Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Religious Studies
First Advisor
Khawaja, Noreen
Abstract
This dissertation is a study of the position of Catholicism in the conceptual organization of secular modernity. Inspired by the plenitude of roles the Catholic plays in formations of religious and cultural self-narration, I take up three thinkers for whom the Catholic represents above all a means of navigating the contradictory structures of modernity, avoiding both the simple negativity of critique and the delusion of nostalgic reaction. For Charles Péguy, early intimations of a modern mysticism lead him to a paradoxical appreciation of his greatest antagonists, which in turn sets the stage for his return to the Catholicism of his youth, read through the thought of Henri Bergson, finally resulting in what I call Péguy’s rewriting of philosophy. In the thought of Donna Haraway, I find a similarly subtle engagement with the violence embedded in modern technoscientific culture, which, informed by her childhood Eucharistic devotion, leads her to mount a critique that results in the production of new forms of thinking beyond the restrictions of modern categorization. Bruno Latour’s rigorously speculative narration of modernity grounds the speculative rereading of Catholicism of the kind I am trying to pursue here. Finally, I sketch a possible intellectual history that leads to these thinkers, which demands an expansion of this speculative effort, combining history and abstract thought in a way only the study of religion can make possible.
Recommended Citation
Hanson, Jack, "Sacramental Reason: Speculative Thought in Catholic Modernity" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1310.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1310
