Charred Root of Meaning: Continuity, Transgression, and the Other in Christian Tradition by John Milbank (review)

Written on the boundary of philosophy and theology and adapting Foucault's insights about the epiphanic quality of transgression, Rosemann interprets the history of Christianity in which transgression and tradition are coconstitutive from inception onward. The phrase "charred root of meaning" comes from Foucault. Rosemann explains it with a story at the outset. When fire has burnt all that can be seen above ground, there remain roots hidden in the soil that, despite having been charred by fire, send up new life into the light.

Charred Root of Meaning is a landmark achievement, in both method and content. First, philosophy has long been known as the handmaiden to theology, but in practice that has usually meant historical or systemic theology. Here, Rosemann shows how philosophy is handmaiden to biblical theology as well. His control both of the original texts of the Old and New Testaments and of the secondary literature is masterful. Rosemann deploys incisively the same tools of textual exegesis to the theological and philosophical texts alike.

Second, this volume is a superb example of history of philosophy as philosophical method. Too often in the Catholic philosophical community, Michel Foucault is treated as a pariah; among many Continental philosophers, as the prophet of atheism. In a sense, both communities agree, and both are wrong. Rosemann makes incontrovertibly clear that Foucault cannot be fully understood apart from his relationship to Neoplatonism, Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. In a word, those who are committed to the philosophical tradition from Thales onward must include Foucault as well in order to be faithful to their commitments.

Third, as St. Augustine observes in De doctrina christiana, every text is read through the lens of some orthodoxy. Among academic philosophers, there is often a pose of objectivity, rather than the more truthful stance of honest and critical (including self-critical) subjectivity. Rosemann courageously takes the latter stance as a Catholic. Far from offering a slavish apologetic for Catholicism, Rosemann's writing about the correlativity of tradition and transgression is itself transgressive. It is, in his own words from another context, "faithful [and] provocative at the same time."

He clarifies the relationships of tradition and transgression. In the positive sense, transgression is the originary of tradition: Immaterial God creating material world, ten divine words etched in stone and heart, Word made flesh. In the negative sense, transgression sharpens the definition of tradition: the forbidden is the negative exemplification of the commanded.

The irony is that once transgression becomes normalized, it ceases to be transgression. Irreverence needs God to be meaningful. If God is dead, then what possible meaning can "irreverent" have? The initial tragedy and subsequent farce is that through commodification the formerly transgressive becomes part of our household furniture. In an operatic metaphor, consider the journey of Orpheus from Monteverdi to Offenbach.

The book's volta comes late, in the last thirty-five pages, when Rosemann discusses first "The Genesis Narrative of the Ur-Transgression," which is to say "the Fall," and "Kant's Transvaluation of the Ur-Transgression." Kant, in his "Conjectural Beginning of Human History," de-evils (Entübelung) the Fall and finds in this Ur-event the beginning of the humanization of the human being as the occasion of privileging reason over instinct and thus activating that freedom that characterizes human life. "The Fall" is for Kant the beginning of progress.

If the reviewer for a philosophical journal were tempted at times to ask whether Charred Root of Meaning can be properly considered "philosophy," the author could, in turn, point to Kant's "Conjectural Beginning of Human History" as his precedent. Though Kant himself refers to his essay as a Lustreise, in it he provides effectively a mythological undergirding for his anthropology of the human as rationally autonomous, which is to say the undergirding ultimately for his entire system.

Charred Root of Meaning is a postmodern text insofar...