My friend James Kelley gave me a complimentary copy.
It is common parlance to say, “We should apply our faith to culture.” In such slogans the words “faith” and “culture” are never defined and always used in the most abstract categories. Kelley does us a service by bringing an advanced level of Patristic theology to such wide-ranging topics as history and esoterism. One can go a step further: Kelley’s insights regarding (Joseph Farrell’s usage) of Sts Maximus the Confessor and Athanasius can provide us a useful compass in witnessing to those trapped in the occult. I don’t know if Kelley himself holds that view, but it is something that came to my mind.
The first part deals with rather esoteric thinkers like Paul Virilio, Joseph P. Farrell, and Phillip Sherrard. Special interest goes to Farrell.
Here is the problem: In order for the Plotinian one to account for creation, it must already contain within himself all plurality. Therefore, epistemology and ontology had to proceed by dialectics. We know something by defining it by its opposite.
How was the Church to respond to this? The best way was by simply breaking its back. Kelley shows this by examining Athanasius’s response to Arius and Maximus’s response to monotheletism.
For Athanasius there are three primary categories that should not be confused: nature, will, and person (Kelley 35). The person of the Father generates the Son according to essence (since the hypostasis of the Father is the font of essence). Creation, by contrast, is according to the will. This leads later fathers (such as Basil) to identify three categories:
(1) Who is doing it?
(2) What is it they are doing? (energies)
(3) What are they? (essence)
The key point, however, is that Person, Nature, and Energy are not to be identified, or we have something like Plotinianism or Arianism.
Maximus is even more interesting: the human will cannot be passive nor defined by its contrary, the divine will. That would mean because the divine nature/will is good, then the human nature must be evil (41). If we define something by its opposite, then we are also saying that said something (God) needs its opposite.
I must stop the analysis at this point. But know that the section on Joseph Farrell is a crash course in advanced theology.
Esoteric Studies
Kelley places the Nation of Islam’s cosmogony within the earlier Gnostic myths (89). He has a fascinating section on Jim Jones. It almost reads like a novel or a news article. His larger point is that in these cults (NOI, Scientology, etc) there is a dialectic of a “life-force creating (or self-creating) within a primordial darkness.”
His chapter on Anaximander’s apeiron is worth the price of the book. But what makes it interesting is Kelley’s tying Anaximander’s apeiron with Tillich’s Ungrund and Barth’s unknowable God. The problem: How can this “god” have any contact with creation? Anaximander gives us a dialectically unstable answer: this apeiron already contains within it the coincidence of opposites.
Conclusions and Analysis
Like all of Kelley’s works, this cannot help but be interesting. How often do you read a theology book and you ask yourself, “I can’t wait to turn the page to see what happens next”? But normally that level of excitement is for fluff. This it most certainly is not. Some chapters are very advanced theology, while others, like the one on Paul Virilio, are probably out of my league.
My only quibble is he set up a great dismantling of Karl Barth’s theology and then didn’t do it. I understand that could be for space reasons. Is Barth’s Unknowable God the same as Anaximander’s apeiron? Maybe. If they are, then one has at his fingertips a very destructive critique.
Aside from that, this book is most highly recommended.
Note: I received this as a complimentary copy and was under no obligation to post a positive review.
Logical Investigations 