Sunday, January 22, 2006
(5:17 PM) | Anonymous:
Kenosis and Tragedy (i)
The chief concern of Donald MacKinnon's The Stripping of the Altars is indicated by the titles of its chapters: Kenosis and Establishment, Theology and Tragedy, Authority and Freedom in the Church, Intercommunion: A Comment, Is Ecumenism a Power Game? and The Controversial Bishop Bell.Each of these titles indicates a controversy, an Auseinandersetzung: in the first three chapters, it is between kenosis and establishment, theology and tragedy, authority and freedom; in the next two, it is the controversy between denominations; in the last, the controversy inhering in the person of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's sometime ally and correspondant, Bishop George Bell.
The question MacKinnon takes up in each of these chapters is that of how a true church of Christ might handle controversy within itself and within the world: how it might handle itself in the face, or teeth, of controversy. Thus, insofar as The Stripping of the Altars is concerned with ecclesiology, what it presents is not so much a positive vision of the church as it should be, as a series of caveats against the abuse and over-reaching of such visions, a series of pleas for intellectual humility.
In his introduction to the volume, MacKinnon writes of a contemporary (this was in 1968) imperative "[t]o emerge self-consciously, and in a spirit of acceptance...into the light of the post-Constantinian age; to seek the forms of post-Constantinian existence both in respect of inter-Church relations and in respect of presence to the world [italics in original];...(most fundamentally) to liberate our basic theology from the inherited inflection of centuries of acquiescence in an objectively false situation vis-a-vis public authority". That "objectively false situation" is one in which the status of the church is "guaranteed" and "allows the manner of that guarantee (the exercise by the civil power of a measure of external compulsive authority) to invade the substance of her life". Inheritance; inflection; invasion: for MacKinnon, the Constantinian compact between imperial power and the church was objectively a disaster for the innermost life of the church, and the undoing of that compact appears as an opportunity for spiritual liberation.
MacKinnon expresses the spiritual and institutional character of the Constantinian church in terms of an "opposition" between Christ and Caiaphas: between "the one who asked as a rhetorical question what shepherd, if he lost one sheep, would not leave the ninety and nine to seek it out; and the one who gave counsel that it was expedient that one man should die for the people". The Constantinian ecclesiological order is sacrificial: the counsel of Caiaphas expresses "the major premise of a great many practical syllogisms whose conclusion is always the same; that the individual shall be broken, or that his or her claims should be disregarded".
Against the sacrificial, syllogistic cast of mind of the "responsible ecclesiastic", MacKinnon calls for a theology inflected by tragedy, and a practical form of Christian presence in the world based on kenosis. Tragedy is, in MacKinnon's account, the discarded, rejected content of Plato's vision of the kallipolis, the "beautiful polity", in the Republic. Tragedy is the situation in which the virtuous man or woman is trapped and overthrown by his or her own virtues: it is the negation of Plato's attempt "to establish a world without ambiguity".
MacKinnon claims that influence of "Plato's authority" on Christian tradition was damaging precisely because "that tradition took over Plato's flight from the tragic as an ultimate, irreducible form of representation of the relation of the transcendent to the familiar". The "ecclesiological fundamentalist...finds in the actual history of his Church something of the security the kallipolis sought to offer", and is drugged and tranquilized by that positive vision: "he uses the study of that history as a kind of tranquilizer whereby he can lull himself into supposing the unknown somehow known, the unfathomable somehow plumbed to its depths. The ragged edges are made to disappear; the terrible reality of human waste, to which the Churches have added so much by the ways in which they have dealt with men and women, is pushed out of sight".
In calling for a restoration of the tragic sensibility to Christian thought, MacKinnon is not yet asserting that "the Gospel records" are intrinsically or fundamentally tragic: tragedy is not presented as the key to the Gospels; but the Platonic attempt "to discredit altogether the claim of tragic drama to represent the notion of what is" must nevertheless be reversed in order for certain important aspects of the Gospels to become visible:
The Christian believes that in Christ's passion he finds at once the judgment and redemption of the world; it is a desperately human occasion fraught not with a great, but with an ultimate, significance. But it is also failure; and that not in the language of devotion, but in that of literal fact. It is in the figure of Judas Iscariot that the failure of Jesus is focussed, and the tragic quality of his mission becomes plain, "Good were it for this man if he had not been born". Yet through his agency the Son of Man goes his appointed way, and of his own choice; for in a few hours' time, he will say "Thy will, not mine, by done". There is no solution here of the problem of the moral evil; there is nothing moreover which the Easter faith somehow obliterates.
MacKinnon's insistence that this failure is irreducible - that "the Easter faith", whatever else it may accomplish, does not simply wipe out the tragic elements within the Gospel narrative - acts as a guard against triumphalism, against the pushing out of sight of "the terrible reality of human waste". It is in the zone of the construction of the kallipolis, the vision of the just and beautiful society, that this restraint on spiritual triumphalism takes on a political (and ecclesiological) significance: if tragedy is admitted, then such totalising social visions, sustained by the "practical syllogisms" of the followers of Caiaphas, must be judged against the sacrificial decisions they enforce, the loss and waste that are their asking price.
I will address MacKinnon's discussion of kenosis in a second post, and perhaps also attempt some commentary on the time and place in which The Stripping of the Altars was written, and its significance for our own time and place (it may be noted that the present Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was a student of MacKinnon's).
