Back To Where?
by modestinus
I recently finished reading Fr. Dominic Bourmaud’s critical survey of 20th C. Catholic thought, One Hundred Years of Modernism (Angelus Press 2006, 356pp.). It’s a good (not great) book which sometimes finds itself saddled with too many generalizations to be convincing. Still, Bourmaud should be commended for attempting to outline the substantial shifts in Western thought as a whole from the period of the Enlightenment up through the rise of phenomenology and existentialism and, from there, discuss its impact on Catholic theology. Bourmaud also brings in the emergence of critical-historical scholarship on the Bible and does a serviceable job connecting up this (originally German Protestant) trend with the (largely Catholic) 20th C. project of going “back to the sources” (ressourcement) with respect to the Christian theological tradition. Though I wish he would have given more pages to the effort, Bourmaud should be commended for pointing out the arbitrary elements of ressourcement and the selectivity biases often at work among the movement’s most visible proponents. Even “scholarly neutral” projects, such as Henri de Lubac’s Sources Chrétiennes, ought to raise eyebrows insofar as certain controversial authors are privileged (e.g., Origen of Alexandria) while other, far less controversial ones, such as St. Jerome, are almost entirely absent from the series. Bourmaud’s claim is that the ressourcement movement represents little more than an attempt by modernist 20th C. theologians to establish an unholy marriage between contemporary, a-theistic philosophy and the “Christian tradition.” And, according to Bourmaud, the concept of “tradition” among the ressourcement theologians is, to say the least, flexible. Where some (even large) elements of the received tradition don’t agree with the worldview of the modernist theologians, it is discarded. Where some obscure line of thought in an obscure thinker’s most obscure work appears, after substantial (if not torturous) interpretation, to gel with modernist thinking, it is placed front n’ center as representing the “authentic tradition.”
Those who have bothered to keep up with my blogging efforts over the years (including the efforts made when I was Orthodox) know that one of my longstanding criticisms with contemporary (Western) Orthodox scholarship is its decision to ape the dubious methodology of many who participated in the ressourcement movement. The “authentic tradition” is often pitted against the “received tradition” and, not surprisingly, the “received tradition” loses—not because it lacks freestanding merit, but because certain scholars believe they now have the sophistication and vision to determine perfectly what aspects of the “received tradition” ought to have never been transmitted in the first place. That these elements became part of the “received tradition” is chalked up to historical accident or ignorance; the work of the Holy Spirit is absent. But two can play at that game, which is why it should come as little surprise that the Orthodox, like the Catholics, are experiencing a counter-revolution (albeit a mild one) insofar as Orthodox writers are now trying to take apart the academic-anointed “authentic tradition.” This, naturally, invites counterattacks and the process goes on, perhaps endlessly and without much fruit. Because the Orthodox Church lacks a centralized teaching authority, these are battles which are unlikely to ever be resolved—at least in the foreseeable future. Whether that reality is any better or worse than the Catholic Church’s apparent abdication of its teaching authority on many critical issues is a matter I won’t bother to get into here.
I do wonder, however, if the counter-revolution can ever be truly successful. Consider, for instance, the ongoing academic quarrel over Henri de Lubac and the question of “pure nature” in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. In the last decade a series of detailed Thomistic studies have cast serious doubt on Lubac’s reading of Aquinas and Thomistic thought, and yet Lubac’s stock appears to be on the rise due to John Milbank’s declaration that he (along with Sergius Bulgakov) represents the pinnacle of 20th C. theology. Many Catholic theologians still genuflect on the Lubacian altar and no doubt every member of the College of Cardinals has read substantial portions of Lubac’s writings. The counter-attack from the Thomists has, up until now, been largely ignored by the mainstream theological establishment and, worst, mocked in the pages of Catholic publications like First Things. There’s no small irony in the fact that Lubac was lauded for questioning the “received tradition” in Catholicism and yet his defenders cannot contemplate that the “received tradition” of Lubac’s theological greatness should itself be subject to serious scrutiny. But Lubac is hardly alone. His fellow theologian and friend, Hans Urs von Balthasar, has started to take a theological thumping in recent years. And yet what “reward” has been offered to his most penetrating Anglophone critic, Alyssa Pitstick? Derision and mockery from one Fr. Edward Oakes in the pages of—you guessed it—First Things. (Non-Catholics are starting to get in on the anti-Balthasar action as well; see Karen Kilby’s recent Balthasar: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Eerdmans 2012).)
Of course, it’s easier to tear down than to build up. After successfully tearing down centuries of Catholic theology and philosophy, the ressourcement theologians (and others who shared in their assumptions) cannot be easily removed from centrality. After all, if they are gone, what stands in their stead? It’s naïve to think that the Catholic Church can simply “go back to Thomism” or “back to Scholasticism”; too much has happened in the last few centuries to make that possibility a reality. A new, more authentically tradition theology, will have to rise up instead, but that itself could take a century or more to produce. And certainly not everything that came off the pen of Lubac and Balthasar deserves to be tossed on the rubbish heap. But at some point a critical analysis will have be undertaken to determine the exact contours of the two men’s orthodoxy and, moreover, the desirability of ressourcement-style projects where a pick-and-choose approach to history is given primacy of place in theological discussions. Contemporary (secular) thought continues to drift further and further into nihilism, and no doubt there will be plenty of young men and women so deeply impressed by the elegance of this drift that they won’t be able to stop themselves from combing through the manuscript archive and critical edition collections for “proof” that the descent into darkness is the true articulation of “Christian theology.” But someone will have to stop them.
“A new, more authentically tradition[al] theology, will have to rise up instead…”
Well isn’t that the Ressourcement project in a nutshell?
I think so.Of course there will be problems which no one should not expect.
With regards, for instance, to figures such as Origen, it’s often forgotten how deeply influential he was both East and West. What he strove to do may have been impossible but he certainly set the bar, as it were, for creative theological thinking that even inspired those who disagreed with him.
The “counter-revolution” will have to equal the Ressourcement crowd in depth in order to have any real impact.
It’s what the ressourcement project promoted itself as being; I’ll grant you that. But “authentic tradition” is the mask that obscures what is more likely the real intent: Build a highly artificial bridge between modernity and the past, picking-and-choosing those elements within the very wide expanse sometimes referred to as the “Patristic tradition” that comports with one’s quite contemporary sensibilities. That’s the illusion of an “authentic tradition”; it’s not the authentic tradition which, whether these folks want to admit it or not, includes Cajetan and Suarez.
Well, I think you’re being a bit unfair as far as the motivations of the Ressourcement crowd go.
You’re also lacking a model for exactly how a tradition is supposed to work here– are you arguing for a painting-into-a-corner model where it’s impossible to go back before the most recent past? Or should tradition work in such a way as to value voices for what they have to say, without regard to chronology?
In any case, people use texts that speak to them, in the broadest sense. I’m not saying that Cajetan and Suarez categorically can’t speak to anyone today, but to make that corner of the Christian tradition meaningful is a kind of an uphill battle for the moment. Who knows in five hundred years, though…
Wait, am I supposed to understand the Ressourcement crowd as they understood themselves? Are you a closet Straussian now? I always knew it…
But seriously…
Chronology matters. I’ll put it that way. But more than just chronology you have to factor in the concrete unfolding of the tradition, which includes why it unfolded the way it did and in response to what. Otherwise you have anarchy. Is Origen part of the tradition? Well, to some extent he will always be insofar as certain swathes of his thought were appropriated and applied by later, less controversial, theologians (some might say “large,” though of course we only hold a fraction of what Origen actually wrote and presumably much which wasn’t considered “orthodox” was discarded in the centuries after his death). But at best what one is saying here is that he is a muted part of the tradition; he’s not central. Yet, if you look at how writers like Lubac and Balthasar approached Origen, you would assume he was as “important” as St. Augustine. But of course, historically speaking, we know he wasn’t. Even if he was unfairly judged by posterity, there is a lot in his theology that was rejected. But if you have an unbounded view of the tradition, then even those rejected elements are now, in the name of “ressourcement,” fair game for reconsideration. In other words, the entire Christian tradition — whether East or West — is in a constant state of openness toward mass reinterpretation, if not upheaval. So yes, I am certainly against that notion of tradition.
Cajetan and Suarez — and Vitoria should be mentioned here as well — were responding to their times, but they did in a way that was consistent with what came before, St. Thomas, who, in turn, was consistent with what he had received. That’s tradition. Certainly Thomas could not have anticipated they discovery of the “New World,” the plight of Native Americans, and the questions surrounding their humanity, but when Vitoria did, he was able to lean on St. Thomas to posit a natural humanity — a universal humanity — that rebuffed the devaluation of native peoples by Iberian conquistadors. Then, a couple hundred years later, Lubac — under the influence of modern philosophy — decides to chuck out what Vitoria (and others) relied upon because it didn’t gel with his intellectual leanings. One project strikes me as much more — how shall we say — “decent” than the other.
If you keep with the line you’re taking, you’ll have to explain how you’re not arguing for a singularly linear conception of tradition, where figures from the relatively near past are privileged on account of their standing on the shoulders of giants or something. Just on its face, this sound more than a bit off.
You’re also coming close to making a straw man by focusing on Origen (who, in any case is at least as important as Augustine in terms of historical influence, unless we completely limit ourselves to people writing in Latin). Are you also opposed to going back to figures who are less controversial? To my mind, the model act of “ressourcement” was when Benedict XV declared Ephrem to be a Doctor of the Church… a full 60 years before Ephrem’s complete works were available in Europe.
It only sounds a bit off if your prejudice takes you into the realm of thinking the past 2,000 years of Christian history is the clay whereby one can remake doctrine in their own image and likeness. That form of scholarly hubris has not been altogether absent from the projects of many 20th and 21st century academic theologians. It pays to be wary of such things.
Of course every theologian until recently went to some lengths to present their ideas as in perfect conformity with the received tradition, even as they made their own not insubstantial contributions to it. That is the linearity I am referring to. Lubac, on the other hand, decided to cut out over four centuries of the thought that preceded him in the name of the authentic tradition. In other words, he posited a radical break in Catholic thought that had to be mended. Yet this mending turned out to be a reinvention of Catholic thought in a very modern key. The Radical Orthodox crowd are Lubacians on steroids, and their project is hardly traditional.
If ressourcement were merely a recognition of the whole expanse of orthodox Christian thought, it wouldn’t raise many eyebrows.
Samn St Augustine is a Doctor of the Church, a Founder of a religious order, wrote won of the most well known works of literature of all time The Confessions.
I don’t see where you are getting that he was equal with Origen in historical influence.
Noah,
I’m talking here in terms of intellectual history pure and simple. Augustine’s influence historically was almost entirely limited to the Latin-speaking world. There was a bit of interest in him in the East during and right after his lifetime (and so we have stuff like Theodore of Mopsuestia writing refutations of him) and another brief flurry in Byzantine territory in the 13th century when his works are translated into Greek. But, for people who didn’t speak Latin (that is, the vast majority of the world’s Christians prior to the age of colonization) there’s no long-term engagement with Augustine’s thought.
Origen, on the other hand, stalks the entire Christian tradition in two ways– his direct influence– that is, people reading him and adopting some of his views and methods– and his indirect influence, in terms of people wrestling with his legacy. The best example of the former is Evagrius, who, despite being technically condemned by the imperial Church is intellectually foundational for all Eastern monasticisms and even, through Cassian, the Latin tradition. A good example of the latter is Maximus the Confessor’s entire intellectual project. In any case, without Origen’s influence in some way or another, it’s also hard to imagine having either the Cappadocians or Alexandrian exegesis….
If you want to play the numbers game, then Augustine still wins since there are now exponentially more Christians in the world whose respective confession adheres to some form of Augustinianism than Origenism. Moreover, your analysis of Origen’s influence goes back to my earlier point: his historical influence was a mediated one. But arguably Lubac and Balthasar weren’t interested in the mediated Origen. They wanted the “pure” Origen which, they believed, would help support their respective theological projects. Milbank carries on this tradition today.
So, one might ask here, what was wrong with the mediated or even the detoxified Origen? Why not accept it and move on? Why go back? Historical curiosity doesn’t cut it. The interest in Origen, which proved to an interest in those rather toxic elements of his thought, was far more than historical.
Well, in terms of the project of Sources Chretiennes, publishing the extant works of Origen is a vastly more valuable endeavor than publishing just about anyone else, given the prior availability of his texts relative to their fundamental importance for understanding just about all subsequent Fathers.
I’m really not out to endorse von Balthasar, who no one reads as a historian in any case. He was very self-conscious of his being a genius in the hypergraphic, Teutonic sense and this makes him something of a singular figure among 20th century theological writers not named Karl Barth. Which is the big reason that he’s very hard to interact with and why Pitstick’s witch-hunt technique of dealing with him is so ineffective.
That said, I think you’re highlighting one of the main modern problems in Christian intellectual life– the problem of catholicity. If Christianity is to address everyone everywhere, we cannot allow it to be progressively narrowed until all we’re left with is a yellowed and dog-eared copy of the Baltimore Catechism. We have to be aware of how Christian life has expressed itself in its full range of times and cultural spaces.
Some of this comes down to whether one sees the endeavor of theology to create bullet-point lists of acceptable and unacceptable propositions (as your apparent manualist yearnings imply) or more as a conversation within the Church. And I hasten to add that seeing theology as a conversation doesn’t have to mean an unlimited broadening of the discourse, even if revisiting questionable figures from the past is extremely valuable. As just one example– the project rehabilitating Theodore of Mopsuestia, pursued by a whole slew of 20th century Catholic theologians, was at least as dangerous as the rehabilitation of Origen (to which it was connected, in that they both emphasized the Latin Church’s discomfort with and near non-reception of the 5th Council). But, their endeavor led in the past 10 years to a serious reconsideration of why Theodore’s theology is unacceptable, significantly deepening our understanding of Christology.
My interest is not to centralize the “manualist tradition.” You strike too stark an either/or here in this discussion. It seems to me, following your line of thought, that a work such as Rowan Williams’ Arius: Heresy and Tradition ought to be lauded because it leads us to rethink the character of Arius; his reasoning; and the historically contingent declaration of heresy (rather than orthodoxy) that was issued in the 4th C. Heck, we can even take a step further back and look at someone like Harnack and his work on Marcion. I mean, really, do we actually need the Old Testament? Wasn’t that just a parochial, genocidal faux-god at work in the minds of a tribalist people? Surely we can discard that, being that we are quite a bit more “enlightened” in the 21st C., no? Maybe we should rethink this whole “Trinity thing” while we’re at it since, certainly, we can find plenty of Christian writers in the tradition writ large whose theology did not contemplate (and, indeed, directly contradicted) the proclamations of Nicaea and Constantinople.
So, where do you draw the line? If there is fair game to be played in 2,000 years of Christianity, what criteria do you apply? Why shouldn’t some enterprising Eastern Orthodox scholars take a hard look at, say, Luther and Calvin? Why should they be so “narrow-minded” and “parochial” as to discard their thought? Because they weren’t in the right geography? Ok, so let’s toss in Jan Huss. He was certainly “Eastern” in geography and, according to one of your confessions’ Saints (St. Nikolai), a man to be revered as an Orthodox martyr because he stood in opposition to the Pope. You can accuse me of being narrow in my views, but I have yet to see you posit a meaningful metric by which heresy can be distinguished form orthodoxy. Following your line of thinking “orthodoxy” is just a historically contingent opinion that can be revised ad infinitum.
I think you misunderstood my example about the attempted rehabilitation of Theodore of Mopsuestia. It’s not that I think that dual-subject Christology is a good thing, it’s that I think having people in the 20th century advocate for it deepened our own understanding of proper Christology. Much the same could be said of the value of Williams’ book on Arius. Thoughtful, sympathetic accounts of heretical thought are essential to enriching our understanding of orthodoxy.
But beyond that, I think it should be uncontroversial to say that revisiting the Christian past and highlighting ideas and themes that have been de-emphazized in more recent eras is part of having a healthy, living tradition. Certainly, this was something that was desperately needed across the Christian world by the close of the 19th century.
Even if we wouldn’t necessarily recapitulate all its elements today, Ressourcement did an incredible service to all Christians– and I don’t see how your feeling squeamish about editions of transliterations of Origen counts as a case against this. We should not be shocked when we learn that within the vast space of Christian orthodoxy there is a great deal of diversity of thought and we should not be afraid of engaging with the thought of foundational figures like Origen, Tertullian, or hell, why not, Martin Luther, who got a lot wrong and a lot right.
I honestly can’t understand this post here as anything but a plea for intellectual cowardice.That is– it’s one thing to disagree with von Balthasar and there are very many grounds to do so on, but it’s something else to argue that the only proper way to ensure orthodoxy is to play ostrich in the sands of history.
*not transliterations, translations. You can see that I’m taking a break from book-cataloging right now by where my mind is.
I am not arguing for “playing ostrich”; but the interest in history doesn’t end at an interest in history. And that’s the problem. The effort to produce and disseminate critical editions of Patristic (and other, later) sources of Christian thought began before ressourcement. To the extent these editions reflect the best manuscript sources available and clarify the thought of past thinkers (even heretical ones) is a laudable project. I don’t believe I have ever written an ill word against it.
Where I am less sanguine is on the point of using the recovery (reminder?) of the Christian past as an open forum to play with the theology and doctrines of the Church. Though Orthodoxy seems to have been immune from this, there is no doubt that a great deal of doctrinal upheaval can be sourced back to the critical-historical approach to the Bible that begun in earnest during the 18th and 19th Centuries. The Catholic Church was right to oppose the (attempted) theological and doctrinal byproducts of this study, and it’s worth mentioning that the Church did that in a fair and nuanced manner until the middle of the 20th C. After that the flood gates were kicked open and today you can find several Church leaders (including Cardinals) who have no problem speaking out of one side of their mouth about the “historical Jesus” (a.k.a., “the real one”) versus the “Christ of faith” (a.k.a., the one the Apostles imagined/felt/constructed/etc.). The Catholic priesthood has been infected with these sorts of views to the point where, in my very limited sojourns to “typical” Chicago parishes, I have heard priests speak to the Resurrection and other concrete events in the life of Christ as pious fables and legends without blinking an eye. I have no doubt that the Masses they preside over are invalid and so obviously I don’t attend them. That the Orthodox Church has been largely sheltered from this is a good thing (though I can think of at least one Orthodox priest who would strongly disagree with me on this point).
What does baffle me a bit is how you seem to approach historical research as a neutral project devoid of harmful agendas and problematic leveraging. I am sure you know many solid historians who believe that a journey back through Christian history yields positive results insofar as it clarifies the theology of the Orthodox Church. But it seems to me that such a project was far more necessary for the Orthodox to undertake than the Catholic Church. Orthodoxy, because of its historical woes, lost a great deal of its own ground, leading to a great deal of (mis)appropriation of “Western thought” (which I don’t think was always a bad thing, but we’ll save that one for another time). But given that Orthodoxy is still, I suppose, in something like “recovery mode,” there doesn’t seem to be the same surge of theological and doctrinal upheaval occurring within its ranks as one has witnessed in the Catholic Church. Does that mean “Thomism of the strict observance” is the answer? No, probably not. In fact, I’ve written against that rallying cry in the past. But a stern rebuke to what has gone on thus far is certainly in order and, outside of narrow academic circles, I remain unconvinced that ressourcement (and the intellectual movements it inspired) has in any sense been a good thing for the man and woman in the pew. The current crisis in the Catholic Church would seem to say otherwise.
Also, I would add this to some of your earlier comments…
The current round of attacks on Lubac (and, I suppose, Balthasar) are not the byproducts of arch-reactionary polemics. That someone like Milbank would try to paint such a picture in The Suspended Middle doesn’t shock me since Milbank, like many of his intellectual ilk and epigones, believes that mocking dismissal is the same thing as a thoroughgoing refutation. But, then, what does he say to someone like Reinhard Hutter who I don’t think anyone would classify as an “arch-reactionary” longing for a return to the manualist tradition? Dust Bound for Heaven (which is an excellent book) contains one of the most punishing retorts to Milbank’s (and, by extension, Lubac’s) entire posture on the “pure nature” issue. It also contains, I think, one of the most thorough and succinct exposes on what that entire axis of theological thought is trying to achieve at the doctrinal level — something even the most hardened traditionalists haven’t yet picked up on.
But this sort of ideological name-calling is excessively silly. If what one might call the “neo-traditional reaction” to 20th C. theology (theology built on historical research) is wrongheaded, shallow, logically flawed, etc., then show it. The work is there. The books are there. Why do these authors, who put a great deal of care into their analysis and criticisms of 20th C. theology (and the theology it inspired), not deserve a fair hearing? There’s too much rank-closing that goes on among the professional theologians and not enough “conversation” or “dialogue” or whatever fetish term they now hold to. All that does in the end is convince the traditional wing that they’re not only on to something, but that they are right and, in turn, now subject to persecution and name-calling because of it.
It’s not that I think that academic endeavors are or even can be neutral (certainly my own are not). It’s that I don’t generally feel like Christendom or whatever is existentially threatened by people– even smart, influential people– getting stuff wrong. If I have to choose between lively disagreement and stagnant consensus, I’ll pick the former every time. I’m sometimes bothered by the fact that the best Christian thinking through history has come as a reaction against a smart person getting things wrong, but it seems to be a general rule.
The types of ‘traditionalist’ (or whatever) thinkers you’re attracted to– whether you’re in Catholic or Orthodox mode– seem to always be the ones who prefer to react and cry heresy or whatever than to put forward a positive project. Living and thinking within tradition should mean more than this. When I and others on this thread have mentioned manualism, it’s a stand-in for this idea that some kind of motionless point can be reached whether everything is more or less answered and the form in which it’s answered will always stay the same.
I don’t think ‘historical Jesus’ type stuff has all that much to do with Ressourcement. Like, at all.
Or at least, historical-jesus type stuff I think would exist in any world in which there are Germans and former Evangelicals, and is ultimately inimical to going back to early Christian sources like, say, Origen.
I think the reason that such will never take off among the Orthodox is the place of Christology in Orthodox identity. There’s a lot of room for theological variation on most other points, but Christology got nailed down with a level of precision that’s pretty baffling, and then pretty well took over hymnography, art, and most other serious elements of Orthodox theological-liturgical consciousness. I would not be surprised if there were not more than a few thinking Orthodox out there who would prefer the Christ of the Church even as a mythological figure, to any historical account.
Now, for lots of obvious contingent reasons, Christology took somewhat different emphases in the Latin world and there seems to have always been a bit of two-subject Christology lurking in the background. Once while I was TAing an intro religion class for a Jesuit, he went through a very run-of-the-mill de-mythologizing account of Jesus, “He was born in Nazareth, not to a virgin”, etc, and he followed it up by presenting normative Christian belief about Jesus’ relationship to divinity in terms what amounted to classical Nestorian enoikosis….
This is worth a couple of replies, but the most interesting to me is your defense of ressourcement which, it seems, could be easily put into play as a defense of manualism and the commentarial tradition.
Despite the caricatures that are made of the movement, the truth is that its espousers believed they were responding to changing intellectual, cultural, scientific, political, etc. issues. The commentators on St. Thomas were engaging the world around them, and they all felt fit to not simply ape Thomas but to to extend his thinking in response to other lines of thought (and events) the Angelic Doctor himself clearly couldn’t have contemplated. As I already noted, the concept of “pure nature” comes out of this commentarial response to a variety of pressing concerns (one of which, as mentioned, was the status of native peoples in the Americas). There’s no small irony in the fact that a tradition of Catholic thought that consciously believed it was extending and responding to the world would be later castigated by 20th C. thinkers who wanted to “return to the authentic tradition” in the name of — wait for it — responding to the world around them. The result was to toss the baby out with the bathwater, and then, of course, to engage in absurd caricatures of neo-Scholasticism and the commentarial tradition in order to effectively shame their contemporaries (and their students) to never look back on it. That worked — for a time. But now these same revisionists — these paladins for the “authentic tradition” — are finding the rug yanked out from underneath them as new scholars come along and point out the glaring gaps in their allegedly objective “historical analysis.”
Moreover, on its face at least, there is something absurd about claiming that the best way for Christianity to respond to the world around it, with its shifting intellectual and cultural fashions, is to dig even deeper into an ever more remote past whose categories of thought are even more alien to the present world than Scholasticism’s. The tale that the proto-Enlightenment and, from there, the actual Enlightenment represented a radical and pure break from Scholasticism’s “Kingdom of Darkness” has been shown time and again to be little more than an extremely convenient myth that was deployed to give polemical support for a thoroughly anti-Catholic (if not anti-Christian) intellectual project. But even up until the 20th C., neo-Scholastics never failed to respond to the Enlightenment or, for that matter, its radical byproducts (e.g., existentialism). A number of thinkers did so with a great deal of sophistication until everybody came to believe, more as a matter of hearsay than thoroughgoing critique, that these folks were dinosaurs past due for extinction.
In the end, though, what was the manualist tradition supposed to serve? The education of tens of thousands of seminarians, most of whom were called to be priests not professional theologians or philosophers. While I agree that this approach to teaching theology and philosophy didn’t always serve these priests well, especially when they were attacked by more sophisticated opponents, I’m not so sure their education was any more “defective” than what you still find today amongst your average Orthodoxy clergyman (even those “sophisticated” sorts who come out of St. Vlad’s dropping Greek terminology they don’t even really understand in their sermons). Even today, those few priestly heirs of the manualist tradition still left in the Catholic Church (the Ecclesia Dei groups, SSPX, etc.), don’t invoke this stuff in their sermon. Sure, they may say something about Aquinas’ definition of happiness in Heaven, but what they are ultimately preaching is the Gospel, not Aristotle’s Metaphysics watered down to an intelligible level.
On the other two points…
With regard to ressourcement and the historical-critical approach to the Bible, it’s too simplistic to say they have nothing to do with each other when both can trace a common ancestor: the “historical sense” that arose during the latter half of the 18th C. That both took on distinct agendas isn’t a point I will dispute; but it’s difficult—if not impossible—to imagine the emergence of ressourcement without the historical turn. Now, can ressourcement provide a barrier to the excesses of the historical-critical method in Biblical studies? Sure, but then again, so can Scholasticism or any other theological school that takes Biblical inerrancy and the truth of revelation seriously.
As for the historical-critical method and Orthodoxy, your answer has plausibility, but I wonder if it doesn’t mask a rougher truth: the longstanding ignorance of the Orthodox schools writ large when it comes to what one might broadly call “contemporary” or “modern Biblical scholarship.” When the Orthodox have, in recent years, gotten their hands on the stuff, the results are, well, laughable (cf. Paul Tarazi). The influx of Protestant converts into (American) Orthodoxy (particularly from Evangelical backgrounds) has reinforced something like a “Moody-esque” approach to the Bible which is probably not helpful either (cf. Orthodox Study Bible). I would imagine (but I don’t know) that Orthodox seminaries outside of the United States have found a way to negotiate this stuff and even, to a certain extent, embrace it (cf. UBS Gospel of John in the Byzantine Tradition). I wouldn’t know what, if any, impact that has had on the general Orthodox interpretation and preaching of the Bible, however.
Now, as for Orthodox (Eastern) Christology, I obviously have no quarrel with it on the theological-doctrinal level (generally speaking). I can’t imagine any Catholic would even if there are still pockets of disagreement out there. But again, I would stress a point I’ve made elsewhere (either on this blog or elsewhere—now I can’t remember), namely the (“popular”) Orthodox tendency to forget the Incarnation and confine Christ to the heavens. There is more than a shade of Christo-mythology in Orthodox hymnography and iconography which reflects, to some extent, how Eastern Christology has been subsumed, interpreted, and expressed among the Orthodox for centuries. Just because these same expressions properly articulate the proper ecumenical formulas doesn’t mean it hasn’t created a certain tension in the Orthodox consciousness of Christ, one that leans, it seems to me, too far away from Christ’s human nature. Now, can an opposite rejoinder be made against the Christian West (Catholicism and Protestantism)? Probably. In fact, definitely. Again, it’s too simplistic to revel in what the actual doctrinal formulations say; it’s equally important to reflect on how they have been received and promulgated through the ages.
There’s an interesting book, “Hindu Theology: A Reader” by Jose Pereira that has an interesting illustration of Catholic theology as a rose window composed of the various “systems” from Eriugena to Henry Noris. Each is one facet proceeding from the center.”Tradition” would then not be linear but prismatic and would include all. I’m not sure if Orthodox theology can be a rose window but it might very well be seen as prismatic also, ( particularly if one includes the Syriac tradition).
Some “doltish” questions;
Do you mean it’s not possible for a “tradition” to take a route divergent from the main “tradition”? That’s what seems to be implied.
Also, do you mean that the “tradition” is not understood through one’s culture and historical situation? Are you really advocating a Platonic ideal to which one must conform to even if it’s not understood?
No on both counts. The tradition unfolds in response to concrete historical events. My critique is centered on those who play fast and loose with the tradition in order to consciously recreate doctrines that have been long established. The Lubac-Milbank project of centralizing Apokatastasis is one of many examples of this conscious mutilation.
“Centralizing Apokatastsis ” Interesting. I’ve just read Ilaria Rameli’s and David Konstan’s work, “Terms for Eternity; Ainios and Aidios in Classical and Christian Texts. It’s a rather dry book but does make some interesting points and arguments. I believe the book is an introduction to Ramelli’s forthcoming book on Apokatastasis.
Being a typical dolt, I’m confused with your last response to Samn! I’d like to know what your “metric” is for orthodoxy.
I will now list the various theological “systems”, ( this is Jose Pereira’s term) that he included in his rose window;
eriugenism
anselmianism
bernarfism
bonaventurianism
thomism
egidianism
scotism
beconianism
nominalism
suarezianism
cartesianism
norisianism
Each one is a fully systematic and articulated catholic theology. Which one is “orthodox” and which one isn’t?
Notice that the first was created in the ninth century and the last in the eighteenth. It seems that Pereira saw none developed after Noris, (d.1704).
It seems to me that de Lubac knew and saw this as a great problem. Perhaps he thought that the problem was in the need to recover the ground, as it were, upon which those theologies were built on.
Recovering the ground with what? Lubacianism? Because that’s what has risen up.
There has always been a tapestry of theological trajectories within the Church, and none of them lay absolute claim to being the final word on orthodoxy. All of them contribute to the tradition, and some have — for a time — centralized themselves due to historical circumstances. But none of them are, on their own, tantamount to orthodoxy.
Recovering the ground, as it were, with the manifold teachings, writings and insights of the patristic era, obviously, an era which included the Latin, Greek, and Semitic cultures. That’s obviously the project of Sources Chretiennes.
You seem to have an interest in Suarez- here’s a review of a book, ( which the local university library does not have unfortunately);
52. Suárez. Between Scholasticism & Modernity, by José Pereira. ISBN-13: 978-087462-750-3 & ISBN-10: 0-87462-750-8. ©2007. 384 pages. Paperbound. Bibliography. Index. $37
Francisco Suárez (1548-1617) is one of the great anomalies in the history of thought: of one thinker functioning in two contrary roles, each reversing the other. The role of being, on the one hand, the consummator of one phase of philosophical speculation, the realist and Scholastic; and on the other, the initiator (though an unwitting one) of another phase, the idealist, modern and nihilist. This shift from realism to idealism was crucial in Western philosophy; it inaugurated an era of irrepressible, if chaotic, creativity.
On the one side, cosmos, the climax of a tradition of over a millennium, embodied in the most massive work of systematics in the history of speculation, the 21-million worded Suarezian synthesis; on the other, chaos, the rise of a plethora of systems, anti-systems and non-systems in a mad sequence of innovations and novelties, each appearing to cancel out the others, all seemingly hurtling toward the black holes of skepticism, anti-realism, relativism and nihilism itself. The anomaly is all the more striking because this conflagration was presumably kindled by the tremendous claim, but made by a small word, that objective truth can be known by ascertaining a subjective state of mind. The small word was notior, “better known”; its claim was that the intra-mental consciousness is “better known” to us than the extra-mental reality itself, and can serve to establish the latter’s truth.
José Pereira earned his doctorate at the University of Bombay 1n 1959 in Ancient Indian culture. Since then he held academic positions in Lisbon, London, Benares and New York: at Fordham University, where he was Professor of Theology, teaching History of Religions from 1970 to 2001. His publications deal with theology, philosophy and architectural history, and include Hindu Theology (Doubleday, 1976), Baroque India. The Neo-Roman Architecture of South Asia (New Delhi, 2000), and The Sacred Architecture of Islam (New Delhi, 2004). His one love has always been the Baroque period, which inspired The Mystical Theology of the Catholic Reformation. An Overview of Baroque Spirituality (AUP, 2006, co-authored with Robert Fastiggi).
It’s ridiculous to say that Lubac is the only line of thought that’s come out of Ressourcement. I know you read enough that you should be able to name at least a couple dozen other thinkers with very different agendas who have come out of the return to early Christian texts.
I am not claiming that Lubcanism is the only line of thought that came out of the ressourcement movement. It is arguably, however, the most influential. The entire Radical Orthodoxy project (which is hardly dead despite the numerous postmortems that have been announced) hinges on Lubac (and, I guess, Bulgakov, though perhaps that’s just Milbank’s thing). Moreover, ressourcement itself isn’t dead and it stands to reason that Lubacian-esque trends of rewriting theology (and doctrine) will continue under the “back to the sources” banner. The second wave backlash against Lubac has only begun (the first coming in the 1940s and 50s); the counterattack is sure to come.
“Contemporary (secular) thought continues to drift further and further into nihilism, and no doubt there will be plenty of young men and women so deeply impressed by the elegance of this drift that they won’t be able to stop themselves from combing through the manuscript archive and critical edition collections for “proof” that the descent into darkness is the true articulation of “Christian theology.”
Uh, yeah, whatever. I think what this means is that Thomist spergs like Edward Feser are going to clean the Stygian stables of contemporary theology and replace it with dry-as-dust manualism, in some quixotic attempt to stave off the reality of Western (non-Aristotelian) science. No thanks. Give me Balthasar any day.
Well, he does seem to have an interesting blog. It has comic book graphics. Very entertaining.
Or not. I wish you knew what you were writing about. I really do.
I glanced at the Amazon version of the book you mention and, it seems to me, that the book in question is fairly tendentious in many aspects as the introduction, ( who wrote it?), shows.
I’m not impressed by it and certainly wouldn’t recommend the book, ( except for those interested in how the other half thinks, if at all), and certainly wouldn’t buy it.
Why do you spend your precious time reading such works?
Here’s some books you should consider reading;
Le créé et l’incréé
Maxime le Confesseur et Thomas d’Aquin
aux sources de la querelle palamienne
Antoine Lévy
An interesting book, ( which I had to read rather quickly since it was a library loan) which explores the commonality and differences between Aquinas and Maximus. He argues that the supposed differences between East, ( Orthodox), and West, ( Latin), are based on different “starting” points and how the conclusions of both seem to be convergent rather than divergent.
For a parallel argument, see A.N. Williams’ book, The Ground of Union, which argues much the same thing.
Thomas Cattoi
Divine Contingency: Theologies of Divine Embodiment in Maximos the Confessor and Tsong kha pa (Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias Press, 2009),.
This book compares the approaches of Maximus and the Tibetan sage Tsong kha pa regarding the value and meaning of being truly embodied. Again, I had to read this in a hurry. It is very technical but the overall argument is fairly sound tho’ I have a difference of opinion regarding Evagrius, ( of course). He argues that both emphasize the concrete reality of embodiment as against an abstract reality.
Cosmic Man by Mar Gregorios. This book explores the thought of St. Gregory of Nyssa through the lens of Indian Vedantic thought. The author was a bishop of the Orthodox Syrian Church in India for quite some time. He attempts, ( I think with some success),to show how the Cappadocian orthodoxy of Gregory parallels much of traditional Hindu thought as elaborated by Sankara.
These are books well worth reading. They invoke and encourage the reading of the patristic ground on which they are based. They are contemporary, dealing with ecumenism of both the Christian and non-Christian world in which we live.
I have a tendency not to dismiss works I haven’t read. Call it my hangup.
I’ve just read the introduction to “Dust Bound for Heaven” and what struck me most about it is that the author clearly argues that in order to understand Aquinas, one must have to practice prayer, silence and contemplation/meditation. Interesting, very interesting.
Considering that there is a disdain and even antagonism to such activities, not just by “secularized” theologians/philosophers but by those who style themselves traditionalists/ conservatives, it definitely makes understanding Aquinas difficult. Of course, it’s obvious that the same practices are necessary in order to understand the patristic heritage and, if one takes the patristic heritage seriously, the Old and New Testament.
It seems to me that it is the neglect of such practices that are the real source of what is considered the crisis in the Church, ( both Catholic and Orthodox).
Whenever there’s a forum held on such practices, ( Centering Prayer, Lectio Divina, etc; etc;), it’s usually full and often overflowing.
Yet there is resistance, deep resistance, to encourage such things.
If I may throw my tuppence into the discussion. . .
Part of the reason that folk like Modestinus and myself are a bit leery of resourcistas like de Lubac and his successors, is some of the ill-advised tinkering with the Roman Liturgy which was done in the name of resourcement, and some of the special pleading done by these so-called ‘periti’ to accomplish said tinkering.
As examples of such ‘tinkering’, I would include the following
1. The replacement of the words ‘pro multis’ with ‘pro omnis’ in the formula of consecration. As I seem to recall, this harks back to Joachim Jeremias’ assertion (or that of one of his successors) that there was no distinction between ‘many/all’ in Aramaic or Hebrew. Of course, anyone with an actual nodding acquaintance with either tongue would know that that was rot. The result was to enshrine something like the Apokatastasis (that is, the heretical belief that all must be saved) in the most central act and Mystery of the Roman Church.
2. The assertion that use of the liturgical East in the construction of churches (that is, churches should be built facing East) was unnecessary, upon examination of a number of ancient church buildings in Rome. Ignored in such study was the fact that those ancient Churches were built as pagan temples, and thus their construction was not guided by Christian or Patristic principles.
3. The removal of what is called in the West the ‘communion rail’. Ignored in the process were the Semitic concept of ‘qodosh’ or ‘holy’ as being a synonym with ‘separate’, or the Imperial Roman practice of separating the Emperor from the people by a wall of pillars and posts. This practice was maintained in the East, and became the basis for the development of the Iconostasis.
I leave the showing of many more such examples as an exercise for the student.
I believe that these, and many other such examples, are demonstrations of the difference between the ‘received tradition’ and the ‘examined tradition’, or whatever words Modestinus used to make such distinction. I also believe that they (and the other examples) can be demonstrated to have done great damage to the way that RCs have served the Divine Liturgy for the past 40 or more years.
One problem for RCs is that in order to be liturgically and spiritually effective, there must be a harmony between the received and the examined traditions. These have been kept in the Orthodox East by making sure that any changes to the liturgy have been minimal. This protection has occurred by a priesthood and a laity who have been quick to maintain the rubrics (the what, when and where of the liturgy) yet remaining open to the why (the theological and spiritual underpinnings).
I would suggest that the true way of reform for the RC Church would be a return to a Mass that is established, together with its rubrics, and a reform of the religious and theological education of its people. I’ll leave discussion of the latter to another time.