Transcript For Episode 66
Ryan: My guest today is Cyril O’Regan. the Katherine F Huisking Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. Cyril's work spans systematic theology, historical theology, and continental philosophy, and ranges topically from 19th century theology and philosophy—especially Hegel—to mysticism, apocalypticism, Gnosticism, religion and literature, and postmodern thought. The work of Hans Urs von Balthasar has been central to his thinking.
Cyril is in the midst of his multi-volume Gnosticism in Modernity project, the first volume of which came out in 2014, entitled An Anatomy of Misremembering: Von Balthasar's Response to Philosophical Modernity. Cyril, welcome.
Cyril: Thank you very much.
Ryan: Cyril, when I talk to Mormons, one thing that puts me to shame is their incredible genealogical memory. One Mormon described to me how her mother and grandmother created sets of playing cards of their ancestors that had brief biographies and quotations on them that she would learn from as a child. I'm lucky that on my side there is a good bit of family memory that gets me genealogically back to Ireland; but I know so little even about the first immigrants in my family to New York. And I've read that in the U.S., even people's bare names beyond three generations tend to be forgotten Who is your earliest ancestor about whom you know something beyond just name/date/place?
Cyril: Well, the Irish are storytellers, and storytelling isn’t necessarily always true telling. It may be, or it may not be. With respect to my family tree—a very complicated family tree as it turns out—it's divided into ancestors that you would want to forget, and ancestors that you might be interested in remembering. But that is relatively short term memory. And also we start looking for some gold under the genealogical tree, and sometimes you don't find that.
Now on the other hand, the narrative myth of ancestry—the very name O’Regan, which in Gaelic is Ó Ríogáin, actually does have an ancestry that goes back to the 11th century. They were sort of a major power family in the south of Ireland. And Regan, we obviously have that character as a first name in a Shakespeare play. But Riagán was the nephew we believe—not the son, but the nephew—of Brian Boru, who was the last high king of Ireland. So whilst there is a kind of paltry result if I do a more immediate kind of family genealogy, or perhaps an embarrassment but not embarrassment of riches, the very name itself does in fact have ancestry.
It's not accidental that where I come from, which is Limerick City, the name O’Regan is the name you would expect to find there. In other words, that short of the last 50 years, names in Ireland do come and are in fact sort of in particular places. This name of O’Regan, at least I'd like to believe it when I have been told that it is in fact chartable back to the nephew of the last high King of Ireland; whether that is true or false, I certainly have interest in it being true.
Ryan: How would you compare your career to James Joyce’s? Do you consider yourself an exile?
Cyril: I do consider myself an exile; but I think I'm an exile in fact, he's an exile in principle—that is, he left in order so to find himself, nd I left because I needed to leave. which doesn't mean of course that the reason that I left was purely accidental.
I went to Yale as a graduate student not out of any particular ambition. I mean, I might have had intellectual ambitions; I had no academic or professional ambitions. I came from the working class, so even getting to high school was a half miracle. So I wasn't educated enough to have ambition. I was smart enough to be able to think, and somehow or other that reproduced itself in some particular way, and I blundered into some situations; but I blundered. I would never have left Ireland. Unlike James Joyce and unlike Stephen—Stephen is going in order to save himself, and to be the kind of manufactured person he's going to be, he's going to leave. I have never had the idea of manufacturing a person; I find myself given, for better or worse. I never found myself in this kind of way, in which I told myself that I'm going to be the artist who creates the condition of the art by creating the very artist.
So I didn't leave Ireland to somehow or other realize professional dreams by going to Yale. Basically, Yale almost handed me a scholarship, and that's how things worked out. And I left and accepted after having turned down any number of other scholarships precisely because the year or so that before I went back to Yale—I had done a year so a couple years previously—I was working on the construction site, and I was very lucky to be working on the construction site. It was a time in which the employment level uh in Ireland was at 26%. So I thought, look, I really don't want to be on welfare for the rest of my life, thank you very much. So maybe I'll go to grad school at Yale.
Now I don't mean to be flippant with respect to Yale. I got a fantastic education. I loved it. I met some sort of one my closest friends there. So the fact that it wasn't a part of my ambition doesn't mean that it wasn't an absolutely irrevocable good; it was. It was all of that. But none of it none of it belonged to the order of intention.
Ryan: Wow.
Anne Carpenter begins each chapter of her book Theo-poetics with an original poem and the book functions as a prosimetrum in the nature of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. The prose and the verse work together to create a meaning that neither could achieve alone. Should should more theologians be writing poetry?
Cyril: I think that more theologians should be writing good poetry. But whether you can guarantee that or not … Bad poetry is noxious; great poetry is disclosive. Not really as disclosive to the degree that you're talking about Anne or other examples of that, contemporary examples and in the past. What I would say is that poetics itself is productive, in the sense that it's not an accident that a chapter is an exegesis of let's say a 24 line lyric; but everything depends upon the poem as to whether that's going to work. To the degree to which I think it does work, it's a particular genre.
I myself would feel perfectly comfortable operating out of that particular mode, but I do think that if one is going to do that kind of thing, the poetry better be good. And it better be good for two reasons: because a poem generally is something to be received by other people, and so generally it isn't commentated on by the particular poet. We do of course have poet-theologians commenting on their work—John of the Cross comes to mind as an example. But of course in his case, his poem is a rewriting of a poem and interpretation of the poem and so forth in the Spiritual Canticles. I think it's a brazen move; I think it's a justified move. But you don't want bad poetry, because bad poetry is not in fact productive. So if it isn't really good, the commentary on it is a commentary on something which is already floundering. So I think one has to be careful.
The idea of it is fantastic, however, because a chapter which has a poem as this lead in is a chapter within a universe of possible interpretations of a poem; it itself turns out to be a gesture with respect to that which overflows it, and also I think gives certain expectations as to what the prose is going to do.
Ryan: You write poetry yourself. Are there moments when you feel this particular theological question is something that I want to approach via lyric poetry rather than a more discursive format, and how do you recognize that?
Cyril: I have this book of poems called Origen in Alexandria, and it's a kind of seeing one's way back into a theologian who himself was a kind of poet, insofar as there’s what he actually says, and then there's what he hypothesizes. I kind of think about it that we've got the daytime Origen of Alexandria—who is just a remarkable figure in any event—in the sense that we’ve got his works, his biblical exegesis, his De Principiis; and then we've got someone who's thinking about XYZ outside the box. So this is a kind of model; it's not necessarily everything he says so much as they’re kind of rhymes for what I want to think.
But I have written probably a full book of poems to imagine even further those thoughts which are not translatable necessarily into good theology; that is, the thoughts which are jagged, experimental, not necessarily thoughts for the community. I think theology is the set of directions with respect to the community, so they can believe better, behave better, feel better. But there are other things which don't serve that particular function. And for me, no, I don't use poetry to serve the standard theological function; I tend to operate in a standard mode with respect to [theology]. But with respect to poetry, I don't operate in standard mode. I can say things, I can worry about things; I don't claim anything, but I can worry about everything, and worry in ways in which I don't have to feel responsible for the idea of a community. I don't know whether I have a community, other than the community, whatever it is, of Roman Catholicism; but nonetheless, the idea of a community—the idea that when I write, it goes into and it's for a particular community—that just seems to me to be the only way for me to think about these matters, and therefore I think I have a substantial degree of responsibility.
When I write poetry, however, I allow myself an amazing degree of irresponsibility. So I don’t actually behave like Anne. I behave in some sense disjunctively rather than conjunctively. I understand what it means to behave conjunctively, and I affirm it; as long as the poetry part is really good. And then presumably, the second part—that is the prose part, the explication part—is good.
Ryan: Fascinating. The title of your magnum opus is not a Genealogy of Misremembering, but instead the Anatomy of Misremembering. What does the analogy of anatomy do for you that genealogy does not?
Cyril: That book echoes my actually really genealogical project, which has Gnostic Return in Modernity, Apocalypse of Jacob Boehme and so forth. And I have the second manuscript on anatomy, which is on Heidegger, and there'll be genealogical moments in that text too. What I wanted to do with Anatomy of Misremembering was to stay with Balthasar as long as possible without it necessarily being an exegesis of him. So it's not an exegesis of him per se; but it is about the way in which he construes, in a very complex way, modernity. Part of my task is to make it clearer. I was trained philosophically; he was not trained philosophically. So I feel I can clean up things which I owe to him in terms of intuition; I think I can clarify them in a way he didn't as a matter of fact clarify in his voluminous work.
So the first thing about anatomy is that, well, it just means anatomy. Balthasar is interested in figuring out, what is the proper description with respect to modernity? What I argue is that the first thing he wants to say about modernity is that, at least in terms of his proponents—who are the idealogues of modernity—they want to say that some rupture has occurred between the pre-modern discourses and modern discourses. The pre-modern discourses are not metalogical; they tend to allow the imprecation of discourses that modern do not. Pre-modern discourses are going to validate heteronomy; modern discourses, autonomy. Pre-modern discourses are going to insist upon the massive distinctions so that between God and the world and ourselves, and modern discourse will tend not to do so. So the first thing is, it's clear therefore that we can say that modernity is based either on an actual forgetfulness of what has gone before, or a willed forgetfulness that is that essentially is programmatically intended to make sure that we don't actually call upon pre-modern sources, precisely because they have the kind of contaminants, the disvalues, of pre-modernity. Whereas modernity has the reverse—autonomy et cetera and so forth. So that's going to be one of the constituents: either actual accidental, but serious and systemic, or willed forgetfulness.
But then I started thinking, well, it isn't only that. Charles Taylor will give one some idea of this in terms of the way in which he charts things. He doesn't really stop and say, “Look, modernity has got to do with the enlightenment.” Whether it's a Lockean enlightenment, or the French enlightenment, or the kind of softer German enlightenment—we have a series of enlightenments, a series of disconnections with respect to the past, some of them absolutely vicious, some of them mildly accommodating, and some of them significantly accommodating. He wants to say, in modernity overall, the second problem is, how do we handle the modernity which has come on the scene with all kinds of promises which are not realized?
Of course it is the case that English Romanticism on the one hand wants to leave behind standard forms of Christianity, and on the other hand who wants to leave behind the Enlightenment and its technical outputs, which are devastating to the land and to cities. But as they do that, it turns out that there is a massive interest in sort of refiguring a religious discourse out of the broken up parts of Christianity.
Blake of course is the ur-example. Blake is going to say that his poetry is religious; that the religiousness is original; that it has something to do with Christianity, but actually only by a series of inversions. He is extraordinarily well read, because of Thomas Taylor, in ancient hermetic discourses, from which he crafts all sorts of views about the world as a mundane shell; about the creator being a demiurge who's fallen. He wants to remember in the pre-modern; but what is he going to remember in the premodern? He's not going to remember standard forms of Christianity. He's going to remember those forms of Christianity or those discourses which can do work on Christianity and reform it. Therefore it's an act of mis-remembering.
Ryan: Because you are telling a story, you're engaged in narrative, it is then a little surprising that the key titular word is anatomy; because anatomy's not a story, it's a spatial analogy. We could even say that it's related to the domain of pathology. How are you thinking of it there? What do you want us to hear in that word?
Cyril: I like that challenge. I think I have a pretty clear answer to it. Remember what I said in the beginning: I said that anatomy is—what is the proper description of modernity? What ways can it deal with the past in an ungrateful way? One way is ingratitude—it forgets; another way’s that it misremembers. So anatomy covers that. That then leads to the second question, and that is why you did identify anatomy also as genealogy. And it is; but I get to genealogy in this instance by way of anatomy.
I then ask the question, to the degree to which therefore Balthasar suggests that at various times, but not in any systematic way, he thinks that Hegel's Christianity looks very neoplatonic, he says; Hegel's Christianity looks very apocalyptic, he says; Hegel’s Christianity looks very Marcionite, he says; and he says that Hegel's Christianity looks very Gnostic. I think that there's reasons for saying all of those things; but I also say—I think that Balthasar really does want to say it; I say it probably a bit more clean than he would like—I say, as we examine these ways in which Hegel is borrowing ancient discourses to mold an acceptable form of Christianity for him, an acceptably modern form of Christianity, which doesn't have what he thinks of the standard dogmatic downsides. He may very well dip into all these discourses; but then the question is, which family tree does he most nearly belong to? The answer in the text is that the family tree he most nearly belonged to is Valentinian Gnosticism, just in terms of the way in which the deformations occur.
I myself in the third volume of the Gnostic Return series, which will be on German idealism, make the argument pretty of my own recognizance; and because I have a far more technical apparatus than Balthasar with respect to Valentinian narrative grammar and so forth, I can make probably a more sturdy case. But I wanted to pay homage to Balthasar in setting that anatomy moves towards a genealogical investigation, with various difficulties in terms of Hegel tapping into various kinds of discourse. Which of those discourses, in the last analysis, really is the one that is massaging Christianity to make it look unrecognizable from a normative point of view?
Ryan: I like that—he's massaging Christianity. Can you pick a genealogy in the Bible, Old Testament or New Testament, that you would think of as closest to your own genealogical purpose? So for example, the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew demonstrates the legitimacy of Jesus' claim to be the Davidic monarchy; Luke by contrast sets out to prove that despite his human descent, Jesus was ultimately the Son of God. Every genealogy in the Bible is making some kind of argument. Which would you want to pick for the kind of argument that you're making?
Cyril: I think it wouldn't be one of those, because those genealogies are what kind of privileged lines is Jesus going to be inserted into, and for what purpose. The kinds of genealogies I'm interested in doing have got to do more with, who is a son of Cain? Who in fact belongs to the non-chosen family tree? That's actually where I go. The genealogy that you described, that kind of genealogy works fairly well I think for Catholic theology in general. That is, to the degree to which you are a contemporary Catholic theologian, I think that whatever your preference is, all of us are deeply embedded in tradition. We accept all of it. I think there's a polyphony in it; it isn't just simply one thing. Often for different purposes, we may emphasize different elements of that tradition in contrast to the previous generation and so forth; but all of it is in a sacred line.
What I'm doing is the non-sacred line. So it'd be a little bit more like the Sons of Ham or the sons of Cain. What I'm interested in are those discourses—which really are religious, however philosophically adept they may be—which seem to be interested in negotiating with Christianity, but actually want to overcome it on narrative grounds. So in other words, it's not the case when one talks about Gnosticism or Valentinianism that you add something to it by saying “Gnostic narrative” or “Valentinian narrative.” They are, from ground up, narratives. That's the point. The second point about it is that the ground up narrative’s meant to be the narrative which overlays, digests, and consumes the Christian narrative to give the Christian narrative meaning. So they're doubly narrative: they're their own narrative, and then they are what I'd call a metaleptic narrative; that is, they're a transformational narrative. So in that sense, narrative is looking at the ways in which the biblical/Christian narrative finds a simulacrum, finds its real narrative shadow side; and then asking the question on the basis of an analysis of how that works in ancient thought: can you see any analog of that working in modern thought? And the answer to that question is, yes you can.
Ryan: That helps me make sense of a phrase that you used repeatedly, which is genealogical battle. When I first read that, it struck me as odd, because I don't think of genealogies as engaging in battle. But by that you mean that there is a contest of master narratives, and that is the battle: they're each trying to out narrate each other. Is that what you're getting at?
Cyril: I think it's exactly what I'm getting at; and from my point of view, it’s therefore part and parcel of all the theological enterprise. I can perfectly well understand that someone might come along and say, you're involved in something that seems very interesting; not quite sure it's important; and kind of on a bad day seems meretricious. You just don't need to be getting very sophisticated about these kinds of things, because ultimately they don't carry any weight.
From my point of view, however, they do. Just one very simple example: it seems to me that if you are in many graduate schools in theology in North America, the following is a pretty regular occurrence. You've got your modern 20th century theologians, 19th century theologians, and so forth. So you’ve got your Jungel; you've got your Jurgen Moltmann, who everyone knows is related, distantly or not so distantly, to Hegel, maybe with a little bit of sliver Schelling thrown in. Okay; all of that seems innocuous. But if you have to make a judgment with respect to Jungel or Moltmann, the Hegelianism does matter. In other words, we want to ask the question, will the Hegelianism interfere with the theological outcome being a Christian outcome or not? And if you take Hegel on his own word—that what he's doing is saving Christianity from itself by refiguring it—then you then you think, this is fantastic: he's depending upon Hegel, who has refigured Christianity, who has saved the doctrine the Trinity (according to Hegel); and you could think, everything is hunky dory. It might or might not be to your taste; but if you reject it, it’s only because it isn't to your taste.
From my point of view, this is far more serious, because you haven't asked yourself any questions whatsoever. So if it is true that a quite modern theologian, who is very interested in not really going along with a tradition with respect to a doctrine of the Trinity, not going along tradition with respect to the doctrine of creation—giving an imaginative recodification in which people might feel that they got their doctrine and they’ve got imagination to boot—there really is a one and one equals two; surely that’s better than a St Thomas Aquinas or an Augustine with respect to these these matters.
But what I tend to do is, okay, fine: if you do agree, then it’s dependent upon Hegel. You think you've been critical, but let's try and think what actual operations Hegel has performed in Christianity to make it gel with modernity, so that we have human autonomy; we've got society that has immanent values [that] don't have to be referring out to God; with no alienation between human beings and God, because we are already divinized. Ask the question: we have some of these particular operations performed in order to get a result that is congenial with respect to modernity; but what about the price of those reconfigurations? And what about the price, not really of the doctrinal and conceptual reconfigurations—what about the recommended behavioral configurations? Holiness is ludicrous; church going is … well, you can go to church, but the Real Presence is thought of in a Lutheran way, where the sacrament is really a cipher, what we can have in civil society.
So I'm thinking, okay: something has gone badly wrong. Now we're looking at what looks like a doppelganger of Christianity, and we're set in that as if that actually is Christianity. I want to say, excuse me: it's not Christianity. It's not even Lutheran Christianity. And then I ask, how did this happen? What kinds of things has Hegel done that we can find analogies to earlier, and what actually are the transmission discourses which would encourage Hegel to head in that direction?
Ryan: Last summer you participated in the Theological Genealogies of Modernity conference that was hosted by Oxford. It was unfortunately remote, but I listened in on all of that and found it really fascinating. It struck me that many of the debates that motivated people in the Q&A sessions were ultimately debates that assumed different problems that we were trying to address, without actually explicating what those problems were. So for example, John Milbank's talk was about pushing back the narrative about the disintegration of the disciplines of theology and philosophy. He had previously thought it was a 13th century thing, and then he thought it was a 12th century thing, and now he's saying it's an 11th century phenomenon. But the reactions to that, I think, were leaving implicit a disagreement about the problem. For Milbank it's an institutional problem, whereas I think for others there was an assumption that it was a metaphysical issue.
Do you have a sense of [what is the] set of problems that Theological Genealogies of Modernity are mostly trying to address? I see that as being different from your project, because your project is actually engaged in this contest of narratives, and so it's not directly motivated by a practical problem in the world in the way that I think some of these others are.
Cyril: I think mine is distinguished for that reason, Ryan. And then I think it's distinguished on another ground as well: that is, my project is not talking about the production of modernity. I'm very interested in not merely how modernity works in terms of retrieval apparatus—that's an incredibly complicated enterprise, but it's more local than what these other folks are doing.
I don't think that you can provide an analysis that essentially is operating as if it were causal. One of the first things that anyone needs to do is, what kind of claim is being made? Are you saying that X causes modernity? From my point of view, it's hard enough with respect to a single experiment regarding effects and cause. When your effect is modernity, will a cause—whether that cause is to split up of theology and philosophy, or anthropological or theological volunteerism—is there any prospect of that functioning causally with respect to modernity, let’s say over eight centuries? Or it could be six, or over four, even over three. In my point of view, there is no prospect of that happening. No prospect whatsoever.
That does not mean that I'm suggesting that you shouldn't be involved in the genealogy of the production of modernity. But what that involves—and this would still only be relatively adequate—the best possible story would be a massive analysis of 5, 6, 7 volumes of the size of Taylor's work. You’d need to do about four or five of those at least to give a plausibility structure which isn't causative, but sets conditions with respect to what modernity would look like. This would be the thing that I'd be most interested in. I know an awful lot about the antecedents of modernity outside of the stuff that I'm doing. But here's what I think: I can regard any number of these things that have been said as somehow or other interesting conditions for respect to modernity; but a condition is not a cause, and conditions are multiple, not singular.
Ryan: In that same conference, Judith Wolfe had a single line that I thought was the best line in the conference, and I was disappointed it didn't get taken up. She said, sin is what we should be focusing on, not narratives of decline or progress. What's your response to that? So if we're asking a question of cause, the cause is sin, and a narrative of decline or progress is not going to give us a more accurate account of of causation.
Cyril: No, it's not going to give us that. It may inform us so that we can see ourselves in the mirror of those hypotheses with respect to modernity. We do need to understand ourselves more, individually and socially, and a doctrine of sin and the various ways in which we have understood that might help us to understand ourselves more.
And in that way, when I do genealogy, part of it is to understand ourselves more in any event. I'm not involved in causation; what I'm involved in, I want to be able to diagnose those forms of Christianity which actually are telling you what everything the modernity is telling you—be in the world, only be in the world; be autonomous; make sure that you don't actually have too much a difference between yourself and God; make sure that you think that uh society is enspirited, that you're lofted up above it and so forth, but you're not thinking about divine agency. When I do that kind of work, it's a clearing house with respect to our own self-understanding as created and as sinners.
Now the other form of genealogy is the genealogy of the production of modernity. The question then is, is that like what I’m trying to do? Is it that we need to understand the production of modernity—if indeed we can understand it—in order for us to find our place? I think that's right. I think she was always right, insofar as whatever we would do would have to bear upon our Christianness or lack thereof. But it's also the case, to use T.S. Eliot, that even if we got the right notion about who we should be as Christian—which is kind of what I do—between that notion and the fact falls the shadow; and the shadow is sin. That is what we do to gum the works up entirely, and to make our relations to others, and relation to God, and our relation to ourselves, relations of alienation; and relations in which all the things that we said we wanted, all the things that we aspire to, are circumvented and in fact the opposite comes about.
Ryan: The other best line in the conference was yours. I think you asked rhetorically, what is the pathos of genealogy? What is the value of this particular intellectual exercise? And you went on to say that the bigger issue is, what's the right size of genealogy in the theological enterprise at large? This might vary by confession, but you said as a Roman Catholic, there's a humility in the larger enterprise; and genealogy should only be part of apologetics, and specifically polemics. It can't do what theology does as a whole. Say more.
Cyril: I think I've been talking to that. I think that, when I do it, it's part of an apologetic enterprise, a polemic enterprise. That is, I want to tell the people who read that you are going to be who you're going to be; I simply do not have any power sort of over that; my power is infinitesimal to persuade you otherwise. But how I do want to hold you to account is, however you're going to behave, however you're going to accommodate yourself to modernity, I don't want you to do it with a clear conscience—that I'm going to be a Hegelian, and that means that I'm a fantastic modern person and a fantastic Christian. I want to say: you may very well be a fantastic modern person, but you're not a fantastic Christian. I don't want you to be that comfortable, because it's intellectually dishonest. You haven't done the work. You make the choice; no one's taken the choice away from you. What one can do, and a duty is, to take away from someone a delusion. We want to disenchant—well, I want to disenchant back. Disenchanters themselves need to be disenchanted.
Ryan: We probably have time for just one more question, but it's potentially a big one. And this is where I want to maybe challenge you and push you a little bit on the way that you're thinking about your project. At times it seems like you prefer the analogy of haunting to genealogy. I think you even say near the beginning of the Anatomy of Misremembering that genealogy is essentially hauntology. What that means is, if there's the question how could an early Christian heresy like Valentinianism somehow be with us today if it died out in any actual form more than a thousand years ago the answer would be that it remains in the world as a ghost.
But this seems to me a major departure from analogies of genealogy—and potentially a a really good one—because first it detaches ideas and culture from the logic of transmission and development that is the genealogical logic; and it reattaches them to a counter logic, or even an alogic, of the occult or of the fairy world. But second, I think it's implicitly non-Christian, because orthodox Christianity teaches that belief in ghosts is superstition, and then redescribes haunting phenomena as spiritual warfare. It says that those voices in the attic are the work of fallen angels; they're not disembodied human souls. I like that latter as an analogy for the kind of apologetics you're engaged in; that you're taking what a pagan world defines as ghosts, and you're saying you're saying: I hear those voices too, but in fact it in part is the work of fallen angels. And so I wonder why is that not more prominent for you? Instead of ending up with weird collocations like genealogical battle, why not just full on turn to the analogy of spiritual warfare?
Cyril: That's a very interesting challenge, and it's not clear that I can meet it in the way that I would like. But before I get to haunting and hauntology, let me just try and claim what I think I'm claiming genealogically. Whatever my use of haunting is going to be, I don't think it's going to displace genealogies in the proper way that you just described. For me, in order to do genealogy, there has to be a minimum of text transmission. I want to prove, I want to be able to show you and I want you to be pretty convinced, that when I talk about these texts as Valentinian, that you can look at what I've said about Valentinianism, you can examine and see whether that's accurate. And then on the basis of what I do with respect to narrative structure, you can examine whether that works or not. In other words, there's a way in which the work I do is not dependent upon the force of my rhetoric; there is a certain way in which you can confirm or not confirm it. And that actually is very, very important to me. So I think that what I do does seem to have those properties more than usual in terms of genealogists who are telling you how modernity came into being, and who might or might not be confounding conditions and cause.
With respect to haunting, I didn't actually have the background that you have in mind in terms of the haunting of fallen angels and the paganess of it, and I certainly am not at all averse to it—it sounds wonderfully interesting. I suppose that I just wanted to say that even though of course these modern discourses have real world effects—so if you agree with Hegel, then you're taking some kind of Valentinian narrative grammar on board. That's my point. I think that's an incredibly serious point, whether that is proven or not proven, or whether that's right or wrong. Which means that if you're a Christian, you should be extraordinary suspicious of Hegel at best, and at worst you should ditch him; he's only functioning as a kind of counter frame with respect to the real thing.
Haunting has got to do with, to the degree to which these discourses are large in the text, there's a way therefore in which these texts—which are not Valentinian proper—somehow or other are the means by which Valentinianism continues. So in other words, textually it’s real in terms of effect. It's kind of like the effect of a haunting or something which is supposed to be long dead. And of course Valentinianism as such is long dead, unless we go to children's literature, where you find it in abundance—that's another story to be told. But the haunting has got to do with its effects in an alien environment, when it didn't seem to have sufficient body to continue to propagate; though in a sense it had enough body to be propagated, but not enough so that it was whole and entire. And that's I suppose what I'm thinking about the haunting affect with respect to it.
Ryan: Okay, actual last question: how is children's literature Valentinian?
Cyril: Normally speaking, if you're in a Catholic university, when you're thinking of Catholic literature, you're thinking of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien. We think that you can kind of renarratize Christianity: put it outside there, add one or two degrees of distance, and then reappropriate it and reanimate Christianity. I think that's presumably the purpose of much of what is best in Catholic literature.
Well, that's also open to other people who have other points of view. An interesting example, and one about which I have written about is Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. His Dark Materials is a very didactic text in its own way; it's brilliantly written, but it's a very didactic text. He tells you that on the one hand, you're going to be immanentist. So there's going to be a power, and it's got to do with matter. So there's a naturalistic assertion or axiom going across all three texts. But then you find [that] all the epigraphs are coming from Blake or Shelley or Milton; in other words, now we have a romantic code. We've got naturalism now, and supernaturalism. And after that, the level sort of the supernaturalism will really have to do with creating sort of a different religious universe. Naturalism now has its own religious universe, largely romantic. It is materialistic, so in that sense it looks as if it's anti-gnostic; but I argue on other occasions, in fairly detailed ways, of how there's a negative capability of Gnosticism being ultra, super materialistic. (That's another day's conversation.)
So the text itself looks materialistic and naturalistic; all the tropes are romantic. And these particular tropes with respect to notions of creation—you can't have a notion of creation. A notion of of benevolent creator does not exist; power and malevolence tend to go together. The eschatological state is not a state necessarily based upon your moral compunction and so forth; it's based upon you having a particular power or not—that is, you've been ontologically constituted as such.
So it seems to me that once you start looking at a text or a set of texts like that, and reading others of that kind of literature—it seems to me that children's literature or young adult literature is a literature that most sells; parents actually read by proxy. Secondly, what sells mostly [has] something to do with fantasy. Fantasy will eventually have to do with an imaginary world, and will have got to do with ways in which one discovers that one is definitely constituted and is better than everyone else. So it’s already programmed. The outcome will not always be Valentinian; it can be just a mishmash of romanticism and this and that. But some of the better forms I think will tend to have that sort of particular power.
Ryan: Well Cyril O’Regan, thank you very much.
Cyril: Thank you Ryan. It's a pleasure.