Political Dialogue of Nature and Grace

Caitlin Smith Gilson is Tutor in Philosophy and Theology, and Acting Dean at Newman College Ireland. She is the author of Metaphysical Presuppositions of Being-in-the-World (2010) and The Philosophical Question of Christ (2014), both published by Bloomsbury.

• AcknowledgementsPrefaceA Note on Context Introduction: Stating the ProblemChapter I: Rebellion of the Gladiators: The Disappearance of Man’s Open NatureChapter II: Calderon and the Chaste AnarchismChapter III: The A-Historical Temporality of the Chaste AnarchismChapter IV: The Groundwork for the Christian Polis: Noli Me TangereEpilogue: The Polis and the Seven Last Words of ChristBibliographyIndex

In this intriguingly diverse reflection Caitlin Smith Gilson ably grasps the new spaces in which all serious and viable theology now operates and has always covertly operated: the space 'between' nature and grace, and the space 'between' the metaphysical concerned with being, and the metapolitical concerned with cosmic order and morality. She also realizes how it is often literary drama which has been able, as with Calderon, to 'stage' these tensions, or a poetic thought like that of Leon Shestov which has been able to insist (beyond 'philosophy') on both the unfathomability of nature and upon its ultimate ethical bearing. In order to witness at once to the structure of reality and yet to the good, revelation as truth requires to be 'staged' in a Christian polity of 'chaste anarchy' that is at once required and yet seemingly 'impossible.' Thus, as for both the Russian and the Atlantic margins of Europe, the question of an eschatological Rome is finally, as Gilson so insightfully realizes in the wake of Shestov, precisely what links the seemingly different questions posed by Athens and Jerusalem. Outside this question, given the instance of Christian revelation, there can be no serious pondering of either given reality or divine imperative, and because it lacks this pondering, which discloses the hidden co-composition of ontology with political practice, secularity is unable to recognize itself. Gilson thereby points us towards the only viable future theological agenda, in contrast to any sterile and now faintly ridiculous pursuit of either 'pure' doctrine, or the 'pure' philosophy of religion.