Filaments: Theological Profiles

Selected Essays, Volume 2

David Tracy

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780226567327
• eBook ISBN: 9780226608457
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

In the second volume of his two-volume collection of essays from the 1980s to 2018, renowned Catholic theologian David Tracy gathers profiles of significant theologians, philosophers, and religious thinkers. These essays, he suggests, can be thought of in terms of Walt Whitman's "filaments," which are thrown out from the speaking self to others—ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary—in order to be caught elsewhere.

Filaments arranges its subjects in rough chronological order, from choices in ancient theology, such as Augustine, through the likes of William of St. Thierry in the medieval period and Martin Luther and Michelangelo in the early modern, and, finally, to modern and contemporary thinkers, including Bernard Lonergan, Paul Tillich, Simone Weil, Karl Rahner, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Iris Murdoch. Taken together, these essays can be understood as a partial initiation into a history of Christian theology defined by Tracy's key virtues of plurality and ambiguity. Marked by surprising insights and connections, Filaments brings the work of one of North America's most important religious thinkers once again to the forefront to be celebrated by longtime and new readers alike.

Part 1

ANCIENTS, MEDIEVALS, MODERNS

AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO

The first two essays in this section are on that singular colossus of Western theology and philosophy, Augustine of Hippo. More recently, a younger generation of Eastern Orthodox theologians happily have abandoned the earlier, purely polemical attitude of so many of their Orthodox predecessors toward Augustine.

From Augustine’s day until our own, Augustinian theology has largely defined the basic frameworks of all Western theology, whether Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed, or radical Reformation and/or Free Church. The Catholic, Anglican, and much of Liberal Protestant traditions, with some notable exceptions (e.g., Blaise Pascal), have been largely formed by Augustine’s nature-grace paradigm (more exactly, grace-nature-grace paradigm), with its emphasis on Augustine’s philosophical and theological reflections on intellect and love, in continuity with the pure gratuity of divine grace (especially in his brilliant early dialogues and his interpretation of the Gospel and letters of John in his greatest theological work, De Trinitate). The classic Protestant Reformation theologians, especially Luther, Calvin, and Müntzer, as well as others, hold to Augustine’s sin-grace paradigm (more accurately, grace-sin-grace paradigm), which rejects any continuity between fallen human nature and divine grace, especially as found in the late Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings and his City of God. These late writings, like Confessions, include both the nature-grace paradigm and the sin-grace paradigm in creative tension.

The first essay on Augustine was occasioned by the welcome invitation of Susan Schreiner who, with Willemien Otten, organized the conference on Augustine and the volume of essays Augustine Our Contemporary. This essay, an account of Augustine’s anthropology, is one of five essays on Augustine I have published over the years. It is intended to address the split in the reception of Augustine between those theologians, largely Catholic, Anglican, and several modern Liberal Protestant (e.g., process theologians), who hold that the nature-grace paradigm is Augustine’s fundamental theological framework, and those largely (but not solely) Reformation theologians, from Luther and Calvin through Kierkegaard and Barth, who hold to the sin-grace paradigm as Augustine’s fundamental theological framework.

In this first essay, I hold that the primary (never the exclusive) theological framework for interpreting Augustine requires both paradigms to understand the whole of Augustine. For my part, the nature-grace paradigm is the more fundamental one, the more inclusive Augustinian paradigm. However, that nature-grace paradigm can function as genuinely inclusive only if it also dialectically includes the increasing importance in the late, anti-Pelagian Augustine of the sin-grace paradigm. In the course of this attempted retrieval of the “whole” Augustine, I also argue critically, even suspiciously, against Augustine’s peculiar and fatal notion of “original” sin, transmitted through sexual intercourse as a deadly legacy to Western theology and, more widely, to Western culture’s troubled and confused interpretation of human sexuality. I argue that Augustine’s profound—indeed unique—insight into the dark side of the pervasive evil and the resulting suffering of the human condition is better interpreted as sometimes human evil and sometimes, more accurately, as tragic, since, contra the late Augustine, human beings are not responsible for all evil and suffering. A good deal of human suffering is innocent suffering occasioned by the pluralistic, complex, ambiguous character of nature and the tragic actuality of the human situation. Human sin, both personal and inherited, is indeed as extensive and deadly as the genius of Augustine saw with such frightening clarity. However deeply damaged as human beings are in both mind and will, it is important to stress, again, that they are not responsible for all evil. A tragic consciousness (which Augustine clearly possessed but refused to make theological use of) is a more adequate model for understanding many of the complexities of the human situation.

Part of the inherited tragedy of Western culture can be laid at Augustine’s door. In Augustine’s peculiar interpretation, original sin is fatally linked with human sexuality, which, from Augustine’s view, transmits original, or, more accurately (as in Eastern Christianity), “inherited” sin. On human sexuality, the Pelagian Julian of Eclanum, although unable to understand Augustine’s Dostoevsky-like profound understanding of the dark side of human beings, was able to cut Augustine’s link between sexuality and Augustine’s all-too-original notion of “original” sin.

The second essay, on Augustine’s Christomorphic theocentrism, addresses the highly controverted issue in Augustine scholarship of whether Augustine’s theology is more accurately described as theocentric or Christocentric. This essay argues that Augustinian theology is, at its heart, profoundly theocentric (i.e., a Trinitarian monotheism, classically articulated in Augustine’s magnificent theological work, De Trinitate). At the same time, Augustine’s theocentrism, precisely as Trinitarian, is formed as such by the form (morphe) of Jesus Christ. Augustine’s theocentrism is, therefore, an unmistakably Christomorphic one. If Augustine had a stronger pneumatology than he did, his fuller position would be both Christomorphic and spiritus-dynamic. As it stands, Augustine’s theology is one of the most powerful Christomorphic theocentrisms in the entire history of Western theology. This is surely one of Augustine’s most important contributions to all Christian theology, which must always be theocentric—as Thomas Aquinas stated with characteristic clarity and precision in his description of theology as the study of God and all things as related to God.

Hans Urs von Balthasar acutely observed that in Western Christian theologies (unlike in Eastern Orthodox theologies), a tragedy was the fact that, in both Catholic Scholastic and Protestant scholastic theologies, spirituality (or, in the Reformed tradition, piety) was separated from theology. The fourteenth-century, late Scholastic theologians, especially the nominalists, who had little theological use for metaphysics, made logic and grammar the main philosophical conversation partners with theology. Logic and grammar became, as in Martin Luther, the only philosophical tools that theology should employ. Metaphysical understandings of God and humankind were idols strongly—even violently—to be rejected. In modern Scholasticism, spirituality was no longer intrinsic to theology, as it had been in Alexander of Hales, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Meister Eckhart, Marguerite Porete, and Duns Scotus—that is, from the confessional era forward to the centuries-long reign of diverse Neo-Scholasticisms in both Catholic and Protestant theologies. In the Catholic context, spirituality became not a distinct dimension of a common theological project, but a separate, basically practice-oriented discipline given such names as ascetic-mystical theologies or “spiritual theology” —now ironically kept distinct from the now purely theoretical and Scholastic theologies.

This move in theology away from spirituality was an intellectual and spiritual disaster for both late Scholastic and later Neo-Scholastic theologies, which reigned supreme in Catholic theology for centuries. Fortunately, there were some notable exceptions (Newman, the Tübingen school) before the great generation of ressourcement theology (de Lubac, Daniélou, Bouyer, Congar, Balthasar, et al.) and the equally important rethinking of the positions of Thomas Aquinas’s magisterial Scholastic theology as both theoretical and deeply spiritual (Chenu), and as a retrieval of Aquinas’s position as a full conversation partner with modern philosophy and theology (especially in German transcendental philosophy and theology in Maréchal, Rahner, Coreth, et al.) and Anglo-American empirical (not empiricist) philosophy and theology (Bernard Lonergan).

That enormously fruitful time in Catholic theology in the early and mid-twentieth century led to the major religious and theological event of modern Christianity: the reforming Second Vatican Council. The theological generations after “the great generations” continued that Vatican II reforming tradition in two major forms, perhaps best represented in two Catholic journals, both with an international editorial board and both publishing in several languages: the earlier progressive journal Concilium (Karl Rahner, Yves Congar, Edward Schillebeeckx, Hans Küng, Johann Baptist Metz, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff, Lisa Soule Cahill, Gregory Baum, Mary Collins, Nicholas Lash, Maria Clara Bingemer, David Tracy, Jon Sorbino, et al.); and the equally excellent, more traditional journal Communio (Hans Urs von Balthasar, Joseph Ratzinger, Henri de Lubac, Louis Bouyer, Jean Daniélou, Avery Dulles, Jean-Luc Marion, Corinne Marion, Jean-Yves Lacoste, Jean-Louis Crétien, Jean-Robert Armogathe, Rémi Brague, et al.).

The theological differences between the two journals can sometimes be quite acute but more usually, in my judgment at least, they can be read as complementary. Among other commonalities, both journals have reunited theology (and philosophy) with “spirituality”: in Concilium, for the most part, in a more prophetic (mystical-political) way, oriented to social justice and full liberation; in Communio, in a more traditionally ecclesial retrieval of the rich and pluralistic Catholic tradition. However, these are different emphases, not exclusivities: the more progressive theologians of Concilium also love and retrieve aspects of the great tradition and are also deeply ecclesial, if often in a more critical manner (e.g., Concilium includes feminist, womanist, and mujerista theologies and the various contextual forms of liberation, political, and public theologies across global Catholicism). The more traditional theologians and philosophers of Communio also strongly affirm the modern Catholic social justice tradition, from Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum to Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ on ecology. Although there are still some Neo-Scholastic theologians who, in effect, continue to separate theology and spirituality, they are now a vociferous minority, unheralded by either the Concilium or the Communio theologians.

Moreover, in historical studies of the history of Catholic theology before Vatican II, the majority of historical work on medieval theology concentrated on the two-century-long, complex, and deeply impressive development of Scholasticism in the groundbreaking scholarship of Joseph Lottin, Martin Grabmann, and, above all, the inestimable Étienne Gilson—whose work still illuminates the intrinsic intellectual greatness of the high Scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas, that theologian of exceptional lucidity who knew instinctively how to distinguish (not separate) in order to unite. In the same century, Bonaventure cultivated works that were both theoretical (i.e., high Scholastic) and profoundly spiritual (e.g., in his remarkable Itinerarium mentis in Deum [The Mind’s Road to God]).

In the post-Gilson era of medieval study, today’s historians of medieval theology, still happily informed by Gilson’s magisterial studies, continue to study Scholastic theology as it developed over several centuries, from the proto-Scholasticism of Anselm through that unique, logical master of Scholastic theory, Duns Scotus. At the same time, historians of medieval theology now devote even more scholarly attention to the three non-Scholastic forms of medieval theology: namely, monastic theology (especially in the twelfth century); humanistic theologies (e.g., Alain de Lille), and lay mystical theologies, especially the once-ignored but now-central female mystical theologians, such as Hildegard of Bingen, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Angela of Foligno, Marguerite Porete, and several others.

WILLIAM OF ST. THIERRY

To demonstrate a medieval theology that is principally monastic while also including mystical-theological and even some early Scholastic work, I have chosen William of St. Thierry to study how philosophy, theology, and spirituality could be united into a powerful and believable theology in the late twelfth century.

William of St. Thierry created a complex theology, at once rigorously intellectual and deeply spiritual. In my judgment, William is even more worthy of contemporary theological attention than his friend and mentor, the deeply influential Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the best poetic and experiential theologians of the entire tradition. William shows the remarkable strength of monastic theology.

MARTIN LUTHER

The next essay is on Martin Luther, under the title “Martin Luther’s Deus Theologicus.” There are very few theologians of whom one can justly state that they are both religious geniuses and theological geniuses. Martin Luther, that explosive figure, was a member of that small number in the history of Christian theology—a number that begins with three New Testament texts that express the Christian religion in theological form at its best: the Gospel and First Epistle of St. John, so rightly held by mystics, metaphysicians, and contemplative theologians as the deepest theological Christic vision, and St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, that dense, magnificent synthesis of the many major elements of Paul’s distinctive dialectical theology of Christ Crucified, whereby the Christian lives in Christ (i.e., paradoxically, with fear and trembling in Christ Crucified). It is no surprise that Martin Luther loved and wrote so well on both Romans and Galatians as well as the Gospel of John. Indeed, if all we had left of Christian theology were the Gospel of John and Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, we would possess most of what we need to understand Christianity.

There are many aspects of Luther to consider, from his understanding of justification through grace by faith, to his law of the cross, and forward. There are, of course, also many troubling writings of Luther, above all his disgraceful writings on the Jews and the peasants as well as many of Luther’s writings on Renaissance popes. Most of those Renaissance popes deserved Luther’s sharp, polemical criticism but not the unjust title “Anti-Christ.” These are serious flaws in Luther. Nevertheless, the exceptionally passionate and powerful—indeed, magnificent—theology of Martin Luther and his honest, earthy, flamboyant personality fully deserve a name to be rarely used: Martin Luther was both a religious and theological genius.

For my part, as the essay on Luther in this book argues, it is Luther’s original, commanding understanding of the Hidden God (in both forms) that I cannot but find unique, persuasive, and in need of close attention by all serious Christians and all those curious to know how Christians understand God to be named both as Incomprehensible (e.g., as Infinite, as in volume 1 of my Selected Essays, Fragments), and as Hidden in suffering, pain, and negativity. For Luther, the Infinitely Loving, Trinitarian One is best revealed as the doubly hidden God in the cross of Jesus Christ.

MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI

In late 2017, a distinguished curator of fashion of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, Andrew Bolton, contacted me. He explained that he was organizing a large exhibit for May–October 2018 entitled “Heavenly Bodies: The Catholic Imagination and the Arts of Fashion.” He also informed me that he had been influenced for the structure of the exhibit, to some extent, by my earlier book, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (1981).

Andrew Bolton invited me to contribute a preface to the two volumes to be published by the Yale University Press on the exhibit. At first, I turned down his request since, as I explained, I am ignorant of the history of fashion, including the role of fashion in the Catholic tradition. He understood my refusal and informed me that he had already found a scholar of fashion to contribute an essay on that topic. He invited me only to summarize certain aspects of my reading of the Catholic imagination in The Analogical Imagination—a book he had clearly read with some care.

I agreed to write the prefatory essay on the Catholic imagination as an analogical imagination in theology and the arts. However, unlike my late good friend Andrew Greeley, I do not believe th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• Part 1: Ancients, Medievals, Moderns
• Part 2: Mentors
• Part 3: Conversation Partners
• Part 4: Prophetic Thought
• Part 5: Seekers of the Good
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• NOTES
• INDEX OF NAMES
• INDEX OF SUBJECTS