to leave theology behind. This is because the haunting (non)presence of the 'other' constantly disrupts theological commitment." (p.145) In the name of the unnameable ‘other’, Hyman’s book reproves Nihilist Textualism for its lack of heterological concern and resists the Radical Orthodox appropriation that would name the 'other' as God. Theology is our familiar territory but we must return to it always as exiles. To keep returning to it, as we must, is to do so as outlaws. (pp.148-149) Hyman's Fictional Nihilism is more sympathetic toward Nihilist Textualism than Radical Orthodoxy but his motive for writing this book rests in the need he sees to address what he considers to be the structural inability of Cupitt's Nihilist Textualism to offer a ‘rigorous critique’ of Radical Orthodoxy. (p. 4) This structural inability arises Non-realism says that the realist/anti-realist debate indubitable == belongs to a representational mode of discourse presences, that is now more trouble than it is worth nothing is hidden. We live in and are shaped by the stories language tells. In these stories of make-believe we cannot help but make belief—an anti realist faith.
However, Hyman argues, Cupitt's anti-realist faith is a form of metaphysical nihilism. It is a totalising system closed off from the intervention of something ‘other’ by a metaphysical gesture which presences everything in the outsideless, contingent flux of language.
Meanwhile, in a second metaphysical gesture, Cupitt uses terms like 'the void’, ‘white noise’, and 'the nihil’ (among others) to label ‘the way the world is' beyond fiction—the nothing against which language makes everything bright. Consequently, Hyman notes, Cupitt's theology "can appear metaphysical, foundational, and nonreflexive." (p.123) It does not apply nihilism to itself as rigorously as it should. (3) Hyman's own postmodern theological "(dis)position", Fictional Nihilism, differs from Cupitt's Nihilist Textualism to the extent that it is aware of nihilism's drive to accomplishment and so avoids making a new metaphysics out of nihilism. In a few short paragraphs (pp. 104-106), Hyman describes the journey from metaphysical to fictional nihilism. Metaphysical nihilism tries to represent the nihil. It tries to master it within a single allencompassing narrative. But the nihil resists being narrated. It is ‘pure nihilism’, anti-narrative—narrative's ‘other’. Language cannot represent it. The more metaphysical nihilism tries to represent this ‘other’ (pure nihilism) the more it fails. This constant failure begins a process of purification by which nihilism is purged of metaphysics.
First a narrative of the void and then a narrative of silence are unmasked as yet further attempts by metaphysics to master the ‘other’. Eventually, metaphysics collapses and dies (p.105) leaving only narrative fictions. Metaphysical nihilism dissolves into fictional nihilism. Crucially, however, pure nihilism has not dissolved since it was only ever a chimera: an unrealisable dream. As such it remains at the margins of narrative from where it haunts fictional nihilism and keeps it fictional. This unnameable ‘other' (pure nihilism) returns metaphysics to narrative, relativises the attempt to make particular narratives absolute and induces the movement from one narrative to the next saying to each, "not that ... not that ... not that" (p. 119) ze =" In developing this "third territory for postmodern theology" (p.7), Hyman draws upon the 'weak thought’ of the Italian postmodern philosopher, MEP and framer of the European constitution, Gianni Vattimo. Vattimo is an ever-present figure in Hymar's text. He is constantly poppingup at crucial stages in the argument to support Hyman's claims but he is never discussed in any detail. Instead, Hyman chooses a writer on historical and social theory, Michel de Certeau, to exemplify Fictional Nihilism. The unsettling experience of 'the other’ in de Certeau's work makes a return to the historical narrative of theology sof 57 January 2003 Gianni Vattimo from Cupitt's failure to think beyond the framework of realism and anti-realism and marks another departure from, and critique of, Cupitt's narrative. In what follows I want to (1) reposition Hyman's criticism of Cupitt's realist/anti-realist framework and (2) address his claim that Cupitt's theology "is essentially a modern [metaphysical] postmodernism, in which the ‘other' is repressed," (p. 7) by questioning Hyman's concept of the ‘other’. (1) Hyman describes the modernist (Kantian) starting point of Cupitt's theological journey toward an anti-realist faith and argues that Cupitt has never moved beyond the limits of a modern liberal theological framework. Hyman positions Cupitt and John Hick at opposite ends of the spectrum of 'modern' theology. Cuipitt's theological pilgrimage has taken him across this spectrum from critical realism to anti-realism but this journey, Hyman argues, has led Cupitt to assume, wrongly, that this is the only theological spectrum. Consequently, anyone who speaks theologically outside the realist/anti-realist framework and the spectrum of modern theology will be misunderstood by Cupitt. Hyman shows how this has nullified Cupitt's response to Rowan Williams and John Milbank.
By placing these theologians within the realist/anti-realist framework Cupitt fails to engage them properly, to understand them in their own terms or to identify their real challenge to his own theology.
Cupitt has missed a paradigm shift in theological framework from the modern to the postmodern. To engage with postmodern theology Cupitt must leave behind the modernist realist / anti-realist framework. (pp. 54, 62-64) Hyman is right about this. What is more, there is enough evidence in Cupitt's own work to suggest that Cupitt would /should also think him right. Both Hyman and Cupitt would agree with Richard Rorty's claim that, "The terms ‘realist’ and ‘anti-realist' should be confined to people who are willing to take seriously the question ‘Is there a matter of fact about X?' for some specified X".' Neither Hyman nor Cupitt intend to take this question seriously nor should any non-realist. Here, we should recognise a distinction between 'anti-realism' and ‘non-realism'. Non-realism says that the realist / anti-realist debate belongs to a representational mode of discourse that is now more trouble than it is worth. It should become anon-issue. Instead of worrying about whether this or that narrative does or does not represent some intrinsic reality, a non-realist hermeneutic asks us to consider the usefulness any narrative might have to particular purposes.
If Cupitt accepts that his anti-realist faith is better understood in these non-realist terms (as I believe he would /should) there might be more agreement between Cupitt and Hyman than Hyman's book might suggest. Hyman, however, might dispute the association I wish to make between aspects of his Fictional Nihilism and a pragmatic non-realist hermeneutic. He might see the latter as yet another metanarrative blind to its own totalising potential because unaware of its attempt to do the impossible: to block the 'other' out.
However, there may be less to be said for Hyman's ‘other’ than he thinks. I would wish to ask him, 'How else, other than by its usefulness, are we to judge his theological narrative?’ 'What might this ‘other’ come to?—Indeed, can it ever come to anything? (2) Hyman argues that Cupitt's narrative framework operates in a late-modern not a postmodern paradigm. His theology is a metaphysical nihilism which represses the ‘other’. However, Vattimo, one of Hyman’'s main sources of support, doubts that it is ever entirely possible to slough off a heritage—even one that is metaphysical. Witness, for example, how Hyman is drawn into a version of the realist /anti-realist debate when he applauds the (repressed) nihilism in Milbank against Phillip Blood's critique of this nihilism (p. 112) or, more importantly, how Hyman's ‘other’ (pure nihilism) arises at the end of, but nevertheless within, a metaphysical consciousness. It is, he says, 'only' in the play of the two moments of nihilism: the metaphysical and the fictional, that the ‘other’ is evoked. (p. 105) To me, this suggests that narratives are more mutually interpenetrative than incommensurable. Indeed, the mutual contamination of narrative bleeding into narrative is an example of what Vattimo refers to as the 'weakening of being’. Given this, Hyman's fictional nihilism (in which stories brush up against each other all the time) sits uncomfortably with his attempt to demarcate narrative frameworks (the metaphysical and the fictional; the modern and the postmodern) into incommensurable paradigms.
I am not as convinced as Hyman seems to be by Milbank's critique of Donald Davidson's debunking of incommensurable conceptual frameworks. (pp. 53-64, 164, n. 24) It is always possible, if not always easy, to tell a new story which harmonises stories previously supposed to be incompatible. In any case, Davidson does not deny alterity, for only a tiny amount of non-overlap in our narratives is enough to make all the difference in the world. But, the large amount of overlap which, Davidson reminds us, must exist as the pragmatic condition of any communication, prevents the absolutisation of otherness. According to Rorty, Davidson makes ‘otherness' a matter of practical differences. Difference (political, social, cultural, linguistic, sexual, economic etc.), however it comes— and we can be sure that it does—presents us with an ethical obligation toward the other person. The ‘otherness’ of conceptual frameworks presents us with only an unnameable no-thing—the ‘other’ as philosophical principle. Whereas Davidsonian ‘charity’ allows us to understand the 'other' as different—as a material singularity—Hyman's 'other' risks subsuming difference within an unnameable philosophical principle of otherness—alterity.
Hyman criticises Cupitt for having a general blindness to the ‘other' but, if Davidson and Rorty are correct—if, indeed, the ‘other' (as philosophical principle) is fiction too—then Hyman's criticism says little more than that Cupitt has not chosen (or chosen otherwise than) to pass through narratives which Hyman believes he should pass through. However, Hyman has in mind something more ‘objective’ to judge against Cupitt. He has in mind the story of otherness that is other than story—fiction's supplement against which, by neglect, Cupitt sins. This ‘other’ is a story that can never be told: an anti-narrative of pure nihilism which must be kept secret, can never be passed through nor left behind but which, according to Hyman, makes all such passing through and leave taking possible.
Cupitt does indeed ignore such an impossible story of otherness.
Perhaps one important question in theology today is whether he (or any one else) is correct to do so. There are at least three reasons to think that Cupitt might be correct. First, Hyman's unnameable 'other' is not the only possible defence against the return of metaphysical closure. A Rortyan irony, for example, aware of the groundlessness of the commitments we still must make, might be enough to keep us in the style of theology's unsettled exiles without the self-reflexive mystification of Hyman's ‘other’ or the constant leave-taking it engenders.
Second, Hyman decides for the 'other's' undecidability "expressed in the otherness of the ‘other’ that cannot be named," (p. 147) and as "a decision that must necessarily be left unmade." (p. 148) But, might not leaving behind all decisions that decide otherwise than undecidability bring with it an ethical danger if concerns for the weak are lost in undecidability? Might not Cupitt be right to close his eyes to the 'other' if sighting it would otherwise make him lose all contact with material difference in the dark maze of the "not that... not that... not that"? Might not Cupitt be right to close his ears to the call of the ‘other's’ cry of "nada... nada... nada... nada... nada," (p. 119) if this cry would otherwise deafen him to the cry of the weak?
Are we not obliged to deny Hyman's 'other' (pure nihilism) if only to keep difference open, the weak audible, and narrative responsible?
Do we touch here upon what Jacques Derrida means by ‘the undeconstructability of justice’? Does not justice raise for us the possibility of decisions other than undecidability—decisions that are politically attuned to the needs of the weak? Is there not a fiction of obligation—imperfectly articulated, among other ways, in liberal democracy at its best and its liberal theological correlative—from which, for the sake of the ‘other’, we would not wish to allow ourselves to be exiled in the name of pure nihilism?
These questions are not intended to cast doubt on the importance of what Hyman calls "the heterological project" (p. 144) but they do intend to question whether Hyman's 'other' belongs to this project.
We should not confuse Hyman's nameless philosophical principle of otherness, which cuts off any possibility of a decision in advance, with the impossible relation to the singularity of the ‘other’ before which (or before whom) we are called to make responsible decisions.
This other ‘other’ to Hyman's ‘other’ always has a name. As John Caputo argues, our response to the singularity of the 'other' "is directed towards whoever bears a proper name.” This is one reason why Caputo wants to 'save' the name of God.
However, this relation to singularity can only be kept open with difficulty. As Hyman correctly notes, once named, the 'other' slips away—being no longer ‘other’. But, without a name, the singularity of the ‘other’ may become lost in a totalised universal principle of otherness. The name that risks closing the relation to the ‘other’ must be risked if we are to keep open, rather than subsume, difference.
Whether we need quasi-transcendental concepts such as those employed by Derrida (‘justice’, 'différance’, 'khéra’, ‘gift’, the ‘secret’, the 'messianic’ etc.) to keep this relation to the ‘other’ open cannot be discussed here, but these concepts do suggest that undecidability is only ever a condition for decision—the impossible a condition of the possible— for only if there is first an impossible undecidability are we able to make a responsible decision (as opposed to merely acting on ‘auto-pilot’).
Thus, I suspect that the ‘other’ which Cupitt should acknowledge more readily than he does is not the unnameable ‘other’ that Hyman has in mind, but a singularity (every singularity), our relation to which/ whom is an infinite obligation that is made possible only as long as the impossibility of this relation remains before us. This, again, is why Caputo, unlike Hyman, wants to 'save' the name of ‘God'—the impossible name for whom all things are possible. Pace Hyman, then, to block the principle of otherness (otherness understood as unnameable pure nihilism) is, I suggest, precisely what theology must always do: not only as an ethical demand but also of necessity, since theology cannot do otherwise thas the impossible for it is we who do it.
The third reason to think that Cupitt might be right to resist Hyman's ‘other’ is that Vattimo is not enamoured of the otherness of the ‘other’. For Vattimo, at the end of modernity “alterity is entirely exhausted."’ Alterity disappears, he argues, not because totality has been achieved but because it has been dissolved. Everything has become fiction. There are different fictions, any number of which contain the traces of past alterity but the 'wholly other' is no more.
The very idea, for Vattimo, imposes much the same violence that the God of foundational metaphysics imposed in the past. Hyman is correct, "Vattimo's nihilism is a fictional nihilism" (p. 103) but his fictional nihilism finds no place for the 'other' understood as pure nihilism. Perhaps this explains why Hyman seems as reluctant to discuss Vattimo as, he claims, Milbank is to consider him. (p. 114) These remarks aside, Hyman's book deserves to be widely read both inside Sea of Faith and beyond. Hyman's intelligible account and critique of Radical Orthodoxy should be welcomed by all students of theology and by those who still have a residual of theological liberalism in their blood. The questions he asks of Cupitt are ones that need to be asked if Sea of Faith is not to lose its radical edge. Hyman outlines a third way of doing theology's impossible task at the end of modernity, one that calls us to both commit to and leave behind narrative traditions. We can do this because they are fictions. We must inhabit them as fictions but be prepared to leave them behind when they take on the pretence of being more than fictions. ‘Richard Rorty, ‘Realism, Anti-realism and Pragmatism’ in C. B. Kulp, Realism/ Antirealism and Epistemology, (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), p. 151 2John D Caputo, Demythologising Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 200 3Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, (Cambridge: Polity Press, ET 1988 Jon R. Snyder), p. 159 Philip Knight is a member of Sea of Faith. Having gained his PhD in theology at Durham in 1997, he now teaches RE in Kent.
Radical Orthodoxy or Nihilist Textualism, by Gavin Hyman. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001, pp.176, pb. £15.99, ISBN 0 664 22366 4.