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  • Truth in the Making: Creative Knowledge in Theology and Philosophy
  • Andrew B. Irvine
Truth in the Making: Creative Knowledge in Theology and Philosophy. By Robert Miner. Routledge, 2004. 166 pages. $28.95.

Truth in the Making appears in Routledge's Radical Orthodoxy series. It is a significant addition to the series because it proposes to defend an account of truth when human knowing is acknowledged to be a matter of construction. The idea of true construction was pervasive, if largely implicit, in John Milbank's [End Page 556] groundbreaking Theology and Social Theory. Miner considers it an answer to the signal spiritual crisis of the time:

"Everything is constructed"—this might be the slogan of modernity. But do we believe in the ultimate reality or significance of our constructions? What Kierkegaard said about his own time is no less applicable to the present age: our business as makers, constructors, fabricators goes on as usual, yet there is no longer anyone who really believes in it. What is constructed can always be deconstructed. Everything that is woven seems destined to unweave. The spectre of nihilism haunts modernity.

(xi)

Miner studies six elaborations on the principle that "the true and the made are convertible." His thesis is that human making cannot be redignified except by retrieving a theological version of the principle, interpreting human making as a participation in divine creation, and therefore as a participation in divine knowledge. This "radically orthodox" approach contrasts with "radical modernity," which conceives human knowing as the secular construction of (what can only be) a technologically determined realm. Miner introduces the principle as enunciated by Giambattista Vico early in the eighteenth century, but he begins with the theological epistemologies of Thomas Aquinas and Nicolaus Cusanus, followed by chapters on Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and Thomas Hobbes as "architects of radical modernity" (xv).

Modern nihilism owes to the general dominance of a technical conception of making. (Miner relies on R. G. Collingwood's analysis of technique as the execution of a preconceived plan to transform raw material into a finished product using means distinct from the end; cf. 1–2.) A way around technologicality begins with Aquinas's notion of creation ex nihilo. Human making is technical in nature, according to Aquinas. Only God creates, in the strict sense of ex nihilo. Yet the plans which humans make are not products of a technique. Human making is not analogous to God's creation of the world, but human planning can bear some analogy to the generation of the divine Verbum within the Trinity, through whom all things are created. Human makers form within themselves the plans to which their artifacts will conform. So to make in time is something like God's eternal act of creation, even if—since all this takes place in a creaturely way for the creature and not ex nihilo—it ought not be termed creation.

Cusanus dramatically strengthens the analogy of divine and human making. In the dialogue, Idiota de mente, the "idiot," a spooncrafter, explains to a philosopher that making does more than actualize knowledge previously acquired. Some things cannot be products of mere technique, for we only discern their forms through their manufacture. Consider the craftsman's spoons (though any cultural artifact would illustrate the claim): their form is nowhere clearly exemplified in nature but comes to be known as he cultivates it. If he does not claim unambiguously to create the form, neither does he simply copy it. At the very least through his craft the craftsman learns to construct "conjectural" images of unseen forms, which in the divine mind are the exemplars of creation. This cultivation of the craftsman's capacity to make out the true measures of things is [End Page 557] also his self-discovery as the image of God: through mindful making human beings make themselves more like their maker.

Modern secularism admits no such orientation of human creativity toward divine. Whereas Cusanus might say that human culture continually opens up new spaces for the divine presence to be recognizable, the secularist view presumes the realm of human making can be "transparently and exhaustively known without reference to its donating source" (59).

Miner...

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