THOMAS PFAU SETS OUT to mind modernity, in the various senses of the word: he calls to mind the development of modern models of subjectivity and agency (concepts which arguably lie at the heart of modernity), while, at the same time, minding the danger of framing his task in distinctly modern terms, such as seeing it as an emancipation from the past. The result is a book that combines a critique of modern humanistic enquiry with an attempt to trace the genealogy of notions crucial to modernity. The central question is whether Pfau achieves the latter by employing an alternative methodology to the one he wishes to criticise. This is the focus of the following essay. Put differently, I am interested in how the four main parts of Pfau’s work relate methodologically and what is implied by their relation.

In what follows, I will first consider Pfau’s methodological commitments, focussing mainly on the first part of his study. Secondly, I will ask whether and how the rest of Pfau’s book meets his own standards. I will argue that while his critique of modernity is striking, and his call for an alternative humanistic method highly welcome, his book does not indicate the alternative approach he proposes as fully as one would hope. In my third section, I will focus on drawing out some of the methodological issues implicit in Pfau’s work and attempt to take them one step further.1

1. Recovering Newman

The first seventy pages of Minding the Modern are among the most original and inspiring parts of the book. In chapter 1, Pfau considers the fundamental change in the self-understanding of humanistic enquiry since the rise of modernity and critiques the contemporary humanities’ “allergic” reaction to what premoderns would have taken for granted, namely, that “to know might depend on the cultivation of moral and intellectual virtues” (13). For the tradition from Plato up to Aquinas, Pfau argues, will and intellect were essentially and productively intertwined, and dependent on their participation in the Divine. At the heart of humanistic enquiry, for this tradition, one finds not the quest for epistemological mastery of the world through accumulative, inter-subjectively demonstrable knowledge, but rather “the sustained engagement and approximation of the logos of which that world was a fluctuating and inscrutable manifestation” (15). Is knowledge a shared and participatory process, or ultimately a commodity? Modernity, Pfau suggests, opted for the latter, and thus supplanted “ontological truth with a quest for contingent certainties sought in the methodical, accumulative, and increasingly compartmentalized study of nature” (19).

Chapter 2 considers the cost of applying such a model of enquiry to the study of history. The study of history, against such a background, has to degenerate into historicism which comprises a mere accumulation of facts. History itself comes to be seen as a repository of expired meanings and outmoded practices. Implicitly, this presupposes a flat-line notion of time in which each event is essentially unprecedented and singular. Any fuller understanding of how ideas and conceptions might develop over time becomes unthinkable. Therefore, modernity cannot meaningfully connect itself to its past, and ironically has to forget it in and through its (historicist) attempt to remember.

Chapter 3 examines John Henry Newman’s work as a possible remedy to this modern predicament. Newman famously said that “the present is a text, and the past its interpretation.” Pfau argues that Newman’s conception of the development of ideas over time undoes the dichotomy between tradition and discovery. His recovery of Newman as a source for methodological deliberations on the form and role of the history of ideas is arguably the single most exciting move Pfau performs in this study. For Newman, the process of ideas dialectically unfolding their potential is never simply carried forward by individuals; rather “the movement of an idea is necessarily trans-generational, inter-subjective, and materially concrete” (57). Much in contrast to a Cartesian idea of a “punctual self,” this notion relativises the position of the individual knower, and counters any illusion of her panoptic view; something which, as we shall see, is crucially important to Pfau’s own project. For Newman, then, “it is impossible to distill the idea in question from any one of the discrete stages through which it successively passes. Thus it would be incorrect to say that an idea undergoes development. Rather, a process of development gradually fleshes out, fills in, and so “realizes” the meaning and significance of a specific, and at first cryptic idea or motif” (63).

Crucially, if history, as Newman sees it, is an open-ended process of clarification, where initially cryptic ideas either gain in sharpness, internal consistency and force, or disintegrate over time, and if we cannot distil the idea in question at any single point in history, this opens up an alternative to historicism and a misconstrued ideal of impartiality of the humanities: What is left, Pfau argues, is to take an “active, interpretive, and urgent interest in the idea itself” (508). Such a hermeneutical urgency, for Pfau, involves both “our responsibility for the knowledge in question and our recognition of its transformative impact on ourselves as ethical beings” (509). Such a position in fact combines historic enquiry with a phenomenological view of the subject. There is a convergence, Pfau mentions in an aside, between Husserl’s understanding of human knowledge, namely, as constituted through our sustained participation in (rather than unilateral domination of) specific phenomena and the relative elusiveness, for Newman, of the idea “in and of itself” at any single point in history.

It is Pfau’s contention that we are ethically involved in such elemental and indispensable conceptions as will, person, teleology, judgment and responsibility; there cannot be any such thing as a disinterested and noncommittal enquiry into them. This is also the quintessence of his critique both of a historicist mode of enquiry and of the present state of the humanities in general: “philosophies that peremptorily exclude all questions of value, commitment, and final causes . . . are by and large incapable of correlating thought and existence, life and action, for they only attend to the propositional structure of our locutions” (72).

2. Genealogies, Romanticism and the Critique of Modernity

Just what does an ethical involvement in, and responsibility for, our knowledge look like? How does Minding the Modern perform its own methodological claims? Pfau is a passionate writer, to be sure, and he is willing to take sides in the historical narrative he describes in parts 2 and 3 of his book. These parts—the bulk of the work—trace the development of a cluster of ideas, viz. will, person, judgement and teleology, through the history of Western thought, and frame this history as a story of a tradition emerging, and then disaggregating. Pfau makes no secret of the fact that he prefers the tradition from Plato up to Aquinas and its intertwining of intellect and will, reason and desire over the gradual modern disintegration of this tradition in modernity. Yet in doing this, Pfau is not hermeneutically radical at all. Like other writers of historical narratives such as MacIntyre or Milbank (and indeed like any hermeneutically self-aware historian to some degree), he writes history informed by standards rather than seeing the task of the historian as providing a neutral chronicle. This might display an “urgent interest in the idea itself,” but does not necessarily recognise the “transformative impact” of an idea on the researcher. The extrinsicist element which Pfau wishes to criticise remains intact in historical genealogies: It is possible that the history I tell, and the standards I employ in telling it, remain entirely detached from myself.

Other reviewers have noted that Pfau’s is no straightforward narrative of decline. The reason for this—and it is worth making this explicit—lies in Newman’s view of the impossibility to distil a “pure” idea from its historic embeddings, at any point of history. Such an insight in fact leads to a radical agnosticism regarding our ability to write both narratives of progress or decline. We do not even know whether something is a narrative of decline, because noetically, we are not in a position to decide so. This is what puts Pfau in a self-declared contrast to “high-altitude surveys of intellectual shifts” (65) such as those by Charles Taylor and John Milbank. I doubt, however, that what Pfau does in parts 2 and 3 is anything other than a high-altitude survey of intellectual shifts over time, and it is hard to read these two parts without seeing some sort of narrative of decline in them.

Yet Minding the Modern is not only about a historical narrative. Part 4 introduces a new, methodologically self-reflexive element. This last part of the essay is dedicated to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and his theology and metaphysics. Pfau is seeing him as a “prophet” of his time, who stressed the importance of Trinitarian thought in critiquing modernity, and who, despite the modern disintegration of teleology, favoured a metaphysics of participation. Coleridge embodies one particular way of critiquing modernity, viz. one that tries to retrieve older traditions by assembling a whole host of historical and philosophical arguments, risking to be accused of losing himself in abstruse speculations. This approach proceeds by assuming that people can be reasoned into accepting a position if they are presented with a mass of learning. The problem with this approach is that the reclamation of an intellectual tradition only works if the very loss of it is still felt, as Pfau argues throughout his essay, drawing on Cora Diamond. Because, however, the recognition of the loss is not given under the conditions of modernity, this approach has to fail. Coleridge’s critique of modernity is therefore, in Pfau’s judgement, ambitious yet flawed.

It might come as a surprise, therefore, that Pfau essentially chooses to follow Coleridge’s approach of reclaiming an intellectual tradition through amassing evidence of what has changed (in parts 2 and 3). Indeed, Pfau’s overall project is “Coleridgian,” and veritably neo-Romantic: To “tabulate the costs of modernity” is—in Pfau’s own words at different places in the book—both the aim of his study and of Coleridge’s project (40; 503). The only place where Pfau’s methodology significantly differs from Coleridge’s is in his recognition of the problem of an irreparable loss of memory, viz. that we might have lost the ability to think in the very categories that he is trying to retrieve. Yet this is yet another “romantic” element of Pfau’s project: In arguing that we do not know whether the Platonic-Christian tradition of will and person has been irretrievably misconstrued or by now lost outright, Pfau emphasises the opacity of history to the individual.

Given Pfau’s double “romanticism” in methodologically following Coleridge, and in stressing the opacity of history, it does not come as a surprise that Pfau has to defend himself against the allegation of succumbing to nostalgia. He denies the charge, saying that the stance resulting is “not one of nostalgia but of lucid and articulate mourning” (70). This in turn, he says, is a perspective on history cultivated by writers of Romanticism (which again confirms Pfau’s own neo-romanticism).

One could argue that the romanticism of Pfau’s project comes closer to performing what he calls for methodologically, namely, to involve both writer and reader radically in the issues debated. The subject, having understood the cost of modernity, is put into a position of “mourning” over what is lost, even though it has perhaps even forgotten what it actually had lost. It seems that Pfau is saying that to be transformed and impacted upon as ethical beings by the knowledge we acquire would mean to recognise the loss of teleology and the disintegration of practical reasoning in modernity, to articulate and deplore it. If I understand Pfau correctly here, I am left wondering whether this is all that can be said and done, against the background of what he had elaborated on earlier in conversation with Newman. Could he not have pushed the potential of Newman’s account further?

3. Pushing Further: The Need for a Theological Praxis

Newman embodies another strategy in criticising modernity than Coleridge’s (and Pfau’s). Unlike Coleridge, he does not assemble an entire machinery of historical and philosophical arguments in his attempt to retrieve a lost tradition, precisely because he thinks that people cannot be argued into accepting a position (such as Coleridge’s neo-Platonic Christianity). Rather, what is needed, according to Newman, is “real assent”: “we must secure that worth for our own use by the personal action of our own minds” (cit. 616). Newman seems to be thinking more in terms of a manuductio. I wish Pfau had pushed further here, and had unlocked some more of Newman’s methodological potential here. What would it look like to choose this other, “manuductial” strategy of critiquing modernity today?

Further un-realised potential of Newman’s methodological account lies in the way Newman regards the movement of an idea as inter-subjective. If the focal point of the historical developments “remain[s] perforce elusive to the individual and communal agents instrumental to its advancement” (63), then the influence of a certain author on the development of an idea might be more complicated than either building it up or facilitating its disaggregation. This means that it becomes difficult over-simplistically to pigeonhole historical protagonists—an insight which could have potentially allowed for a more complex narrative in Pfau’s parts 2 and 3. Someone might contribute to the development of an idea not only without fully grasping the “essence” of it, but also without unambiguously furthering either its progress or its decline. There is a need for attending to this ambiguity in every single author—something which Pfau’s narrative fails to do by depicting figures such as William of Ockham and Thomas Hobbes unequivocally as “destroyers.”

Such an ambiguity, moreover, is not only present in historic figures, but also in us. This is another theme that could have been drawn out more clearly in Minding the Modern: the need for a praxis of introspection, which involves a noetic metanoia, and the cultivation of virtues that guide our attention. Such a praxis, however, is perforce theological. Pfau’s decision to end his book with a part on Coleridge’s theological speculations, I contend, is implicitly challenging the modern divide between philosophy and theology (as much as the divide between practical and theoretical reason).

To make more explicit what is at stake here: Pfau’s quest to save the humanities from their contemporary methodological impasse can be solved, I would argue, by a paradigm shift presently happening in the humanities, namely, the overcoming of the modern divide between faith and reason. There is great resistance in parts of the humanities against this, and indeed against anything that seems to subvert analytic rationalities: The pathos of allegedly value-neutral proceduralism has migrated from science into the humanities, as Pfau rightly observes (510). In contrast to this, as Johannes Hoff has written recently in a Syndicate response, “premodern philosophers resisted the inclination to draw a clear demarcation line between the scientific cultivation of rational arguments and the religious cultivation of the symbolically charged spiritual practices that guide our attention.” 2 To cultivate such practices, and thereby to acknowledge that “every knowledge starts with the commitment to a truth that transcends our reflexive comprehension,”3 would be the radical hermeneutical involvement that Pfau himself calls for. It is not enough to stop with a “lucid and articulate mourning.” Pfau’s romanticism, I believe, prevents him from fully awakening the potential slumbering in his methodological commitments, namely, to overcome the modern divide of faith and reason through integrating the cultivation of rational arguments with the religious cultivation of a spiritual praxis. Doing this would veritably recognise the transformative impact of knowledge on ourselves as ethical beings, and this would be truly radical.

THIS IS A WELCOME book and a much needed one. The scale is epic, and the subject matter is of the utmost importance. Since I agree with the author on all the points of his basic argument, I will try only to offer a few observations that I hope may usefully supplement his own interpretations and perhaps extend them a little to take into account some further aspects of the issues he analyzes so well.

Perhaps the simplest way to epitomize the main point of Pfau’s comprehensive and wonderfully detailed analysis of the tradition we are all still engaged in and wrestling with in our various ways is to say that Pfau thinks the central problem is one of cultural amnesia, by which key understandings of fundamental issues of human life—will, purpose, freedom, ethics and their relation to possibilities of human fulfillment and ultimate meaning—have been lost sight of and forgotten. This has both caused and been caused by various forms of reductionism that leave out important aspects of the full reality of human existence, especially that aspect that Saint Thomas Aquinas and other theologians of the earlier theological era before Ockham, Autrecourt, et al., called synderesis, which Pfau says, “names the fact that we are not simply neutral and arbitrarily located in a world but that . . . we have that world by being intentionally oriented toward it as interpretive, evaluative, and responsible human beings.” He also describes synderesis as “an awareness not of this or that particular right or wrong (which is what conscience pronounces) but of the ways in which the distinction itself is latently and indelibly inscribed within the human person.”

In the last one hundred pages or so of the book, Pfau also offers an extensive discussion of the ways this aspect of human personhood relates to ways of understanding the doctrine of the Trinity, with special—and I think very appropriate—reference to the religious thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom I also consider a very important, though unfortunately neglected, religious thinker. Since this particular topic—that is, the symbolism of the Triune God—is one that has especially interested me and on which I have recently published a book myself, I will begin my comments with a few observations that relate to that.

To begin with, I think Pfau is quite right about the immense cultural shift that took place in the fourteenth century with the rise and eventual ascendance of nominalist patterns of thinking, but I also think the cultural amnesia involved in that had much earlier roots, some of which directly pertain to the trinitarian symbolism. Pfau focuses especially on the way that amnesiac loss of meaning took place when the tradition that he describes as running from Plato and Aristotle through Aquinas was displaced and largely forgotten in world of the via moderna from the fourteenth century on. I would like to suggest myself that there were earlier amnesias that were equally crucial.

I am thinking of two in particular. One is the tradition of the Eastern Christian world, which was almost entirely forgotten by Western Christians except for some fragments (such as the Nicene Creed and the Chalcedonian Definition of the Faith), which were themselves read through Western spectacles. The other is the tradition of imagery and symbolism embodied in the religion of Israel and the Hebrew Bible.

I realize that this last comment might sound rather shocking or even obviously false, since Aquinas makes many references to Greek Patristic thinkers and all Western theologians have drawn extensively on the Hebrew Bible, but I will try to explain briefly why I say this. As an example of a fragmentary memory of Greek Patristic sources read through Western spectacles, I suggest one take a look at Aquinas’s little-read, but telling, De erroribus Graecorum, written to show that the Eastern Church had completely misunderstood the Christian religion. I could go into detail about that, but space here is limited, so I will simply go back to Augustine and cite his own words in De Trinitate, 3.1.1, 
where he tells his readers that although he knows that most of the discussion leading to the formulation of the final version of the trinitarian Creed (at Constantinople in 381), took place in Greek, “Let them also bear in mind, that the writings which we have read on these subjects have not been sufficiently explained in the Latin tongue, or they are not available, or at least it was difficult for us to find them; nor are we so familiar with Greek, as to be in any way capable of reading and understanding such books on these subjects in that language.” Augustine assumed that what those writers were mainly doing was speculating about what there might be three of in the one God, and his own speculation that these three “somethings” were analogous to human memory, reason, and will eventually became virtual dogma in the West. And it is true that there were speculations of that sort in the East as well as the West. But there was also a greater attention in the East to the narrative character of the symbolism of Father, Son, and Spirit in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, especially the identification of Israel as the son of God, called by the Father into a filial relationship that Israel was constantly falling away from and constantly being called back to. For the earliest Christians, Jesus was the one faithful Israelite in whom that calling was truly fulfilled, once and for all. One of the principal images for this way of interpreting Jesus’s sonship to God is the story of his baptism, in which the Spirit is described as descending on Jesus and resting or abiding on him (e.g., John 1:32: “I saw the Spirit descend as a dove from heaven, and it remained on him.”) John of Damascus’s commentary on the Nicene Creed draws on this same image when he summarizes the opening of the creed: “We likewise believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and abides in the Son . . .”

The continuing importance of this imagery for the Eastern Christian tradition’s understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity can be seen in the way Photius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, appealed to the image of Jesus’s baptism when he set out in the ninth century in his On the Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit to refute the Carolingian change in the creed from “and in the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father” to “. . . who proceeds from the Father and the Son.”

The Carolingian creed’s interpolated filioque (“and from the Son”) had the effect of making Jesus into a superhuman being equivalent to the Father in generating the very being of the Spirit. This was useful to Charlemagne and his court in two momentous ways: (1) since Charlemagne was for them the chief representative of Jesus on earth, exalting Jesus’s status exalted that of Charlemagne; and (2) it cast the entire Eastern Christian tradition, with its supposedly defective creed, as heretical and thereby legitimated Charlemagne’s claim to be the only rightful claimant to the office of Roman Emperor (against his rivals in Constantinople).

Pfau frequently, and very appropriately, refers to the historical role of the lust for power that Augustine called libido dominandi. In the case of the Carolingian attempt to claim the imperial title and the use of religious difference to cast his rivals as “manifest heretics” (in the words of one of Charlemagne’s bishops, Paulinus of Aquileia) we see a prime example of that. The significance of the Carolingian effort to gain both political and religious preeminence for Charlemagne extends well beyond his own reign and that of his heirs, especially because after his death his realm was divided among his sons, which not only generated rivalry among them but also set up a situation in which the medieval popes would begin to claim the status of vicar of Christ that had belonged to Charlemagne. This led to papal claims to both political power in the West and to monarchic authority over all the bishops of the East—which was as large a factor in the breach between Eastern and Western Christendom as was the change in doctrine.

A few further comments on the role libido dominandi seems to have played in some of the historical events Pfau relates: Pfau interprets Aquinas as the culminating figure in the earlier tradition that nominalism broke with, and in many respects he was. But another way to read the story of what happened in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries would be to say that there were aspects of Aquinas’s own tradition that bore the seeds of what was to come. Let me explain. Aquinas was the greatest figure of the medieval Dominican order. His aim was to develop a way of doing theology that could fight heresy by the gentle coercion of logic, as a (certainly preferred) supplement to the rougher coercion of physical torture (for which Aquinas also provided a justification in case logical persuasion did not work). The Dominican order was founded by St. Dominic at the time of the Albigensian controversy (and subsequent Occitanian crusade) in southern France. Aquinas is a rather ambiguous figure in this respect. He appreciated the spiritual tradition that had thought faith could not be coerced, but he also continued the efforts of Dominic and his order to find a way to coerce it, using theological logic as a virtual weapon. It seems to me no accident that once St. Thomas and his colleagues started this effort, a parallel use of logical weaponry on the part of Ockham and his heirs might cause the Western theological tradition, which had earlier, like that in the Christian East, been a tradition of prayer and contemplation, to become a sometimes bloody field of polemics. And it is worth remembering that Ockham was not only important for the impetus he gave nominalism but also for the impetus he gave to the conciliar movement that arose in reaction to the papacy’s increasing assertion of absolute power.

I will mention just two other topics regarding which forgetfulness of the Eastern side of the Christian tradition led to some of the Western developments that Pfau laments: theological anthropology and human evil. These are closely related because Augustine’s idea of original sin has had a strong formative influence on the Western way of thinking about theological anthropology. In trying to find an explanation for human evil, Augustine speculated that Adam’s sin cut humanity off from any direct experience of divine presence in this life—a fundamental flaw in humanity as such that would be inherited by every human being descending from Adam and that would give each of them an innate tendency to sin. As Pfau makes clear, this is an important factor in the currents of thought he analyzes.

In the Eastern tradition, on the other hand, where Augustine was scarcely known at all and was never an important influence, the basic tendency in theological anthropology was to think of human beings as made up of body, soul, and Holy Spirit. This is the basis for a major theme of Eastern Christian theology that has tended to make Western theologians uncomfortable (and sometimes to suspect the Easterners of pantheism): theosis (deification). St. Gregory Palamas, probably the principal figure in articulating that tradition, said for example, “the essence of God is everywhere, for, as it is said, ‘the Spirit fills all things,’ according to essence. Deification is likewise everywhere, ineffably present in the essence and inseparable from it, as its natural power.”

Regarding Adam’s sin, in the Greek patristic tradition one finds Irenaeus of Lyons saying, “man was a child; and his mind was not yet fully mature; and thus he was easily led astray by the deceiver.” The idea of inherent sinfulness deriving from Adam is quite foreign, as in Pseudo-Macarius: “it is not true, as some maintain who are led astray by error, that the human being is irremediably dead and can no longer do anything good. A small child is incapable of anything; it cannot run to its mother on its own legs; it tumbles on the ground, cries out, sobs, calls out to her. and she is gentle with it. . . . God loves us and he behaves like her toward the soul that seeks him and cries out to him.”

This does not mean, however, that sin is less real for Eastern Christian thinkers or that they are less aware of the importance of the libido dominandi that Augustine astutely identified at the heart of sin. But in the East the analysis of sin is less speculative and more grounded in psychological reflection on its present experience, as when Maximus the Confessor says, “There are three great, fundamental evils, and one can affirm quite simply that they are the source of every other evil: ignorance [agnoia], egoistic self-love [philautia], and tyranny [tyrannis] . . . for from ignorance of God comes egoistic self-love, and from this comes tyranny towards one’s fellows.” By ignorance of God (agnoia theou), I should note, Maximus does not mean ignorance of propositional knowledge about God but of the experiential knowledge that is the fruit of living in Christ, knowing from within, experientially rather than speculatively, the love (agape) that is the very being of God, which was embodied in Jesus and becomes further embodied in those who love with his love.

There is much more that could be said about these forgotten alternative ways of understanding the Christian tradition that so many of the thinkers Pfau discusses have either rejected or distorted. Perhaps Pfau’s brilliant analysis of the evolution and devolution of Western thought will stimulate some to look further into such alternatives. He certainly identifies the key problems, and he does an admirable job of clarifying the issues.

THOMAS PFAU’S MINDING THE MODERN is a work of breathtaking scope and staggering ambition, which narrates the vicissitudes of a number of interrelated concepts, most notably those of will and personhood, throughout a long history reaching from the Homeric epics and Aristotelian polis by way of the Stoics, Scholastics and early modern thinkers such as Hobbes and Locke, all the way to Coleridge and the nineteenth century. But his book is not a purportedly value-neutral tabulation of an endless and ultimately meaningless set of variations in concepts that we could view with dispassion or indifference. For Pfau, it is we ourselves, as persons and deliberate agents, who are at stake in these ideas, from the ways we relate to ourselves to the ways in which we encounter others and situate ourselves ethically in the world. Sharply polemical in tone, Pfau’s argument unembarrassedly and responsibly takes sides, in a way that should serve as a model for what an engaged and historically aware humanistic scholarship could look like.

Minding the Modern should compel us to revise radically our sense of what is at stake in the modernity we all so awkwardly inhabit. For better or worse, a central element in the usual accounts of modernity is the emergence of an individual and autonomous subjectivity: rational, reflective, independent, with a rich inward psychic life attuned in unprecedented ways to its own sensations and emotions. The outlines of the narrative are similar, whether the outcome is thought to be the alienated and isolated bourgeois subject, or the self-sufficient and newly empowered liberal subject of modernity. The story Pfau wants to tell is also the story of the troublingly autonomous modern individual, but because he situates this story within a much longer historical narrative, its coordinates and consequences look profoundly different than they do in the usual accounts. For Pfau, a complex, highly self-aware and dialectically self-modifying tradition of Western intellectual history had already articulated a conception of the responsible will, not as arbitrarily free but rationally self-regulating (see chapters 4 and 6), and a conception of personhood as always already relational, communal and participatory (see chapter 17). Beginning with Ockham’s disaggregation of will and reason, radicalized and secularized by Hobbes (186), we find in modern naturalist and reductionist accounts of will and personhood, not a deeper and more enriched account, but one which is significantly impoverished and symptomatically severed from its earlier history. The will, once it operates arbitrarily in voluntarist fashion, utterly separated from any ground in reason, is conceived as purely irrational and capricious, when it is not simply reactive and conditioned. And the person is flattened out into a persona or role, responding to the world but without any capacity for reflection and self-modulation beyond a purely external conditioning. Since the modern individual, as it is theorized from Hobbes and Locke onwards, lacks the capacity for reflexive self-regulation, the modern state can only understand itself as developing institutions and forms of disciplinarity to check the wayward impulses of this subject (401–2). On this account, the complex and layered forms of psychic interiority developed in the modern novel, modern psychology and phenomenology, must not be understood as typical, but rather as countercurrents or reaction-formations, attempting to restore or recover, however inadequately, the textured premodern forms of will and personhood that have all but fallen into oblivion in modernity: they are precisely attempts to mind or perhaps re-mind the modern. My thumbnail sketch cannot do justice to the argument as it is developed with complexity and precision in the book, but suffice it to say that, as counterintuitive as this argument is, it is utterly compelling as Pfau traces it through a long, uneven and magnificently detailed intellectual tradition.

Beyond this outline of the content of the argument, I would like to call attention to one other feature of the book. Minding the Modern brings to bear an extraordinary degree of philological, exegetical and hermeneutic rigor on an unimaginably wide array of texts from the archive of Western intellectual history, making it a very long book indeed. The purpose of this careful reconstruction of the history of two key concepts is not antiquarian indulgence or a mere display of erudition, nor does it mean to bludgeon us into conviction through the sheer undeniable weight of accumulated evidence. No such amassing of evidence can ever convince by itself. Rather, there is a point of profound methodological import in the form that this text takes, a point that the opening chapters on method articulate explicitly. For Pfau, concepts are not tools to be invented ex nihilo and deployed opportunistically as we need them. They are frameworks progressively and dialectically clarified within an intellectual tradition, that help us make sense of and orient ourselves in the world we inhabit (see chapter 1). The tradition out of which a concept emerges is not something to be dispensed with willy-nilly once we have understood or grasped the concept. Rather, it is only through our own personal engagement with the tradition that we can translate ourselves into these frameworks, and live them as relevant and revealing for our own lives. As such, Minding the Modern is not an Olympian or impassive history of ideas, narrated at a remove, without any investment in the positions it describes; rather, it itself engages in the very work of progressive and dialectical clarification of ideas that it views as the most vital element in intellectual history, retrieving and making relevant again for our historical moment the nearly defunct ideas of will and personhood. In other words, it performs or exemplifies the historical engagement with tradition that it also argues is the indispensable but forgotten condition of responsible knowing. In that sense, Minding the Modern is at once a deeply personal book, and yet one from which we all have so much to learn, not only about the history of our own conceptual frameworks, but also about how to bring that history to life and awareness in our own amnesic present.

In the spirit of the progressive and dialectical clarification of tradition that Pfau proposes as the very engine of intellectual history, I would like to raise a series of related questions that request further clarification but perhaps also dialectically reinflect the framework Pfau offers. The first concerns the question of modernity itself, and how one periodizes or dates the inception of modernity. Indeed, the very gesture of finding a point of inception or epochal departure is a distinctively modern one, and as Fredric Jameson notes, in his Singular Modernity, attempts to specify the onset of modernity always result in a proliferation of ever-receding starting points: 1493, 1517, 1688, 1776, 1789, and so on. In Pfau’s narrative, the point of inception is clearly marked, with Ockham’s voluntarism providing the conditions from within Scholasticism for Hobbes’s radically nominalist, reductionist and naturalistic account of the will. Yet, precisely because Pfau narrates the movement of intellectual history so dialectically, it can often seem as though, rather than the story of a progressively clarified co-implication of will and reason, which is then gradually eclipsed and obscured by the modern legacy of voluntarism, reductionism and naturalism, a rather different story might be told with the same materials, a story about the perennial opposition of two explanatory accounts of human persons and the world, one transcendent and normative, the other immanent and reductionist, but with the two co-present at every given historical moment. Thus, Pfau himself alerts us to the early atomists Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius (72); the opposition of Plato to the Sophists (17); Augustine and the Pelagians (17); Aquinas and Ockham (chapters 6 and 7); Hobbes and the Cambridge Platonists (chapter 8); Coleridge, Newman and the nineteenth-century novel opposing the legacy of Hobbesian reductionism (part 4) and so forth. One might plausibly continue this story into the present, noting the opposition between contemporary materialisms, on the one hand, and traditions of virtue ethics or theological inquiry on the other, or perhaps even between a Catholic traditionalism and a largely Protestant inflected modernity. In Pfau’s story, the modern reductionist or naturalist tradition doesn’t speak to or engage with its other, since it prefers its own sui generis accounts and apodictic mode of argumentation (73, 191, 227). Indeed, because reductionist theories are premised on a rejection of tradition, even their own, it would be difficult to speak of any process of dialectical clarification and progress in these accounts, only a serial reinvention of the same problems, paradoxes and impoverishments. The two modes of inquiry do not exist on the same footing: the dialectical and self-clarifying tradition is far preferable to the reductionist and apodictic mode of theorizing, even though it has been significantly eclipsed in modernity.

There are two related sets of questions I would like to pose about the historical model Pfau proposes. First set of questions: if the tradition of reductionist and naturalist accounts of the human person has always been available, what constitutes the distinctiveness of the modern rupture? What is at stake in telling this as a story of modernity, rather than of perennial opposition? And what allows us to tell the story as a narrative (albeit a declension narrative) of the emergence of modernity, when it seems like, at every instant, each tradition appears to shadow the other with a dogged persistence that seems nearly impossible to shake? However, the observation about the perpetual presence of reductionist and naturalist accounts does not only raise questions about historical periodization and the extent to which the problems described are specific to modernity; it raises a far more troubling set of questions about the ability to bridge the divide between the two forms of inquiry, and about the purpose of a book like Pfau’s. If Minding the Modern is not only speaking to those who already share its framework, then its aim must be to persuade those who hold reductionist views to give them up in favor of the dialectical and self-clarifying tradition (which, as Pfau shows, is neither monolithic nor dogmatic). But surely the longstanding and ongoing opposition between these two modes of inquiry, if it is not simply an aberration of modernity, gives us little reason for optimism. If anything, it prompts us to reflect further on the unbridgeability of the divide and the reasons for it. What if these two traditions are radically incommensurable? What if they proceed from radically divergent starting points, mutually unintelligible to each other? What would it take to set them in conversation with one another, or to move someone from one to the other? Minding the Modern explains lucidly and compellingly how reductionist accounts close themselves off from a rich tradition of inquiry about the moral life. But it also enables us to glimpse, in passing, why the tradition of dialectical inquiry as Pfau reconstructs it might be so difficult to enter into for someone who stands outside of it. There is a nonnegotiable starting point whose acceptance is imperative to everything that follows. Glossing Newman’s notion of “real assent,” Pfau writes that “human freedom cannot be reduced to a function of subjective (and likely ephemeral) preference for this or that value or meaning. Rather, it presupposes an intuitive and unconditional commitment to suprapersonal ends to be sifted and internalized with increasing clarity by our discursive understanding and deliberative judgment” (404). Or, in the case of Aquinas: “that ontological framework must be accepted by all those who wish to engage in a rational and sustained exchange about pretty much anything at all. Even heretics and pagans can be engaged, within limits, provided they accept the premise of some non-contingent relation between the human and the divine” (133). The price of entry is high indeed. This is not to say that it is arbitrary or dogmatically demanded. Pfau believes that the prior assent or commitment to a transcendent normative order is apparent all around us, in the sheer givenness of being and the saturated significance of phenomena that radiate meaning (28–29, 135–36, 149, 405, 476, 612–13), and indeed, his new work on the image will take this up even more emphatically. But what if I just don’t see it, as much as I might want to? What if I view the natural world as well accounted for by naturalist and reductionist accounts, and understand the world of ends, meanings, values as necessary but imposed by human fiat and fictioning? How does one even begin to have a conversation with someone for whom the experience of the saturated phenomenon is not available? Does this not account for the persistent and unbridgeable divergence between naturalist and non-naturalist accounts? And if one could indeed begin that conversation, would it not suggest that prior commitment and assent were not necessary for “rational and sustained exchange”? Would it be sufficient to understand Pfau’s demand for “real assent” in a Kantian way, as the assumptions and preconditions necessary for us to be moral agents, or is the claim stronger than that, as I suspect it is? And perhaps most importantly, is it not possible (and indeed even necessary) to imagine reconstructing, as an alternative to naturalist and reductionist accounts, a notion of the human moral life as necessarily ends-oriented, without assenting to the verticality essential to Pfau’s account, or only a “weak” version of it, a “finite transcendence” (as I would like to wager)? Might this not be the only way to bridge between the otherwise incommensurable traditions whose perpetual antagonism Pfau describes so well?

A second question concerns one of the fundamental operations of the text: the operation that Pfau, following Coleridge, calls “desynonimization” (466). In order to distinguish certain privileged concepts from their reductionist and voluntarist counterparts, Pfau insists that it is necessary to desynonimize terms which often mimic or even closely resemble one another. Thus, acting “in order to” achieve something must be strongly distinguished from acting “for the sake of” something, goods of “efficiency” from those of “excellence” (92, 94). But is this distinction tenable? When I go to the store to buy food (presumably one of the goods of efficiency), could it not be said that I am acting in order to satisfy my hunger or that I am acting for the sake of satisfying my hunger? And if we think of happiness as eudaimonia, could it not be said that I am acting in order to secure my happiness, just as I am acting for the sake of securing my happiness? Like Pfau, I believe it is important to distinguish strongly between mere instrumentality and a necessary orientation towards ends, but the grounds for the distinction appear to lie in good judgment and our orientation toward the fictioned ends rather than any difference in kind between the ends in question.1

Similarly, Pfau believes that there is a form of reflective awareness of, attention to and dialogical engagement with our interior states that is essential for cogent and meaningful action (80, 224), yet there is also a form of interiority that is utterly paralyzing and prevaricating, disabling our capacity for judgment (100, 247). But how are these forms of interiority to be kept rigorously separate? How is it that the moderns appear at times to have dispensed with the reflexivity and awareness essential to the will, and yet at others, they appear too reflective and deliberative? How is it that Aristotle’s “deliberate choosing” can play such an important role in the dialectical tradition (80), whereas the “deliberative individual” exemplifies the atomized and alienated subjects of modernity (100)? What makes for the difference between enabling and paralyzing deliberation, or is deliberation insufficient to distinguish between the two competing modes of inquiry? There are many other examples of such concepts that shadow each other in the two traditions. I will simply point to a few others, since it is impossible to discuss them all in detail here. How is the socialization involved in the Aristotelian epagōgē different from the problematic socialization at work in eighteenth-century models of reason (374, 409, 500)? Can habit and habituation be as sharply desynonymized from behavior, conventions, manners and customs as Pfau would like (269, 610), or are they not all forms of socialization designed to minimize the labor of reflection and deliberation? Indeed, isn’t the line between the traditional and the customary nearly impossible to specify, even though tradition functions as a privileged term for Pfau and custom as its shadowy modern Doppelgänger? Is “certainty” all that different from “certitude” (614)?

A last example of the difficulties of desynonimization: the notion of an autonomous individual deciding on his or her commitments is exposed as fraught in a number of ways, and ultimately bound up with the irrationalist voluntarism that is modernity’s legacy. But I wonder whether the burden of autonomous judgment can ever be bypassed, even in the accounts that are most worried about the problematic legacy of autonomy. So, for example, describing Newman’s reaction to Coleridge’s copious moral reflections, Pfau writes: “[Newman] also acknowledges that the recovery of any such tradition as a framework enabling the orientation of rational human beings in a social and hence moral space will only succeed if such a frame becomes the object of ‘real assent.’ We cannot be argued into accepting a position such as the one Coleridge has so elaborately retrieved from Trinitarian theology and (neo-)Platonism. Rather, ‘we must secure that worth for our own use by the personal action of our own minds’” (616). To my mind, it is very difficult if not impossible to separate this injunction from the Enlightenment dicta of Locke or Kant that we must, in the last instance, judge for ourselves, and this as I understand it is the very essence of what it means to be autonomous. How, then, is one kind of autonomy to be desynonimized from the other? Does “rational self-possession” (188), here associated with the traditional view, not resemble too closely certain Enlightenment notions of autonomy?

If we step back from these particular examples for a moment, I want to emphasize that my point here is not the banal one that any act of desynonimizing such closely related terms is always bound to fail. On the contrary, I believe like Pfau that this work of desynonimization is absolutely crucial if we are to secure for ourselves a set of concepts in the humanities that are not reducible to or translatable into forms of naturalistic and scientistic thinking. But it seems to me that, in order to secure this conceptual space as radically distinct, it will be necessary to give a rigorously formal account of the precise way in which these concepts differ, and how they speak about different and indeed incommensurable realms of human experience. Now, Minding the Modern resists the imperative to offer such a formal account, and it does so, I think, on methodological grounds having to do with the historical emergence of concepts that I outlined above. I am torn here, because I understand and endorse, up to a point, the value of the historical method that Pfau proposes. However, it seems to me that one can still, at the end of a process of historical reflection of the kind Minding the Modern engages in, arrive at a formal set of distinctions that would rigorously separate the two major kinds of theoretical account in the book. Otherwise, they risk blurring into each other, as the above examples of precarious desynonymization suggest. I wonder, then, whether a formalization of the two models might not help shore up the practice of desynonimization which, at least at moments such as the ones I have identified, seems a little too unstable. What might be the advantages and dangers of such a formalization? Would Pfau’s method permit it? Indeed, does his argument not require it?

I would like to conclude this review with a final knot of questions, that will bring into focus how tricky and consequential the operation of desynonymization is, at the precise point where the stakes of the project are highest. According to Pfau, one of the major casualties of the conceptual transformation wrought by voluntarism is the notion of action: “First, there is the increasingly embattled, seemingly untenable status of action, practical reason, and a coherent model of human agency as both self-aware and responsible” (3). I am in complete agreement with him on this point. But the way in which Pfau maps the coordinates of this transformation is at times counterintuitive, and it blunts the political force of the vision he outlines in Minding the Modern (perhaps deliberately so). The first sign that “action” is being understood in a surprising way that would challenge its political valence comes early, when Pfau accuses the moderns not of inaction or passivity, but precisely of a certain activism: “To consider the changing understanding of concepts in the modern era . . . also means to apprehend the costs of several other, closely related shifts: viz., from a contemplative to an active stance; and from a mode of knowing that takes itself to be participating in reason to one that takes itself to be producing rational order by applying concepts to what is now posited as a universe replete with puzzling and ostensibly isolated objects and phenomena” (18). Since the recuperation of a concept of action is part of the project, one might be tempted to dismiss this statement as an anomaly or a contradiction, but it is consistent with the overall thrust of his argument. The “activism” of the moderns follows from their notion of the will as unrestrained and self-originating (493), one of the legacies of voluntarism. Thus, an accusation Pfau frequently levels against modern theorists is that they are utopian (256, 268, 378, 402, 404).2 In order to check the utopian excesses of modernity and to restore a realm of action that is ordered by reason rather than chaotically produced by arbitrary acts of self-creation, it is necessary to acknowledge one’s participation in a dialectically self-modifying tradition. Pfau speaks of “the realm of action that proceeds on the strength of habits, judgments, and traditions whose meaning is inseparable from our acknowledgment of their authority and their dialectically reasoned transmission to the future” (3). The consequences of this view for Pfau’s own conception of action are profound. In the act of desynonymizing action from its modern counterpart, action comes to look nothing like what we would call action: “Hence, actus for Aquinas ‘is a single complex operation involving both will and intellect,’ less an instant discharge of causal power than a hermeneutic process whereby human beings achieve a coherent perspective on and commitment to the specific goods in which they take themselves to participate. . . . action in Aquinas unfolds as a complex and sustained interpretive and evaluative process” (139). This radical reinterpretation of action is in itself not a problem; indeed, it is a hallmark of the boldest conceptual work. More worryingly, however, Pfau’s reconceptualization tends to narrow the field of action to the individual and its own work of personal transformation, while the world of politics is at best indifferent and at worst a Hobbesian play of power, self-interest and manipulation, tenuously held together by fear and the threat of violence: “action is not merely oriented toward the manipulation of some specific object or to the attainment of some contingent objective. Rather, by its very nature, action transforms the agent’s very sense of ‘being-in-the-world.’ . . . Unlike mechanical causation, then, action discloses ‘the unique and distinct identity of the agent’” (396; see also, 155). It is almost as though we have come full circle, to a modern focus on individuality, though the features of this individual have been substantially rewritten, so that it has been re-embedded in a tradition that supplies the place of the community lost under the conditions of modernity.

Of course, that cannot be the whole story, and aspects of Pfau’s account confirm for us the necessarily utopian character of all action worthy of the name. Explaining what happens when thinking becomes “strictly reactive” in Schopenhauer, Pfau writes that “on that premise, thinking lacks any generative, imaginative, or counterfactual dimension” (475–76). At the core of Minding the Modern, then, is a desire to restore a form of thinking that is both deliberative and creative as it ranges through the space of alternative possibilities. But this, as I understand it, is precisely the essence of utopian reasoning, as it manifests itself in the political writings of Plato, Aristotle, More and many others. It is not simply that such reasoning allows us to see and magine alternatives; rather, the space of normativity is constituted each time through acts of utopian fictioning. Fictions both produce the ideals which afford some transcendence from the world as it is given, and they produce (when they work well) the attachments to those ideals that engender the desire to will them into reality. On this point, we can recognize a deep tension in Pfau’s thinking between the deliberative, self-aware, counterfactual and responsible dimension of reason on the one hand, and the need for an absolute prior assent or commitment to an already existent normative order that remains nonnegotiable at some level. We have already seen instances of both these imperatives, but a few more examples will sharpen the sense of opposing tendencies. Describing how the recognition of personhood in Coleridge implies a commitment to a set of norms, Pfau writes: “Hence to say that recognition implies the practical acknowledgment of the other as being of equal dignity as the ‘I’ means not so much to have advanced a neutral and formally contestable claim but to have grasped how the empirical, inter-subjective realm is saturated with normative values or ideas. Inasmuch as questions of community and relationality are matters of truth, not correctness, normativity signifies not in the manner of a ‘thou shalt’ but, instead, points to the nature of the real itself, and thus proves immune to some counterfactual scenario” (591–92). Yet at other times, it is precisely the acceptance of givenness that undermines the counterfactual realm in which action operates: “Fearful of the causal indeterminacy and unpredictability of action, and wary of committing to the good to be realized through action, the modern individual is prone to accept the world as something ‘objective,’ determinate, and non-negotiable” (396). Refusing to commit to the utopian good to be realized through action, the modern individual here is quintessentially anti-utopian rather than utopian. At issue in my observation is not something so simple as a contradiction, between whether the modern individual is utopian or anti-utopian (it could be both), or between counterfactual reasoning and the need for prior assent to an already existent order (since some starting point, however provisional, will always be necessary for counterfactual reason). The issue concerns the status of the “good to be realized through action,” and this is precisely where the final knot of questions emerges. To what extent can this good be renegotiated (utopian), or is it in the final reckoning sheltered by the authority of tradition? To what extent is this good a political achievement (utopian) or is it confined to the individual, as the critique of the causal understanding of action suggests? (I call this a “knot” because the questions are interrelated in messy ways around the utopian.) On both these questions, Pfau’s views are complex and need to be worked through more carefully than can be done in the space of a review, so I will only provide some hints here. Regarding the first question, Pfau’s notion of a dialectically self-modifying and self-clarifying tradition suggests that there is already built into a healthy living tradition a process of self-correction and renegotiation. At the same time, we have seen him speak of “traditions whose meaning is inseparable from our acknowledgment of their authority.” But authority is not an arbitrary imposition of power. In a symposium on Minding the Modern at Northwestern University, Pfau explained in response to my preliminary remarks that “as Gadamer has pointed out, authority (unlike Hobbesian ‘power’) can never be ‘seized’ but must always be ‘earned’ (muß erworben werden).” Now I would say that authority of this kind cannot be earned and acquired once and for all (indeed, under the conditions of modernity, whatever authority had been earned has been almost terminally lost); it must be earned over and over again, through the work of reasoning, as Pfau’s book itself testifies. And it will always be a judgment we make, an autonomous judgment, as to whether that authority has been earned or not. But this means that even tradition cannot substitute for the work of autonomous judgment in the last instance. At least two things follow from this observation. In the dialectic of assent and counterfactual deliberative reasoning, the latter always has priority over the former. And this means that in any genuine effort to engage dialectically with a tradition, we must always open ourselves up to the possibility of a non-dialectical rejection of tradition. There will be times, indeed possibly many times, when tradition will also have led us astray, and we judge that it is better to seek, through the work of a generative, imaginative and counterfactual reason, for a new set of traditions more appropriate to our situation.

Indeed, it is precisely here that the utopian and political dimension of Pfau’s vision reenters the picture, as a response to the second question I posed. After all, the very act of wanting a reengagement with tradition, in a modern world that is so misaligned with this desire, is a utopian demand. It cannot be satisfied by individual acts of engagement with tradition, though these are certainly a necessary precondition. If the social world and political institutions we inhabit are so organized as to produce, foster and perpetuate our disembedding from communities and the traditions that sustain them, then only a reorganization of that world to embody a vision of the good can fully respond to the social and conceptual problems of modernity Pfau diagnoses. This claim is not foreign to Pfau’s vision, but implicit in some of the claims he makes. Paraphrasing Milbank, Pfau argues that rights theory has “lost sight of how the legitimacy of . . . political power necessarily presupposes a notion of ‘right order’” (384). We will always have to “arrive at a reasoned judgment as to whether we construe communal flourishing to depend on (enforced) respect for the inherent rights of individuals, or whether our conception of what those rights are is itself derived from a transcendently sanctioned, normative conception of a just (communal) order” (385). It is precisely the specification of that just order in concrete detail, and its instantiation through political action, that will have to be the work of utopian politics. Since the tradition to which Pfau recurs is ultimately an Aristotelian one, it should not be surprising that there is an Aristotelian insight lurking here. Only certain polities are suited to and organized with a view to the flourishing life. The best kind of city will be the one which most enables and ensures this flourishing. Ethics and politics are not separate or antithetical enterprises for Aristotle, but complementary and conjoined. Integral to the possibility of a flourishing ethical life is a utopian politics that will imagine the customs, traditions and institutions capable of serving as the matrix for such a life.

PFAU’S BOOK IS ROOMY enough and the discussions of individual thinkers interesting and expansive enough that one can easily forget that this large and marvelously readable book is obviously an exercise in genealogy. It takes a modicum of distance to remind oneself that Pfau is producing something like a genealogy of modernity, while also suggesting the outlines of a cure. I suppose, in a sense, it would be sufficient to reproduce the skeleton of Pfau’s argument by putting in parentheses the thick descriptions of thinkers along the way. What I propose to do, however, while related, is somewhat different and supposes such an outline. Rather I aim to deal with the meta-issue of precisely where in the landscape of genealogies does Minding the Modern belong? I start at a bit of a distance by making two general observations about Pfau’s text. First, the content and style of genealogical discourse displayed in Minding the Modern is that of a compositional arrangement which performs something like a double orchestration, first of the voices of the thinkers who are the explicit object of analysis in the chapters (and the other voices that speak more episodically), and second the genealogical voices that throughout haunt the text. Second, there is the issue of the title. The word “minding” in the title of the book has as its most obvious sense paying attention to or caring about the modern and especially what it makes possible and forecloses. A second, related sense has to do with taking care of the modern, for the modern needs taking care of, maybe needs help, perhaps on an analogy to medical help. Perhaps modernity is a kind of “hospital” about which Goethe complains. A third sense, perhaps, is minding as in being aware of and perhaps being wary of modernity’s aggressive willfulness, calculative, organizational and methodological propensity to a wisdom possible only in a self grounded in ethos, open to the formation, and the redemption of disaggregating temporality. Maybe Hӧlderlin and the best of Heidegger (Andenken), as well as Coleridge, who is privileged, are sounding through. Since a genealogy of modernity tells a story of its waywardness, I wish to attend to subtle inflections in Pfau’s text that suggest conversation with other genealogists. Since a genealogy of modernity routinely suggests something like a therapeutic, I will attend to Pfau’s selection of Coleridge as a site of possible repair. I begin, as a first point, with Pfau’s latent and critical conversation with other genealogists of modernity, what I call here the “genealogical filters” of Minding the Modern.

Genealogical Filters

Minding the Modern is a very learned book and while some thinkers are “minded,” many others with German and English and occasionally even French names come and go. But there is a special group of thinkers, that is, current genealogists who are not so much interlocutors, even interlocutors with genealogical interests such as Nietzsche and Heidegger, as filters for Pfau’s complex and—to use a Coleridgean locution—highly “reticulated” narrative of loss and recovery. These include Hans Blumenberg, Louis Dupré, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre. Each of these genealogists make important contributions to Pfau’s story. From Blumenberg Pfau imbibes the sense of the rupture with the past indicated/constituted by modern discourses and practices and the way in which new discourses and practices “reoccupy” the vacancy left by the exhausted or defeated discourses and practices. But Pfau seems to draw more clearly the corollary that if new discourses and practices emerge that recall the old, one is necessarily dealing with a non-identical repetition. Presumably Coleridge’s recovery of the integral of will and reason in the participatory matrix in which the Trinity is horizon and actor is the singularly most crucial non-identical repetition. From Dupré, Pfau can find either inspiration or confirmation concerning the break-up in the late medieval period of the erstwhile integral view of self as will and reason. Whether Nominalism represents a beginning of the career of will as a free radical or something more like a pre-beginning may be open to question. In any event, Nominalism represents a major crack in the premodern world of assumption. The crack, which establishes voluntarism, is theologically mediated in that the primacy of will on the anthropological level re-presents at once the separation of will and reason at the level of the divine and the newfound primacy of the former. Pfau also shows himself sympathetic in a general way to other features of Dupré’s genealogical program, specifically his concern that the destabilization of the matrix of participation, which supported an integral anthropology, changes not only the epistemological rules but our social and political understanding. Pfau shares Dupré’s broad sympathies for the Romantics and the German Idealists who repair some features of modernity while unsuccessfully addressing others. Finally, and most importantly, the model of genealogy is strikingly similar to that of Dupré’s in that it tries to move between history of ideas and philosophy in the proper sense, in that it tells a story of a fundamental shift in perspective, underscores the cost, yet also tries to point to features in the modernity which are covered over in a modern picture of the self that is only apparently plural. In a sense Pfau and Dupré assume that the modern has in some real sense not only displaced and replaced, but written or painted over the premodern. The figure of the genealogist here is that of palimpsest.

Taylor’s Sources of the Self as much as Secularism might be thought to make three contributions to Minding the Modern: first, offering complex and nuancedN accounts of Enlightenment authors thereby forestalling peremptory severe judgments on the Enlightenment and especially on Romanticism that flows from it, and second by chastening our expectations regarding a pure recovery of an original. There is no way back to a pristinely pure premodernity. And lastly, Pfau’s book is inspired by After Virtue and Alasdair MacIntyre’s other texts for a workable description of the initial premodern understanding of the self and the conceptual matrix and practices that sustain it and that it also sustains, and also a workable description of the new picture of the world with its corresponding practices and forms of life. For both Pfau and McIntryre the integrated self is governed more by ethos than rule, and responsibility arises from a self temporally and attitudinally coherent oriented towards goods that transcend immediate gratification and immanent satisfaction.

The above outline could mislead if it suggests that all four genealogists which haunt Pfau’s discourse haunt it equally. They are made up of greater and lesser proximities, with Dupré and MacIntyre having the greater influence, and with Dupré likely having the most, since he self-consciously attempts as Pfau does to integrate in critical fashion the other three. I suppose the issue of proximity gets to the issue of placing Pfau’s genealogical account in a topology of such accounts. Importantly, Pfau’s text repeats none of these figures exactly. It is interesting to spot the differences. For example, despite his apparent sanction of Blumenberg’s “reoccupation,” Pfau affirms that forms of thought, whether relatively mainline traditional (Platonism; Boethius and Richard of Saint Victor’s view of person) or marginal (Gnosticism and Marcionism), can be repeated in discourses that react to the Enlightenment. This, however, seems to suppose something like substantive repetition, even if the repetition is non-identical. Pfau here seems to position himself in a way similar to Dupré, who grants that in a fundamental sense modernity represents a rupture, only to mitigate its absoluteness by thinking that one can to a limited extent continue to speak of secularization and the perseveration of content identities in discourse across time. This is indicated most generally in Dupré’s attempt to unite Blumenberg with Gadamer who presents a restricted version of substantive discursive and conceptual unity across time. Ultimately, Pfau’s genealogical model, as is true of Dupré also, is hermeneutical.

Besides the general difference between what Pfau characterizes as the “high altitude” complexion of all of the genealogical filters he employs, the following differences between Pfau and MacIntyre are especially illustrative. (i) Even as he focuses on a single aspect of premodern conceptuality, that is, the integration of will and reason in the depiction of the self, compared with MacIntyre Pfau offers a more variegated and democratic view of the self in which different premodern views and/or emphases are relatively—although not absolutely—irreducible. If, after MacIntyre, Pfau might be thought to privilege Aquinas when it comes to the vision of integration of will and reason in the self, he does not do so to such an extent that other classical views of the self (Stoicism) or other Christian views for that matter (Augustine) are subjected to something like an Aufhebung. (ii) In addition, Pfau has much greater sympathies for the Platonic tradition than is evident in MacIntryre’s work and displays much more interest in the premodern matrix of participation. This is not to say that Aristotle is not important for Pfau—he is. But he does not think that it is a zero-sum game in premodernity between Aristotle and Plato—the same is true of Aquinas. This has real consequence with regard both to the pertinence and value of retrievals in the Romantic and Idealist period of Platonism and Neoplatonism, whose retrieval Pfau is anxious to bring to our attention. (iii) Pfau is more focused than MacIntyre on naming the culprits for the prizing apart of intellect and will, and points in general to the Franciscan School and calls out Ockham in particular. (iv) Pfau seems more confident than MacIntyre that we have an answer to the aporia of modernity. Relatedly, Pfau is more determinate in pointing to those discourses which we might call discourses of redress. Pfau certainly does not deny that Newman might contribute to an answer regarding the integration of will and reason—on the basis of MacIntyre’s work as a whole MacIntyre has to capacity to say this although he doesn’t say it in After Virtue. Notably, however, Pfau privileges S. T. Coleridge as the intellectual figure who most adequately overcomes the manifold disaggregations of modernity (mind and nature, self and God) and most adequately repeats the premodern synthesis of will and reason in the responsible agential self. (v) Finally, in his treatment of discourses of redress Pfau proves himself to be unadulterately theological in a way that MacIntyre almost never is. Here we are talking of theological in the strict sense and not simply about a general theistic assumption. Pfau wishes to support Coleridge at his most metaphysical—which is also his most theological—namely, that it is the vision of the Trinity which makes sense of the notion of person which, in turn, supposes relation as a condition of personal integrity. Coleridge’s Trinitarian and anthropological discourses, as well as their link, represents a non-identical repetition of what is best in premodern Christian thought. With this we segue to my second substantive point.

Coleridge as Privileged

Pfau advances a startling thesis: our true repentance with regard to the break and our hope in recovery and/or reconstruction of the premodern view of the self as an integrated and responsible agent whose will is connected with rational aims is vested in S. T. Coleridge. The unavoidable question is why Coleridge?—where an acceptable answer cannot be that the author of this book is in an expert on Coleridge and has significant expertise in Romanticism more generally. One possible response to what comes off as an embarrassing counterintuitive claim is to attenuate it and simply insist that Coleridge represents a single, if important, point of overcoming the dispensation of separation of will and reason and the demise of virtue. The ameliorative strategy, however, is hardly viable, given the number of chapters devoted to Coleridge. Pfau is claiming in fact that Coleridge is nothing less than exemplary. Now, it is true that the reasons for the singularity of Coleridge are not explicitly produced. Neither are they buried. I think a very modest amount of interpretation excavates the following six. (i) One finds in Coleridge a rich anthropology that attacks the modern separation of will and reason and the related reduction of the former to desire, and which reconstructs the premodern view of an embodied agential self oriented towards good, while variously emphasizing its quite different Platonic, Stoic, Aristotelian, Augustinian, and Thomistic inflections. Coleridge’s recovery of Platonic and Neoplatonic forms of thought is especially important, and he demonstrates the continual vitality and Platonic and Neoplatonic discourses, both ancient and modern. Platonism is the lingua franca of English Romantic protest against methodologism and materialism. (ii) Coleridge makes sense of this anthropology by framing it within a larger horizon in which not only is the relation of individual selves to community and history worked out, but also the relation of the human world to the natural world and both to an ultimate horizon of divine agency and presumptive presence in the world. (iii) Coleridge believes that a certain form of knowledge—reason rather than understanding—enables us to have contact with God as well as responsibly articulate the Trinitarian and thus relational personhood of the Christian God who serves as a model for what is truly human. (iv) Coleridge is able partially to overcome in his own life and in his thought features of Romantic and Idealist thought that represent further alienations from the premodern view of the self or counterfeits of it. Yet he also displays the capacity to make use of what in these discourses represents an overcoming of the contracted and deformed views on the self that are the modern defaults. (v) Obviously, for the sake of plausibility, the singularity of Coleridge is qualified in a number of ways: We are talking textually about the Coleridge not of the Rhyme, but the Anglican Coleridge of Aids to Reflection and Opus Maximus. Coleridge needs to be supplemented by any number of other thinkers, Newman proximally, but also phenomenological thinkers such as Husserl and Heidegger in some vein and, by the hermeneutic tradition, especially that of Gadamer. (vi) Coleridge’s failure to present a fully satisfactory account of how will and reason in the self, and the surrounding issues of the relation of self and community, human beings and nature, and all of the above with God, is instructive as well as contingent. It is a kind of parable that in or after modernity no absolute cure is given to us and that what is demanded of us is to be inventive in our pharakon, in light of the fact that modernity itself is generative and always throws up new forms of will, rationality, and community with which we have to deal. We have to be ever mindful, ever caring, and ever medicinal.

THOMAS PFAU’S MINDING THE MODERN is both critical and constructive (or, perhaps more accurately, reconstructive). The critical dimension of his project is evident in his trenchant analysis of various intellectual and behavioral habits that emerged in Western culture during the modern period and developed in ways that ultimately destabilized confidence in both theoretical and practical forms of reasoning. The constructive dimension is manifest in his effort to articulate an account of knowing and being (and the relationship between them) that enables us to recognize the “unfathomable complexity” and “dynamic, steadily evolving contemporaneity” of Western humanistic inquiry (213).

At the heart of the critical dimension of Pfau’s argument is his analysis of the pervasive and corrosive effects of nominalism on Western thought. Pfau indicts Peter Abelard, Francis of Assisi, Bonaventure, Étienne Tempier, and Nicholas of Autrecourt as each to varying degrees responsible for aiding and abetting the development of nominalist tendencies, but fingers William of Ockham as the principal culprit (160–82). William’s voluntarism and “anti-institutional, fideist hyper-Augustinianism” reaches all the way from the thirteenth century into the “Puritanism, Jansenism, . . . [and] German Pietism” of the eighteenth century and thence into “the evangelical and Pentecostal denominationalism of the early nineteenth century” (179), and is evident even still today.

The essential problem at the heart of nominalist thought, Pfau suggests, is its tendency to make purpose (i.e., telos) an indicator of volition rather than of nature (166). This seemingly and ostensibly rather pious move ultimately has the effect of sundering the relationships between God and the world, between the individual and the community, and between humanity and the natural order (167). God is said to exist “at an infinite remove” from the world (169), the divine life being in no way constrained or conditioned by the created order. The autonomous self-determination of God is thence transposed to individual human beings, reducing social interactions to the exercise of power and thereby leading to the collapse of vibrant shared traditions and, ironically, the emergence of statism (185–213). Rather than discovering a “divinely created” rational order in nature, “human knowledge in fact imposes its own paradigms of cognition in lieu of God’s” (176). In short, where previously there existed a vast network of purposeful, meaningful relationships, there remains in the wake of nominalism only a jumbled agglomeration of accidentally related monads.

More than once, Pfau suggests the proliferation of nominalist tendencies during the modern period was to a significant degree a consequence of problems or tensions left over in the Christian tradition from earlier periods. For example, he cites Coleridge’s assessment of “modernity as a renewed confrontation with the unresolved legacy of Gnosticism” (438), a conflict that was “aggravated” following the rejection of scholastic accounts of grace and volition in favor of the more exaggerated treatments of the same that emerged during the Reformation (447). Similarly, Bernard de Mandeville reopened a problem evident in the earlier exposition of the correspondence between “human fate” and “divine providence” provided by Boethius. The problem was resolved by Aquinas, but Mandeville’s insistence on the “absolute primacy” of passion eclipsed the Thomistic solution and thereby recast in more adversarial terms the relationship between reason and volition, and hence between God and humanity (260–64).

Pfau’s demonstration of the extent to which some of the more worrisome tendencies of modern thought should be seen as the recurrence of earlier intellectual errors helps elucidate several of his other arguments. It buttresses his proposal that the emergence of modernity was less a “momentous rupture within a single vector of historical progress” than it was the eclipse of one worldview by an incommensurable alternative (24). Similarly, it lends support to his suggestion that humanistic inquiry has less to do with the kind of “accumulative, inter-subjectively demonstrable, and systematic” knowledge characteristic of the empirical sciences (18–19) and rather more to do with the successful transmission of a tradition marked by the “dialectical and agonistic” contest of ideas pertaining to human identity, agency, and responsibility (69; cf. 75).

I find all of this quite compelling, but would also like to suggest Pfau may not have dug deep enough in the Western tradition in his effort to root out the source of the malaise associated with modern critical thought. Like Pfau, I believe the problem is at its heart essentially theological in nature rather than philosophical (and even less political), but the problem predates Ockham by more than a millennium. The crises brought about as a result of the elaboration of nominalism during the modern period are representative of tensions that can ultimately be traced back to the kind of radical monotheism that first emerged in the Western tradition in the faith and practice of Israel during and after the Babylonian exile.

The shift from polytheism to henotheism to monotheism tends to bring with it a series of attendant developments pertaining to the relationship between God and the world, the correspondence between divine will and human action, and the nature of good and evil. These developments reinforce one another such that the intensification of any one of them tends to lead to a comparable intensification of the others. Relative to the first, monotheism posits a much greater distinction between God and the world than is typical of henotheism or (especially) polytheism: God in no way depends on the world, but the world depends entirely on God. Relative to the second, the radical dependence of the world on God tends to absolutize divine sovereignty: the qualitative difference between God and the world becomes the basis of increasingly voluntaristic accounts of divine action in the world. Relative to the third, a pronounced emphasis on divine sovereignty raises questions having to do with the nature of evil and God’s dominion over injustice, suffering, and death.

These developments tend to be mirrored in concomitant accounts of human identity and experience. The radical distinction between God and the world not only opens up a qualitative distinction between God and human beings, it introduces a significant alterity between (first) human beings and the rest of the natural order and (second) individual human beings one from another; the distinction between God and the world is transposed to other relationships in ways that can push entities apart rather than draw them together. Similarly, an emphasis on divine sovereignty contributes not only to voluntaristic accounts of divine action but of human action as well: the fulfillment of one’s religious obligations (and hence of one’s identity as a creature made in the image of God) increasingly involves the exercise of one’s will in the fulfillment of one’s moral responsibilities (to God, to other human beings, and to the world). Such accounts of human identity and action extend to considerations of the culpability human beings have for evil in the world; indeed, the source of evil is itself articulated in increasingly volitional terms.

I do not have the space here to explore the way these tendencies are manifest in the post-exilic faith and practice of Israel, but I believe it’s reasonable to suggest all of these tendencies were during that period amplified in ways they had not been before. My purpose in making this proposal is to suggest the problems and questions Pfau (rightly) associates with the rise of nominalism are representative of a much deeper tension in the Western tradition. This tension cannot be addressed at a purely philosophical level but require a radically theological solution.

This solution is exemplified in the reconfiguration of radical monotheism that accompanied the development of the doctrine of the incarnation during the patristic conciliar period. The willingness to rethink the doctrine of God in light of the church’s experience and understanding of both Christ and (not at all incidentally) the Spirit brought about an unprecedented account of divine life and action that accommodated the freedom of both God and the world, grounded metaphysics and ontology in the (dynamic and relational) concept of the person rather than in the more abstract category of being, and acknowledged the pervasive and destructive reality of evil without compromising either the sovereignty of God or the responsibility of human beings.

Pfau is of course cognizant of the consequences that follow when we fail to recognize the priority of the doctrine of the incarnation for understanding the doctrine of God. When the “Christological and soteriological dimensions of the spiritual life” are allowed to “wither away,” he says, the result is an anemic understanding of God, humanity, and the world (170). We end up with something like what Colin Gunton described (in Act and Being) as an account of the divine life that is less soteriological than it is cosmological, one that cannot help but resolve itself into some version of deism. Pfau also alludes to the problems that can arise when undue emphasis is placed (as did, he suggests, Francis and Bonaventure) on the “individuality, singularity, and exemplarity” of Jesus at the expense of a fully trinitarian exposition of God’s salvific action (171). He also includes in his exposition of Coleridge an outline of the historical development of the concept of the person within the late patristic and early medieval theological tradition (516–23, 535–55). Despite all this, however, I wonder if attending more explicitly and thoroughly to the priority of the doctrine of the economic trinity over that of the immanent trinity would alter either the critical or the constructive dimensions of Pfau’s project.

As far as the critical dimension of Minding the Modern is concerned, it seems a greater emphasis on the priority of the incarnation and the economic trinity would yield a slightly different reading of history of the Western intellectual tradition. In particular, such a reading would suggest the conciliar tradition represents both a refinement of the burgeoning theological tradition as well as a philosophical achievement of the first order. Not only did the conciliar tradition develop a new way of thinking and speaking about God’s redemptive activity, it also by extension established new ways of approaching questions having to do with metaphysics, action, knowledge, and language. From this vantage point, it seems we might inquire as to whether or not the medieval recovery of Aristotelian categories and logic and their subsequent theological reception represents something of a mixed blessing.

As far as the constructive dimension of Minding the Modern is concerned, approaching questions having to do with identity, agency, and understanding by way of the perspective afforded by the doctrine of the economic trinity would help accentuate the importance of one of the principal concerns of Pfau’s project, namely, the priority of personhood. At the heart of the theological discoveries of the conciliar tradition is that of the person as an inherently integral and dynamic reality oriented towards others in meaningful mutual relations; thus, “understanding the self means understanding its relations, its constitutive embeddedness and participation in the world” (208), which provides the basis for participatory accounts of understanding and articulation. This in turn helps us understand tradition as something that ultimately enables human beings to participate not only in the intellectual heritage of a given culture but in the living reality of the divine life as given to the world by the Father in Christ and the Spirit.

Towards the end of Minding the Modern, Pfau suggests (following John Henry Newman) the loss of appreciation for tradition during the modern period and thereafter is so great that it is not even felt as such: “recovery” is no longer possible because we lack even the sense we have neglected something of vital importance (615–16). In the midst of a cultural crisis of that magnitude, a renewed emphasis on the necessarily personalistic and theological underpinnings of both theoretical and practical reasoning and (especially) on the gift of participation in the divine life that continues to be offered to the world are perhaps the only reliable means of reawakening us to the importance of tradition and all it has to offer to our understanding of human agency and responsible knowledge.

BEFORE BEGINNING, I TENDER a double confession.

(1) Encountering Thomas Pfau’s Minding the Modern, I feel a bit like Theaetetus. “By the gods,” Theaetetus confesses to Socrates, “I am lost in wonder when I think of all these things, and sometimes when I regard them it really makes my head swim.”1 This confession is not furtive critique. It’s appreciation, or admiration: wonder (the first of the soul’s passions, on René Descartes’s account). Minding the Modern is a big book whose scope and sweep are big—and really impressive. “By any fair assessment,” Brad Gregory admits, “Minding the Modern is a remarkable intellectual achievement.”2

(2) I cheated. My previous sentence gives me away. I read the Immanent Frame forum on Minding the Modern, from fall 2014 (http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/minding-the-modern/), including Pfau’s response. So I write knowing this exchange. And I write in response to Pfau’s response to it. Pfau laments that most of the Immanent Frame responses “passed over in almost complete silence the first seven chapters of Minding the Modern.”3 He adds, “I would have welcomed at least some methodological reflections on the conceptual architecture of Minding the Modern.”4

I would like to (try to) give Pfau what he asks for: engagement on premodern and methodological matters. I do so in three movements. Each is partial, limited. Still, each tries to respond to Pfau’s text, via a double hermeneutic of charity and critique (which ≠ criticism).

I

The era of petits récits is over. Grand narratives are back. Minding the Modern is one.

These statements are diagnostic, not disparaging. They’re statements of method. (In other words, they’re judgments.) Minding the Modern’s method is narrative. That it is—narrative—matters. It makes a difference.

A narrative précis: Minding the Modern tells a grand, genealogical story, of will and person. They are this narrative’s protagonists, and their retrieval this narrative’s aim. This story, like most good ones, has good guys and bad guys. (And they are guys.5) Its good guys include Plato, Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (this story’s hero, in a way). Its bad guys include Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, and—baddest of all—William of Ockham. This story also has benevolent guides, who show the way. They include Hans Blumenberg, Louis Dupré, Alasdair MacIntyre, John Milbank, and Charles Taylor.

I recount Minding the Modern this way to emphasize that it’s a story—a narrative, a grand one. It’s a narrative of Bildung: of formation, development. No accident, then, that in the index under “narrative,” it reads “see also flourishing.”

Minding the Modern takes its narrative cue from, among others, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Coleridge. Their writings, Pfau notes, “are liable to disconcert today’s critic with their grand narrative design.”6 And that, Pfau judges, is a good thing. What disconcerts “today’s critic” provokes Pfau. He, with Goethe and Coleridge, provokes us: “to move away from a parochial and hermetic niche-criticism whose historicist and materialist assumptions and methodologies have steadily diminished the scope and stakes of intellectual argument in the humanities today.”7

How has this diminishing happened? By diminishing knowledge and judgment (prohairesis) to information and methodology.

(Methodology is my word, not Pfau’s. I import it to distinguish between Minding the Modern’s two senses of method: as framework and as tool.8 I reserve “method” for the former, which Minding the Modern appreciates, and use “methodology” to name the latter, which Minding the Modern depreciates.)

A methodology is a tool. It names a fixed procedure, sure of its rectitude, that applies itself ahistorically to any number of objects, phenomena, situations. Think of the scientific method, as a methodology of achieving data; or of Descartes’s radical doubt, as a methodology of achieving certainty; or of bad deconstruction in the 80s, as a methodology of seeming intellectually chic.

As a tool, a methodology is reductive. It reduces knowledge to value-free information, separated into ever smaller, ever specialized spaces.9 A methodology is a tool for specialization.10 And specialization is what “today’s critic” would call “scholarship.” This methodology installs itself as, Pfau writes, “the successor to judgment (prohairesis),” which is “a hermeneutic and evaluative act.”11

Knowledge and judgment, hermeneutics and evaluation, are narrative matters. Narrative is Minding the Modern’s shape as well as method. And method, it turns out, is narrative. A method names a methodos: a way, path, journey—one that affects a person who follows it. A method, Pfau writes, “carries with it a strong narrative dimension.”12

So method and narrative, in Minding the Modern, are imbricated. Method has a narrative element. And narrative is a method. Minding the Modern’s method, its methodos, is doubly narrative.

It tells a narrative about narratives, of will and person. And it tells this narrative from in a narrative. Minding the Modern is in, not above or outside of, the story it tells. It, too, is in a hermeneutic framework—which, as Pfau notes, affects the telling and the teller.

Minding the Modern also reads narratives as narratives, with care. It has to. “Any account,” Pfau insists, “of competing or intersecting intellectual traditions has to rest on the kind of close, textual analysis that, at its best, has always been the bread and butter of literary studies.”13 So Minding the Modern “is committed to close textual analysis as its principal method.”14

This method is the way, the methodos, of becoming “alert to the profound stakes of its [intellectual history’s] contested ideas and genealogies of inquiry.”15 It requires that, Pfau writes, “one must pay scrupulous attention to the rhetorical maneuvers, metaphoric shifts, ellipses, competing translations, and countless stylistic quirks and symptoms of its preeminent voices.”16

Minding the Modern’s (doubly) narrative method distinguishes it from other, similar stories. These stories are less stories than “high-altitude surveys of intellectual shifts and diverse, often competing strands of inquiry.”17 Some of them mark William of Ockham (as Minding the Modern does) as where things went wrong. But Minding the Modern novelly attends to William, and nominalism, as a narrative problem. “Can narrative,” Pfau asks, “still aspire to exemplarity, let alone universality? Can it still be ‘representative’ of anything beyond its own, singular occurrence? And can there be anything like a meaningful ‘plot’ in a world composed of strictly singular and thus ostensibly a-rational entities and subjects?”18

Minding the Modern’s narrative method also enables a suggestive approach to Thomas Aquinas, to whom I now turn. Thomas, Pfau suggests, “understands freedom as a transition from potentiality to actuality and, as such, conceives it narratively.”19 For “action in Aquinas unfolds as a complex and sustained interpretive and evaluative process.”20

Before passing from narratives to names, I offer one small query: why does Minding the Modern not include Paul Ricœur? His Time and Narrative begins, as Minding the Modern does, with Aristotle and Augustine. And his hermeneutic sensibility (and sensitivity) makes him seem, at least to me, like an obvious character in Pfau’s grand narrative. So I find Ricœur’s absence a bit puzzling.

II

Thomas Aquinas plays a vital role in Minding the Modern’s narrative. It’s no surprise that he does. His role in Minding the Modern is as synthesizer of Aristotelian and Augustinian lineages. For example, Pfau writes, “following Augustine, Aquinas accords ‘relation’ a unique place, above and beyond the other nine Aristotelian categories (praedicamenta).”21 Relation is neither accidental or occasional. It’s “an ontological characteristic of being.”Ibid. This citation indirectly refers to Summa Theologiae 1.3.4 (cited by part, question, and article).22

And it’s no surprise that Minding the Modern, focused on will and person, focuses on those parts of Thomas’s Summa Theologiae that directly address will and person. Given the narrative that Minding the Modern tells, focusing on those parts makes sense.

But Summa Theologiae is, in its way, also a narrative—a grand one. It’s a narrative of (in the briefest possible terms) God and relations to God, which unfold humanly (through sacra doctrina) in relation to reason and revelation, nature and grace. It has to be, since, Thomas writes, “all things are treated in sacra doctrina under the aspect of God, either because those things are God himself or because they are ordered”—related—“to God as origin and end.”23

So jumping to the parts of the narrative on will and person misses part—a crucial part—of Summa’s story: the beginning. (It also misses a key character in Summa’s narrative: Pseudo-Dionysius.) Without the beginning, the story doesn’t, and can’t, make the same sense.

How does Summa’s story begin? With names, God’s names. As Thomas tells it, God’s ultimate name is Being. For Dionysius (and others, including Bonaventure), Good is God’s ultimate name. Dionysius, Thomas writes, “places good before being among the names of God,” because for Dionysius “the good is conceptually prior to being.”24 Thomas, though, maintains that “being is conceptually prior to good.”25 The first name of God, in Thomas’s theological narrative, is Being.

Why do names matter? Because it’s in narrating God’s names that Thomas narrates his idea—his method—of analogy as a mode of relation to God through language (or, for that matter, through anything else).26 It’s also in narrating God’s names that Thomas articulates his theory of participation, on which relations to God depend.27

(Names also matter in relation to nominalism’s wrong turn, away from Thomas. “Much of nominalism’s impact,” Pfau writes, “on subsequent theology, philosophy, science, and political thought flows from Bishop Tempier’s commitment in his 1277 condemnation to accord God unconditional priority over every other value or ‘divine name.’”28)

Naming God as Being informs the entire theological narrative that follows. It engenders the “ontology of ‘being and truth’” in which Thomas locates personhood and will.29 It’s why for Thomas, relation “is an ontological characteristic of being.”30 Again, Thomas recognizes relation in this way thanks to his theory of participation, which owes to his naming of God.

Naming God as Being also mobilizes the great role that grace plays in Thomas’s and Pfau’s narratives. Grace, on Thomas’s telling, is what perfects nature, which is how humans can know anything in relation to God (like God’s names).31 Grace—its “unconditional and non-negotiable priority,” as gift—is what, in Pfau’s narrative, “negates from the outset modernity’s axiomatic idea of knowledge as a strictly autonomous act, and of human rational agents as epistemologically self-determining and self-legitimating.”32

So grace is really important in both narratives (Thomas’s and Pfau’s). And knowing both narratives is really important, to know how one relates to the other.

I don’t raise these points about divine names to suggest that Minding the Modern misreads Thomas’s text. I don’t think it does. But I do think it misses an important part of Thomas’s theological story—a part that helps to explain the part of Thomas’s story that Minding the Modern engages, as well as nominalist responses to Thomas’s theology that it takes up.

And I think a fuller treatment of Thomas’s narrative reiterates that it is a narrative, a rich and complicated one, with a beginning and an end: a narratives that moves “from prima philosophia (metaphysics) to sacra doctrina (theological wisdom) to a mystical visio beatifica.”33 This narrative arc is important, too—but that’s another story.

III

Running short of space, I can only sketch this third movement.

I find Minding the Modern’s treatment of Franciscans wanting. Francis of Assisi and Bonaventure each earn only one mention, which (without any textual support) accuses their emphasis on Christ’s singularity of prompting the wrong turn that nominalism takes. Such a claim calls for narrative attention, especially concerning such a complex issue.

William of Ockham is the one who, in Minding the Modern, takes that fateful (or fatal?) wrong turn. So William serves as a crucial hinge in Minding the Modern’s narrative. Despite his importance, there is less close textual reading in this chapter than in any other. There is instead a reliance on secondary summaries and glosses. I’m left wanting, from a moment of weakness in narrative and method at this all-important turning point in the story.

But a moment of weakness is a moment. It’s not the whole story—not by a lot.