Ars Disputandi

Volume 7 (2007)
: 15665399

Michael Hanby A Response to Brachtendorf and Wisse

,

[1]
I would like to thank Johannes Brachtendorf and Maarten Wisse once
again for their thoughtful, detailed, and rigorous engagement with my work.
One can only hope for critics who take their responsibility so seriously, and I am
grateful to them for providing me with the opportunity to further reflect on the
flaws of my argument. Though these are undoubtedly legion, I hope nonetheless
that they are fewer in number and gravity than either of them suggest. Even so, I
am afraid there can be little question of my reply being equal to their labor; I must
remain content for the most part to let this book stand as my final thoughts on the
questions that divide us and to allow readers to determine whether the admittedly
constructive theological synthesis of Augustine and Modernity amounts to a viable
interpretation of Augustine and a viable theology in its own right. I must confess
that this inadequacy derives partly from the fact that while I still regard myself
as an Augustinian theologian, in the five years or so since writing the book my
attention and energy have turned from Augustine himself to other matters of
more contemporary concern. So there can be no question of my duplicating the
research that led to my original claims. The difficulty in giving an adequate
reply is compounded, moreover, by the fact that these criticisms are sometimes
at odds with each other. I take this not only as a sign that each has misread
or misrepresented my position at key points, but also as further evidence of the
deep modern anachronisms infecting much of the contemporary treatment of
Augustine which I tried to address in the book. Finally, because each in the end
concludes that the theology of Augustine and Modernity is little more than a thinly
veiled attempt to legitimate the ideology of Radical Orthodoxy, there is in each
critique an uneasy tension, parallel to that in the book, between criticism of my
Augustinian theology qua Augustinian and criticism of my Augustinian theology
qua theology. As I proceed I will note some of those points of divergence, which
are relatively minor on the whole, as well as instances where I think Brachtendorf
and Wisse have both misread me and misunderstood Augustine. I think that
most of these instances are generated not from Augustine himself but are rather
premised upon metaphysical presuppositions, which I tried to question in the
book, determining both their appropriation of Augustine and their interpretation
of my text. It is here that I will conclude.
[2]
Whereas Brachtendorf accuses me of underplaying Augustines debts
to Platonism, for Wisse my Augustine is little more than a Neoplatonist with
an illicit Barthian twist. Neither description accurately captures my position

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Michael Hanby, A Response to Brachtendorf and Wisse, Ars Disputandi [http://www.ArsDisputandi.org] 7 (2007),
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 Michael Hanby: A Response to Brachtendorf and Wisse

or that of Augustine. Whether Augustine is indebted to Platonic philosophy,

and particularly the Neoplatonism of Plotinus, is not the question. Rather the
question is the nature of that debt, and more particularly still, how to characterize
it not simply as a matter of philosophical history, which would render a certain
picture of genetic dependence, but theologically, which would render quite another
picture of ontological dependence. (In this regard, neither critic does justice to
my intention to read Augustine not simply as a theologian, but theologically). In
opposing my account, Brachtendorf simply restates the commonplace that for
Augustine, the Neoplatonists see the homeland from a distance but do not find
the way there which is Christ (Confessiones VII). In interpreting this for us, he
offers the very convention that I argue against, though he neither defends this
interpretation nor really engages these criticisms. Negatively stated, philosophy
is not a sufficient means of attaining salvation; but positively stated, philosophy
can develop an accurate picture of the consummation of humans. He then
generalizes from this into an essential and essentially unhistorical distinction
between autonomous philosophy and theology, presumably to defend the former
against the illegitimate incursions of Radical Orthdoxy (more on this anxiety
shortly).
[3]
However, simply restating the conventional position once more with
feeling does not make it so. There are many questions here that Brachtendorf
does not acknowledge, and they are not just radically orthodox idiosyncrasies.
Some are raised by no less an authority than James ODonnell hardly an R.O.
apologist in his great commentary on the Confessiones. The most serious of these
questions is theological. Is such a rigid distinction between theological ends and
means really licit? Is Christ merely the way or the means, or does the disclosure
of the means reveal something new and indispensable about the end, for example,
that the meaning of being is love, that love is inherently reciprocal, that the
manifestation and reciprocal exchange of this love in our world is bound up with
the life of a historical people? In other words, does the revelation of Christ as
way reveal something about the very meaning of those predicates immutability,
immateriality, unity and goodness comprising philosophys accurate picture of
the consummation of humans? And what makes these predicates true in the first
place if not the light of truth whose principle is God himself? That God himself
makes our truth true that every act of knowledge is enabled by the participation
in the absolute/God, in Wisses words is of course a basic element of Augustines
notions of judgment and illumination in De Musica, De Libero Arbitrio, and other
places, yet these notions are stunningly absent in both reviewers objections to
my account. This dependence of our truth upon Gods Truth has its parallel in
history as well, as Christ retroactively makes the historical events of the Old
Testament a figure of Him and/or the Church and souls relation to Him. These
notions are hardly peculiarities of radically orthodox ideology. Rather they are an
explicit feature of the tradition of Augustinian theology and exegesis as it would
develop in the Middle Ages and are particularly evident in Bonaventure and
the Victorines. Thus Platonisms relative truth, which is not in dispute, should
not be confused with the anachronistic sense of philosophical autonomy which

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 Michael Hanby: A Response to Brachtendorf and Wisse

Brachtendorf seems to guard so jealously. There is something about philosophy

as Augustine understood it that was always already theological or religiousa
point made abundantly clear in De civitate Dei.
[4]
Wisse, by contrast, contends that I invoke a Barthian Christology to
circumvent the aporias of an essentially Proclean ontology. His criticisms on this
score are more subtle and interesting than Brachtendorfs, though I must confess
that I am at something of a loss as to how to respond to them. While my thinking
is undoubtedly shaped by more influences than I can name or number, neither
Proclus nor Barth form a very significant part of my intellectual biography or the
genalogy of sources comprising this project. Augustine is not a Barthian and I am
not conscious of being either a Proclean or a Barthian. My alleged transformation
of Barths analogia fidei into an analogia entis, a move in my opinion akin to
transforming a square into a circle, should give one pause on this point.
[5]
More importantly, though, it is not entirely clear what Wisse means by
my supposed Barthian Christology where God is God in Christ from the very
outset. This is his language, not mine. Nor is it clear to me what he means in
opposing creation in Jesus Christ to creation through the Son/Word, or what
critical advantage he thinks he has gained thereby. It is true that I see, and I think
Augustine sees, the historical event of the incarnation as anticipated from before
the foundation of the world and as determining the final meaning of creation qua
creation both retrospectively and prospectively. It is true furthermore that I see
the non posse peccare of eschatological beatitude as bringing to perfection the posse
non peccare of the original creation and thus answering to what is most proper to
it, though with the important qualification that the perfection of freedom therein
implied exceeds that which was enjoyed by Adam or that which could be supplied
from within nature itself. Creation is perfected by being made more than itself.
[6]
That creation is so ordered to grace, indeed that creation is itself grace
even for Adam, though not the remedial grace necessary to draw humanity to
God from its fallen state, seems to me to be inherent in the notion of Christ
as the new Adam, in the distinction between the posse non peccare of the first
Adam and his progeny and the ultimate non posse peccare of the blessed, in the
ubiquitously typological structure of Augustinian exegesis and history, and in the
plot structure of De civitate Dei, among other things. And denial of this finally
seems tantamount to atheism. But it does not follow, and nowhere do I advocate,
the simple absurdities that Wisse and Brachtendorf attributed to me: that, the gift
of creation is sufficient unto itself for salvation, or that being need be denied to
the sinner (though Augustine is explicit in De civ. XIV that the sinner is closer
to nothingness for abandoning God), or that faith and love for God belong in
any simple sense to the constitutional conditions of postlapsarian humanity,
or that at this side of the eschaton, to be is the same as to be saved, such that
we are saved already; consequently, that all Radical Orthodoxys soteriology is
concerned with is manifestation, and thus that to be saved is only to learn a new
view of the world.
[7]
I can see where I might have provided some fodder for such misunder-
standing in claiming for instance that the rudiments of faith, hope, and love are

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 Michael Hanby: A Response to Brachtendorf and Wisse

entailed in every act of knowledge, or that the inherent desire for happiness is
in its way a desire for God, but this is only to say once again in each case that
creatures are inherently and naturally ordered from the outset to what only God
can finally give them, that they are made to receive God as gift. The objections
regarding manifestation and salvation neglect all that I have to say about the
intrinsic interrelation in Augustines thought between knowing and loving. To
have truly acquired a new view of the world, or in terms more befitting his, to love
the truth, is not for Augustine simply to see differently. Precisely because to know
differently is to love differently, it is also to live differently. Surely Augustines
biography demonstrates that. And it is precisely this that Christ as exemplum and
sacramentum enables us to do in the giving of the Spirit in and with the Father.
This is not instead of satisfaction with respect to the law, as Wisse seems to imply.
Rather as Augustine contends repeatedly against the Pelagians, it is only in the
Spirit, that is, out of love at once moved and self-moving, that the law, the perfect
fulfillment of which is the love of Christ himself, can finally be obeyed. Indeed it
is precisely love of God and neighbor that for Augustine constitutes the plenitude
and fullness of the law (De doct.). It is perfectly possible on Augustinian terms to
choose to obey the letter of the law while remaining disobedient, because only
he who loves without reserve is truly obedient and truly free. Indeed the extent
to which we must choose between genuine alternative and incompatible objects
of attraction on this side of beatitude is an index of the extent to which we still
remain un-free. Likewise the first two complaints opposing my elision of creation
and salvation into a single divine economy neglect all that I have to say about sin,
which, contrary to Wisses assertion, is actually a great deal. To insist on a single
economy is not to deny the reality of sin. Rather it is to insist, as Augustine does
in analyzing his theft of the pears in Confessiones II that even our sins, being dis-
tortions of our nature and perverse imitations of the divine goodness upon which
they depend, do not fall outside of that economy any more than the damned of
De Trinitate I fall outside it in their dread vision of Christ in the form of judge only.
[8]
Brachtendorf seems to concur in most of these objections, thinking he is
correcting me, as if I didnt belabor the point of the divided will after the fashion of
the preceding paragraph, when he says that the distinction between via and patria
implies that the human is not unified with God per se, but rather shall become
unified through the passage of a waya process that will first reach its end in the
eschaton. More remarkably still, he seems to think he is further amending my
Trinitarian theology in contesting my depiction of the Fathers eros as provoked
by the beauty of the Son, saying that this implies that the Father has a need that
is satisfied by the beauty of the son, adding that the Son does not have anything
that the Father himself does not have. The criticism seems to trade on the a priori
assumption of a division between eros and agape that I flatly reject. Even in what
I called the eros of faith, which in contrast to the relation of love between Father
and Son does appear as the space of difference and lack, I insist that this very
distance is the site of a gift. I simply do not see how a comprehending reader
could attribute either of these positions to me.
[9]
This tendency to impute to me positions for which I did not argue

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 Michael Hanby: A Response to Brachtendorf and Wisse

undoubtedly indicates instances where my original argument is unclear and in-

sufficiently precise, and again, I appreciate the opportunity to clarify my position.
Yet the haste and frequency with which both critics move from criticism of me
to denunciation of Radical Orthodoxy provokes the question of whether the felt
need to deny Radical Orthodoxy the legitimation of an Augustinian pedigree
sometimes causes them to exaggerate the difference between my admittedly syn-
thetic and constructive proposal and the historical Augustine, to the point of
distorting us both. This is ironic to say the least, since this totalitarian bogey-
man, which overlooks significant differences between those writing under the
auspices of this series, is every bit the monolithic hypostasized construct they
accuse my Augustinianism of being.
[10]
Indeed for Brachtendorf, the Augustine of Augustine and Modernity is lit-
tle more than a pastiche of my own arbitrary construction attempting to legitimate
my own positive theological assertions or those of RO with appeal to patristic
authority. Hence for him, the idiosyncrasies of my reading of De Trinitate and
my alleged neglect of secondary literature, a criticism which bypasses my debts
not only to Rowan Williams, but to Lewis Ayres, Michel Rene Barnes, Jim Wetzel,
Bob Dodaro, Basil Studer, Carol Harrison, James ODonnell, and others, are evi-
dence of this thesis. Though Wisse, who faults me for over-reliance on secondary
literature, ultimately concurs in this judgmentfinding it necessary to remind
me that we are not Jesus and suggesting in the end that I conflate Augustine and
God into my own self-assertionhis is once again the more insightful objection. I
fully acknowledge at the outset an uneasy tension between the books exegetical,
synthetic, and constructive aspects; moreover, I offer principled methodological
reasons for why this and all appropriations of Augustine must exhibit this tension.
Brachtendorf simply disregards all this, preferring instead to criticize the book
for failing to be what it denies in principle is either possible or desirable, which is
a bit like criticizing an orange for failing to be a peach.
[11]
In his haste to deny my book any Augustinian legitimacy, he also ignores
my rather close attention to significant exegetical details such as Augustines
frequent pairing of Romans 5:5 and Galatians 5:6 that seem to have escaped
the attention of most commentators. And he thus refuses even to entertain my
contention that the book can plausibly claim to be more genuinely Augustinian
than some of its conventional alternatives, not in spite but because of its synthetic
and constructive aspects. For instance, I claim that my reading supplies the other-
wise elusive unity binding both halves of De Trinitate, which are too often treated
as if they were two different works. Moreover, I claim to uncover a conceptual
unity between this great work and those of the anti-Pelagian Augustine which
are too often treated as if they were the product of different authors. There are
many reasons for this, but one is simply the divisions in the modern academy
between the various guilds, which either find only certain features of the vast
Augustinian corpus relevant to their concerns or which are so laden with his-
torical and metaphysical assumptions that they are constitutionally incapable of
considering certain of Augustines truth claims and practices as anything more
than historical artifacts. In this case, departure from the guilds would be a sign of

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 Michael Hanby: A Response to Brachtendorf and Wisse

the strength of the books Augustinian credentials and not its weakness, though
here again I leave it to readers to render the final verdict.
[12]
Wisse, on the other hand, agrees in principle on the legitimacy of an
Augustinian synthesis and even takes cognizance of my concern for the ontolog-
ical implications of exegetical method. In the end, however, he demurs. Not
only does Hanby not practice historical and exegetical analysis, he would not
even be able to do it, as it contradicts Radical Orthodoxys ontology. (Note
once more the seamless movement from Hanby to the monolithic ideology of
Radical Orthodoxy.) Here again though Wisse misses the point, which is not to
deny the importance of history or historical analysis but rather to ask whether
modern methodologies, which entail ontological presuppositions of their own,
are adequate to the phenomenon of historicity and the task of historiography.
[13]
I do not speak for Radical Orthodoxys philosophy of history, and I
will refrain here from attempting to articulate anew what I think it might mean
to think theologically or in Augustinian fashion about history as a theoretical
or ontological category, though I will say that while the revelation of God as
Trinity is for us an event within history, the unfolding of the inexpressible Trinity
along the lines of time seems to me to have the matter somewhat backward
if taken as an ontological statement of the relationship between eternity and
time. Be that as it may, I ask more mundanely what methods of historical and
exegetical analysis are adequate to thinking with (and not just about) a man
who held to a macrocosmic/microcosmic isomorphism between the soul, city, and
cosmos, who believed that each thing was a vestige of the Trinity merely by virtue
of its measure, weight, and number, who subscribed to a symbolic universe, a
typological view of history and a view of knowledge as illumination, and whose
own exegetical practices exemplify all this at virtually every turn? Does not the
a priori assumption that historical analysis as the contemporary sciences know
it can reliably deliver the historical meaning of his thought entail a certain
measure of anachonism from the very outset, presupposing as it does, that the
nature of history is a settled matter? The difference is that I acknowledge both this
problem and the inevitably anachronistic character both of all appropriations of
Augustine and of Augustines appropriation of Scripture, but this does not mean
that I take it as license simply to construct an Augustine of my own convenience,
as Wisse seems to suggest, any more than Augustine thought he had license to
make Scripture mean whatever he pleased. In defense of my position, I can do
no more to offer evidence than simply recommend my arguments in favor of the
synthesis and let other readers decide once more whose interpretation in fact does
Augustine the greater violence.
[14]
Whatever the various factors contributing to these misinterpretations
and objections, all are to my mind premised on a more fundamental disagree-
ment over the relationship between God and the world in my interpretation of
Augustine and in my own thought or that of Radical Orthodoxy more generally.
I realize that these are merely one and the same in the eyes of Brachtendorf and
Wisse, but it is nevertheless necessary to raise this distinction because I believe it
is certain un-Augustinian metaphysical presuppositions on their part that frame

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 Michael Hanby: A Response to Brachtendorf and Wisse

their reading of both Augustine and me and continually lead them to force my
argument into unpalatable alternatives contrary to its own sense. I have indicated
some of these already. Each opposes my elision of creation and sanctification into
a single economy on grounds first, that it is un-Augustinian, and second, that
to do so creates an indissoluble connection between the worldly and the godly
or makes creation ontologically linked to the being of God in such a way that
it simultaneously robs the world of its worldliness and God of his godliness, or
worse still, makes both merely the receptacle for the capricious will of the Radi-
cally Orthodox. In Wisses case, and in spite of his objection to what he takes to
be my Barthian Christology, this objection appears to be premised upon his accep-
tance of the Barthian misunderstanding and subsequent rejection of the analogia
entis. To admit this, he seems to imply, is to erase the distinction between nature
and grace, which is ultimately to erase the ontological difference between God
and creation and thus to make God share the ontological structure of the world.
Hence knowledge for Augustine cannot be a matter of participation or illumi-
nation (though neither Brachtendorf nor Wisse tell us what it is on Augustinian
terms) without denying reason its proper autonomy as reason. Sanctification
and creation cannot comprise a single economy in their minds without it leading
to the absurd conclusions that to be is to be saved or that sin is an unreal figment
of our imaginations.
[15]
Wisse is of course absolutely correct to call our attention to some of
the numerous passages in which Augustine insists upon the absolute ontological
difference between God and the world, and he is also correct, in my estimation,
to suggest that this difference is finally and most fully realized, not even in the
transcendence of the Plotinian One, but with the Christian understanding of
God as Creator in the strict sense. Augustine never relents on this difference
it would be idolatry to do so and yet throughout the Pelagian controversy
he insists that every human act which can finally be called good is at once
the work of the creature and the Creator, that there is no moment at which the
human contribution to this act can be held in a state of reserve as its own private
possession, separate from the gift of grace. And whats more, he insists against
Pelagian incomprehension that the gift of love which enables such acts does
not compromise or violate human freedom or autonomy but rather constitutes
them precisely as free and human. One can relegate this to a distinct realm of
sanctification, as my critics do, but this raises more problems than it solves, and
it should not be mistaken at any rate for an answer to the question of how we
might think through this possibility.
[16]
My purpose in rereading the Pelagian controversy in the light of what I
take to be the Christology and ecclesiology of De Trinitate and other works was not
to save Augustines doctrine of grace from its nasty aspectspredestination of
course, as Wisse asserts. (Brachtendorf ignores this aspect of my work entirely.)
In fact, it should be clear that I regard the question of predestination as at best a
secondary concern. Rather, my purpose was to make sense of these paradoxical
claims by displaying how an Augustinian conception of the God-nature relation-
ship in Christ overcomes just those presuppositions which shackle Brachtendorfs

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 Michael Hanby: A Response to Brachtendorf and Wisse

and Wisses thinking and force them and the Pelagians into the misbegotten al-
ternatives they impose upon me. For there is a deep analogy between the question
of how an act can be at once divine and human without compromising the differ-
ence between God and the world and the question of how the Son can become
incarnate without sacrificing genuine divinity or humanity, even if there remains
an infinite difference between Christ our Head and us, his Bodya difference I
adamantly affirm. Or put differently, if one can offer a coherent account of how
the Son could become incarnate without violating either his divinity or humanity,
one can offer a coherent account of how the graced act could be at once Gods and
mine, and more finally and fully the latter for being the former.
[17]
The alternatives suggested by Brachtendorf and Wisse appear to trade
on questionable metaphysical assumptions similar to those of the Pelagians,
namely, that the world for its part cannot be really related to God without com-
promising both its worldly integrity and the genuine divinity of God. This would
seem to be the implication of Wisses Barthian equation of the analogia entis with
ontological continuity and his assumption that participation elides the being of
God into that of the world. But the best accounts of what would become known as
the analogia entis were predicated not on the similarity between God and the world,
but upon the dissimilarity that obviated the need for these despairing alternatives
by denying, from Gods side, what Thomas would call a real relation to the world,
thus making the real opposition between divine and created being incoherent. It
is this dissimilarity, this ontological discontinuity, the fact that God is not really
but freely and contingently related to the world that makes it possible to think
both the incarnation, and by analogy, a doctrine of grace that at once constitutes,
perfects, and completes nature in its very naturality while remaining entirely
distinct and gratuitous. Were I now to argue this independently of Augustine, I
would take recourse to the Thomist distinction between the esse ipsum subsistens
of God himself and the esse creatum non subsistens of the world to account for how
we might think of the world as being at once possessed of its own being while
being nonetheless intrinsically constituted in relation to God and dependent for
its fulfillment as world on the gift of grace. And it is on this basis that I would
contend, perhaps more strongly than I did in the book, for a genuine sense of
creaturely, human and by extension, philosophical autonomy, founded not
in a fictional independence from God, but rather precisely in its embrace of its
need for and dependence upon God.
[18]
Wisse is of course right to say that Augustine has no doctrine of anal-
ogy per se, and he lacks a notion of created being as precise as Thomas, but I
stand by my claims in Augustine and Modernity that the essential elements for this
understanding are there and that it develops historically, centuries before Radical
Orthodoxy, in genuine continuity with Augustine. (See Henri de Lubacs Augus-
tinianism and Modern Theology.) For a major purpose of my participationist account
was to show how the Augustinian mens is constituted in analogous relation to
God, not fundamentally by virtue of its similarity to the Trinity, but by virtue of
its difference, how it is like God precisely in being unlike God: as the creature
whose very being is constituted in its integral distinction from God by its inherent

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 Michael Hanby: A Response to Brachtendorf and Wisse

need and desire for the God who has no need. This is why, both in De Trinitate
and in fact, Rowan Williams is correct in insisting that the lover, beloved, love
triad finally trumps the memoria, intellectus, voluntas and memoria sui, intellegentia
sui and voluntas sui triads, or rather why the latter comes to be encompassed by
the former in the creatures dependent relation to God. (Had he bothered with
the books final chapter, where I contrast the cogitarian arguments of Augustine
and Descartes, Brachtendorf could not have accused me of ignoring the triad of
self memory, knowledge and love.) Augustine does make the remarkable claim
in De Trin. VIII that one can know God more clearly than he knows his brother.
It is there after all that Augustine makes the even more astonishing claim, thou
seest the Trinity if thou seest Love. And it is why Brachtendorf is simply wrong
when he says that Augustine believes to have found precisely in [this last triad]
the image of the Trinitarian God. This trinity, then, of the mind is not therefore
the image of God, because the mind remembers itself, and understands and loves
itself; but because it can remember, understand, and love Him by whom it was
made (De Trin., XIV). And as Augustine is forever reminding us, it does so by
faith working through love . . . which is diffused in our hearts by the Holy
Ghost who is working in us.
[19]
The question, then, is not whether there is a difference between God
and the world, whether nature has a legitimate freedom or autonomy, or even
whether the world in its freedom, autonomy, and being not-God has the capacity
to remain indifferent or resistant to divine solicitations. Of course it does; it would
be blindness to claim otherwise, and in fact, I never do. Rather the question
for my critics and, I argue, for Augustine against the Pelagians is whether it
is this indifference and this capacity for resistance that constitutes the world in
its very worldliness, whether the legitimate autonomy of the world consists in
this indifference and resistance, or rather whether the world and its autonomy
find their fulfillment in relation to God because this fulfillment answers to their
original, intrinsic constitution as creatures.
[20]
One can put this yet another way. Having mistakenly accused me
of simply equating creation and salvation, and thus casting sanctification as a
mere metaphysical datum that has already determined the being of humans,
Brachtendorf insists that religious ethical conversion . . . depicts an act in the
life of humans who must already be constituted as human in order to be capable of
religious question. Fair enough, but what does it really mean to be constituted as
human, and does the incarnation of God in Christ reveal anything of the inherent
meaning of human and created being qua human and created and being? In other
words, does this religious-ethical conversion consequent upon Christ answer to
the metaphysical constitution of created, and specifically human, being? Does
the mutual embrace of the non posse peccare, to say nothing of the resurrection
of the body, complete and perfect humans persons in their human-ness? Or is
this conversion merely religious and ethical, a merely extrinsic and ultimately
arbitrary addition to a nature constituted as natural by virtue of its neutrality and
indifference to this conversion and to its divine source and end? In which case it
is the sheer given fact of created and human being, and not sanctification, that

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 Michael Hanby: A Response to Brachtendorf and Wisse

is truly a mere metaphysical datum, one, ironically, which reduces God to the
same.
[21]
Earlier I questioned Bractendorfs interpretation of Augustines distinc-
tion between via and patria, asking whether the revelation of Christ as the means
discloses anything essential of the end. The question is now reversed. Does the
revelation of the end disclose anything essential about the means and about those
for whom Christ is the way? Can we say no without inadvertently lapsing into
atheism? Is the unity of God and humanity simply an extrinsic miracle pene-
trating an otherwise neutral stream of causes and effects, merely one event on
the plane of history? Or must it by definition affect the meaning of every other
event past or future? I believe that the answer to these questions given by the
length and breadth of the Augustinian corpus is so obvious that it takes a certain
self-imposed blindness not to see it.
[22]
However, while Brachtendorf prefers simply to ignore these obvious
features of Augustines thought, it is not at all clear that Wisse is so much blind
to these aspects as afraid of them. For he too acknowledges the need for a
constructive Augustinian synthesis, and he too is candid that this will mean
elevating certain features of Augustines thought over others. And in something
of a contrast to Brachtendorf, who though disregarding the breadth and depth
of these claims nevertheless attempts to oppose them on Augustinian grounds,
Wisse does not strictly object to my contention that the world derives its meaning
as world from its relation to the God incarnate in Christ on grounds that it is
un-Augustinian. Rather he objects to what he takes to be the ontology of Radical
Orthodoxy, and presumably Augustine insofar as he has any community with
it, on grounds that it is dangerously totalitarianin other words, because those
inconvenient features of Augustines thought do not conform to his antecedent
metaphysical and ethical commitments. Is this really making the most of those
elements of Augustine that fit into [his] reading least?
[23]
It should come as no surprise though, that in mistaking the nature of this
ontology, Wisse completely mistakes its practical and existential consequences.
His objection trades first, on a mistaken assumption we have already considered,
namely, that God, my neighbor, and I are bound by this view into the same
ontological structure such that God and my neighbor become merely the passive
receptacle for my dominant self-assertion. A proper sense of analogy, rather, is
one which recognizes that all likenesses of creation to God are encompassed by
an ever-greater unlikeness. The conclusions Wisse draws from this assumption
are aided and abetted, secondly, by what appears to be his consent to the modern
juxtaposition of freedom and determination. Thus to integrate the whole of
history in one and the same world of signs pointing to the one single reality is
ipso facto to do violence to that world. But to say that the world figures God in
its very worldliness is not to say that it has only one meaning surely this is
refuted by Augustinian exegesis! that this meaning is entirely clear to us, or that
its clarity is grounds for mastery, possession, and domination. To the contrary,
to say that the meaning of the world as world is constituted in relation to God
who really is other to the world is to say that the truth of the world, like the

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works of Christ himself, cannot be contained by the world. The worlds criterion
of identity does not lie solely within itselfand here Brachtendorfs criticism
of sanctification as having already determined the being of humans becomes
interesting to contemplate, albeit in a very different sense, one suspects, than the
one he meant. The Confessiones can be read as Augustines attempt to come to
grips with this displaced criterion of identity, to know himself as he is known,
which means knowing that many of his self-definitions heretofore were false, and
that for all his increased clarity, he remains for all that, an enigma.
[24]
Entailed in this very hope is not the juxtaposition of freedom and
determination, but the coincidence of mystery and determination, indeed an
infinity of mystery within the determination of meaning, all of which points to
the convertability of infinite beauty and infinite truth, beauty which makes truth
desirable in the first place. And we must insist that it is only on these grounds, in
this recognition of the beauty of a truth that exceeds and encompasses us and
not, as Wisse would seem to have it, in the monochrome austerity of some Kantian
or Levinasian alterity that the love he rightfully commends as Augustinian can
finally be sustained. Because only this infinity of meaning and beauty constituting
the other (and constituting me as other to myself) can compel the radical self-
surrender and dispossession that actually receives the other, the surrender and
reception that is at once love and true Augustinian freedom.
[25]
The demand for this surrender my surrender is indeed frightening,
not least because there is no procedure guaranteeing holiness in advance, and
the expectation of really receiving another is perhaps more frightening still. Au-
gustine certainly seems to have thought so and put it off till he found he had no
other choice, which is of course the very moment that he recovered his freedom
and his will was restored to itself. The figure of choice hardly does justice to
so serious and agonizing a phenomenon, suggesting as it does that reservoir of
autarkic self-containment, unperturbed by the demand and unimpaired in its at-
tempt to comply. Modernity, of course, has relished this reserve and the ontology
of indeterminacy that accompanies it. As both a cause and consequence of its
voluntarist conception of freedom, and in stark contrast to Augustine, modernity
sees the natural as constituted by its very meaninglessness. A significant portion
of Augustine and Modernity is devoted to an argument along these lines, but neither
Brachtendorf nor Wisse give it more than passing mention. From this point of
view, any claim that the world has inherent meaning in relation to God or that this
meaning is necessary for the realization of human being and freedom is regarded
with suspicion as a totalitarian infringement upon this voluntarist liberty; con-
cerns clearly echoed in Wisses objections to Radical Orthodoxy and more faintly,
perhaps, in Brachtendorfs attempts to secure a realm of purely human autonomy
beyond the reach of theology.
[26]
For in seeming to constitute human being in indifference to sanctifi-
cation, faith, and love for God, and in premising the autonomy of philosophy
on this basis, Brachtendorf perhaps unwittingly suggests just such a view. Wisse
falls even more obviously into this pitfall, not just in his objection to Radical Or-
thodoxys alleged totalitarianism, but more fundamentally in making the posse

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 Michael Hanby: A Response to Brachtendorf and Wisse

peccare an essential element of human freedom. (What then of the non posse peccare
of the blessed or of God himself; are these less free?). But this is not, as he claims,
to take sin more seriously; rather it is to valorize it. It is easy to misread Augustine
in this way, especially when he is attempting to absolve God from responsibility
for evil by laying it squarely on the shoulders of perverted angelic and human
wills. But nowhere does he celebrate this capacity for rejecting God by making
it an essential element of freedom; indeed this is always a sign of bondage and
unfreedom, of wills foolishly and proudly withholding themselves or absurdly
surrendering themselves to what is beneath them, whether the subject be the in-
dividual soul of the Confessiones or the earthly city as a whole, conquered by its
own libido dominandi. The capacity to reject God does not belong to our nobility
or dignity but is rather an unfortunate possibility inherent in the fact that we are
not God, and it is always a departure from this dignity. It does not belong to the
essence of our agency but remains in the end an absurd and ultimately irrational
and inexplicable defect of that agencya deficient cause in the words of De
civ. XII, beyond which no further explanation should be sought or can be given.
Brachtendorfs assertion to the contrary notwithstanding, there remains a sense
common to both De libero arbitrio and De civitate Dei in which Augustine does not
and in principle cannot answer the Manichean question, unde malum? For he
refuses to dignify evil with reason.
[27]
As grateful as I am therefore for my critics diligent efforts and as mindful
as I am of the inadequate and overly general character of my reply, I cannot avoid
concluding that there are important senses in which they have not understood
me and perhaps could not understand me, since their assessments appear to be-
tray commitments to metaphysical principles similar to those animating Pelagian
opposition to Augustine, metaphysical principles which I tried in my book to
uncover and refuse. That these presuppositions should assert themselves unwit-
tingly in Augustines name and in his defense and not for the first time by any
means is the irony and the tragedy of Augustine and modernity.

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