Khegan M. Delport

From the time of Plato’s proposed expulsion of the poets, tragedy has repeatedly proposed a challenge to philosophical and theological certainties. This is apparent already in early Christianity amongst leading figures during the patristic age. But this raises the question: Why was the theme of tragedy still accepted and deployed throughout the history of Christianity nevertheless? Is this merely an accident or is there something more substantial at play? Can Christian theology take the tragic seriously? Must Christianity ultimately deny the tragic to be coherent, or might it be able to sustain its negativity? Some like George Steiner, David Bentley Hart, and John Milbank have doubts about such a coherency, but others think differently. This book aims to examine this debate, laying out the lines of disagreement and continuing tensions. Through a critical examination of the work of Donald MacKinnon and the eminent Christian thinker Rowan Williams, the book aims to show that there is a path for reconciling the claims of Christian orthodoxy and the experience of tragedy, one that is able to maintain a metaphysical foundation for both real transcendence and unfolding historicity, without denying either.

The Christian doctrine of theosis teaches that the natural end of creatures is union with the Holy Trinity, the supernatural end of nature-both human and non-human. However, through certain developments in modernity, there occurred a separation of the natural and the supernatural, and later a dualism between nature and culture. In this essay, I argue, one the one side, that a secularised transhumanism can be seen as a parody of theosis, now reframed within this modern bifurcation between nature and supernature, replacing teleology with technical efficiency and the beatific vision with an immanentized eschatology. However, on the other side, I also wager that the figure of the transhuman or posthuman does nevertheless challenge the separation of nature and artifice, the human and non-human, and that rather than continuing this unsustainable division we should resource alternative theological traditions that have blended nature and artifice with the aim of articulating a Christian vision of theandric humanism.

The modernity of the West has generally tended to construct the relation between magic and religion according to a developmentalist schema, chiefly as a movement from the primitive to the modern, from superstition to enlightenment. However, recent developments in the study of religion, intellectual history, critical theory, as well as theology demonstrate that such a dualism might be unsustainable. The persistence of the magical into the discourses of modernity (e.g., science, philosophy, and theology) undermines any framing narrative of this sort. In this essay, which serves as an introduction to a special section in Religion & Theology on magic, science, philosophy, and theology, I put forward both a descriptive and constructive account as to why the construct of “magic,” in the words of Randall Styers, may be considered “the unthought of modernity.”

Christianity from its inception has expressed a tension between imperium and sacerdotium; after the Reformation, this tension has only been aggravated. Avowals of religious freedom thereafter have often rightly insisted on the capacity of spiritual communities to invoke limits for the state. This is readily apparent in South Africa, past and present. However, scholarship has shown that “religious liberty” has an ambiguous function, such as its privatisation of belief, based on a liberalised notion of “negative” freedom that allows the state to grant the “right” to “belief,” while simultaneously rendering belief a purely private or “otherworldly” affair. This is traceable to overly-Protestant conceptions of “religion” and “freedom” that are pervasive – including South Africa. From a theological perspective, I argue that this conception of “religious freedom” might sit in tension with aspects of ecclesiology and that the discursive deployment of “religious freedom” should therefore be engaged critically.

Following Jacob Taubes, this essay seeks to make a comparison of the work of Karl Barth and Walter Benjamin. I argue, with the assistance of Rowan Williams and Gillian Rose, that Barth and Benjamin, for differing reasons, refuse the mediation of the transcendence qua history and the created world. For Barth, this may be traced to his critique of natural theology and his rejection of the analogia entis, and his apparently inability to conceptualize how materiality and historicity may constitute a "fitting" mediation for divine self-disclosure, intimating a nascent voluntarism in his theology. For Benjamin, this failure to approximate mediation may be linked to the conceptual diastasis between metaphysics and law, which leads him to adopt the idea of divine violence of law-breaking, as opposed to the mythical violence of lawmaking, as a way of resolving the disjunction. However, following Rose, I argue that this leads to a pathological conception of the relation of immanence to transcendence and a messianic politics that avoids the labour of mourning and the constraints of the middle.

A large portion of the criticism of pornographic production is often polarised towards the ethical dimensions of such critique. While not negating this approach, this essay aims to delineate some ontological tendencies of the pornographic imagination, offering both a critique and therapy from the vantage of a theological metaphysic. Beginning with a critical examination of an influential essay, namely Susan Sontag’s The Pornographic Imagination I suggest that the aesthetic vision of pornography is predicated on a denial of difference and anticipates no gratuitous reciprocity, but rather a return of the same, and that the ultimate drift of pornographic excessiveness is towards
a deadening solipsism. Within this totalized imagination, the consumption of pornography fabricates an affective relation to material bodies within a radical narrowing of vision and sensory possibility. This is manifested at several levels, in both its form and content, from its very medium
to its deployment of language. I further contend that this is not necessarily a unique phenomenon, but a by-product of certain tendencies within modern technology and capitalist production. I argue that it is difficult to understand the advent of pornography without a simultaneous description of
the modernist cartography of being and its regime of representation. This concerns the way bodies are spatialised and mechanised into a manageable plane of immanence susceptible to modernist ideals of panoptic observation and technological “standing reserve.” At the end of the essay, an
alternative metaphysic of desire and the image is put forward, with the assistance of Rowan Williams; it is argued that a broadly Augustinian and patristic vision of Trinitarian desire andliturgical incorporation provides an affective and ontological restoration of selfhood; it suggests a
sacramental mediation of the real, in contrast to the simulation of pornography.

This article aims to trace, apparently for the first time, the interactions of philosophy and theology, particularly in the post-1994 period. It begins with a brief genealogy of the concept of "philosophical theology", and thereafter moves to trace some of its influence in pre-1994 South Africa. Thereafter, I outline the trajectories of philosophical theology, as they have developed in post-1994, particularly focusing on continental philosophy of religion, Reformational philosophy, analytical philosophy of religion, and African Philosophical Theology, In the final part, I give an indication of the prospects of philosophical theology within the South African context.

This essay is placed within a continuing debate on the appropriateness of a Christian deployment of tragedy. According David Bentley Hart, tragedy legitimates a sacrificial and scapegoating logic that is in contradiction with the Christian gospel. It promotes exclusion and therefore is imaginatively and metaphysically conservative in its import. In the ensuing argument, I hope to show through one example how even Greek tragedy can resist some of these claims. Drawing on the seminal work of Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, I argue that Sophocles’ Oedipus cycle, firstly, demonstrates the inability of nomos to grasp the exception of Oedipus, and that this might constitute a critique rather than a simple legitimation of the civic order. Secondly, the narrative arc of Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus at Colonus point towards incorporation rather than final exclusion, and that his apotheosis could be read as resisting deleterious tropes of a final holocaust of the tragic figure. I...

The article seeks to describe one trend within the theological scene in South Africa, a trajectory that could be called "African Philosophical Theology". In the first part of the article, some methodological problems surrounding such a descriptive category are discussed. Thereafter, I attempt to give a summary of the contributions of two thinkers who could be grouped within this category, namely Augustine Shutte (1938-2016) and Gerrit Brand (1970-2013). In this regard, Shutte's approach can be viewed as a philosophical synthesis of Thomistic and African accounts of personhood, while Brand's constitutes a meta-theology, a postfoundationalist attempt to articulate those criteria that are fundamental to adjudicating doctrinal and religious change. While their respective projects are distinctive, I argue that both of them can be classified as practicing a variety of metaphysics and theology that takes seriously the deliverances of African thought, performing thereby a "decolonial" gesture within philosophical theology.

Plato is accused by some of being a totalitarian, "top-down" thinker, a claim that is linked not just to his politics but to his philosophical proclivities more generally. This essay will argue that Plato's method and metaphysics collectively provide a few avenues for questioning this outcome. I think Plato's Socratic-style provides resistance to a hegemonic and carapaced metaphysics, and moreover I would argue that there is a greater coherence between Plato's method and his positive teaching than is allowed for by some. Through an engagement with central Platonic doctrines, namely his account of philosophical dialogue, the transcendental Good, as well as participation, and recollection, it is argued that Plato's relational metaphysics does not fit seamlessly into an "ideological" or "naïve" rendering of intellectual intuition, an exclusionary dualism of material and spiritual substance, or an uncritical evocation of "innate ideas," and, moreover, that it allows for a greater plurality of perspectives, all ordered towards a deeper realism and unity within the Good Beyond Being.

The essay argues that Aeschylus's tragic trilogy The Oresteia articulates what I call a "poetics of equity." After placing the genesis of this article within a theological debate between David Bentley Hart and Rowan Williams on the viability of a Christian appropriation of tragedy, I aim to show-using the suggestive work of J. Peter Euben (amongst others)-that The Oresteia dramatizes a growth in perspective and linguistic capaciousness which confirms Williams's general picture of ancient tragedy. The progress of the trilogy, from the Agamemnon to The Eumenides, can be shown to represent ever-deepening awareness of mutual claims of justice and recognition, and moreover that its linguistic indeterminacy manifests the breadth and instability of the lexicon of justice (dikē), and how this plays itself out within the Aeschylean narrative. The essay closes with some of Donald MacKinnon's reflections on temporality and growth, and how these relate to The Oresteia.

This paper aims to expound Rowan Williams’s reading of Augustine and Hegel on the question of selfhood. Through an adoption of the tropes of ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’, the argument will be made that Williams’s interpretation of Augustine’s portrayal of the soul as wandering and homeless does not imply an unremitting vision of loss and fragmentation. For him, the distentio animi is always placed within a more expansive arc of desire in which the self is continually rediscovered in what is ‘other’. This means that my self is most primarily found in the unhanding of restrictive identities that hinder our spiritual growth towards union with God, and also in the discovery of my goods as being bound up with the goods of others. This reading is further expanded by relating Williams’s ‘Augustine’ to Gillian Rose’s ‘Hegel’, thereby showing the way that his reception of this has assisted him in explicating a greater ‘comic’ undercurrent in his retrieval of selfhood.

This article seeks to unpack an oscillating duality within the work of Donald MacKinnon and Christian Wiman, particularly surrounding the theme of ‘consolation’. Using Geoffrey Hill’s heuristic of neither ‘denying nor taming’ the impress of reality, I suggest the practice of attentive prayer as one route through which these concerns are mutually sustained. Moreover, I also suggest that our language of contingency, as suggested by MacKinnon and Wiman, will need to be refigured in the light of Christology.

This article analyzes the dependencies of Donald MacKinnon on Aristotle and Immanuel Kant, particularly as regards to his "descriptive metaphysics". MacKinnon remains indebted to an Aristotelian aporetics of "substance" that at once emphasizes the irrepressible particularity of entities, while simultaneously not resolving the tension between specific description and universal categories of meaning. This insight was contemporaneously mediated for MacKinnon through his reception of G.E. Moore, and especially in the way that his critique of Bradleyian "internal relations" attempted to retain "individuality" over against the collapse of objects into relational determinations. Kant"s transcendental apriorism had a similar function for MacKinnon, although now with the added novelty of synthetic judgments which are adduced by Kant to grasp those imaginative totalities that were need to garner "experience" within the limits of reason alone. The article traces Kant"s deepening impression on MacKinnon with respect to ontological analogy, showing through a theological genealogy how MacKinnon gradually becomes disenchanted with the analogia entis-a move which is dependent on a critique of Platonic methexis. In MacKinnon"s mind, analogical metaphysics remains predicated on an intuitional account of being that transcends the critical strictures asserted by Kant, and moreover relies upon a questionable reading of "being-as-predicate". This constitutes MacKinnon"s reception of a Kantian apophatics. The article concludes by suggesting that MacKinnon could have been better served in his attempt to collate historicity and metaphysics by retaining the analogical participation, and by supplementing his realism with a broadly Hegelian approach to the development of knowledge. Moreover, his Kantianism probably does not assist him as regards a re-articulation of the via negativa insofar as it remains in a diastasis between anthropocentricism and a transcendentally-formal sublime.

Ward’s recent volume on the entwining of belief and perception, while not being an explicitly theological monograph, nonetheless evinces a subtle texture that displays his continuing fidelity to certain aspects of Radical Orthodoxy’s vision. This can be seen in its interdisciplinary focus and its rejection of dualistic philosophies (including the supposed divisions between the sacred and the secular, nature and grace, transcendence and immanence, visibility and invisibility), and argues for the ultimate “fittingness” between mind and world, thereby rejecting any representationalist account of this relation. By grounding the practices of belief within a re-telling of evolutionary history and phenomenological accounts of perception, Ward seeks to show the pervasiveness of belief in all worldly interactions, and therefore cannot to be relegated an epiphenomenal, lesser form of knowing, since all seeing is a ­seeing-as, being imbued with affect and valuation. Religious faith is simply a deepening of the logic that is already present within ordinary modes of finite engagement, and therefore should not be seen as an “unnatural” intervention within the realm of human culture. Overall then, this work can be summarized as an apologetic for the rationality of belief in our “secularized” societies, and furthermore, for the constitutive role of belief and faith for sensibility as such.

In this essay we discuss Williams’s notion of the self as a social mediation. The argument is made that from early on Williams was influenced by different streams of thought that directed him to analogous conclusions regarding language and personhood. I will show that through internalizing of Augustine, Wittgensteinian philosophy and
certain strands of Eastern Orthodox thought, Williams came to an understanding of language that was grounded in the particulars of human interaction, one that is finally kenotic since the imago dei is reflective of the imago trinitatis. It is within this context that one should place Williams own relationally-centred, non-egocentric construal of
human personhood that finds its centre in the dynamic exteriority of love.

The aim of this essay is to provide a critical exposition of Rowan Williams's unpublished lectures on T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. A thorough examination of these texts has been lacking in various interpretations of Williams's writings, and this essay aims to remedy this paucity, making available the argument and content of the lectures open to scrutiny and historical investigation. As will be seen, Williams's interpretation of the poems is robustly theological, and seeks to articulate a radically incarnational reading of the Four Quartets. Such an interpretation seeks to assert creation's fundamental historicity and often tragic contingency, while at the same time suggesting that it is only when reality is seen for what it is that a vision of redemption may be truly glimpsed.

Ward's recent volume on the entwining of belief and perception, while not being an explicitly theological monograph, nonetheless evinces a subtle texture that displays his continuing fidelity to certain aspects of Radical Orthodoxy's vision. (Ward, Graham 2013. Unbelievable: Why We Believe and Why We Don't. London and New York: I. B. Tauris; ISBN: 971780767352). This can be seen in its interdisciplinary focus and its rejection of dualistic philosophies (including the supposed divisions between the sacred and the secular, nature and grace, transcendence and immanence, visibility and invisibility). He argues for the ultimate 'fittingness' between mind and world, thereby rejecting any representationalist account of this relation. Viewing the practices of belief within a re-telling of evolutionary history and phenomenological accounts of perception, Ward seeks to show the pervasiveness of dispositional beliefs within all worldly interactions. Consequentially, 'belief ' cannot therefore be relegated to an epiphenomenal or lesser form of knowing, since all seeing is a seeing-as, with the result being that it is imbued with the valences of affect and valuation. Religious faith then is simply a deepening of the logic that is already present within ordinary modes of finite engagement, and therefore should not be seen as an 'unnatural' intervention within the realm of human culture. Overall then, this work can be summarized as an apologetic for the rationality of belief in our 'secularized' societies, and furthermore, for the constitutive role of belief and faith for sensibility as such.

This dissertation is focused on the relation between Christian metaphysics and philosophies of the tragic. Its context is within a modern debate, a setting where this interrelation has become contested. Its research question can be phrased so: can a classical account of transcendence account for ‘the tragic’? Or to put the question from the other side: are there grammars of transcendence associated with ‘the tragic’ (here understood as a metaphysical or philosophical trope) that hinder the reception of ‘tragedy’ within orthodox theology? For the purposes of this study, such a question becomes concretized within the debate around the critical reception of Donald MacKinnon, particularly amongst David Bentley Hart and John Milbank.
The core argument of this dissertation proposes that the most pointed tension within this controversy is centered on the language of transcendence, and how Christian orthodoxy has traditionally conceptualized it (e.g. aseity, the analogia entis, the transcendental convertibility of goodness and oneness, etc.). It also suggests that there are refractions of ‘the tragic’ and ‘transcendence’ within the modern period that have created problems for the interrelations of a classical-orthodox metaphysics and the tragic. We specifically note three incarnations within the modern period, namely: the Kantian sublime, the suffering Absolute, and a rejection of the privatio boni. All of these concepts are related to the question of ‘the tragic’ in the contemporary debate, and also have application to the discussion of MacKinnon, as seen in the critical responses to his work we will be addressing.
This study hopes to move the conversation forward by engaging in a critical exposition of Donald MacKinnon and Rowan Williams within the context of this contemporary discussion. The research suggests that MacKinnon’s insightful commentary on the interconnections between metaphysics and the tragic is marred by a strong dependence on Kantianism, as well as some misguided attacks on the Augustinian account of evil. Thereafter, this study wagers that Rowan Williams provides a corrective supplementation to MacKinnon: he adopts Mackinnon’s emphases on taking tragedy in complete seriousness, while simultaneously transcending several drawbacks associated with MacKinnon’s approach. This can be seen in the way that Williams is able to incorporate a deep sense of historicity and the tragic within a robust metaphysics of creativity, language and analogy. Moreover, he offers a defense of aseity, analogical participation and the privatio boni in a manner that exhibits a coherency with a sense of the tragic. Overall, we desire to make a contribution to the conversation by placing MacKinnon’s and Williams’s reflections on the tragic within their wider theological projects, hereby developing the argument that classical orthodoxy is able to sustain, with integrity, a vision that includes tragedy within it.

In this study, I will be concerned with the viability of a tragic theology that is at the same time able to cohere with the standards of a classically orthodox Christian theology. My study will focus on a particular figure, namely Rowan Williams who, I will argue, exemplifies a blending together of these two concerns. However, as we shall see in this study, ‘tragic theology’ is by no means an uncontroversial affair since some argue that it implies heterodox conclusions in relation to God, creation, sin, etc. My aim is to counteract this claim that a classically orthodox theology cannot coexist with a tragic perspective. I will make the claim that tragic theology aims to emphasise the reality of contingency, conflict and suffering in relation to human life as seriously as possible, without effacing the difficulty it proposes to thought and the limits of human action, while at the same time holding onto the conviction that these beliefs can exist comfortably with an orthodox theological perspective. Through my study of Williams, which will largely follow a genealogical approach, I aim to show that Williams is able to emphasise this difficulty of tragedy, while at the same time believing in the fundamental goodness of creation, the possibility of transformation, hope and healing, as understood within a incarnationally-centred understanding of ‘the redemption of time’. Systematically speaking, I will attempt to arrange Williams’ understanding of tragedy according to four motifs which recur throughout his oeuvre, namely contingency, contemplation, compassion, and non-closure, all of which can be understood within the context of a classical Christian theology of God, salvation, and creaturely finitude.