WE GET OUR FIRST extended look at the way Pabst thinks metaphysics ought to be done in his section on Plato. For Plato, the ecstatic, self-giving Good is the source of all else that exists—e.g., the forms and the things found in the material world—and, therefore, all things are constituted as what they are precisely in their relationship with the Good, and either other forms or material things. Plato refuses, then, to beg the question as to why there are individual things besides the Good (this would be on account of the essential generosity of the Good), but he also refuses to beg the question of individuation. Individuation comes about precisely as individual forms or individual things find their place in relation to the Good and other forms and things. Individuation, then, is paradoxically relational. Furthermore, the order in which individuation occurs is a hierarchical one, insofar as different sorts of things participate in different degrees in the Good. Finally, for the purposes of our summary at least, this hierarchical, metaphysical order has political implications inasmuch as the vertical relationship between the things we encounter in this world and the transcendent Good is never irrelevant to the horizontal relationships that occur within the sublunary, and still hierarchically ordered, human realm. This would preclude the sort of politics of mere immanence that we begin to get in Aristotle.

We get our first extended look at the way Pabst thinks metaphysics ought not be done in his section on Aristotle. It should be noted, however, that Aristotle is not all wrong and even introduces an important notion (the relationship between act and potency) that helps to make Christian Neo-Platonism, with its synthesis of Plato and Aristotle, an improvement over Platonism alone. In Aristotle, the ecstatic Good of Plato gives way to the more isolated Self-Thinking Thought (Prime Mover), and although this latter is still the final cause of all things, it is hard to see how it can still be the efficient or formal cause. Individuation, in Pabst’s reading of Aristotle, is no longer understood in the context of the relationship between all things with their Source and each other, but is rather seemingly taken for granted. As Pabst puts it:

If all that is stands in potency to the Prime Mover as the final cause and if there is no formal mediation of actuality, then Aristotle cannot explain how the realm of form-matter compounds comes into existence and is sustained in being. . . . Indeed, the actuality of the first mover does not act as efficient cause for the sublunary world and thus cannot explain how and why individual composites are actualized and individuated (52).

As alluded to above, Pabst does prefer Aristotle’s notion of matter as pure potency to Plato’s matter as chaos, but he thinks it more significant that, theologically speaking, Aristotle’s indifferent Prime Mover marks a regression. And both thinkers come under fire for failing to account for why matter should exist in the first place. We are now introduced to the triple advantage of Christian metaphysics over either Plato or Aristotle: first, God is the creator even of matter; second, God creates out of a deliberate act of love; third, God is also constituted by relationality. While none of these things is strictly speaking available to the philosopher qua philosopher, they certainly have metaphysical implications once they are revealed, and I suspect that Pabst would argue that they make good philosophical sense, in hindsight. I also suspect that Pabst would say that even from the side of philosophy the question of the “why” and “whence” of matter and the pervasiveness and centrality of relationality ought to have been given more thought, even in the pagan Greeks. Be that as it may, my main reason for bringing up the relationship between philosophy and theology is to point out a sub-thesis of Pabst’s text: namely, that the appropriation of Greek metaphysics by Christian theologians by no means simply left those metaphysics in tact, as if the line between philosophy and theology could be drawn so sharply. Indeed, it is patchy and porous in Pabst’s view; when the two become separated, metaphysics gives way to “the transcendental science of ontology” (384).

The remaining heroes and villains in Pabst’s book are divided between those who prioritize relationality to substance in their metaphysics on the one hand, and those who understand individuals to be self-individuating and, therefore, falsely autonomous vis-à-vis God and each other on the other. These latter are also going to tend to divide ontology from theology and prioritize logic and semantics to metaphysics. In fact one of the more interesting aspects of Pabst’s book is the catalogue of features that folk as otherwise different as Scotus (a realist) and Ockham (a nominalist) have in common. In the end, Pabst is going to recommend the Christian Neo-Platonism running from Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa through Boethius and Thomas Aquinas to Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa, and, closer to our time, through “Italian civic humanism” to the Cambridge Platonists and Russian sophologists to twentieth-century nouvelle theolgie. “The real alternative,” Pabst maintains, “to the transcendental science of ontology . . . is a revivified theological metaphysics that develops Plato’s notion of relational participation in the direction of Trinitarian relationality, which upholds the ‘ontological difference’ between Creator and creation through analogical relation and anagogical union with God” (384). And I would be remiss if I didn’t at least mention the fact that Pabst also documents the significant political implications that flow out of these contrasting metaphysical approaches.

So what is one to make of all of this? Let me try to answer that, first, by addressing the very project of genealogies of modernity, and then by assessing the success of this particular genealogy. There is little doubt that a book of this nature is going to elicit eye rolls from all manner of modern theologians and historians of theology who have had quite enough of genealogies of modernity. The historians in particular will argue that an a priori narrative determines the manner in which the various players are treated on the way, so that no one thinker gets the careful attention he/she deserves. Since individual thinkers will be swept up in the narrative, they will be judged on terms and in circumstances other than their own. In short, if you want to know about the thought of, say, John Duns Scotus, this book will be of little or no help.

Of course this raises a series of complicated questions that cannot be addressed in a short review, but I would like to make a few arguments in favor of the enterprise. First, a genealogy of modernity is not that different from the various philosophical histories of philosophy (borrowing a phrase from Gilson) found at least as early as the works of Plato (Theaetetus and Philebus) and Aristotle (Metaphysics, book 1). The purpose of these overviews of various positions was not so much to present the “historical” Heraclitus or Parmenides, as it was to pass philosophical judgment on the relative merits and demerits of past philosophical positions. Heraclitus is going to look quite different when the question I’m asking is, “How does Heraclitus’s view of the relationship between being and process look in the light of reality as we encounter it, or in the light of other thinkers of different eras on the same question?” than he will look if my question is, “What did Heraclitus think about the relationship between being and process in the light of the intellectual milieu in which he was writing?” Both questions are valid. They are also not unrelated. If I’m asking the former, it may help to know a fair amount about the latter. However, the two questions are going to be pursued in different ways using different methods.

Second, it will inevitably be claimed that this approach is simply inaccurate, that we can’t possibly learn about, say, Duns Scotus in one chapter in a book which has very likely framed the question in a way that Duns Scotus would have never framed the question. Hans-Georg Gadamer addresses this sort of objection in a discussion of period instrument reproductions of classical or baroque music.1 As Gadamer puts it: “Thus for example, historicizing presentations—e.g., of music played on old instruments—are not as faithful as they seem. Rather, they are an imitation of an imitation and are thus in danger ‘of standing at a third remove from the truth’ (Plato)” (119–20). There are musical academies that specialize in reproducing, say, Bach’s Brandenberg Concertos on the exact instruments (or reproductions thereof), in the exact same way (as much as possible), and on the exact same scale (in terms of orchestra size and the like) as in Bach’s day. It might seem simply obvious that such painstaking historical scholarship and attention to detail would show greater affection for or fairness to Bach’s music than an interpretation of the same pieces with a modern piano and a modern orchestra, perhaps even conducted by a person who has been “corrupted” by classicism, romanticism or even modernism. Yet Gadamer makes the rather counterintuitive suggestion that it is quite possible that it is the latter performance that does more justice to Bach, for, rather than treating Bach as a dead composer in the museum of baroque music history, he is treated as somebody who might still have something musical to say on modern instruments, after the Classical, Romantic and Modern periods. The question is whether there is something here that transcends time and place, and this, of course, will require an act of discernment and retrieval on the part of the person interpreting the work in a new context. The historical reproduction will be safer and more accurate, but at the risk of implying that Bach is irrelevant as a composer and to the non-specialist listener of today.

Similarly, theologians or philosophers, in contrast to the historians, aren’t content simply to know about the historical Augustine or Ockham; rather, if they believe that all reason is traditioned reason, they also want to make a retrieval wherein they “test everything and hold fast to that which is good.” These acts of retrieval look at individual thinkers of the past in the light of the whole in a way that is analogous to the role of the composer or conductor vis-à-vis the individual instruments in a symphony. As Josef Pieper argues in In Defense of Philosophy, philosophy’s job is to say something about the whole, rather than just the part, whereas the scientist gains his precision (precaedere: to cut off) by considering a part in abstraction from the whole. Since Pabst wants to say something about the whole of the metaphysical tradition, from Plato through the Middle Ages to the moderns and even postmoderns, there is little chance that he will satisfy, in terms of precision, the various specialists on the various figures he addresses. Although, even here it should be said that Pabst seems to have done his homework on the individual thinkers with which he deals, both in terms of languages and the work of specialists. This notwithstanding, I don’t think that Pabst’s attempt should be considered invalid for its inevitable lack of precision, because: (a) as communal, linguistic animals, we ought not avoid engaging the history of thought as we try to formulate our answers to perennial human questions, and (b) we can’t do this without attempting to determine how an individual thinker fits into the broader discussion, and whether or not individual contributions mark an advancement or setback on the issue. In short, I have no problem in principle with the ambitions of Pabst’s project, and would even argue that such projects are unavoidable if we are going to do good theology and philosophy going forward.

A final question that arises along these lines regards the implication that there is some sort of causal link between ideas that is analogous to the passing on of family traits. Here I will simply say that as long as we understand genealogy in an analogous way, that is, a way which acknowledges both the similarities and dissimilarities between genealogies proper and intellectual genealogies, we ought not rule out the possibility of Pabst’s approach. If we recall, for instance, that Etienne Gilson’s intellectual work began with Descartes, and that he was unable to account for many of Descartes central ideas without first looking at their medieval antecedents, we can see that ideas get “passed down” without having to subscribe to some sort of biological or mechanical causality. I don’t think Pabst can be accused of overplaying the analogy of genealogy here.

But the question still remains regarding the relative merits of this particular attempt at the foregoing, and here I am mixed. On the one hand, I am largely sympathetic to Pabst’s recommendation of Christian Neo-Platonism. I am also on board with his notion that bad metaphysics have bad ramifications for both theology and politics. This point is made convincingly by David Bentley Hart (in Thomas Joseph White, ed., The Analogy of Being: Invention of Antichrist or the Wisdom of God? [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011]) when he shows that the Christology of the first seven ecumenical councils is unthinkable apart from a proper understanding of the analogy of being. I am even quite sympathetic with Pabst’s vision of politics as rooted in a hierarchical relationship of beings to each other in the Good (God).

My reservations begin when I compare Pabst’s overview of the history of metaphysics with that of Hans Urs von Balthasar in volumes 4 and 5 of The Glory of the Lord (vol. 3 of Herrlichkeit). In the interest of space I will do scarcely more than mention two concerns. First, Pabst is a little too quick to gloss over the many difficulties that have come with Christianity’s flirtation with Platonism. While it is true that in many ways Christianity disciplined its Platonism with the doctrines of creation, incarnation, and Trinity, it is also true that were it not for the heretics (e.g., Arius), Christianity may never have drawn the line as clearly as it eventually did. If Origenism and Arianism are two things you get when Platonism is not sufficiently refined, it seems odd that Pabst rarely alludes to such dangers. Is it because he has become fixated on the dangers of Aristotelianism? We may also ask if even in its rejection of Platonism simpliciter, the church successfully purged itself of all of the dangers inherent in Christian Neo-Platonism. Balthasar wonders, for instance, whether the squeamishness regarding human sexuality that we find in many church fathers, including his beloved Maximus, has more than a little to do with remaining Platonist prejudices, or whether the early church’s failure to develop a distinctly Trinitarian spirituality to go with its Trinitarian theology may have stemmed from the fact that its spirituality was still overly Platonic. He also wonders, in Was durfen wir hoffen?, whether or not both the Eastern tendency towards apokatastasis and the Western tendency towards massa damnata do not stem from the same Platonically tinged understanding of the relationship between divine and human freedom.

A second concern flows from this first: namely, for all of Pabst’s talk of analogy, the method which seems to prevail in his treatment of the history of thought comes closer to that of dialectic, and this is a pattern I find in Radical Orthodoxy readings of history in general. Again, a comparison with Balthasar may be helpful. With the latter’s notion that the “truth is symphonic” comes an understanding that the truest position is the one that contains the most, taking up a wide variety of partial truths and making a place for them. For example, without the notion of the distinction of Trinitarian hypostases, homoousios would simply entail Sabellianism, but when kept together with the distinction between hypostasis and ousia, homoousios helps us to say something true regarding the Son’s equality with the Father without denying their distinction. In Balthasar’s telling of the history of metaphysics, for instance, Aristotle does not so much represent an alternative to Plato as he represents a balancing influence. If Aristotle grants too much autonomy to the sublunar, and, therefore, political order, there is a danger in Plato that nothing outside of the Good is really given space to exist or that politics are construed in an overly utopian fashion. While Pabst acknowledges that Christianity refines Platonism with its doctrine of creation, he doesn’t seem eager to acknowledge the degree to which thinkers like Maximus and Thomas were able to articulate a more distinctively Christian metaphysic precisely on account of the influence of Aristotle on their thought. It’s not that Pabst doesn’t acknowledge, at least at times, the positive influence of Aristotle, it’s that he doesn’t treat Aristotle with the same charity that he treats Plato; nor does he submit Plato to the same scrutiny that he does Aristotle. In short, Plato and Aristotle are not related in a merely dialectical fashion in the best of the Christian metaphysical tradition, but are seen as complements, both attaining to some of the truth contained in the Christian doctrine of creation: participation and rightful autonomy, rather than participation instead of autonomy. Chalcedon has a “without confusion” to go with its “without separation.”

Even in his treatment of nominalism Balthasar is more nuanced than Pabst, and this is because he sees Ockham’s concern, at least in part, as an attempt to do justice to the transcendence of God on the one hand, and the proper autonomy of the created order on the other. This means that Balthasar can read modern philosophy not just as a series of simple errors, but also as an attempt to get at a truth that had not been properly addressed in the Christian Neo-Platonism of the fathers and scholastics. There is little doubt, for instance, that Balthasar would have seen Dignitatis Humanae as an attempt to give the sort of attention to the question of individual freedom and even rights that the tradition had up until then failed sufficiently to articulate. If all heresies contain a partial truth—and Liberalism is nothing if it isn’t a Christian heresy—then setting oneself simply in dialectical opposition to Liberalism is bound to land one in a position that is less than fully catholic.

While, in sum, I am largely sympathetic to Pabst’s project and learned enormously from his remarkable book, I worry that the tone is often more dialectical than catholic, and this is a worry that I often experience when I read the Radical Orthodoxy school. I wonder if I might not apply Kierkegaard’s assessment of his own and Luther’s thought to this book: it will be best understood when read as a corrective.

ADRIAN PABST HAS GIVEN us a brilliant monograph which pulls off two tasks that are hard enough to do on their own, but constitute a near-miracle when they coincide: aggressively tracing a single theme across a swath of intellectual history broad enough to constitute a virtual textbook in historical theology while also marshaling this erudition in support of a bold constructive thesis. Unlike some similarly magisterial texts to which it doubtlessly will be compared, Metaphysics: The Creation of Hierarchy retains throughout its exploration of diverse sources an admirably sharp focus; at no point in its four hundred–plus pages is the reader tempted to wonder why and how a particular figure under investigation fits into the broader sweep of Pabst’s argument. While the overarching question that animates the text is nothing less than the relationship of Christian theology to philosophy as that controversy has taken shape from the beginnings of the Christian movement, the presenting issue is the fate of how what is arguably the most paradigmatic question of Hellenistic philosophy—the relationship of the one and the many—has been retained throughout the patristic, medieval, and modern periods up to our own time.

Specifically, Pabst centers in on the question of individuation and how the account that one gives concerning the nature of individuation has political, cultural, and theological implications. The narrative that his book offers is one of two fundamentally divergent paths in which Platonic/Neo-Platonic understandings of individuation as rooted in participation in a hierarchy of diffused good eventually gives way to more immanent accounts of individuation as tied to formal principles, which “are located in beings and lack any metaphysical relation with God’s created activity” (272). This move from creation to immanentist generation corresponds to a politics that begins with the agon of democracy but soon descends into the barely concealed violence at the heart of postmodern celebrations of competing interests as non-transcendably inevitable and in fact valuable in their own right. Lost in this transition is a metaphysically rooted affirmation of relationality as a core principle of ontology that might engender, not only renewed interest in theology per se, but reclamation of the task of politics as pursuit of genuinely common good. To argue for that Neo-Platonic affirmation is the ultimate goal of Pabst’s analysis.

For my purposes, of most of interest is Pabst’s sketch—necessarily brief and allusive—is how the specifically theological implications of a revitalized Neo-Platonic Christian metaphysic might inform the shared task of making sense of our world in humane fashion. In other words, having no particular quarrel with the book’s detailed descriptions of the fate of individuation in (predominantly) Western philosophy and theology, I am most interested in pressing Pabst to build on the achievements of his book’s constructive vision (a vision that repeatedly cites, as a sort of urtext, Pope Benedict XVI’s controversial Regensburg lecture in which Benedict similarly enumerates the deleterious theological and political effects of dehellenization upon Western culture). As is both inevitable and salutary, the implications of this vision are not limited to the final chapter, but inform the book’s source selection and exegesis of those sources throughout. Pabst clearly views the eclipse of the Neo-Platonist account of individuation and hierarchy as a loss for both theology and politics, and thus the possibilities for what the recovery of this tradition might mean in our time animate the entirety of the text.

The first thing to note is that Pabst’s book renders the valuable service of nuancing, and even flat-out correcting, what have become rather hackneyed complaints against the supposedly non-relational character of patristic and medieval Christian metaphysics (due at least in part, perhaps, to the later emaciation and sometimes repudiation suffered by this inheritance at the hands of modernity and modernity’s medieval antecedents, particularly the nominalists). While the basic structure of Pabst’s prescriptive argument (that is, advocating a revitalized metaphysic in the broad tradition of Plato, Augustine, and Aquinas as a tonic for postmodernism’s various philosophical and political stalemates) will not be new to anyone familiar with the currents of Radical Orthodoxy that inform Pabst’s methodology, his book is notable for its zeroing in on two core themes—hierarchy and creatio ex nihilo—and their deployment by such thinkers as Augustine, Dionysius, and Aquinas in order to articulate a fundamentally relational account of individuation.

This contribution is all the more valuable for its timeliness in contemporary theology. While Pabst spends most of his energy in the book defending the Neo-Platonic trajectory from the attacks of philosophers engaged in battle against what they take to be ontotheology, an equally significant challenge to Hellenistic metaphysics in theology proper comes from those who would disparage so-called “classical theism.” These critiques, often offered by such partisans of relational ontology as process and feminist theologians (a partisanship, it should be noted, to which Pabst too is clearly devoted), censure “classical” Christian metaphysics for positing what they take to be a cartography of the divine that employs hierarchy and unilateral creation from nothing in order to promote distance between God and the world and fixed, static relationships among creatures. Pabst, however, weaves together the Neo-Platonic Christian imagery of creation as hierarchy and the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo to argue for a more doxological understanding of hierarchy that outflanks the sterility of “theism” as it is characterized in early modernity and caricaturized ever since. As he explicates the “gratuitous, free, and continuous divine gift of being that brings everything out of nothing into actuality” in connection with Dionysius,

The Incarnation manifests God’s kenotic decent and calls on the whole of creation to receive and return it liturgically in an asymmetrical gift-exchange that perfects the degrees of being of each creature standing in analogical relation to its creator. Divine creativity issues forth in a sacred order wherein individuation is neither purely internal nor purely external to beings but instead marks God’s gift of goodness that actualizes all things relationally. This sacred order is both hierarchical and participatory in the sense that the cosmos is characterized by degrees of being and perfection and things are positioned relationally at different stations in the hierarchy of creation. (148)

Overcoming the truncation of this vision—begun already with strands in Aristotle but perpetuated by a medieval/modern rogues gallery of figures such as Ockham, Scotus, and Spinoza—is what Pabst sees as the key to regaining a “theological metaphysic” that “gestures towards a pluralist universalism that avoids the enduring metaphysical dilemma of either monism or dualism and the similarly enduring ethical temptation of either absolutism or relativism” (453) while moving also towards a “postsecular nonliberal vision of politics, the economy, and society” (302). Regardless of whether one is as sanguine as Pabst about this possibility, if nothing else after Pabst’s book no one will be able to claim that Neo-Platonic metaphysical visions of the sort defended by Augustine and Aquinas do not posit relationality as a core ontological principle, or that Christian views of cosmic hierarchy can only support political visions of stasis as opposed to ongoing (participatory) dynamicity.

As Pabst recognizes, though, to the extent that this vision is to be recognizably Christian, it must follow Augustine, Aquinas, et al. in tying creation and hierarchy to the triune existence of God and the triune character of God’s salvific love for creation. But this raises the question of what I take to be a significant gap in Pabst’s text: the absence of a robust Christology. The book concludes by invoking the possibility of a gift economy “grounded . . . ultimately in the mystical union of the divine and the human in Jesus Christ” (455), and indeed Pabst goes so far as to argue that “only Christian theology can give a rationally intelligible account of divine revelation because in and through Jesus Christ alone is God visible and able to be known as a personal Creator God” (440). So certainly the incarnation as a decisive moment in the Trinitarian economy is not lost in Pabst’s revival of Platonism.

However, surely the significance of Jesus of Nazareth to Christian metaphysics, including their Neo-Platonic variety, must extend beyond the kenosis and “paradox” (441) of the incarnation itself and into the actual life, death, and resurrection of the crucified Messiah. While it is not my intention to fault Pabst for what he does not include in his already rich text, I would argue that the question of how a theology of the cross does or does not have a home in his vision does have significant import for his hopes towards what theology and metaphysics might accomplish in our political imagination.

More specifically, the ability to see the world as a “creation” that participates in something akin to a freely gifted diffusion of God’s goodness and love is crucial for the kind of politics for which Pabst advocates. But this sort of optic is regularly challenged by the sheer scope of suffering and horror in our world, suffering that often goes far beyond the breadth of the political per se. It is one thing to read the newspaper headlines and be horrified by the inhumanity of war; however, as David Bentley Hart and others have noted, far more indicative of the fact that we exist in the midst of a sort of “provisional cosmic dualism” is the seemingly random suffering of humans at the whim of indifferent nature. To hear accounts of Indian peasants starving to death or dying in preventable conflicts is to encounter questions of justice and fair distribution of resources; however, to hear of an Indian toddler dying a horrible death due to a seemingly random collision with a passing vehicle is to confront a more existential terror of life’s pain and threatened meaninglessness. Surely it is this sort of terror that plays a significant role in fueling a global biopolitics based on assumptions of scarcity and competition rather than abundance—that is, exactly the sort of biopolitics to which Pabst thinks our contemporary lack of metaphysical vision has condemned us.

The theology of the cross is not a simple epistemological principle that can be applied gratuitously to cover over such horror in generic fashion; however, within Christian discourse in Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant streams, the cross of Jesus Christ and the subsequent empty tomb has served to speak directly to the dynamic triumph of God’s life over the forces of death and hopelessness in ways that—at their best—escape both sentimentality and the flight into false serenity for which metaphysical speculation is occasionally indicted (whether fairly nor not). Indeed, within contemporary continental philosophy at least, I would argue that it is the refusal to varnish suffering with platitude that makes certain rigorously sober materialist accounts of reality seem more noble than a number of Christian alternatives. For Pabst to extend his vision in compelling fashion in the face of this Ivan Karamozov-like refusal of consolation, his account of Trinitarian economy might do well to engage more deeply with the metaphysical implications of the Good as that which the world—including nature itself—crucifies.

Indeed, to confuse the otherwise clear lines between metaphysical hero and rogue in Pabst’s account, I would suggest that it was in fact Luther—however indebted to the same nominalist strands rejected by Pabst as he was—who offers an admirably clear sense of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo as being crucial, not simply for protology, but for speaking faithfully about how God brings life out of death and justification out of fallenness. In other words, for Luther and his subsequent theologians of the cross, creatio ex nihilo remains an ongoing and politically critical reality of God’s dealing with a fallen world. Within politics, appropriating this line of thinking might entail a move past Badiou (whose invocation of Paul as an architectonic of the onset of universalism Pabst approvingly cites) and his problematic dismissal of the importance of the cross to the Christian event and towards something more akin to the Christological maneuvers of those theologians (“liberation” and otherwise) who invoke the metaphysics of the cross precisely as the sort of indispensable critical principle that is necessary to shock the world out of the politics of immanent scarcity and death-dealing global structures. Indeed, elaborating on a theology of the cross within the doxological metaphysics offered by Pabst’s book might go a long way towards avoiding the pitfalls of dolorism occasionally associated with the theologia crucis while simultaneously helping those who suffer locate their own experience within the praise of creation’s ontological beauty that is so central to the Platonic worldview.

Given the erudition and creative facility with sources on display in this, Pabst’s first book, I do not doubt that his constructive framework can encompass such a thickening of the Christological content of his metaphysics; my hope is simply that he might be convinced that it is a necessary future step in the unfolding of his vision’s promise.

WIDE YAWNS THE GAP; connexion is no more;
Check’d Reason halts; her next step wants;
Striving to climb, she tumbles from her scheme;
A scheme, analogy pronounc’d true;
Analogy, man’s surest guide below.

Edward Young, Night Thoughts

There is no doubt that modern theology and philosophy, in both their speculative and practical modes, privilege freedom. Carl Schmitt has rightly understood the center of these concerns in his definition of sovereignty: a person is sovereign who decides the exception.1 Pinning power to exceptionality shows that possibility always exceeds the grasp of politics in its modern, liberal mode. This emphasis on the power to act marks our age as an age dominated by volition as well as possibility. For modern theology and philosophy, it seems that the way to underscore possibility is to free it entirely from its ties to actuality, that is, to invert the relationship between possibility and actuality such that the possible, that is, what a thing could be, in fact determines its actuality. There is no single way that possibility has been elevated, no chief advocate for possibility’s superiority. For instance, it seems that to attend to this same freedom, in other words, to avoid the atomism of the subject or modern essentialism, demands that we develop a metaphysics of the event. Adrian Pabst has adroitly demonstrated in his genealogy of individuation how this age longs after possibility and the cost of that shift to politics and theology. I find his argument convincing and his account of the various figures accurate and important.

I wish to press two related concerns. The first concerns the being of God; the second the kinds of participatory possibility that his work outlines. The being of God, is, of course, a tremendous question, and should not in any way diminish Pabst’s accomplishment or his choice to focus on the problem of individuation. The second concern focuses on the possibility the creature does posses in the kind of realist participatory metaphysic that Pabst advocates.

Within Pabst’s analysis there seems to be a divide presented in the book: possibility first for creatures and actuality out of God or possibility self-given by things themselves, or some other permutation. But what of God’s being in creating this divide? Pabst attends to individuation and only occasionally skirts up against the being of the God who in some accounts is the reason for such individuation. The individuation he advocates has being participating in God’s being; it is because of this participation, not because of what the individual is or could be. I think there is a lot here that I want to learn from Pabst. Are there ways that, for instance, Scotus’s failure is solely in his view of knowledge and his construction of metaphysics, not in his use of infinity as a name for God? It may be that infinity does not suffice to hold out the maior dissimilitudo that analogical participation demands. Thomas and Maximus both tame the hyperessentialism implicit in the Dionysian corpus; but need they? This would extend his genealogy to address much of contemporary theology and its intersections with phenomenology.

The second concern is more mundane but no less import for occupying the earth. Is it possible to preserve Pabst’s critique of possibilism while still upholding the aims of modern possibilists, so long as these concerns are transported into a different key? In order to bring this thesis to actuality, I shall first discuss Johann Georg Hamann’s important definition of “world” in his Aesthetica in Nuce and then J. R. R. Tolkien’s remarkable Ainulindalë. Together, these two texts demonstrate that the gift of creation engenders the gift of possibility that exists between creatures such that they participate in the creative possibility of God; thus, there exists an analogical possibility that God is; posseset? A fully actualized possibility? Surely not just a mundane possibility extended to infinity.

Hamann plays an important but minor role in Pabst’s work. He is among the many who show how the theological metaphysics that Pabst advocates should move beyond Thomas and his immediate heirs. But there are twists in this trajectory, twists that advance the creative participation of creatures in God that may surprise and capaciously expand God in ways that are only briefly outlined by either Aquinas or Nicholas of Cusa. Hamann wrote Aesthetica in Nuce in order to oppose a variety of currents of his time, the chief of which was Johann Michaelis’s burgeoning rationalist interpretation of the Bible.2 In opposition to this and its attendant theories of human language and reason, Hamann advocates in this dense writing a laconic definition of Schöpfung: “Speak! That I may see you! This wish is fulfilled through creation, which is an address to the creature through the creature; for one day speaks to the other, and one night to another.”3 Hamann understands the creative activity of God to be a shared communication between creatures. This, when compared to Dionysius, suggests that all things in themselves, in their particular acts, have a share in the aitia that is God. God may create but God does not create without creatures. Such a claim need not oppose the idea of creation out of nothing, nor does it have to lead to Hegel’s way of adopting this statement of Hamann’s. Individuation is Pabst’s theme: his account seems to lead to a kind of participatory creativity on the part of creatures.

No better text exists for my question than Tolkien’s Ainulindalë.4 This beautiful text never reached a state satisfactory to Tolkien but the work still puts forward his notion of sub-creation in a powerful way. This notion seems to fit the kind of individuation Pabst advocates and would carry out his project of defending it against contemporary alternatives. Indeed, could Tolkien be a theological-metaphysical peer of Deleuze and Whitehead?

Tolkien’s text shows forth this kind of Christan neo-platonism in a poetic mode, one that can rival the kinds of constructivism and poesis that many contemporaries advocate.5 This writing purports to be the work of the medieval Englishman Ælfwine, who visits a strange island to the west of Britain; there he hears the tales of the elves. This tale concerns the beginnings of Middle Earth. The elves recall the work of Ilúvater, who creates beings called the Ainur. Ilúvater speaks and sings to these Ainur, giving them “themes of music.” Later, he gives them a task. They shall devise “Great Music.” This, however, is important, “And since I have kindled you with the Flame Imperishable, ye shall show forth your powers in adorning this theme, each with his own thoughts and devices, if he will.” This was a great music; however, the greatest of the Ainur, Melkor, desired to “bring into Being things of his own” and he makes discord and destruction, noise, to visit the Great Music. In response, Illúvater makes two themes that interact with Melkor’s theme; the Music concludes in one fantastic sound. The final speech that Illúvater makes shows the power of poesis in its participatory mode. It is yet utterly surprising, that is, can go beyond the given and immanent possibilities, but not in such a way that it is self-generated and autonomous: “And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that has not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall be but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.” Even as the Ainur “adorn” these themes, the elves latter point out that no one knows the what these human beings will contribute to the music. This poesis involves the kind of “adornment” that the Ainur and elves undertake but seems to be an even fuller participation in the Flame of creativity. It seems to me that Pabst’s positive account of individuation would lead to this kind of human poesis.

Individuation matters a great deal in theological metaphysics and in political theology as well. Now I hope Pabst’s project can continue his thesis and genealogical approach to embrace poesis and more reflection on the being of God than that already implicit in his excellent work.

LET ME BEGIN, if I may, by expressing my gratitude to the editors at Syndicate for inviting me to participate in this symposium on Adrian Pabst’s Metaphysics: The Creation of Hierarchy.1 All parenthetical paginations are references to this text. This study is certainly an impressive achievement for a number of reasons, not least of which is Pabst’s staggering ability to seamlessly integrate various lines of argument into a tightly constructed and thoughtful reflection on the metaphysics of individuation, which considers the question of what separates individual things or kinds things from one another. In addition to making a persuasive case for a relational metaphysics of individuation, which I largely agree with, Pabst also manages to demonstrate, through the differing theories of individuality he considers, the harm done to both theology and philosophy when they are rigidly separated from one another. Moreover, Pabst always has an eye on the political and cultural implications of the varying philosophical theories and theological ideas he considers, which he develops into a rather sophisticated critique and response to modern secularism.

Pabst’s many accomplishments in each of these areas certainly deserve far more attention than I can give them here since my purpose in this essay is not to review the book’s achievements but to engage in more critical dialogue with the work itself. So instead, I will focus on how Pabst’s genealogical schematization is related to the political implications he draws from the two rival theories of individuation he addresses. Pabst’s principle argument is that individuation cannot be explained through secular ontologies of immanence but, rather, is best understood in relational terms originating in the Neo-Platonist metaphysics of participation (xxviii). For those aware of recent trends in theological discourse, especially the movement commonly known as Radical Orthodoxy, the genealogical account that Pabst uses to structure the work will not be all that surprising; nevertheless, it is worth noting that his distinct focus on the metaphysics of individuation makes a unique contribution to a somewhat familiar narrative.2

Pabst’s genealogical account essentially tells the tale of how two rival theories of individuation take shape through a series of shifts in the understanding of metaphysics, which begin in antiquity and continue into the medieval, early modern, and modern eras. On one side of the divide are those theologians and philosophers that posit a Neo-Platonist metaphysics of relational participation to account for individuality; on the other side, stand those thinkers that propose some sort of ontology of self-individuation. The former tradition originates with Plato, whose theory of “the ecstatic outflow and relational self-giving of the Good in which all participate” (38) is appropriated and developed through theological reflection on the revelation of Christ and the Trinity by figures such as Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius the Areopagite, Boethius, and Aquinas (455). Alternatively, there are the various theories of self-individualization foreshadowed by Aristotle’s theory of composite substances and, what Pabst calls “theo-ontology,” which serves as a precursor to the onto-theology of Scotus and William of Ockham as well as the transcendental science of ontology associated with or attributed to Gilbert Porreta, Suárez, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant, among others (395, 397).

Taken on its own terms, the genealogical formation of these two rival traditions establishes a basic division between notions of individuation that rest on a distinctly theological vision of the asymmetrical relation between God and creation and those based on an ontology of pure immanence (82). As such, Pabst’s genealogy provides, first, a basis for reflection on how stripping God from the metaphysics of individuation encourages the conceptual breakdown of the unity between creator and creation, which is connected to the various ontologies of pure immanence that take root in the early modern era. Second, it demonstrates that the tradition of Christian Neo-Platonism can offer a theological alternative to the division between essence and existence that emerges in Gilbert’s “mathematical Platonism” and late medieval theological voluntarism. Although the clarity and precision of this schematic recasting of the division in the metaphysics of individuation is certainly one of Pabst’s greatest achievements in the book, I cannot shake the sense the he may be asking his genealogical account to accomplish far more than it is capable of doing. My questions for Pabst, therefore, arise from his extension of the dichotomy in his genealogical reflections on the metaphysics of individuation into the opposition he establishes between modern liberalism and his metaphysical politics.

Since the book is principally concerned with the metaphysical problem of individuation, Pabst is careful to note that he only touches on the political implications related to the division between Neo-Platonist theological metaphysics and modern ontologies of pure immanence (450). This political dimension of the work, nevertheless, follows the same dichotomous pattern as Pabst’s genealogical account of individuation; thus, the political opposition between liberal secularism and Pabst’s vision for a post-secular politics is mapped onto the polarity separating the two rival theories of individuation at the center of the book (156). In the penultimate chapter, Pabst comments on the metaphysical, political, and cultural vision offered by both the Eastern and the Western traditions of Christian Neo-Platonist theological metaphysics. He writes:

Metaphysically, it binds together the one and the many and blends differences harmoniously and peacefully. Politically, it opposes both absolutist theocracy and arbitrary secularism in the name of an integral model that distinguishes state and church without divorcing religion from politics. Culturally, it rejects postmodern celebrations of relativism and nihilism in favor of a vibrant civic culture based around “free associations” and their interrelations, thus giving expression to the fundamentally relational nature of man created in the image and likeness of the one and triune God (444).

This is a rather bold claim that is only further magnified by Pabst’s insistence that this tradition offers the only way forward to a vision of a “truly global Christendom” as well as opposing the perceived failures in modern and postmodern theology, philosophy, and politics. Although this study does not, nor could it be expected to, thoroughly work out how Christian Neo-Platonism might actually accomplish all of these things, this passage demonstrates Pabst’s certainty the he has located in Christian Neo-Platonism the one true metaphysics, but one is left wondering how he reaches this conclusion. It seems as if Pabst may be using his genealogical account as proof for the normative character of Neo-Platonist metaphysics, which would be incredibly problematic; however, if this is not the case, then the exact relation between Pabst’s genealogy of Neo-Platonism and the normative claims represented in this passage is not altogether clear.

Contrary to the sense of theological, metaphysical, and political promise offered by Christian Neo-Platonism, Pabst portrays political liberalism as beholden to the modern transcendental science of ontology in which individuality is understood to be an autonomous achievement. According to Pabst, the common characteristic in modern theories of immanence is the exclusion of God from the actuality of individuation (330). Pabst traces the elimination of God from metaphysics to a series of theological shifts that culminate in late medieval nominalism and theological voluntarism (447). The crucial step in Pabst’s narrative is that he causally links voluntarism, modern ontologies of pure immanence, and liberal secularism. Consequently, for Pabst, since the defining quality of the modern transcendental science of ontology is its elimination of God from the actuality of individuation, by extension, then, the key feature of liberalism is the bracketing of God from the political sphere (406, 450). While these running parallels between metaphysics and politics create helpful interpretive patterns, Chris Insole, in a recent essay that is well worth the read, highlights the dangers present in approaching the intellectual history of liberalism through such a schematic program.3

Although Pabst and Insole agree on a number of points, such as the acknowledgment that secular liberalism is rooted in theological and metaphysical claims that are often ignored or denied, Insole’s insistence that it is dangerous to reduce the “complex phenomena” of liberalism to a single notion or defining characteristic occasions some question about the outcome of Pabst’s approach to the intellectual history of secular liberalism. Insole proceeds to argue that theologians should not begin “with metaphysically and theologically freighted definitions” of liberalism or its genealogy.4 Instead, he proposes that theologians should begin by thinking of liberalism as “a set of practices” that may be variously upheld by different thinkers. The advantage to this approach, according to Insole, is that it allows the interpreter to be attentive to the layers, textures, and possibilities in the history of ideas.5 These layers are reflected in how different thinkers and movements implemented the same liberal practices for diverse reasons. One of Insole’s principle concerns in this essay is to demonstrate that there were various ways in which different theological traditions, including Christian Neo-Platonism, and varying doctrinal concerns—related to creation, the fall, ecclesiology, soteriology, and theological epistemology—served as “conduits” to modern liberalism.6 DeHart makes the point that dichotomous genealogies tend to run the risk of somewhat haphazardly casting seminal historical figures and movements into polarizing roles as either protagonists or antagonists depending on their perceived positive or negative relation to the matter at hand. Furthermore, DeHart contends that “the more figures of the past who are assigned a place in the narrative, the more unambiguously their roles and effects are evaluated, the tighter the causal connections are asserted, in short, the more ambitious and schematic the genealogy, the greater the risk.”7 Even though Pabst clearly works at thoughtfully engaging each author that he draws into his narrative, his genealogy undoubtedly runs this risk as he gathers theologians and philosophers from antiquity to postmodernity to make his case. Moreover, since Pabst is moving back and forth between the rival theories of individuation and their political implications, he increases the risk of minimizing various theological and philosophical nuances present in political liberalism that operate outside the division between Neo-Platonic realism and theological voluntarism.

While my time wandering through the annals of intellectual history has not been as long nor anywhere near as prolific as Pabst’s, one thing it has shown me is that we must always hold our genealogies somewhat loosely because the history of ideas is never as clean or clear cut as we would like. By adopting this more open approach, one can more easily leave room for DeHart’s astute instruction that when dealing with a genealogy, “all the more care will be required to notice nuance, surprises, complicated cross-patterns that throw a kink in the smooth line of the story or that place a key figure athwart the supposed direction of development.”8 Yet, this approach appears absent from Pabst’s genealogical account. It may very well be that I have simply overlooked this dimension of the work, and if so, I would be happy to have my error corrected. However, by appearing to use his genealogical account of the two rival theories of individuation as the backbone for the opposition between liberalism and his own political vision, Pabst’s exegesis of the various theologians and philosophers he considers tends to intensify this division as each figure he analyzes falls neatly into one of the two traditions he outlines.

What, then, is one to make of the relation between Pabst’s genealogical account and his vision for politics? My answer, at the moment, is that I am not sure. If the work is intended to initiate a conversation, then the clear lines and restricted interpretations may be seen more as boundaries for these future discussions, which might also account for the sense that Pabst’s genealogy is often governed less by the various thinkers it interacts with and more by the grand narrative it props up. However, if the interactions depicted between the genealogical account of individuation and politics are taken as more universally normative, then the lack of variation seems particularly dangerous for a work that situates itself between proposing a political vision for the future by reclaiming a metaphysics from the past and accounting for the current state of theology, philosophy and politics. For example, if the intellectual history of secular liberalism is reduced to the bracketing of God that develops in voluntarist theology and ontologies of pure immanence, then important figures, like Edmund Burke, and crucial nuances in the doctrines of creation, salvation, epistemology, and eschatology may be excluded from the conversation because they do not match the genealogical patterns. Now, I am not suggesting the Pabst is somehow unaware of the layers and variants in texture within intellectual history, but because he does not directly address them, I remain uncertain about how his work is intended to engage them.