After Writing: On the Liturgical Cosummation of Philosophy (Challenges in Contemporary Theology) [Paperback]

Catherine Pickstock (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2, 1998 | Series: Challenges in Contemporary Theology

After Writing provides a significant contribution to the growing genre of works which offers a challenge to modern and postmodern accounts of Christianity.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Highly recommended." Fergus Kerr, Blackfriars, Edinburgh

"After Writing establishes Catherine Pickstock as one of the most promising young theologians in the English-speaking world. The book is insightful, provocative, and of consistently high scholarly quality." L. Gregory Jones, Duke University

"I applaud the thesis of this impressive work." Paul Avis, Center for the study of the Christian Church Exeter

"One could in conscience recommended this volume only to the ambitious and determined, but they will find it rich, and Pickstock is a name to be watching for." William C. Placher, Christian Century

"Catherine Pickstock, has perhaps written the best riposte yet to the archbishop's request for a 'spiritual space' within the Millennium Dome." C. W. Kemp

"Pickstock's discussion of Derrida is sophisticated." Bryan D. Spinks, Yale University

"Lightning may now be said to have struck in the form of Catherine Pickstock's After Writing, a bright flash in the sometimes murky world of religion and Postmodernism." David Williams, Religion & Literature

"its theses are destined to be the subject of much discussion." Tracey Rowland, Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge

"Her argument deserves to be widely discussed: it is genuine theology, an example of what might be done were Christian theologians to abandon idolatry and take seriously the reality of the triune God to whom their work is supposed to be subject." Paul Griffiths, University of Chicago

"The proposal of a radical self-surpassing giftedness in the eucharist invites the possibility of future conversations with other hermeneutical positions." David Livingston, Mercyhurst College

"This a book of real originality, and in its finest moments it achieves an almost visionary intensity ... She is extraordinarily gifted, and I suspect that in this book we have merely glimpsed her portent." Pro Ecclesia

From the Back Cover

After Writing provides a significant contribution to the growing genre of works which offers a challenge to modern and postmodern accounts of Christianity. Catherine Pickstock shows how Platonic philosophy did not assume a primacy of metaphysical presence, as had previously been thought, but a primacy of liturgical theory and practice. The author also provides a significant rethinking of Christian understandings of language, temporal and bodily life, and notions of the presence of God by discussing the Christian understandings of the liturgical practice, especially in the Medieval and pre-Enlightenment era. Through a detailed reading of Plato's Phaedrus, the medieval Roman Rite, and a discussion of the theology of the Eucharist, the book indicates directions for the restoration of the liturgical order.

This book will be required reading for all systematic and philosophical theologians and their students, besides being of great interest to liturgists, historians and linguists. The ideas presented in the book are both significant in themselves and of great use at a teaching level.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell; 1 edition (January 2, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0631206728
• ISBN-13: 978-0631206729
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #427,395 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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62 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A treatise of startling intellectual power, March 1, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: After Writing: On the Liturgical Cosummation of Philosophy (Challenges in Contemporary Theology) (Paperback)

This is a remarkable treatise, and I can do no better than to quote what Latin Mass Magazine (Winter 1998) had to say:

"Dr. Catherine Pickstock of Cambridge University is an unusual philosopher: she has an ear for liturgy and, though a member of the Church of England, she has studied and is deeply inspired by the traditional Roman Rite of the Catholic Church.

"At first glance, her book After Writing: On The Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Malden Mass.: Blackwell, 1998), which develops her doctoral dissertation, appears to be an abstract and extremely difficult work of politico-literary criticism, intended only for specialists. But what actually emerges in her defense of 'radical orthodoxy' is quite possibly the most poetically powerful defense of the Mass, and its place in culture, in a generation.

"Her thesis: outside liturgy, as embodied in the traditional Mass, there can be no meaning. The first half of her book examines the crucial role of praise of the divine, or 'doxology,' in the philosophy and culture of the ancient world. She explains how, with the coming of Christendom, the doxological dimension of antique thought was brought to a fuller realization in early liturgical texts, and thereby shaped the culture and politics of civilization of the pre-modern era.

"The second half subjects the entire Mass text to a remarkably close, phrase-by-phrase, philosophical and theological analysis that turns the method of postmodern literary criticism in on itself. She concludes that the old Catholic liturgy is the 'culmination' of philosophy, art, literature, and life itself, and defends that position in a treatise that has astonished reviewers with its brilliance, erudition, and sheer intellectual rigor."

45 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, but sometimes shockingly deficient., November 20, 2002

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: After Writing: On the Liturgical Cosummation of Philosophy (Challenges in Contemporary Theology) (Paperback)

There are some really fantastic elements in this book. But let me tell you first that I am a Catholic associated with the movement to restore the Tridentine Rite, and I can legitimately call myself a Thomist as far as my metaphysics and theology go. And so my criticisms of the work do not flow from a rejection of either of these.

Pickstock's reading of Plato's Phaedrus and her refutation of Derrida are a cut above. Because Derrida is so obscure in style and terminology, Pickstock's refutation necessarily comes off a bit obscure itself. But she also seems very comfortable with that sort of discourse and makes little effort to speak to those who are untouched by post-modernist drivel. Still, it is a very rich and incisive critique of Derrida, the best I have read.

Many of Pickstock's criticisms of modern philosophy and the evolution of modern languages seem to me to be very original, very accurate, and very important. Unfortunately, she has some gross misunderstandings of medieval philosophy, in particular Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas.

For Aquinas, body and soul are *really* distinct. The fact that the two are inseparable in material beings has no bearing on the issue. Wherever there is composition, potency and act must be really distinct. This applies both to the essence/act-of-being distinction and the matter/form distinction. The distinction of matter and form is therefore not a logical one as she claims. This error is astounding in one who claims to follow Thomas.

Her portrayal of Scotus is so flawed that it would take a short book to refute it. But let me get at least to the root of her difficulties, namely the "univocity of being". There is a great danger in learning your Scotism from thomists, because they are so intent on proselytizing Thomas that they rarely make an honest effort to understand alternative formulations. There is a common myth, no doubt reassuring to these thomists, that the golden age of medieval philosophy ended with the death of Aquinas in 1274. (Rather than actually argue the philosophical facts, everyone today seems content with telling these rhetorically charged "histories" of philosophy. They are in fact quite useless.) Everyone before Aquinas is his precursor or opponent. Everyone after him represents a deviation and a failure to understand him. There is a rise, a peak in Aquinas, then a progressive decline. It is a lot more complicated than this. Contrary to Pickstock's claim, Scotus was not primarily addressing Aquinas at all, but Henry of Ghent, who maintained not an analogy of being, but an equivocity of being. Scotus answered that there *had* to be some sense in which being is univocal, notwithstanding the denial of Saint Thomas. (He does not thereby deny that being is also predicated analogously!) But Scotus also meant something different by univocity. Univocity is simply that which suffices for a middle term in a syllogism. It does not have the baggage that Thomists try to foist upon it. And Scotus points out that even those who reject univocal being in fact make constant use of it.

Now Aquinas describes several sorts of "analogy". The "analogy of proportion" is the proportion between essence and act-of-being. It is only within created beings, because there is properly speaking no proportion between essence and act-of-being in God, only identity. The second holds *between* one being and another. This class will later be called the "analogy of attribution." In this latter sort of analogy, there is one "ratio" (aspect) in which two beings are the same and one in which they differ. So this kind of analogy reduces to a combination of univocity and equivocity. Scotus simply isolated this univocal aspect, and showed that it is the foundation of quantitative comparisons of beings. Hence his distinction between the infinite mode of being (God) and the finite mode of being (creatures). Rather than produce these unending mock contests between Scotus and Aquinas, Thomists should spend more time actually reading both philosophers. All of Pickstock's misrepresentations of Scotus flow from this fundamental misunderstanding.

Although I appreciate Pickstock's promotion of the Tridentine Rite, her motivations seem to be misplaced. She seems far too concerned with the social role of religion, as though Christianity were first and foremost about Christians and only then about Christ. A Catholic certainly cannot accept this distortion. The Real Presence for a Catholic must always be the "Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity" of Jesus Christ under the appearance of bread and wine. The Reality follows infallibly from the sacramental action of the ministerial priesthood, not from the priesthood of all believers. This Angelic Bread nourishes and builds up the Mystical Body through the practice of Holy Communion. So the Real Presence has priority over the Mystical Body. And it is precisely this that was forgotten after Vatican II.

This book is flavored with Pickstock's High Church Anglicanism and post-modern agenda. It is worth a read, but Catholics need to be wary when she claims to accurately characterize medieval (i.e. Catholic) thought.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A treatise of startling intellectual power, March 1, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: After Writing: On the Liturgical Cosummation of Philosophy (Challenges in Contemporary Theology) (Paperback)

This is a remarkable treatise, and I can do no better than to quote what Latin Mass Magazine (Winter 1998) had to say:

"Dr. Catherine Pickstock of Cambridge University is an unusual philosopher: she has an ear for liturgy and, though a member of the Church of England, she has studied and is deeply inspired by the traditional Roman Rite of the Catholic Church.

"At first glance, her book After Writing: On The Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Malden Mass.: Blackwell, 1998), which develops her doctoral dissertation, appears to be an abstract and extremely difficult work of politico-literary criticism, intended only for specialists. But what actually emerges in her defense of 'radical orthodoxy' is quite possibly the most poetically powerful defense of the Mass, and its place in culture, in a generation.

"Her thesis: outside liturgy, as embodied in the traditional Mass, there can be no meaning. The first half of her book examines the crucial role of praise of the divine, or 'doxology,' in the philosophy and culture of the ancient world. She explains how, with the coming of Christendom, the doxological dimension of antique thought was brought to a fuller realization in early liturgical texts, and thereby shaped the culture and politics of civilization of the pre-modern era.

"The second half subjects the entire Mass text to a remarkably close, phrase-by-phrase, philosophical and theological analysis that turns the method of postmodern literary criticism in on itself. She concludes that the old Catholic liturgy is the 'culmination' of philosophy, art, literature, and life itself, and defends that position in a treatise that has astonished reviewers with its brilliance, erudition, and sheer intellectual rigor."