Introduction

The title of this chapter would have struck most Romans at the time of Cicero as provocative if not downright inapt. Philosophy had entered Rome as a Greek importation, and those who taught it mainly stemmed from Greece or from still further east of Italy. Romans who wished to study philosophy generally travelled to Athens or to other Greek-speaking centres. Early in the principate of Augustus (27 BC-AD 14), Quintus Sextius founded a school that combined Stoic ethics with such principles of Pythagoreanism as abstention from meat. But, apart from this short-lived and unremarkable sect, there were no exclusively Roman schools of philosophy, as distinct from the long-established Academics, Peripatetics, Epicureans and Stoics. The Cynic movement, which gained Roman adherents in the early Empire, did not count as a formal institution, and it too was originally Greek, looking back to Diogenes whom the Stoics had appropriated along with Socrates. There was no home-grown option of any consequence, and therefore no Roman philosophy as such.

Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, that verdict will hardly stand. On many thinkers from the early Renaissance to the middle of the eighteenth century, the influence of Cicero and Seneca was enormous, outstripping in its general diffusion the impact of even Plato and Aristotle (see further, chapter 12).

The volume Radical Orthodoxy bears the subtitle “A New Theology.” This could easily mislead readers, preventing them from understanding radical orthodoxy. It is not a “new” theology. If it were to present itself as such, it would merely take the form of one more “modern” theology, which radical orthodoxy is not. Although it could qualifiedly be labeled postmodern, radical orthodoxy is neither a newer nor improved version of modern theology, for an interminable “newness” characterizes modernity. As Gianni Vattimo tells us: “if we say that we are at a later point than modernity, and if we treat this fact as in some way decisively important, then this presupposes an acceptance of what more specifically characterizes the point of view of modernity itself, namely the idea of history with its two corollary notions of progress and overcoming.” Through overcoming the past, modernity progresses toward the new. Precisely because radical orthodoxy is not a “modern” theology it does not overcome the past - not even a modernity that can never be past - or progress toward the novel.

“Modern” theology looks for new categories within which to present a theological essence, usually understood in terms of a “mystery” that transcends the “new” categories used for its expression. Like modernity itself, modern theology is “progressive”; moving from the old toward the new, which never quite arrives. Thus modern theology is caught within a dialectic of presence and absence. It moves from what it lacks – the promised but absent “new” – toward what it hopes for – the presence of the new. In this movement the past is continually dissolved into an absent future, which promises to render the past and all its sacrifices meaningful. Progress becomes our fate and ethics is tied to a sacrificial economy. We are taught to sacrifice particular interests and commitments for the sake of the future arrival of the new. Postmodernity places this modern progress in question. Like postmodernity, radical orthodoxy seeks to escape the constraints of modern progress.

The nineteenth-century historical novel

Since the time of Napoleon's collapse, the historical novel has been an extremely popular genre. A type of narrative literature in prose, a fictional story set in a documented or documentable context which may also include actual persons who lived at the time, this genre has one foot in fact and the other in fiction, one in a kind of scholarship or erudition and the other in a kind of entertainment. Its purpose is to instruct and to divert. The heterogeneity of historical novels produced over time and in response to various audiences militates against a narratological, technical approach. The historical novel humanizes history and rediscovers land- and cityscapes.

In the history of Italian literature, historical fiction – whether in poetic and dramatic forms or in prose – preceded Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (1827 and 1840). One can refer to Manzoni’s own tragedies, Il Conte di Carmagnola (The Count of Carmagnola, 1820) and Adelchi (Adelchi, 1822), whose completion had been interrupted by the beginning of the novel, and to works originating in his Romantic circle in Milan: Tommaso Grossi’s Ildegonda (Ildegonda, 1820) and I Lombardi alla prima crociata (The Lombards in the First Crusade, 1826), both set at the time of the Crusades; or I profughi di Parga (The Exiles of Parga, 1823) by Giovanni Berchet (1783–1851), set in Albania during the struggle between the Turks and the English. One might also cite the earlier Platone in Italia (Plato in Italy, 1804–6) by Vincenzo Cuoco (1770–1823), who imagines that he has found a manuscript in which the Greek philosopher reported on a trip to Italy in pre-Roman times; or Alessandro Verri’s Notti romane al sepolcro degli Scipioni, a work indebted to the excavations that in 1780 brought to light two funerary inscriptions from the time of Scipio Africanus.

Lacan without paradox

Paradoxical formulas are not lacking in Lacan's texts and teachings. As far as the symptom is concerned, these paradoxes culminate in the idea that normative heterosexuality is itself a symptom, and that sexual partners are symptoms for each other. Is Lacan being facetious and indulging his notorious taste for paradox? Is he performing intellectual acrobatics? The questions can rebound endlessly, but I, for one, conclude from all my readings and my clinical experience that the Lacan we meet here is not paradoxical any more. In fact, with the symptom, each psychoanalyst should be prepared to be questioned, for what he or she has to say about symptoms provides a test for the consistency of his or her praxis and doctrine. No doubt Lacan has to be tested like all others on this point, and if he is, the verdict reached after we follow his successive elaborations will correspond to the rigor of a rationalism that is never canceled but always adjusted to the specificity of its field.

We just need to read Lacan closely. In some twenty years of teaching, his definitions of the symptom evolved. One can verify that, at each state, they were compatible with the overall theory, and in particular, with the successive definitions he gave of the unconscious. Thus, when he defined the unconscious as speech, which had been suggested by the technique of the talking cure, he treated the symptom as a kind of message, an encoded cipher for a gagged discourse containing a kernel of truth.

The beginnings of Physical Science

The earliest literary survivals from the Greek world, the epic poems of Homer and Hesiod, contain, inter alia, accounts of natural phenomena and of the origins of the universe. But the latter are speculative mythology, while the former invariably impute large-scale natural phenomena to supernatural forces: Zeus coruscates miscreants with thunderbolts; Poseidon shakes the earth in anger; Apollo visits plagues upon the impious. There is no attempt to explain events in naturalistic terms (that is, as the natural result of natural forces and the intrinsic properties of things), and no effort to reduce the apparent diversity of phenomena to a small set of explanatory concepts in terms of which they are to be accounted for.

The Greeks themselves considered that with Thales (fl. c.585 BC) there emerged a wholly new way of looking at things, one characterized by Aristotle as the search for the archai, or basic ‘principles’ of things. According to tradition, Thales, the first of the so-called Presocratics, made water his archē. Water was fundamental to the world and its processes, perhaps, as Aristotle says, because of the observation that moisture is necessary for life and that ‘heat comes from moisture’; moreover, the earth ‘rests on water’, a feature which accounts both for its general stability, and also (probably) for the occasional earthquake. Thales also claimed that magnets possess souls, presumably because they have that power to induce motion which is characteristic of animate life.

Many students of the arts and humanities probably first encounter the name of Jacques Lacan in one of the numerous studies of the French Structuralist movement, an intellectual paradigm which attained the zenith of its public success during the 1960s, and which has since occupied many an Anglo- American scholar's critical spotlight, either as a fashionable esoteric creed or as an original explanatory doctrine. Invariably associated with the contributions of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Louis Althusser – the central quadrivium of Structuralism – Lacan's oeuvre has indeed frequently appeared as another influential instance of how Structuralist ideas managed to change the face of many research areas in the human and social sciences, in his case the field of Freudian psychoanalytic practice. Whereas his companions have been hailed or vilified for their Structuralist approaches to anthropology, literary criticism, philosophy, and politics, Lacan has entered history as the quintessential defender of the Structuralist cause in psychoanalysis, an acolyte so militant that he did not shrink from making the claim that Freud himself had always been an inveterate structuralist avant la lettre.

The main reason for Lacan’s recognition, and his intermittent selfidentification as a Structuralist is situated in his allegiance to the basic principles of Structuralist linguistics, as inaugurated by Ferdinand de Saussure in his famous Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, and as elaborated from the late 1920s by Roman Jakobson, founding member and chief representative of the Prague Linguistic Circle.

WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT TO THINK THAT?

We take Nicholas Lash, formerly Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University, as our first exemplar of postmodern theology in the Anglo-American tradition. Lash makes several claims that may strike the (modern) reader as strange. For one, he criticizes accounts of religious experience that assume such experience, at least in its richest and purest forms, to be experience of God. In contrast, he says, “on the account that I shall offer, our experience of God is by no means necessarily ‘religious’ in character nor, from the fact that a particular type of experience is appropriately characterized as ‘religious,’ may it be inferred that it is, in any special or privileged sense, experience of God.”

What is it, then, to know God? The word “God” is descriptive and not a proper name, and to believe in God is to believe that “there is something or other which has divine attributes.” The important question, then, is not whether God exists, but how to speak of God without becoming inane. All attempts to speak about God express the speakers’ deepest convictions about the character and outcome of that transformative (creative and redemptive) process in which they and others are engaged. The outcome of this process will define what it is to be human. Thus, Lash says, “human persons are not what we initially, privately, and ‘inwardly’ are, but what we may (perhaps) together hope and struggle to become.”

While during the closing decades of the twentieth century the Italian novel was relatively successful, not so long ago, in the 1980s, critics were lamenting the allegedly bleak future of the genre. At the center of this polemical argument about new “young writers” was the controversial statement by Edoardo Sanguineti (1930- ) that the style and content of these new writers constituted a useless elegance. Some of the writers under attack were Antonio Tabucchi, Pier Vittorio Tondelli (1955-91), Daniele Del Giudice (1949- ), Andrea De Carlo (1952- ), Aldo Busi (1948- ), and Roberto Pazzi. Paradoxically, to outside observers of the Italian scene in France and Germany, the Italian novel at that moment and in the following years seemed so healthy that foreigners were envious of its successes at home and abroad, and translation of the works of not just Umberto Eco but also of Tabucchi, Alessandro Baricco (1958- ), Susanna Tamaro, Paola Capriolo (1962- ), and many others began to attract readers from around the world.

It is a puzzling characteristic of the Italian literary scene that contemporary fiction is criticized for its lack of social or political awareness. For example, some academic critics have attacked Umberto Eco’s best-selling fiction and those who imitate postmodern pastiche on these grounds.

Introduction

This chapter covers a fascinating stretch in the history of ancient Greek philosophy, ranging from the dawn of the Roman empire in the first century BC until the Arab conquest of Alexandria in AD 640. It is well known that in this period most of the ancient legacy to Byzantine, mediaeval and Renaissance philosophy received its definitive shape. However, in the transmission of this legacy to later centuries much of the depth, detail and motivation of late ancient philosophy was lost. Only in recent decades has the period begun to receive the attention it deserves. Within the confines of the present chapter we shall bring together a selection of the first - often tentative – conclusions in this rapidly advancing area of ancient philosophy.

First a few words on labels and periods. There is some justice in speaking of late ancient philosophy as Imperial philosophy. Nearly all philosophers mentioned in this chapter lived and worked in the Roman empire (western, eastern, or both), and some of them even owed their position to emperors.

The Spirit's completion of Christ's work is no longer to be seen epistemologically, as a supplement or extension to the teaching of Christ, or even as that which makes it possible to hear and receive the Word. It is, rather, a completion in terms of liberation and transformation: it is gift, renewal and life. It is not possible to speak of the Spirit in abstraction from the Christian form of life as a whole: Spirit is “specified” not with reference to any kind of episodic experience but in relation to the human identity of the Christian. The question “Where, or what, is the Holy Spirit?” is not answered (as it might be by Luke) by pointing to prophecy and “charismata” and saying, “Spirit is the agency productive of phenomena like this.”

How then is it answered? Perhaps not at all. The theological quest which is preoccupied with identifying the distinctive quality or work of the Spirit has so often, as Hanson points out, produced only the most sterile abstractions. And there is at least in eastern Christian thought a sense that the “face” of the Holy Spirit is not there for us to see. If what we are speaking of is the agency which draws us to the Father by constituting us children, we are evidently speaking of an agency not simply identical with “Father” or “Son,” or with a sum or amalgam of the two. That perhaps is obvious, or even trivial, but it may be that no more can be said of the Spirit’s distinctiveness.

Introduction

The 'Hellenistic' age is a politically defined one, bounded at its beginning by the demise of Alexander the Great's empire (on his death in 323 BC) and at its end by Augustus' inauguration of the Roman empire, notionally in 27 BC. These three centuries were a time of major geo-political upheaval in the Greek-speaking world, due first to the growing power of eastern kingdoms and later to that of Rome.

In one way or another, philosophical developments kept pace with these political ones. At the start of the new age, Alexander’s death was almost immediately followed by that of Aristotle (322), who in earlier days had been his personal tutor. In Alexander’s later years, by contrast, he had been accompanied on his eastern campaign by Pyrrho, around twenty years Aristotle’s junior and the philosopher whose name was to become synonymous with scepticism (later known as #x2018;Pyrrhonism’). Pyrrho was as much the voice of the newly emerging age as Aristotle had been of the old.

Ancients and Moderns

While ancient philosophy continues to live on, and indeed to flourish, in the modern discipline of philosophy, the religions of ancient Greece and Rome have left very little discernible trace upon the religions of the modern world. It was only because, and only to the extent that, the pagan religions of Greek and Roman antiquity were radically transformed, almost beyond recognition, into the vast, eclectic world religion of Christianity, that anything of them at all managed to survive the fall of the classical world. The result is that, while the Christian Church shrewdly adapted its practices to the traditional conditions of the mass pagan world it found itself in and while the Christian Fathers elaborated a brilliant theoretical synthesis of certain elements of pagan intellectual culture with Judaeo-Christian theology, religion in the modern world is so different from what it was in antiquity that it requires considerable effort to appreciate ancient religiosity without a feeling of bewilderment, repulsion or superiority.

The writings and biographies of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and Pier Paolo Pasolini seem so different as to prevent any useful comparison. Yet the novels for which these two authors are best known – Pasolini's Ragazzi di vita and Una vita violenta; and Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo – have in common an identical cultural environment. In fact, while they gestated in the minds of their authors in entirely different ways, these novels were all received and reviewed by the same critical establishment and, within the span of a few brief years, launched into the same publishing marketplace. One can even say that Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo and Pasolini's Una vita violenta crossed paths, and after an almost contemporaneous first printing (the former in November of 1958, and the latter in May of 1959), the two works shared the stage at the 1959 Strega Prize ceremony, the prestigious award for the best narrative in Italy. The prize was awarded to Lampedusa's novel, while Pasolini's book took third place. Pasolini's two novels and Lampedusa's posthumous novel (the only one the Sicilian nobleman ever completed, which was approved for publication after his death) are also comparable in terms of the happy fate bestowed upon them by the larger reading public.

No writer in the history of psychoanalysis has done more to bring Freudian theory into dialogue with the philosophical tradition than Jacques Lacan. His work engages with a dauntingly wide array of thinkers, including not only his near contemporaries (Saussure, Benvéniste, Jakobson, Bataille, Merleau-Ponty, Lévi-Strauss, Piaget, Sartre, Kojève, Hyppolite, Koyré, and Althusser), but also other figures reaching back to the Enlightenment (Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Marx, Hegel, and Kant) and beyond, from Spinoza, Leibniz, and Descartes, to Pascal, Saint Augustine, Aristotle, Plato, and the pre- Socratics. His references, moreover, are not limited to the familiar landmarks of the post-Structuralist tradition who have so often been used to interpret him (Kojève and Hegel, Saussure and Lévi-Strauss), but include numerous figures from the British tradition (Bertrand Russell, Jeremy Bentham, Isaac Newton, Jonathan Swift, and George Berkeley), as well as from the history of science and mathematics (Cantor, Frege, Poincaré, Bourbaki, Moebius, Huyghens, Copernicus, Kepler, and Euclid). While some of these references are no doubt merely grace notes, introduced to embellish a notoriously labyrinthine and Gongoristic style, it is impossible to ignore the fact that his engagement with a large number of these figures is serious, focused, and sustained over many years.