Historical Contingency

As I argued here, I am increasingly convinced that many conflicts within Catholic and Orthodox Christianity today (and between their so-called apologists) are historiographical in nature. Much of what--especially in more "popular" forms, or in the proliferation of books appearing from dodgy publishers or even self-published, as well as on myriad blogs and websites--makes it into print today purporting to tell Christians about our past is not serious and scholarly history told, as I argued, with requisite asceticism, serenity, and comprehensive accounting of the evidence in a manner free of ideological bias or a tendentiousness designed to thwart your imaginary enemies--the "Franks" and "Latins" and "Greeks" and "modernist heretics" and, of course, "the Masons."

This kind of history exults in creating grotesques and fatuously glosses over any acknowledgement of the contingency of human affairs, pretending that one can here, now, today, in an unaided fashion make infallible snap judgments about long-ago events half hidden in the mists "between two waves of the sea" (Eliot). When the evidence is lacking for such judgments, then one magics up some conspiracy theories to account for such lacunae and to stitch together wholly implausible events in search of a kind of coherence which is often mythical and almost invariably constricting and constraining, sometimes lethally so if one cares about the truth.

Where, in this, is the awareness of the contingency of our lives (a theme I first learned many years ago from Stanley Hauerwas and then Alasdair MacIntyre and finally Newman)?

For some Christians, perhaps most, like people in general, they abhor any notion of contingency and instead prefer (often unconsciously) to find their lives to be determined, and to make others' lives be determined, too, according to the dictates of some pope or patriarch or preacher on the TV, or perhaps some politician, all of them offering a program, group, party you can join (for a fee, of course) and be magically rescued from having to contend ever again with the messiness of your own life--never mind that of your community, country, and Church. This thinking is typically manifest via "if only" statements: if only the pope weren't a modernist; if only the seventeenth secret of Fatima were revealed; if only we didn't have the media/deep state/Clinton/Trump/Phanar/Mt. Athos/Moscow/Constantinople (etc.) to contend with then we could really smite our enemies and bring the messiness of history to an uncluttered end.

But surely contingency is the very price and stuff of our freedom as creatures? Surely it is, and is to be welcomed as, a gift, however disguised it may often seem to people who would rather make themselves "slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary" or who "exult in the freedom to submit themselves to church authority with wild abandon" (Neuhaus)?

But that itself raises two further questions: do we secretly hate freedom, as suggested here? And do we in fact prefer to have determined lives, not only determined by others (including those wreathed about with pious smoke) but also by our own self-generated narratives and internal censors and self-diagnoses, as Adam Phillips suggests in his invaluable book, Unforbidden Pleasures, discussed here?

The question of historical contingency comes in for examination in a new book, Contingency and the Limits of History: How Touch Shapes Experience and Meaning by Liane Carlson (Columbia University Press, 2019), 304pp.

About this new book the publisher tells us this:

Central to the historicizing work of recent decades has been the concept of contingency, the realm of chance, change, and the unnecessary. Following Nietzsche and Foucault, genealogists have deployed contingency to show that all institutions and ideas could have been otherwise as a critique of the status quo. Yet scholars have spent very little time considering the genealogy of contingency itself—or what its history means for its role in politics.

In Contingency and the Limits of History, Liane Carlson historicizes contingency by tying it to its theological and etymological roots in “touch,” contending that much of its critical, disruptive power is specific to our current historical moment. She returns to an older definition of contingency found in Christian theology that understands it as the lot of mortal creatures, who suffer, feel, bleed, and change, in contrast to a necessary, unchanging, impassible God. Far from dying out, Carlson reveals, this theological past persists in continental philosophy, where thinkers such as Novalis, Schelling, Merleau-Ponty, and Serres have imagined contingency as a type of radical destabilization brought about by the body’s collision with a changing world. Through studies of sickness, loneliness, violation, and love, she shows that different experiences of contingency can lead to dramatically dissimilar ethical and political projects. A strikingly original reconsideration of one of continental philosophy and critical theory’s most cherished concepts, this book reveals the limits of historicist accounts.