Offered as a response to the challenges that arose out of the public debate between Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger at the Catholic Academy of Bavaria in 2004, Brian T. Trainor sets himself the formidable challenge of arguing, most broadly, that the sacred and the secular are ‘integral aspects of a single dynamic totality’ (p. 3). Fashionably beginning as an intervention into the dialectics of secularization, Trainor attempts to substantiate this claim by plunging headlong into dialogue with a host of diverse voices ranging from Barth, Rahner and the Niebuhr brothers to Hobbes, Bosanquet, Foucault and Derrida. What emerges throughout the book, however, is the pursuit of a certain kind of rehabilitation of universal liberalism and theological metaphysics in the face of contemporary discourses that celebrate the endless proliferation of difference and the overcoming of onto-theology.
Divided into four parts, Trainor begins by taking issue with what he calls ‘our curious and over-inflated fondness for the particular’ (p. 36), which he claims reveals a misplaced hostility toward the universal. Trainor's bold argument here attempts to show that H. Richard Niebuhr and Michael Walzer produce an illuminating synthesis of the particularist insights of what he terms the ‘Ressourcement/culture school’ and the universalist insights of what he calls the ‘Rahnerian/instrumentalist school’. Predictably enough, the quarrel in the background here is with John Milbank, whose account Trainor seeks to complicate by introducing a conception of the relative or, as he puts it, ‘penultimate’ autonomy of the secular and by questioning whether Milbank's reliance on Blondel is as revolutionary as he claims.
Trainor continues his rehabilitation of the universal in part two by setting his account against the backdrop of Foucault, whose ‘withering critique of experts certainly helps us to become humble servants of Truth’ (p. 197). This productive use of Foucault is by no means a wholesale endorsement, however, since Trainor claims that he is ‘the leading theorist who has contributed to the current anti-Truth cultural climate’(p. 199) and goes on to suggest that the way forward is helpfully illuminated by Bosanquet, who represents an advance on Walzer's communitarianism. Trainor's recourse to this largely neglected English political philosopher is certainly one of the more interesting turns in the book. In Trainor's hands, Bosanquet offers the resources to resist the postmodern severing of the particular from the universal with his account of how the universal ‘descend[s] upon its differences without de-naturing or destroying them’ (p. 221). This leads on to a spirited defence of a kind of universal liberalism with a built in openness to criticism against the kind of political liberalism espoused by Rawls.
Recourse to Bosanquet continues in part three, in which Trainor aims to ‘show that the kind of ethical-metaphysical theory of the state that we broadly associate with idealist political philosophy provides us with a theoretical account of the state that … remains the most profound and powerful account of the state available’(p. 295). Central here is an account of the state that maintains that in addition to its existence as a network of political and juridical institutions, the state is also an ‘ethical community’ or a ‘living ethical reality’. Drawing attention to Barth's later work, particularly his Community, State and Church, and explicitly pushing his analysis much farther than Barth ever imagined, Trainor audaciously argues that ‘the state, conceived of as an angelic presence of the Spirit, bearing and mediating the will to justice … is beyond corruption’(p. 369). As outlandish as this claim may seem, Trainor is careful to qualify what he means and explicitly suggests that the Third Reich should not be regarded as a state at all, which of course raises further questions about the criteria by which statehood can be judged to be legitimate that are left largely unanswered apart from a rather vague notion of conformity to Christ. Of the utmost importance for Trainor is that the shared ethical-metaphysical kernel of the state both Barth and Bosanquet articulate ‘stands firmly against and roundly condemns totalitarian political ideologies’ (p. 401).
The final part of the book is dominated by a discussion of Hobbes, who Trainor suggests is useful because he exhibits a ‘subtle understanding of the ennobling and constructive role of law’ (p. 426) and ‘ecumenically valuable because he is associated both with the (Catholic) natural law tradition and yet also with the (Protestant) Occamite, nominalist tendencies of the Reformation tradition, so that his work serves … as a bridge between the two’ (p. 473). Here again, Trainor launches into a highly polemic argument that seeks to resituate Barth with respect to the Catholic tradition by suggesting that ‘whilst Barth, in his earlier work, is clearly out of sympathy with natural law both rhetorically and substantively, yet in his later work, it appears that he is out of sympathy rhetorically rather than substantively with the natural law tradition’ (p. 488). Ending where he began, the final chapter tackles the difficult relationship between justice and violence by reading Derrida against himself.
The overall impression the book leaves is more of a collection of essays cobbled together rather than a coherent monograph. Indeed, seven of the eleven chapters are based on previously published articles and there is much additional overlap with an earlier book on justice and the state. The text itself is also overburdened with parenthetical remarks, which at times would have been better consigned to footnotes since they too often interrupt the flow of the narrative, and chapter references throughout the text are incorrect. Editorial idiosyncrasies including the sporadic omission of author names from footnotes, a complete lack of page numbers in the contents, only a very brief index of names, no subject index whatsoever and other miscellaneous errata inhibit the usefulness of such a large and wide-ranging volume.
More substantively, however, Trainor's mode of analysis moves very quickly. Readers are bombarded with a veritable cacophony of names that are parachuted into the text and, while frequently relevant and interesting, often disappear as quickly as they arrive and thus have the effect of distracting from rather than deepening the analysis. Alongside this, Trainor's arguments suffer from a marked tendency to overreach what they are actually able to show and at times would benefit from a more discerning contextual approach. His attempt to resituate Barth, for example, fails to mention Przywara and touches on Balthasar only tangentially. Likewise, his discussion of Bosanquet, which is surely where the uniqueness of Trainor's contribution lies, makes no mention of the significant influence of Hegel, whose absence is doubly curious given his subsequent advocacy of a kind of Sittlichkeit. Despite these weaknesses, or indeed perhaps because of them, Trainor's contribution raises a host of valuable questions and his provocations invite further constructive dialogue of precisely the sort he displays throughout this weighty volume.
