Scott-Coe's Essay
Submitted by Ed Appel on Tue, 2005-08-02 09:19
I certainly agree with both Hawhee and Fitzgerald that it's time to push Burke's RHETORIC OF RELIGION more into the mainstream, not just for its insight into the forms of language (it's surely gotten its share of attention, within Burke studies, on that score), but also for its shrewd commentary on the imperatives of human nature. At the panel on Burke and education at NCA last month, Robert Wess raised the question of why there's so much religiosity in the air right now. The woman sitting next to him on the plane (I think it was) reading her Bible, among other mainifestations of Christian faith to cross his path, apparently filled him with wonder and trepidation. Where's all this presumptive fanaticism---the gist of Bob's inquiry---coming from in this enlightened day and age? I responded with Burke's definition of logology---the systematic study of theological terms for the light they may throw on the forms of language---with its implicit assertion that theological concepts and beliefs will surely be with us always, even unto the end of the age.
I should have gone further with that thought, however. It's Burke's philosophy that can explain the recrudescence of Fundamentalism in our time, not any positivism, empiricism, or scientism. From a scientistic standpoint, red-state revulsion at rampant sexuality and secularism in our popular culture is inexplicable. To a modernist, maybe even postmodernist, mindset, liberal preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick's naive prediction of 75 years ago would make eminent sense: Someday everybody's going to think like me. The dictates of the hortatory negative and its perfectionist residues will be rescinded. Under the irresistible weight of scientific demystifications, religion, except in its etiolated mainstream forms, will wither.
In my view, Scott-Coe brilliantly brings these issues to the fore once again. She makes Burke's inherently theological system (well, Chesebro called it a System in the title of HIS book) stand out clearly, figure/ground, in apt comparison with Augustine and counterpositioning with Ramus. Was Burke a theologian, and if so, what kind? Scott-Coe offers some neat stuff in partial answer to that query. (A definitive answer is not in the offing to that, as well as many other, questions about Burke and his philosophy.)
I hope to get to some of this neat stuff in later posts. If I can find them in my deep files, I might share, also, a couple of Burke's epistolary answers to my claim that he was, in fact, a theologain of a kind.
Poet, then actor, then theologian---aren't those the metaphors Burke proposed, in serial progression, for the symbol-using animal?
If you dare, tell me that's not so.
Comments
When I say that the implications of Burke's dramatism/logology tend to deconstruct the Christian drama, I'm not ascribing to Burke's system apodictic certainty in the matter. God is a mystery (or, if you prefer, God is a mystery). The Transcendental realm Burke calls God in RM---Burke says there that it exists, God exists, in our mind by dialectical necessity---is a mystery. Statements of nonbelief, as well as those of belief, are no less metaphysical conjectures. When they assert that life forms arose and evolved on this planet altogether by accident, Darwinians can't actually know that. Thoroughly unemergent, anti-teleological evolutionism is every bit a matter of faith as Creationism's new tack, intelligent design. Deconstructors see through a glass (filter, lens, frame, template, guiding vector, screen, lamination) darkly, too.
On the issue of evolution and possible imperatives in the structure of life forms themselves---if I'm not getting too far afield here---an acquaintance of mine at the Unitarian Universalist church I attend had some pertinent things to say in an article of his in the journal SCIENCE (19 May, 2000, Vol. 288, pp. 1239-1242). He is Roger D. K. Thomas, John Williamson Nevin Professor of Geosciences at Franklin & Marshcll College. The essay is entitled, Evolutionary Exploitation of Design Options by the First Animals with Hard Skeletons (coauthored with Rebecca M. Shearman and Graham W. Stewart). In the piece, Thomas et al. take issue with Thomas's mentor at Harvard, Stephen Jay Gould. Thomas put his demurrers and differences this way in a letter he sent me (he had read a theistic sermon I had preached at the church last summer):
This letter is prompted by the thought that you may find the enclosed reprint interesting. I learned a great deal from Stephen Jay Gould. However, we came to differ quite fundamentally on the rules of 'history' and 'constraint' in evolution. For Steve, the accidents of history were central, not incidental. You will see from my own work that, like Peter Atkins, I see the large-scale, long-term patterns of evolution as being much more largely determined by natural laws. However, I must acknowledge that without the accidents of history, there can be no free will. I suspect that this was Steve's underlying motive, perhaps not even fully conscious, for his passionate embrace of the accidents of history.
Gould had given an endowed lecture at UUCL just before his death, as arranged by Professor Thomas. Thomas sent me a tape recording of Gould's quite fascinating talk. I listened to it several times and responded with a five-page letter. That's how we initially got going on this topic. Thomas's take on evolution at least tangentially relates to theology through the question of what's built into material processes in our universe, the accidents of history providing propitious conditions for emergence.
I hope to get to a reductive definition of theism, and some Burke correspondence on these themes, later.