ABSTRACT
The character of subjectivity in pre-modern Christian theological and philosophical writings has been and remains a question.1 Partly this is owed to the anti-modern purposes of the nineteenth century revival of scholasticism in the Roman Church. In that campaign a shift from being to the subject was associated with modernity (Hankey 1998a, 141-152; Hankey 1998b, 157-188; Inglis 1998). At present we have a postmodern retrieval of the Platonic traditions which also wishes to get back beyond what it depicts as closed and totalizing modern subjectivity to a human identity which is open, living, incomplete; a human self on a journey beyond itself (Hanby 1999, 109-26; Marion, 1998, 265; Pickstock 1997:95, 199, 114, 118, 192, 211-12, 214). In general, these revivals and rereadings set strong walls of difference between the modern and premodern, between Platonism and Aristotelianism and between philosophy (and thus Hellenism) and Christian theology (Hankey 1999b, 387-397; Hankey 1998a). Accounts of the relation between the knower and the object of knowledge are at the heart of these divisions and oppositions.
