Cromatografia de gases acoplada a espectrometría de masas (GC-MS)

This thesis will investigate what might be entailed in considering discipleship to be theology’s prolegomenon by considering the epistemic implications of the work of three Christian thinkers deeply interested in the priority of discipleship. In the course of doing so, the hope is that discipleship will demonstrate the potential to serve as a prolegomenon in a way that uniquely eludes the common problem of circular reasoning. It will do so by re-considering what is en- tailed in theological reasoning which follows after discipleship. The rest of this thesis will ex- pand on this notion through the following chapters. Chapters 2-4 form the heart of the thesis, developing the account of discipleship as theological prolegomena by reference to Pascal, Kier- kegaard, and Bonhoeffer. Chapter 5 will then serve as a kind of application of the definition of theological reasoning developed in chapters 2-4. Chapter 6 will conclude with an extended reflection on where the implications of this investigation could lead future research.

Chapter 2 will begin our investigation with a close reading of the work of Blaise Pascal, focus- ing in particular on the epistemological claims of the Pensées. Pascal’s work will introduce us to a unique notion of reason’s media which results from the priority which he gives to the human incapacity revealed in the call to discipleship. God calls us to be disciples, we are unable to do so, and this inability incorporates even our intellectual condition.

Chapter 3 will continue with an investigation of the work of Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s insight expands on Pascal’s by supplying us with a broader notion of how the whole of reality is conceived in relation to the call to discipleship. The call on the disciple’s life to imitate the perfection of Christ creates a unique kind of dialectic in which the disciple is able to follow Christ only in virtue of being unable to follow Christ, thus entering into Christ’s self-surrender by virtue of the divine undoing of consciousness.

Chapter 4 will take up the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. While Kierkegaard’s dialectic can lead to a sense of total negation, Bonhoeffer’s supplements this sensibility with a more positive notion of Christus praesens. The availability of the present God-human is something to be

celebrated, but cautiously. Bonhoeffer’s work, particularly between the years 1938-1941, pro- vides a window into his attempt to navigate these two impulses. He argues simultaneously that discipleship entails reasons to believe in the possibility of knowing God’s will while also re- stricting the disciple’s knowledge. The balance of knowledge and ignorance in Bonhoeffer’s work will be instructive for a broader notion of discipleship’s epistemic implications.

Chapter 5 will serve as an application of theological reasoning after discipleship which will hopefully further clarify and develop the preceding argument. Discipleship clearly bears some relation to current theological and philosophical language surrounding ‘embodiment.’ Chapter 5 will investigate the work of a patristic writer, Clement of Alexandria, whose contrast of dis- cipleship with Valentinian forms of knowing serves as an entry into a Christian notion of em- bodiment. This notion will be compared and contrasted with various approaches arising from critical theory—another discipline interested in re-thinking what constitutes embodied reason- ing.

Chapter 6 will conclude by considering where this thesis’ notion of discipleship as theological prolegomenon sits with respect to traditional theological forms of thought. Possible avenues for future research will be explored in a preliminary way by comparing this thesis’ argument to a Barthian actualistic ontology and to the relation of nature and grace in the nouvelle théolo-

Chapter 2

Blaise Pascal and the Insufficiency of

Language as the Media of Reason

2.1 Introduction

2.1.1 Pascal and Christian reasoning

Despite never being a theologian or a clergyman, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) spent the majority of his adult life engaged in theological reflection, first in the context of ecclesial disputes, then later in developing his own account of an apologetic for Christian faith. In the task of this thesis to understand the possibilities of theology after discipleship, Pascal’s consideration of Chris- tian reasoning is useful. Pascal’s notion of an embodied rationality, shaped by the daily disci- plines of fidelity to God, illuminates the first step along our path. Discipleship is the ultimate rebuke to rationality as we commonly understand it, but rather than suggesting irrationality, discipleship presses us to consider whether we understand what we mean when we talk about the faculty of reason. How shall we think about reason if it turns out that we never attain to our own standards of rationality? Shall we give up on reason, or redefine it to according to the possibility of its transformation? That is the question which Pascal’s work will pose, and the question we will attempt to answer over the course of this chapter.1

1 _{All of the translations in this section are my own, and any errors are my own. I have, however, consulted with}

existing translations of some of Pascal’s works. With respect to the Lettres provinciales, I have found particularly useful the translation by Thomas M’Crie, published as an ebook by the University of Adelaide Library, updated 2014, available at https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/pascal/blaise/p27pr/index.html. With respect to the Pensées, I have often turned to the translation by W.F. Trotter, published by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, available at https://www.ccel.org/ccel/pascal/pensees.html. The quotations from Pascal’s works in this chapter come from the newest two-volume critical edition: Blaise Pascal, Oeuvres complètes, 2 vol., ed. Michel Le Guern (Paris: Gallimard, 2000).

2.1.2 Biographical background

Born in 1623, in Clermont, France, Blaise Pascal initially followed his father’s vocation into mathematics.2 A precocious scientific mind, by age 25 he had published treatises on geometry, developed a prototype for a computing machine, and conducted the first observations of at- mospheric pressure using mercury barometers. At the same time, however, he and his family were slowly being drawn in as partisans in the major theological controversy of 17th-century France. In 1645, when Pascal was 22, his father—while recovering from a broken leg—was attended to by a pair of monks from an abbey which had been increasingly influenced by the work of the Dutch bishop Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638). Over time, Pascal’s entire family came to identify with this branch of Catholic thought; in 1651, his sister, Jacqueline, even became a nun under the direction of an abbess influenced by Jansenism.

While Jansenism would be anathematized by Pope Innocent X in his 1653 bull, Cum occasione, Pascal—along with many of its defenders—saw Jansenism not as a break with the Catholic church but as a revival of its true essence.3 The influence of Jansenism grew out of the posthu- mous proliferation of Jansen’s work Augustinus, published in 1642. Not unlike the Reformers, Jansen took up a particular reading of Augustine’s works that emphasised the insufficiency of human efforts apart from grace, and the overwhelming efficaciousness of grace once given to humanity. In this respect, Augustinus made explicit parallels between the semi-pelagians whom Augustine rejected and certain emphases in the Catholic theology of Jansen’s day. These theses in particular were singled out for rebuke by Cum occasione.4 Following Jansen’s death, the centre of Jansenist thought shifted to the abbey at Port-Royal, where the philosopher Antoine Arnauld became its most sophisticated defender. As we shall see later, Pascal’s own entry into the larger theological polemic of the time was initially couched as a personal defense of Ar- nauld when the philosopher’s appointment at the Sorbonne was called into question.

2 _{The following biographical sketch of Pascal’s life is indebted to Hugh M. Davidson, Blaise Pascal (Boston:}

Twayne Publishers, 1983); Anthony Levi, “Introduction,” in Blaise Pascal, Pensées and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Honor Levi (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995); Desmond Clarke, “Blaise Pascal,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2015 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/pascal/.

3 _{The following is indebted to Sylvio Hermann De Franceshi, Entre saint Augustine et saint Thomas: Les jansé-}

nistes et le refuge thomiste (1653-1663) (Paris: Nolin, 2009), 63ff and F. Ellen Weaver, The Evolution of the Reform of Port-Royal: From the Rule of Cîteaux to Jansenism (Paris: Beauchesne, 1978), 65ff.

4 _{Innocent X, “From the Constitution ‘Cum occasione,’ May 31, 1653: Errors said to have been extracted from}

the Augustinus of Cornelius Jansen,” Our Lady of the Rosary (Taken from Henry Denzinger, The Sources of Catholic Dogma, 1957), accessed November 10, 2017, http://www.rosarychurch.net/history/1653_Inno- cent_X.html.

Significantly, in the midst of this ongoing theological dispute, Pascal underwent a life-altering epiphanic encounter with God. On a November night in 1654, Pascal experienced what would later be called la nuit de feu—his ‘night of fire.’ Pascal wrote an account of his experience on a fragment of parchment which he sewed into the lining of his coat and kept with him for the remainder of his life. Known as Le Mémorial, this fragment is typically published today along with the Pensées. In it, Pascal describes a revelation of the “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob / not of the philosophers and of the learned.”5 _{Following this experience, Pascal} set aside much of his mathematical work to focus on theology and apologetics, defending both Jansenism from the Catholic magisterium and faith more generally from philosophical skep- tics. Much of his writing from this time remained unfinished, sitting in piles of manuscripts found and published after his death. Taken as a whole, however, they suggest a mind wholly devoted to developing an account of human reason originating in Pascal’s own desire for a “soumission totale à Jésus-Christ.”6

This chapter intends to develop an understanding of Pascal’s own peculiar form of Jansenism, a form which has potential to helpfully advance our understanding of theological reasoning after discipleship. It will do so by briefly taking up two of Pascal’s writings, a fragmentary set of reflections on grace, and his Lettres provinciales, in which he publicly defends Jansenism. The bulk of this chapter will then consider the Pensées which, though fragmentary in its own right, remains the place where it is most possible to develop a coherent understanding of Pas- cal’s position on human reason. Before looking at the primary literature, however, we will consider a variety of perspectives on Pascal’s understanding of reason from the secondary lit- erature.