Sunday, January 29, 2006
(5:48 PM) | Anonymous:
Kenosis and Tragedy (ii)
The centrepiece of Donald MacKinnon's The Stripping of the Altars is the Gore Memorial Lecture, Kenosis and Establishment. This lecture was delivered in Westminster Abbey on November 5th in 1968: an eventful year. The tone and style of MacKinnon's prose are recognisably those of the English-speaking public intellectual at a time when the terms "the public" and "the intellectual" were subject to disconcertingly rapid shifts in sense. There is a similar combination of boldness and hesitancy, a similar sense of needing to tread carefully precisely because one is breaking new - inevitably "radically new" - ground, in the writing of Raymond Williams from the same period.Some indication of how much was changing, and has changed further since, in the configuration of the "public" for such writing can be taken from the fact that the Greek terms in the text (with the exception, strangely enough, of "kenosis") are given in the Greek alphabet, untransliterated and without explanatory footnotes. It is assumed that the educated reader will be able to make sense of such terms as given; that the uneducated reader will not be looking at the book at all; and that there is nothing and no-one occupying the space between these two classes of person - or perhaps no such space to be occupied. MacKinnon is addressing a public audience to whom the phrases "de haut en bas", "vis-à-vis", "point de départ", "soi-disant" and so on will be immediately intelligible; an audience that knows what a modus vivendi is, and a magnum opus too.
The first thing, then, that we may say about MacKinnon's call for the church to give up its conventional adherence to the titles and privileges of a social authority guaranteed by imperial power, is that it issues from inside the fortress of that authority. However beleaguered and crumbling that fortress may be, the discourse that is carried on within its walls remains masterful, self-assured even as it declares its foundations shaken, its certainties swept away.
One would not readily describe the tone of the following passage as "radically democratic":
We live in a radically democratic age, in which established sanctities are ceaselessly called in question, compelled to justify their claim by reference to the human values they promote. The temper of this protest is often crudely utilitarian, unaware of the serious criticisms to which a thoroughgoing utilitarianism in ethical theory is open (whether 'rule-utilitarianism' or 'act-utilitarianism' is in mind); but the demand which thus finds expression is the fundamentally healthy rejection of an order which secures certainly a measure of respect for certain traditional values, but only at the cost religiously of a profound deformation of the ultimately radical faith of the incarnation through its conversion into the underlying spiritual tradition of a supposedly supremely excellent civilization.Some radical democratisation is taking place, certainly; it takes the form of a "protest" and "rejection" perhaps "crudely utilitarian" in temper, and "unaware" of "serious criticisms", but "fundamentally healthy" nevertheless. MacKinnon's stance here is one of simultaneous avowal and disavowal: what is "healthy" about such democratic sentiment is not the means it employs, its compulsive recourse to utilitarian standards of judgment, but the ends towards which it gestures. Thus, the cultural supremacism of the "supposedly supremely excellent civilization" is to be opposed, not because such supremacism goes against the democratic temper of the age, but because it profoundly deforms "the ultimately radical faith of the incarnation".
Kenosis, then, is the spiritual centre of MacKinnon's critique of the affiliation between the Church of England and what in the England of 1968 was still known, and still able to know itself, as "the Establishment"; and kenosis is not democratic self-assertion, or the multilateral "struggle for recognition", but "self-emptying": "taking the form of a servant". MacKinnon takes his lead from Charles Gore, to whose memory the lecture on Kenosis and Establishment is dedicated, and the Roman Catholic theologian Father Robert Adolfs:
What Father Adolfs is pleading for is, in the first instance, a renewal of understanding of the manner of the Church's presence to the human societies in which its work is carried on; but he recognises quite clearly that this touches also the nature of its self-understanding, and indeed the way in which it understands its mission and the faith by which its existence is defined. So he latches on to the idea of kenosis or self-emptying...and urges its application in the field of ecclesiology at once in theory and in pastoral practice.One is compelled to wonder what form an application of the "idea of kenosis" might be expected to take. Is the formal servanthood of the incarnate Christ in the first instance an idea, a concept that might be added to the conceptual apparatus of ecclesiology "in theory" at the same time as it was to be worked out in practice? MacKinnon does not fail to doubt it. He notes, firstly, that "the notion of kenosis as a Christological concept has been drastically criticized", and that the "paradoxes in the theory are well known"; and, at the end of the lecture, that "it belongs to the heart of the idea of kenosis that ultimate significance should be received, not imposed". The idea of kenosis is, at its heart, paradoxical: it does not take a positive form in the present, but inculcates a receptivity towards an as-yet unknown future. Although MacKinnon does not use the word, it seems to me to be closely bound to the condition of poverty (as in "the poverty of theory", "the poverty of historicism", etc: a constitutive failure of articulation); and MacKinnon's use of the term "aphasia" has something of this sense:
To speak in these terms is not to be guilty of irrationalism. It is to express the conviction, which at some level we all share, that in Christian belief we reach the frontiers of the intelligible, the mysterious actuality of the divine self-emptying. Certainly the writ of logic runs in the field of theology. But we cannot trace always the precise way in which it does. Thus we know...that we must, as far as we can, eliminate self-contradiction and every other counter-intuitive element from our concepts. Yet still we may, rather we must, admit a final and inescapable failure to represent the manner of God's presence to the world in Christ, the quality of the transcendent decisively disclosed in him. And in this situation we do well to consider silence as a "system of projection" of the ineffable. But it must be a silence expressed in action: not simply an unwillingly accepted aphasia...a silence that bears witness to the fact that we have reached beyond argument to a place in which all that is left us is to affirm not ourselves but that to which, however haltingly, we are bound to witness.That is, the paradox of kenosis arises at the point of confrontation between two imperatives: the imperative to articulate, to trace the precise lineaments of the "writ of logic" within our arguments, and the imperative to witness, "in action", to what has been decisively yet inarticulably disclosed in Christ. Particularly valuable here is MacKinnon's insistance that this "failure" of articulation not be "simply an unwillingly accepted aphasia"; or, worse still, lead to "a cult of powerlessness or failure, recalling the well-known, deeply unhealthy cult of despair as the only praeambula fidei, which was fashionable in the 'forties". On the contrary, such "failure" is the condition of a hope which can only arise as such in conditions of uncertainty, in the disconcerting and disconcerted condition of the present moment:
It is, rather, a defeat that is not a defeat, because it is eloquent of hope as well as of failure; it is suffused by a sense of promise of that which is not yet, but which is even now coming to be, which is indeed coming to be as the Church begins to realize existentially as well as theoretically the law of kenosis, the law of the Incarnation, by which the manner of its own fidelity is bound.There is much else that could be said about MacKinnon's analyses of the abuses of spiritual authority within the Church, and the relationship between "the manner of the Church's presence" to society and its own spiritual self-understanding. The political argument he is making is for a certain democratisation of the Church, but on a Christological or Christocentric basis that is, as I have suggested, not founded on any positive representation of some democratic essence (e.g. the promotion of "human values") but formally open (this would be the paradox of kenosis in a nutshell) to a transfiguration of human values, that would be "received rather than imposed" and that would "teach us not to seek in our future, deliverance from the tragic, but the presence of the ground that alone makes possible the endurance of its burden".
As for the consequences of this analysis for the present day, let me note one "sign of the times", no doubt intended and even to a degree stage-managed as such. One of the earliest public, publicised acts of MacKinnon's former student Rowan Williams, following his installation as Archbishop of Canterbury, was to wash the feet of twelve members of his congregation in Canterbury Cathedral on Maundy Thursday.
