Pickstock Chooses Radical Orthodoxy

Cambridge University philosopher Catherine Pickstock challenges the very basis of the modern outlook by returning to the Western tradition that society must be rooted in worship.

If ideas have consequences, then the University of Cambridge has been the source of many such consequences. Sometime after 1200, groups of scholars began congregating around the religious houses and hospitals that had grown up in the prosperous market town. Over the centuries luminaries such as Erasmus, William Tyndale, Thomas Cranmer, High Latimer, John Harvard, Isaac Newton, several signers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, poets such as Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Byron, great philosophers and literary critics, and scientists such as Babbage, Darwin, Maxwell, Thomson, Hopkins, Rutherford, Crick and Watson found a home or a starting place in Cambridge, England.

So it is not surprising that a new movement has been developing in Cambridge that finds all this accomplishment, insofar as it is a type of Western civilization, somewhat regrettable -- not so much because the achievements of the West are not genuine and indeed of great value, but because the modern Western mind has chosen to think that these advances are complete and sufficient unto themselves. The movement is centered in a group of philosophers and theologians resident at Cambridge or who have studied there, including John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, Graham Ward and a score of others who are reaffirming the primacy in everyday life of the Good and the Beautiful, and the mysterious reality of God. They are using the traditional categories of Western thought from Plato to Aquinas to criticize and correct the errors of the modern world. This they term "radical orthodoxy," a fundamental challenge to the architects of modern philosophy from Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx and Sartre, to Derrida, Foucault and their current followers.

Insight went to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, to talk to Catherine Pickstock, whose recent book, After Writing: The Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy, is a basic statement of a spiritually based attitude toward social community.

Insight: After Writing takes on some very astonishing propositions and in effect turns a lot of modern thought on its head. If you look at the range of philosophy as it has developed in the Western world, it may be divided into two kinds. During the first 2,000 years of Western philosophy, say from the time of Plato to the time of Aquinas, that is to about the year 1300, most people seemed to think that our knowledge was enriched by including things which could not be seen, which could not be specifically articulated in everyday life. After Aquinas, a movement grew that only the things that could be seen and articulated constitute knowledge of any value. If you consider Plato and Western thought up to the time of Aquinas, what was the perception that people had of their existence and the life around them?

Catherine Pickstock: I think perhaps it will be fair to say that one of the most characteristic aspects of the perception of reality from Plato to Aquinas -- obviously with variants in between and huge disagreements among individuals- was all of an ordered universe which was beautiful, and that the beauty manifested in the universe was a sign of a transcendent mind and a creator.

Insight: If "transcendent" means God is more than humans can understand, does that mean we can have no knowledge of God, that God is something completely "other" from us and therefore utterly unknowable?

CP: No. It depends what you mean by "knowledge.daytime phone number. " Because the created universe was just that, i.e., created, according to the tradition the whole of the universe participates in God and therefore isn't in any simple way outside of God. The universe is not "in addition" to God in any mundane sense. And so it's precisely as I said. By perceiving beauty in the universe, we can know something inchoately of the creator. This is exactly what, in a way, Plato is saying, although of course he didn't have a God in the Christian sense. But in his dialogue, the Phaedrus, he talks of perceiving beauty in the physical world, and that beauty for him triggers memory in the philosopher's soul of all forms of the good.

Insight: But in the Phaedrus, he attacks the Sophists. What was it in their point of view that he thought was so reprehensible?

CP: A great many things, but above all this: their detachment of things from their origins and aims in the good -- a simple mercantilist outlook which, rather than seeking to push everything in the direction of its recollection of the good, rather sought to place everything in a position of maximum output, accumulation and [earning a living].

Insight: Does the Sophistic attitude make any difference for the organization of society? Some people think that philosophy is just some idle speculation from an ivory tower. Does the philosophy held by a people make any difference in their culture and the way they run the state?