The Metaphysics of the Sublime: Old Wine, New Wineskin?

John Milbank’s and Phillip Blond’s narratives of modernity’s descent to nihilism identify the “metaphysics of the sublime” as a feature of modernity, assimilated from Kant’s critical project, that is particularly problematic for the robust post-modern Christian theology proposed in Radical Orthodoxy. This essay argues that the sublime is not the concept most fundamental to their account of Kant’s role in modernity. Far more important is the “phenomenon/noumenon” distinction, which Milbank and Blond read as a “two-world” distinction—an understanding that, despite a long history in Kant interpretation, is not Kant’s. It is less important, however, that constructive dialogue between Radical Orthodoxy and Catholic theology correct this misreading of Kant. More important will be efforts to understand the metaphor of the “immense depth of things,” which Radical Orthodox offers in contrast to the “metaphysics of the sublime,” particularly in relation to the concepts of participation and the analogy of attribution that emerge from Radical Orthodoxy’s reading of Aquinas

War As Morally Unintelligible: Sovereign Agency and the Limits of Kantian Autonomy

Kant’s treatment of war is usually discussed as part of his political philosophy or philosophy of history. In contrast, this essay locates these discussions in direct reference to major elements of his moral philosophy: autonomy, the categorical imperative, and the moral relationality of the kingdom of ends. Within this context, Kant’s account of war, particularly in writings from the 1790s, can be read as affirming war as morally unintelligible: It is the expression of a collective withdrawal from the constitutive relationality of moral community. This results in a radical disparity in the exercise of moral autonomy by the sovereign agency of the state with respect to peace, on one hand, and with respect to war, on the other

Theology from a Fractured Vista: Susan Neiman’s \u3cem\u3eEvil in Modern Thought\u3c/em\u3e

Evil in Modern Thought, Susan Neiman\u27s account of the intellectual trajectory of modernity, employs the trope “homeless” to articulate deep difficulties that affirmations of divine transcendence and of human capacities to acknowledge transcendence face in a contemporary context thoroughly marked by fragmentation, fragility, and contingency. The “hospitality” of the Incarnation, which makes a fractured world a place for divine welcoming of the human in all its contingency and brokenness, is proposed as locus for theological engagement with Neiman\u27s appropriation of a Kantian sense of hope as the readiness to resist evil in a world seemingly bereft of welcome