After Writing

After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy by Catherine Pickstock, 273 pages

Alfred North Whitehead famously characterized all of a European philosophy as "a series of footnotes to Plato."  For some postmodern philosophers, Plato has become the serpent in the garden who began Western civilization's obsession with objective, and therefore objectivizing, truth.  Through a careful reading of the Phaedrus, Catherine Pickstock argues that, contrary to this postmodern reading, what the great philosopher upheld was not a reified abstract truth, but a lived love of the good.  Indeed, at the heart of the Socratic project is a denial of easy certitude in favor of careful development, focused on a paideia of virtue.

In Pickstock's understanding, Plato's embodied dialectic is essentially liturgical, and the acknowledgement of the transcendent stands against a technocratic, commercial, leveling secular ethos which rejects reality for utility, the gift for the given.  Postmodern nihilism is thus revealed as the culmination rather than the rejection of indifferent rationalism.  A genuine alternative is found in the fulfillment of the Platonic vision in the practice of the medieval Christian liturgy, a work of praise that crowns and completes the ordinary world of work.  Leaving behind the postmodern world of alienation and absence, the narrative of becoming which constitutes the Mass restores the relational and personal through its revelation of the superabundant plentitude of the good.

Pickstock takes up two monumental tasks - a reinterpretation of postmodern philosophy and a liturgical analysis which challenges both the Tridentine traditionalist and postconciliar modernist approaches.  Her tools are the tools of deconstruction, and those who have little sympathy with that method will find it hard going, but Pickstock uses reason neither to bind mystery nor to sow confusion, but rather to open up the portals of the sublime.