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Discerning Fidelity: Badiou between Faith and Reason
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
At this juncture in history, viewed as either the dusk of modernity or the dawn of its overcoming, questions of faith and reason are continually cast up anew. The questioning of faith and reason raise familiar binaries and oppositions: Is faith for or against, internal or external, before or after, above or below reason? Does faith perfect or overcome, complete or destroy, add or subtract from reason? This essay will pass through two figures representative of the contested field of Thomistic scholarship en route to a discussion of how the French philosopher Alain Badiou might intervene within the contemporary discussions of faith and reason. It will first engage Denys Turner's recent work which could be characterized as a dogmatic faith in reason attempting to repel the dispositional faith which he attributes to Fergus Kerr. These competing conceptions of faith will set the backdrop for a presentation and application of Badiou's understanding of faith as discerning fidelity.
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- Copyright © The author 2009. Journal compilation © The Dominican Council/Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2009
References
1 Turner, Denys, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. xiiCrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Ibid., p. xv.
3 Ibid., p. 232.
4 Ibid., p. 248.
5 Ibid., p. 232.
6 Ibid., p. 242.
7 Ibid., pp. 244–5.
8 Ibid., p. 24.
9 Ibid., p. 193.
10 Ibid., p. xi.
11 Ibid, pp. 14 and 17.
12 Ibid., p. 16, noting Kerr's, Fergus After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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29 Badiou, Being and Event, p. 177.
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55 Turner would have to complete his argument by showing how his suggested shape of reason could be accounted for without recourse to concepts and terms developed by the history of faith, and therefore argue for a ‘timeless’ structure of faith hinted at in other traditions regardless of revelatory tradition.
56 For the beginning of such an argument see John Milbank, “The Return of Mediation, or The Ambivalence of Alain Badiou,” Angelaki 12:1 (April 2007), pp. 127–143.