“Life Is the Therapy for Nihilism”: The Vital Theology of Carmody Grey

Discussion about science and religion has an uncanny ability to bring to light various mythologies about the genesis of the modern world. One such myth still in vogue in certain circles is that science and religion are locked in mortal combat, and that modernity should above all be seen as a gradual triumphing of science over religion. It is essentially a myth of growing up. But no serious historian of Western modernity would concede that this framing of the issues even makes conceptual sense. In reality, as the historian Peter Harrison has shown in his 2015 book The Territories of Science and Religion, the very concepts of “science” and “religion” have undergone numerous shifts in meaning and have had porous conceptual borders throughout the centuries, which makes any attempted history of their interaction exceedingly complex. ¹ How do we even know what we are talking about when we talk about “science” and “religion”?

Over the last few decades, scholars have proposed more granular typologies of the relation between science and religion, ranging from conflict to indifference to harmony. On the more positive end of the spectrum, this relation is often cast as a kind of “dialogue” between contemporary science and religious belief. I have taken part in several such dialogues, and they have never failed to be interesting. But the format is often predictable enough: the scientists speak first, telling those gathered how things really are in the natural world; the theologians then present some interpretation of religious faith that chimes with the scientific account given. The hierarchy is pretty well established.

But once in a blue moon a theologian comes along with enough panache to insist on speaking first, refusing to play within the parameters set by a secular discourse. John Milbank is arguably such a theologian; his book Theology and Social Theory spawned Radical Orthodoxy, perhaps the most significant movement in academic theology over the last twenty-five years. ² Milbank is best known for his critique of the self-evidence and superior legitimacy of secular reason as it emerges in modernity from late Medieval roots, and the belief that such secular reason has some sort of unmediated access to the way things are. Rather, the secular perspective is as much a construction as the theological perspective, and one that moreover interprets the world as primarily an arena of conflict rather than peace. There is, however, no neutral ground from which to adjudicate the truthfulness of the secular or the theological interpretation—every position is constructed and there is no view from nowhere. Therefore, the only thing the different parties in a debate or dialogue can do is to narrate the world as they see it and present this narration as the most persuasive alternative.

Milbank has primarily been interested in social theory and philosophy, but in her new book Theology, Science and Life, the Durham theologian Carmody Grey sets out to “test drive” his self-confident theological approach in the context of science—especially life science—because she believes his approach still has “mileage in it” (p. 5). What Grey offers is no mere repetition of Milbankian theses, though the first part of the book can be read as a lucid introduction to his way of doing theology; rather, she undertakes her own creative exploration of how theology even today may be said to be queen of the sciences. As Grey boldly states: “Theology does not ice a cake which is first made by the sciences” (p. 235).

In the second part of the book, Grey undertakes a critical assessment of Milbank’s approach with a view to how it could actually be put to work in the context of science and religion. It is clear, she says, that theology conceived in this way cannot simply come along the other disciplines as one player among others, even perhaps a junior player, to complement the knowledge independently generated by the various sciences. For if theology is the meta-narrative within which everything else fits, narrating as it does the beginning and end of the whole world, then there is no independent sphere about which we could gain knowledge without theology coming into play. This perspective obviously raises some concerns: Is it not a version of epistemic imperialism, subjugating all other perspectives to the theological perspective? How is it possible within this framework to safeguard the integrity of the various disciplines? In short, is the queen of the sciences not a very evil queen indeed?

Grey answers in the negative, and explains why: Because the theological perspective is self-determined as a celebration of peaceful difference—ultimately anchored in the peaceful difference that is the divine itself—if it is to be true to its own most fundamental commitment it cannot be used to stifle the difference between the various disciplines and their unique contributions. For this reason, theology is bound to offer a hospitable welcome to disciplinary difference. As it turns out, then, theology is the queen of the sciences in the sense that it is—borrowing a phrase from the theologian Hans Boersma—“the queen of hospitality” (p. 93).

What does this mean more precisely? Grey argues that theology’s unique meta-narrative status must involve two things: hospitable affirmation and prophetic critique. First, theology provides a hospitable framework for the disciplines within which their respective contribution even to theology itself can be discerned and affirmed. For if nothing is independent of God, every branch of knowledge also necessarily speaks theology—it says something about God as mediated by created things. This means that science is never innocent of theology. But, of course, sometimes it is bad theology, which is why the second prophetic task of critique is also needed, especially when the sciences veer toward a self-sufficient immanentism in their interpretations of reality. Anyone who has lived through the promiscuous extension of evolutionary thinking into every nook and cranny of the inner and outer world will appreciate this latter point—what the physician and writer Raymond Tallis in his book Aping Mankind calls “Darwinitis” is perhaps best understood as a kind of pseudo-theology. ³

It is, however, the third part of the book that really stands out. Using the framework developed in the earlier chapters, Grey turns to a theological engagement with the life philosophy of one of the most significant—though now sadly neglected—thinkers of the twentieth century, Hans Jonas (1903–1993). The rapprochement between the Jewish Jonas and Christian theology is an event that has been waiting to happen for a long time. In an hour when Pope Francis speaks of Christian environmentalism as “care for our common home,” it is significant that Jonas spent a good part of his writing life criticizing modern forms of Gnostic dualism, which he characterized as suffering from a profound sense of not being at home in the world—something he described as acosmism. ⁴

Jonas’s central thesis is that organic life is irreducible to the categories provided by modern philosophy, those of materialism and dualism. When life emerges from the river of being, something irreducibly new happens in nature—a phenomenon with intrinsic purposiveness and a stake in its own continued existence comes into being. From this follows a rejection of one of modern philosophy’s central shibboleths: the unbridgeable chasm between facts and values. For if an organism has a stake in life, a purposive orientation to self-maintenance, then it has a good—some things are good for it, other things bad. Ultimately, life itself is the good for which it strives. Clearly, a normative ethic of nature will need more than this, but Jonas’s analysis of life was the starting point from which he developed the environmental ethic of responsibility presented in the 1979 book The Imperative of Responsibility, which made him something of a philosophical superstar in his native Germany in old age. ⁵

Jonas and Grey both think that the acosmic nihilism of modernity is a genuine threat because it drives a wedge between humanity and nature, allowing nature to be approached as a repository of raw materials for human appropriation with no concern for the immanent purposes of natural things themselves. For if purposiveness and normativity have been purged from the natural world and placed exclusively within human subjectivity, what is there to respect? Why should we not take what we want? If, however, living nature has its own purposiveness and normativity, something stands in our way, talks back, demands to be taken into account. We see a reflection of our own purposiveness in that of nature. Indeed, Jonas’s vision counters the nihilism of cosmic loneliness with a profound sense of belonging. As Grey puts it, “life is the therapy for nihilism” (p. 180).

Her deep appreciation notwithstanding, Grey also launces a theological critique of Jonas. For all his celebration of the dignity of the organism, he nonetheless succumbs in the end to a dark, essentially Hobbesian conflictual narrative of life, emphasizing that life is constant struggle against the forces of death. For Grey, or at least for the Milbankian approach she “test drives,” the truthful narration is the one that discerns the ontological peace subtending all life, as ultimately given by God. As a riposte to a caricature of the natural world as nothing but a ruthless struggle for survival at the expense of others, this is a point well taken. And yet, something seems amiss. The question is this: How does one narrate the phenomenon of life—life as it appears—in a truthful manner? It seems to me that when Jonas describes the nature of life as somehow embattled, he is not so much making a mistake that theology could come along and correct, as seeing something truly, as far as it goes. To be sure, theology will want to speak a still deeper word about the nature of reality and may perhaps awaken a perception of the goodness of being as ultimately given, but it is unclear how we can say that the one perception is true and the other false under present circumstances. We are dealing here, of course, with the intractable question of evil and suffering in a world created by a good God. Grey is obviously aware, and she provides a fascinating discussion of this toward the end of the book, suggesting that it will be a key issue in the development of a fuller theology of life. But this issue points up a tension in her argument, which closely enough follows the tension of human experience of life as such, between the affirmation of its goodness and the undeniable persistence of suffering.

Such reservations do not detract from Grey’s achievement in this book. Her presentation of a new radically orthodox approach to science is as lucid as ether; her adjudication of difficult issues never comes forward as contentious, and she argues her points clearly; her staging of a conversation between Hans Jonas’s philosophy of life and Christian theology proves to be incredibly generative for further thinking in this area. And not only thinking, for along the trajectory of this work there is certain to be action. After all, if nature can once again be seen in all its vitality, purposiveness, and value, then by the same token we come face to face with an ethical responsibility. Hans Jonas at one point laments the fact that when we most need the normative guidance of nature, science has convinced us that there is no such thing. But it appears that when we really pay attention to the living organism something changes. Could it be that Daniel Dennett had it exactly wrong in his 1995 bestseller Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, where he claimed that Darwinism is like a universal acid which “eats through just about every traditional concept”? ⁶ Grey’s reading of Jonas suggests the very opposite: “The organism . . . [is] an exemplary solvent of secular reason” (p. 180).

ANDREAS NORDLANDERUniversity of Gothenburg, Sweden