In his 1936 article “Sur la philosophie chrétienne,”1 Henri de Lubac claims that the question of the viability of “Christian philosophy” is not a question so much of Christian thought, or theology, adapting its own concepts to the “external” language of philosophy (e.g. Anglo-analytic religious epistemology and Classical Theism). Nor is it the converse, a philosophy that has “received a Christian contribution”, a kind-of Christian stamp of approval.2 Rather, Christian philosophy is that philosophy which recognizes its finitude (”its radical insufficiency”)3, admits to its short-comings (that is its inability to on-its-own be Christian), and give up any notion of rationalizing Revelation. Continue reading ‘Henri de Lubac “On Christian Philosophy”, part 1′
Archive for the 'Systematic Theology' Category
I wanted to draw attention to a comment made last week. Because it pertains to a post made several months ago, I fear many of us might miss it - I would probably miss most comments if I didn’t have them emailed to me - and I would hate to see it forgotten. Go here and here for the original posts. I hope Tony, the author of it, won’t mind me posting a snippet of it here. Oh, and, Welcome and Thanks for the contribution, Tony! Send me your email address if you see this.
Continue reading ‘Neo-scholasticism and Reno, redux’
The Chicago Reader Film Blog has a cool post about the use of the supernatural and cosmic in the latest Pirates of the Caribbean. The post asserts that while some of the imagery is borrowed from the french director Eric Rohmer, especially the green flash symbolizing the transference of a person from this world to the other, the film ultimately fails to plumb the depths of the supernatural to which it sets out. I agree. On a purely symbolic level (we won’t even discuss the quality of the film), many images are introduced, but, like many of my high school students’ essay, the movie fails to seal the deal. The introduction is given, a lot of irrelevant details are used (presumably) as supporting evidence, and the conclusion predictably is a happy one although divorced from the deep, spiritual elements. One feels as though one has been shot by Dick Cheney’s shotgun, left with nothing else to do but apologize for being there in the first place.
Which brings me to the movie I really wanted to talk about today: The Fountain, directed by Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream). If you want to get really fucked up tonight, go out and rent this gem. Aronofsky, unlike Verbinski, seems to recognize that what matters more in the fantasy genre is drawing the audience in with the question of the supernatural, not the assumed, unexplored premise of the supernatural. “We’ve seen it all. It’s not really interesting to audiences anymore. The interesting things are the ideas; the search for God, the search for meaning.” This is where Pirates fails, not so much because it lacked the “ideas”, but because it seemed to be unaware (inasmuch as a movie can be unaware or aware) that it even had the ideas…. maybe that’s a little harsh.
The Fountain, on the other hand, is bursting with the ideas and the questions. The imagery is overflowing, yet understated. Rather than throwing many different images on the screen, they return to the same imagery throughout the film, exploring new aspects, letting the chaos settle as the story nears its conclusion. I really appreciated the way the question of the supernatural didn’t fight death, but embraced it, unlike Pirates where in the end the main character managed to evade death for the moment. Whereas Pirates of the Caribbean advocates an uneasy truce with death, the Fountain’s main character takes a 1000 year voyage to finally be at peace with his and his wife’s death, the end of the book.
I’m watching The Fountain with an 11th grade AP English class tomorrow morning. I’m afraid it may be a bit heavy for them, but they’ll at least get exposure to religious imagery in film. So, I’ll let you all know how it goes.
I guess I should have just posted my proposal! But don’t ask me for more (that is, until the proposal gets accepted and I actually have to write the paper)
Considering the importance of the Imaginary register in children’s literature, it is no surprise that the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, the best selling children’s books ever, has some fairly typical imaginary/fantasy elements, such as wizards and witches with improbable powers. Rowling, though, has stated that her books are simply “about death”—the one element which fantasies seem to always miraculously avoid. While the genre of fantasy in its purest sense obviates death, and thus the dimension of theReal, Rowling’s book are structured such that the Imaginary realm is always running into its own limit, the paths of fantasy always being surprised by the stroke of death.
The structure of Harry’s fantasy world, and consequently the structure of the books themselves, is centered on the loss of his parents, but especially that of his father, whose specter makes an appearance in book three, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, as part of a unique time travel sequence. Unlike most time travel sequences which are structured such that an alternative time thread must be created which runs parallel to the “real” time, and which functions as a powerful fantasy of how life could be “if only. . .” the sequence in this book maintains only one history—but with a twist. When Harry and his friends go back in time to ensure that Harry’s godfather, Sirius Black, is able to elude capture, we realize that everything they go back in time to do had already been accomplished by their time traveling selves. This would merely be a typical time-traveling conundrum were it not for the intrusion of the Real in the form of an impasse within the Imaginary. At the end of the initial narration Harry is saved from a gruesome death by the apparition of a stag controlled by what he takes to be the ghost of his deceased father. In the second narration the time traveling Harry, in a moment of shock, realizes that it was not his father who had conjured up the saving image but that it is his present, time-traveling self that must take the responsibility to perform the difficult charm.
The time travel sequence reiterates a theme that is present throughout the whole series, namely, that Harry must come to terms with his desire that his father could save him, or the fantasy that he might never have lost him. When Harry steps into the place that he had reserved for his father by performing the conjuration himself, we have a moment analogous to what Lacan referred to as the “traversing of the fantasy.” At this moment the fantasy dies, yet inasmuch as Harry is able to act from the place at which his fantasies had controlled him, we witness a sublimation in the Lacanian sense, that is, a re-structuring of the relationship of the Imaginary order to that of the Real, such that the Imaginary does not function to block the Real, but to maintain it, as well as the subject’s minimal distance from it.
The fourth and fifth sections of the Outlines, chapter 1, continues Hall’s attempt to delineate the natural and supernatural. In my reading, Hall suffers primarily here by delineating science and theology enough that, in so doing, creates an emancipated, secular science that is able to carry on entirely in the absence of theology, regardless of how much he wants it to want the input of faith and the church.
Hall begins by elucidating the “natural order” or the phenomenal world, in which certain observable “laws” or regulating forces maintain a uniformity of experience. However, this uniformity must not mislead one to believe that this is an eternal or everlasting cosmos, as neither science can prove nor revelation attests to such. Rather, revelation states that “this order will, in due time, give place to a new one.” Moreover, the phenomenal world has seen the breaking in of miracles and the supernatural, as testified to by the ancients’ preoccupation with the uniformity of the supernatural long before interest in natural laws grew. “Theological science is more ancient than physical science—in fact, the mother of it.” As such, Hall posits the following division of disciplines:
So long as natural science confines itself to the investigation of nature as such, and theological science to the theistic and spiritual interpretation of facts undeniably established, there can be no conflict. But when natural scientists undertake to advance theological interpretations of their results, a collision is apt to occur between their crude speculations and more mature Theology. And when theologians continue to rely upon exploded views of nature, basing theological speculations upon them, a conflict occurs between out-of-date and up-to-date natural science. As Dr. Pusey says, unscience, not science, is adverse to Faith.
Reason and faith, then, are both important in the theological project. Reason according to Hall is “an intellectual process making for the acquisition of truth… invariably conditioned in its exercise by the will and affections.” Faith, while having several different modes, is here “a department of reason, although dependant upon supernatural grace… the spiritual faculty by which we discern spiritual things.” Thus, being an exercise of reason, “the laws of human reason hold good.” Grace becomes important to Hall here, in that grace is vital to one’s very ability to grasp supernatural knowledge. Consequently, he grants a special place to the sacraments inasmuch as they expose one to grace. Access to grace through faith is most evident in the common statements of faith embraced by the “Greek, Latin, and Anglican (churches)… with but slight verbal variations and with the same meaning… significant, in view of the diversity of races and usages which exists, and the age-long mutual hostility which has prevailed. Such consent is not to be found elsewhere.” Rationalism, then, is not some pure form of access to reason, but is a crippled endeavor simply by virtue of its prima facie rejection of ecclesial authority.
While it seems that Hall’s definition of natural and supernatural probably got a lot of mileage, particularly among more technologically or scientifically minded Christians (Janet comments on this is a previous posting’s comment section), and maybe I’m even detecting a hint of CS Lewis’ Miracles, his language is ultimately uncompelling and rather flat to me. I’m especially uneasy about his division of territory between science and theology. This is possibly due to Hall attempting to hedge the claims of science, and my nostalgia for cosmologies like Maximus’, in which a theological understanding of the world not only precedes but informs a natural one, in which there is no comprehensive understanding of the natural world that does not flow from an initial engagement with that world’s creator. Furthermore, while he tries to ward off the notion of an universal scientific reason, his separation of powers between science and theology seem to grant that there is a space apart from theology in which a kind of positivist and exhaustive scientific knowledge is possible. Of course, it now is commonplace to reject such notions almost entirely on their naivete toward the place of interpretation in all things, scientific or theological. Similarly, one could ask exactly what Hall means by a natural order, and whether investigation of such includes ontology. He certainly isn’t clear as to how broad or narrow he expects the study of the natural order to be, but philosophers might make a convincing case for their autonomy under Hall’s system. Conversely, if anthropology and ontology are theological topics, or at least not wholly secular disciplines, then Hall’s secular science will be surely lacking in its exercise. My thomist friends can probably spell out for me how Thomas answers many of these questions, and I probably should point you all to this book as it helped me flesh a little bit of this out for myself as I was typing this post.
Per Caritatem has an interesting 3 part series on a Reformed View of the Eucharist by Mike Vendsel that just ended last thursday. Vendsel reviews Douglas Farrow’s article, “Between the Rock and a Hard Place: In Support of (something like) a Reformed View of the Eucharist”. I must confess, I didn’t know there was such a thing. Just goes to show the state of catechesis when I was growing up. Farrow’s article basically posits two views: 1.is the “traditional” reformed view that attempts to safeguard a notion of Christ’s ontological body, existing in space and time, quite distinct from the sacramental elements. This perspective reminds me of something a youth leader said to me back in high school: “We don’t have sacraments; we have ordinances.” At the time, I took him to be mincing words, but since then I have come to wonder if it really wasn’t just an excuse to not deal with the tensions of being in a rather new tradition that has failed to articulate a metaphysic. Anyway, the problem with this for Farrow is how it radically seperates our materiality from Christ’s, and the Gnostic connotation of the worshipper engaged in some mental/spiritual connection to Christ.
The 2nd view is is the RC perspective, best articulated by Thomas, summarized by Farrow:
“by virtue of His divine omnipresence and omnipotence as the Logos, Jesus is able to provide on earth a eucharistic form of His humanity under the accidents of bread and wine, making present (albeit non-spatially) the actual substance of His exalted body and blood” (p. 171)
Calvin provides the foil to this view. For Calvin, the power of the Eucharist is not in dilluting Christ’s humanity, but rather in transporting us to heaven in union with Christ - a kind of beatific experience, it seems.
I won’t summarize the rest of the posts from Per Caritatem here, but rather direct your attention to the links to each post: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
The series followed a post on an article on the Eucharist by Catherine Pickstock, “Thomas Aquinas and the Quest for the Eucharist.” The post highlights Pickstock’s work with “Desire” and the allegory of the Grail. Here’s an interesting quote from Pickstock that seems to encapsulate most of the summary from Per Caritatem:
“Thus we can see that what the Eucharist is is desire. Although we know via desire, or wanting to know, and this circumstance alone resolves the aporia of learning, beyond this we discover that what there is to know is desire. But not desire as absence, lack and perpetual postponement; rather, desire as the free flow of actualization, perpetually renewed and never foreclosed” (pp. 178-179).
These posts got me thinking about how one might capture the distinctiveness of an Anglican view of the Eucharist. Rowan Williams talks about Hooker’s doctrine of Christology and Sacraments in his book, Anglican Identities. A major theme Williams brings out is Hooker’s emphasis of the incarnation as the redemption (or “restoration”) of humanity via the work of the Holy Spirit, not simply a relationship of solidarity by virtue of his being human: “it is a relation with a humanity itself already transfigured (not annihilated)by the outpouring of a divine gift.” The Holy Spirit can act upon and through us in multiple ways, including by not limited to the Eucharist - however one may theorize the relationship of Christ to the elements.
“Papist error about the Eucharist is less in the doctrine of transubstantiation as such than in the insistence on this as the only legitimate account of how Christ acts… Hooker can say, boldly, ‘there ensueth a kind of transubstantiation in us (67.2, p. 358); [similarly] Herbert argues that Christ died for humanity, not for bread, so it is the former that needs changing…”
While Hooker doesn’t seem to want to spend a lot of time fleshing out the metaphysics of the Sacraments, the point is clear: Christ acts on us through his gifts. “Receive the gift of divine action and the effects of divine action follow - in Christ’s humanity, in the bread and the wine, in the holy person.”
If only I had unlimited funds and unlimited time, I’d probably forgo schooling and just read journals, attend conferences, and scope out local restaurants in the world’s great cities. As it seems improbable that any of you, our dear TLOU readers, are in the position to become my patron, then I must ask that whichever of you are nearest to St. Andrews must attend and record/videotape/take the best notes of your life, especially at Nick Wolterstorff’s talk. I would pay good money to have that session. really.
Thanks Dan for starting off our conversation of Francis Hall’s Theological Outlines. Lets have a go at question 2, on the supernatural. While I thought he opened clearly with his definition of theology, some confusion immediately comes in when he starts in on the supernatural , or at least some terms go by without being well explained. Of course, “the supernatural” is a huge topic, especially when we also look at philosophical concerns (which he apparently wants to do). I would like to quote this bit at the end though, and then make a brief comment: “Certain writers err in supposing that the distinction between lower and higher natures and between the forces resident in them (for this is what the distinction between natural and supernatural really means) has the effect of banishing God from nature and of reducing nature’s Divine significance. It is God that worketh whether He employs the forces resident in lower or higher natures, or dispenses with the use of means.” In other words, grace founds nature, as Balthasar and de Lubac stressed. And if we look at Hall’s definition of supernatural, which is anything the causation of which cannot be assigned to visible or human means, then obviously men and women are fundamentally graced, and all of the natural causes which they assign and effect come from grace. Balthasar makes the same point at the end of “Love Alone” and it really grounds his understanding of universal salvation. More on that later.
Today, Matthew Milliner, an Art History student at Princeton Univ., posted a reflection on Reno’s article, which I wrote about yesterday. Milliner begins by recounting the recent art conference, Retracing the Expanded Field, at Princeton’s School of Architecture. The conference included art critic legends like Hal Foster, who seem now to be arguing the same thing about the practice of Art Criticism as Reno does about Theology, namely that revolutionary movements in art, Post-modernisms namely, have been great for shaking up the paradigms, but they’ve done so to the extent that Criticism has yet to find a unified machinery from which to continue to assess art. Like the Heroic Generation, figures like Piet Mondrian and Andre Malraux (to use Milliner’s examples), gained enough momentum to attract a following, but failed to provide a stable “baseline” from which others could grow or rebel. Now, many are without enough of a tradition or background to converse gainfully with others in the field, resulting in a kind of Babel experience. Milliner goes on to conclude that as with the supposed break of the Heroic Generation with the 2 centuries of theological neo-scholasticism before them, so the “post-moderns” broke with those before them, like the New Criticism group (Clement Greenberg, et. al.). Continue reading ‘The Heroic Generation and Art Criticism’s Tower of Babel’
Rusty Reno has a great review article over at the First Things website of Fergus Kerr’s new book, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians: From Chenu to Ratzinger, on the last generation of Catholic theologians, covering greats like Yves Congar, de Lubac, Balthasar, and Rahner. The book actually goes all the way through JP II and Ratzinger/Benedict. Meant not as much as a survey of all RC 20th and 21st C theology, but rather as an examination of what Kerr considers the archetypes of RC theology in the last century, Reno lauds Kerr’s decision to consider how these theologians “fundamentally changed the way in which the Church thinks.” These are the theologians of the “Heroic Generation”.
Since I’m pretty sure you have to be a subscriber to FT, and will therefore not be able to follow the above link, I’ll do my best to highlight the salient points of the article, although you really should try to get your hands on it or, better yet, buy the book.
Kerr chose this particular group because he believes each in his own way articulates a form of post-neoscholastic RC theology. To be sure, the variance between each occurs in greater and lesser degrees. Whereas the distance between de Lubac and Ratzinger is bridged nicely by Balthasar, it could be argued that there is a fundamental split between Rahner and Balthasar. Thus, Kerr’s survey functions less like Frei’s “typology” and more like a historical text, exploring the nuances of these theologians’ projects within the larger scheme of church theology of the time.
In this respect, one of the most interesting arguments, as Reno points out, regarding the attrition in RC theological culture after Vatican II. I know little about Bernard Lonergan, so I was surprised to learn that Kerr considers him to be one of the most acute philosophical minds in this group. Lonergan, according to Kerr, successfully overcame the dualistic, scholastic reading of Thomas, and proposed in his 1972 Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas a new way of understanding Thomas that was more sensitive to recent Continental developments. However, with Vatican II and the concurrent distaste for neo-scholasticism came a diminished vocabulary and skill set among theology students - they couldn’t grasp either the original debate about neo-scholasticism or Lonergan’s creative solution. In this way, Lonergan’s impact was small, although his contribution was potentially large.
Reno states that Kerr makes a similar argument about Henri de Lubac and the loss of his unique contribution with the loss of fluency with Thomism, but I would disagree slightly here. Students, both of philosophy and theology, are rediscovering de Lubac on two fronts. First, von Balthasar’s mediation of Lubac is worth noting, and as Balthasar’s coverage grows, so does Lubac’s. Second, Lubac’s work on Surnaturel and similar works are gaining popularity among philosophy students who have followed the Derrida/Marion and Zizek/Badiou trains as far as they can go. Creative, orthodox theology seems to have something to offer them that exotic philosophies couldn’t.
Reno ends the article by extolling the virtue of a stable, culture forming theology, geared toward educating the church in “the common framework and vocabulary, to prepare them to become full participants in the theological project.” A “exploratory theologian” himself, he recalls popular dismissals of “dusty” Thomism and encourages, with Pope Leo XIII’s 1879 Aeterni Patris, the reader to recognize that “without a standard theology, the Church will lack precisely the sort of internally coherent and widespread theological culture that is necessary for understanding and employing bold new experiments and fruitful recoveries of past traditions.” Yet, while these archetypes of the Heroic Generation were largely innovators and criticized the status quo Thomism, they weren’t seeking to destroy the base, necessarily, but Reno faults many of them, including an acrimonious bit toward von Balthasar for offering “only criticism, much of it bitter and dismissive, and he launched out in new directions with little regard for the official, mainstream theologies of the day.” Had Balthasar attempted to engage theological education, Reno argues, there might have been some constructive value in offering his theology in an introduction to Catholic Theology. However, as it stands, Reno advocates in stead a critical examination of the time that these thinkers worked in. Although they offered many biting criticisms and little constructive engagements with Traditional theological education, we should strive to understand the problems they were trying to correct within their context. “[T]he old theological culture of the Church has largely been destroyed, while the Heroic Generation did not, perhaps could not, formulate a workable, teachable alternative to take its place.” To this extent Reno practically blames Balthasar and others for creating the vacuum that Rahner ended up filling.
Today, lacking the educational and theological base that made thinkers like Balthasar and Rahner possible, Reno calls for a renewal of theology that cares about the concerns and suggestions made by the “Heroic Generation”, but that also seriously evaluates and compensates for their errors.
Reno demonstrates his chastened appropriation in the last paragraph by calling for a ressourcement, this time one that doesn’t only creatively summon the brilliance of the Patristics and Medievals, but one that also recovers the riches of the neo-scholastic period in light of the Heroic Generation.
“To overcome the poverty of the present, our generation must base its theological vision on a fuller, deeper form of ressourcement, one that discerns the essential continuity of the last two hundred years of Catholic theology. After an era of creativity, exploration, and discontinuity, much of it fruitful and perhaps necessary, we need a period of consolidation that allows us to integrate the lasting achievements of the Heroic Generation into a renewed standard theology.”
Reno is right to recall our attention to the lost theologians of the 18th and 19th centuries. As recent work in Schliermacher has demonstrated, sometimes the theologians influenced by the events and philosophies of the European continent in the 20th century were too hasty in the dismissals of such figures. Maybe we can see what they couldn’t thanks to their insights. Maybe our sensibilities, having been admonished by the “Heroic Generation”, enjoy a special perspective that allows us to hang in the balance between those neo-scholastic minds and the post-war, Vatican II intellectuals.
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