A Cheer for Bishop Berkeley

Milbank suggests that Berkeley makes some important breakthroughs in working out a Christian understanding of language and of a creation made by the Logos (“Theological Without Substance,” Journal of Literature and Theology 2:2 [1988]). 

Berkeley imagines a metaphysics without substance, but, because he believes in a God who communicates in creation, he doesn’t collapse into solipcism or abandon a form of realism. As usual, Milbank’s analysis is more than a mouthful, but it’s worth some careful study:

“If, for Berkeley, ‘things’ are
not founded in any substantia, but are just composed of sensory qualities,
then it becomes impossible to say that they are anything ‘beyond’ the
implicatory network of signs which encompasses our whole practical
inhabitation of the world. This is not, of course, to deny that things (which
are just signs, or ‘ideas’) exist without our thinking them; in fact it is central
to Berkeley’s philosophy to insist on the ‘exteriority’ of all ideas even so far
as they are thought, because he is the first thinker (before Thomas Reid) to
break with the Aristotelian realist and empiricist versions of the idea that
‘transmissions’ from matter enter the mind like a ‘receptacle’. In doing this
Berkeley denies that knowledge is a process of ‘cause and effect’ between
two apparently incommensurable realities (mind and matter) and affirms
instead that knowledge occurs in the single medium of ‘ideas’ or signs, and
can be no further explicated than as the reading of signs according to
conventions. Here Berkeley had already closed the chapter of’epistemology’
and substituted a sort of ‘hermeneutics of nature’. He considers that the
‘ideas’ of nature are to be regarded strictly as linguistic components, because
we never ‘know’ anything except according to signifying implication: ‘sight
is foresight’ as he puts it in Siris . . . . Yet at the same time this hermeneutics
opens into a metaphysics, because Berkeley thinks that all language must be
grounded in the ‘mental substance’ of mind; words that are not ours, he
argues, are necessarily the voice of God” (132).

Berkeley’s metaphysics brings in a new semantics: “If substance
drops out, then so also does subject-predicate logic; to attribute something to
a thing is now simply to further explicate its definition, which is no longer
‘once and for all’, but infinitely revisable according to changing networks of
relation. Encyclopaedic explication here replaces dictionary denotation and
location on the tree of substance” (132).

Berkeley denies that names stand for abstract universals; names have particular reference. But he is not a nominalist, but instead overcomes the entire nominalist-realist problematic. Nouns don’t stand for discrete particulars, but rather “indicate the natural ‘linguistic’
elements which like letters or words have in themselves a certain abstract and
universal character, yet are never found in isolation, but always in concrete combination. As ‘divine speech’ nature is composed of nothing but universals
(ideas), but they are only meaningfully articulated ‘together’” (132-3).

Individual qualities have universal character, indicated by a “certain indeterminacy,” which, far from undermining knowledge and meaning, is a condition of the possibility of knowing a world of change. Indeterminacy is necessary and “congruent with the mysterious possibilities of change and recombination” (133). Milbank finds some echoes of stoicism in Berkeley’s combination of “pragmatic semiotics” with “the ‘exotic metaphysics’ of the divine ‘language of vision’” (133).

Berkeley is not beyond criticism. Milbank claims that he denies “any ‘horizontal’ principles of relation among the various qualities” of the creation, and thus lapses “into an ‘alphabetic’ nominalism, combined with a Malebranchian occasionlaism and ontologism which denies secondary causes and so (heretically) turns God into a finite agent” (135).

Yet, in Siris, Berkeley offers a Trinitarian theology of light that enabls him to “articulate a kind of ‘divine pragmatics’ which is able to affirm, on a theological basis, that mind is only present in ‘operations about signs.’”  Milbank sums up Berkeley’s case: “The Father, for Berkeley, is the Platonic sun, ultimate
goodness, ‘the source of light’, rather than light or truth itself, but a sun
never without its rays which ‘effects truth’ (vere efficit) in an eternal
illocutionary act. Likewise God the son is never without God the spirit; the
rays of light, the pyr technikon or logos spermatikos never actually exist
without the various life which they engender. In this third stage the divine
mind achieves a perlocutionary, ‘rhetorical’ performance; the notions are
received as ideas, and this reception constitutes the human subject (the only
real goal of creation). This is not a sequence of’cause and effect’, (it cannot
be, if it applies to God) if one takes as the paradigm of ‘cause’ the idea that
substantial causes ‘precontain’ their accidental effects. This view is specifically
denied by Berkeley in his notebooks. Instead it is a sequence of
speaking and interpretation where at each stage the effect ‘exceeds’ and
actually constitutes, ‘backwards’, its own cause. Hence Berkeley adverts to
the logic of Trinitarian ‘substantive relations’ to construct an aesthetic
ontology which dispenses with both cause and substance. This does not, of
course, mean that Berkeley is in danger of ‘pantheism’. The ‘romance of
light’ concerns only the economic operations of the Trinity, and all finite
ideas fall short of infinite perfection. Nonetheless Berkeley indicates the full
consequence of the specifically Judeo-Christian view that perfection is
‘infinity’ rather than substance (for the Greeks the ‘infinite’ still had
overtones of the ‘chaotic’ and confused). The ascent to perfection is no
longer a reductio to a prior containing cause, but a recovery of the ‘lost region
of light’ which is an infinitely realized communication” (138).

In this Trinitarian framework, Berkeley recovers the stoic “construal of meaning as ‘tension,” but without the stoic “traces of hyle, and of the myth of a ceaseless struggle between logos and underlying matter” (138), seeing it instead as “peaceful tension, or as the realization of communication in a dynamic but harmonious order” (138-9).