Abstract

This dissertation is an attempt to develop a reading of Christian ethics as a non-manipulative and non-possessive mode of enquiry, an epistemology of peace. I begin with an examination of the debate between ethical theory and anti-theory and argue for the need to renarrate and reposition what is at stake between them in terms of the violent desire to master contingency, a move which is best understood as calling for the need to move beyond the alternatives of theory and anti-theory. The interpretive heart of the argument involves the construction of an extended three-way debate between Alasdair MacIntyre, John Milbank, and John Howard Yoder. Although MacIntyre, Milbank, and Yoder are agreed in rejecting a "theoretical" conception of discourse in terms of abstract universal reason, there are significant ethical stakes that remain between them, most specifically in terms of the question of the difference between violent and non-violent modes of enquiry. I shall follow Milbank in arguing that MacIntyre's account of embodied rational conflict between competing traditions of enquiry presupposes an ontology of violence which is problematic from the perspective of Christian theology, which is founded instead on a charitable ontology of peace. Yet Milbank's own account of rhetorical persuasion, which attempts to give up all "external" constraints governing rational discourse in favour of the aesthetic possibility of telling a more beautiful story, can itself be seen as an ultimately violent mode of enquiry. But this argument can only finally be made from the perspective of Yoder. More specifically, Yoder shows that Milbank remains implicated in the "constantinian" temptation towards understanding Christianity as a civilizational religion. While his aesthetic turn may not rest on the appeal to external rational standards, it appears to involve a totalizing attempt to absorb the other by means of its persuasive power in a way that is not fully reciprocal since it need not receive any counter-gift back from the other. By contrast, Yoder's "non-constantinian" conception of the church as a disestablished minority which holds no territory can be more genuinely receptive of others precisely because it does not attempt to take charge over the course of history and the world in general. Drawing on Yoder, I develop a series of counter-cultural political and epistemological practices such as the virtue of patience, the cultivation of a readiness for radical reformation, and a non-violent conception of witness as gift serve to embody a conception of discourse in which there can be a genuine exchange of gift and counter-gift, but which cannot but lose their witnessing potential when they are employed in the service of putting handles on history or ruling the world