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Challenges in Contemporary Theology
After Writing: On the Liturgical Cosummation of Philosophy
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.
292 pages, Hardcover
First published December 29, 1997
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 3, 2021
Definitively wrests Plato from Derrida’s deconstruction. ****** ******
Among many, many other mind-blowing accomplishments. But let’s be clear: this book is philosophical theology and requires a lot of training to be able to understand any of it. It is changing my view of modern poetics, the Eucharist, the liturgy, and even language itself. I am very grateful for it.
Among many, many other mind-blowing accomplishments. But let’s be clear: this book is philosophical theology and requires a lot of training to be able to understand any of it. It is changing my view of modern poetics, the Eucharist, the liturgy, and even language itself. I am very grateful for it.
June 2, 2024
Catherine Pickstock asking for a cup of tea: 'The optimum receptaclised transcendental infusion of enchauffed camellia sinensis with a modicum of bovine lactational excretion...please.'
There are three reasons why philosophy might be difficult to read:
1. It is so unfathomably deep that ordinary mortals are not able to understand it.
2. The author has deliberately couched it in language that only fellow professional academics will be able to comprehend.
3. The author is a bad writer.
It's not always easy to tell, in any given case, which of the three it is. The author may like to think it is (1); readers, wary of being condescended to, will suspect it is (2). I'm only just beginning this, but I am satisfied that in this case the reason is (3) - Pickstock is just a bad writer. I know this because she can't even do something as straightforward as outlining the plot of a Platonic dialogue without producing sentences such as:
'...he reads aloud the script of a speech by Lysias which advocates a contractualizng of erotic partnerships for the avoidance of the difficulties - especially the transience - usually experienced in conventional relationships'.
It would be hard to get further away from Plato's lucid, down-to-earth style, or any sort of good English, than this. It's not that we don't know the words individually - it's not that we don't understand the way they are put together - it's simply that they are *not quite right*. By way of comparison, Wikipedia - hardly a paragon of good prose style - says of the speech in question that it 'explains all the reasons why it is better to give your favour to a non-lover rather than a true lover'. Ah, I see! Pickstock, I'm afraid, is one of those people who has become so habituated to thinking and writing academic-ese, twisting nouns and adjectives into ad hoc verbs, or the reverse, using phrases that are both grandiloquent and vague, unnecessarily convoluted constructions, specialised jargon terms, superfluous sub-clauses, bizarre circumlocutions, polysyllabilization*, and generally writing as if the reader already knows what she wants to say, that she is probably unable to do any different. What to the ordinary reader is a grotesque distortion of language is, in her world, usual - not natural, to be sure, but 'second nature'. Nobody could read a long book of such stuff without superhuman determination. And it suggests a contempt for normal people and normal lives that is no less off-putting because it may be unconscious: ivory-tower academia at its worst. It is probably the only book of the last hundred years to use the term 'hoi polloi' without any appearance of irony.
The irony though is that most readers will very much *not* already know what she is trying to say. Whilst the ingenuous arrogance of her opening claim to 'surpass and complete' philosophy (the first of a number of rather cocky claims throughout the book) must provoke either smiles or irritation, this is without doubt a highly original and profound work about the central place of liturgy - public religious worship - in a harmonious society. As you read, flashes of brilliance come regularly through the heavy clouds of verbiage. It really is a shame that the author was not more capable of putting it in a form that would have allowed its ideas to disseminate more readily. I doubt it's any accident that even those who commend it tend to focus on the bit about Phaedrus and Derrida - if they were honest, that is probably as far as they got! And I don't know whether I will get much further myself. But I'll try.
PS Here's a good one: 'visible voted-in apexes'. I think that means 'elected governments'.
PPS I'm not convinced that this school really understands Kant, whom they seem content to paint as a philosophical pantomime villain.
*Polysyllabilization: I made that one up, like it? I think Pickstock would be proud. I mean by it the unnecessary addition of extra syllables to a word to make it more grandiloquent. A common example is 'transportation' rather than 'transport'; one from the book is 'proprietous' rather than 'proper'.
There are three reasons why philosophy might be difficult to read:
1. It is so unfathomably deep that ordinary mortals are not able to understand it.
2. The author has deliberately couched it in language that only fellow professional academics will be able to comprehend.
3. The author is a bad writer.
It's not always easy to tell, in any given case, which of the three it is. The author may like to think it is (1); readers, wary of being condescended to, will suspect it is (2). I'm only just beginning this, but I am satisfied that in this case the reason is (3) - Pickstock is just a bad writer. I know this because she can't even do something as straightforward as outlining the plot of a Platonic dialogue without producing sentences such as:
'...he reads aloud the script of a speech by Lysias which advocates a contractualizng of erotic partnerships for the avoidance of the difficulties - especially the transience - usually experienced in conventional relationships'.
It would be hard to get further away from Plato's lucid, down-to-earth style, or any sort of good English, than this. It's not that we don't know the words individually - it's not that we don't understand the way they are put together - it's simply that they are *not quite right*. By way of comparison, Wikipedia - hardly a paragon of good prose style - says of the speech in question that it 'explains all the reasons why it is better to give your favour to a non-lover rather than a true lover'. Ah, I see! Pickstock, I'm afraid, is one of those people who has become so habituated to thinking and writing academic-ese, twisting nouns and adjectives into ad hoc verbs, or the reverse, using phrases that are both grandiloquent and vague, unnecessarily convoluted constructions, specialised jargon terms, superfluous sub-clauses, bizarre circumlocutions, polysyllabilization*, and generally writing as if the reader already knows what she wants to say, that she is probably unable to do any different. What to the ordinary reader is a grotesque distortion of language is, in her world, usual - not natural, to be sure, but 'second nature'. Nobody could read a long book of such stuff without superhuman determination. And it suggests a contempt for normal people and normal lives that is no less off-putting because it may be unconscious: ivory-tower academia at its worst. It is probably the only book of the last hundred years to use the term 'hoi polloi' without any appearance of irony.
The irony though is that most readers will very much *not* already know what she is trying to say. Whilst the ingenuous arrogance of her opening claim to 'surpass and complete' philosophy (the first of a number of rather cocky claims throughout the book) must provoke either smiles or irritation, this is without doubt a highly original and profound work about the central place of liturgy - public religious worship - in a harmonious society. As you read, flashes of brilliance come regularly through the heavy clouds of verbiage. It really is a shame that the author was not more capable of putting it in a form that would have allowed its ideas to disseminate more readily. I doubt it's any accident that even those who commend it tend to focus on the bit about Phaedrus and Derrida - if they were honest, that is probably as far as they got! And I don't know whether I will get much further myself. But I'll try.
PS Here's a good one: 'visible voted-in apexes'. I think that means 'elected governments'.
PPS I'm not convinced that this school really understands Kant, whom they seem content to paint as a philosophical pantomime villain.
*Polysyllabilization: I made that one up, like it? I think Pickstock would be proud. I mean by it the unnecessary addition of extra syllables to a word to make it more grandiloquent. A common example is 'transportation' rather than 'transport'; one from the book is 'proprietous' rather than 'proper'.
February 11, 2017
Read in the Previous Year(s):
2012 (12-17 May)
Review:
An excellent book critiquing modernity, Pickstock's After Writing shows how liturgy not only in church, but in life can help us better understand time and space and our relation to them. This book should be read by all who have an interest in theology, life, liturgy, and even politics.
2012 (12-17 May)
Review:
An excellent book critiquing modernity, Pickstock's After Writing shows how liturgy not only in church, but in life can help us better understand time and space and our relation to them. This book should be read by all who have an interest in theology, life, liturgy, and even politics.
April 2, 2013
Not for the faint of heart, this book is nonetheless the most deeply compelling critique of the revised Latin liturgy I have ever read. Her criticisms of the arise of "linerarity," the slaughter of liturgical "repetition" and "apophatic stammer" remain to my mind incredibly damning, and hitherto unanswered by any apologist (at least in English) for the revised Pauline Missal of 1970.
October 18, 2013
Would have given four stars if this book wasn't one of the hardest books on philosophy I've ever read and it feels like that is very intentional. A little more accessible and this is one of my favorites.
August 24, 2020
This is one of those books which was highly recommended by ecumenical colleagues and so I got my own copy, thinking every time that I taught about communion I might read it and several times I did start. But never got very far. Pickstock is a philosophical theologian, focused in this book on Plato and the medieval Roman Mass. I think I will pass it on to one of my more philosophical students who is also interested in liturgy.
But some notes out of it first:
Preface: Indeed, throughout the essay, I suggest that liturgical language is the only language that really makes sense. But the essay builds to a conclusion which asserts that the event of transubstantiation in the Eucharist is the condition of possibility for all human meaning. xv
[Liturgical] language is in several ways "impossible." For liturgy is at once a gift from God and a sacrifice to God. 176
combination of salvific narration [the book/text of the Mass] and the purificatory reading [the performance/saying of it] 219
Eucharist as gift, esp. 238-252 gift of citizenship, of being, impossible, repeated, we receive God into ourselves
The Eucharistic difference is therefore more radical. Since every Eucharist is an essential repetition of the incarnation--as the full unfolding of time, as community, as gift--our attempt to "return" to our divine origin is not so much a journey toward God, as a journey towards God's entry into our body--both physical, and relational--which really happens. Thus, with Christianity, the optimum of meaningfulness and the optimum of living subjectivity coincide within the world--with all its temporality, space, and embodiment. And whereas in Plato, the body if ultimately left behind, in Christianity, the spirit and the body are sacrificed together in order that the spirit and the body together might be received back again on the eschatological morning. 273 The End
But some notes out of it first:
Preface: Indeed, throughout the essay, I suggest that liturgical language is the only language that really makes sense. But the essay builds to a conclusion which asserts that the event of transubstantiation in the Eucharist is the condition of possibility for all human meaning. xv
[Liturgical] language is in several ways "impossible." For liturgy is at once a gift from God and a sacrifice to God. 176
combination of salvific narration [the book/text of the Mass] and the purificatory reading [the performance/saying of it] 219
Eucharist as gift, esp. 238-252 gift of citizenship, of being, impossible, repeated, we receive God into ourselves
The Eucharistic difference is therefore more radical. Since every Eucharist is an essential repetition of the incarnation--as the full unfolding of time, as community, as gift--our attempt to "return" to our divine origin is not so much a journey toward God, as a journey towards God's entry into our body--both physical, and relational--which really happens. Thus, with Christianity, the optimum of meaningfulness and the optimum of living subjectivity coincide within the world--with all its temporality, space, and embodiment. And whereas in Plato, the body if ultimately left behind, in Christianity, the spirit and the body are sacrificed together in order that the spirit and the body together might be received back again on the eschatological morning. 273 The End
April 6, 2019
A must read!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews