Brian Hamilton-Vise

Against being fragmented

There is obviously something right about Halden’s stand against closed systems and his warning against theologies “centered more on the desire to rule out disruptive difference that to cultivate the sort of Christic dispositions that would enable us to welcome such disruptions as divine gifts.” The self-satisfied ruminations of the wise is repeatedly disparaged in the New Testament–by Paul for thinking that “knowing” could possibly precede “being known” by God (1 Cor. 8:2–3) and by John’s Jesus for piously intoning those things we “know” when the Truth we can only believe is standing just before us (11:21–26). And St. Augustine reserves his most forceful invective for the intellectual complacency so characteristic of the “impressive reasoning of the wise [magna ratio sapientum], ‘whose thoughts God knows, how futile they are’ (Ps. 94:11)” (de civ. Dei XXII.4).

That human beings are prone to erect our own admirable towers and shut out God is a fact worth taking seriously in the work of theology; systems of thought as often as towers or empires are built on the basis of self-protection and self-glorification. It is extremely important that theology be done in a way that opens up our lives to the disruptive and transforming movement of the Spirit, rather than close us off. But I think Halden’s wrong to say that’s what’s going on in “holistic” theologies like those of Hart or Balthasar (or presumably Thomas or Gregory or Augustine). I would grant that it may be more of a danger for theologians writing in a systematic mode, but not that theology aimed at painting whole pictures of things is intrinsically lacking in “self-dispossessive openness” and closed off to the irruption of difference.

What “holistic theology” aims at expressing–though only ever provisionally expressing–is the unity and perfect beauty of all things in God, where difference becomes harmony and pilgrims finally and eternally lay eyes on their destination. And it aims to express how in Christ all things hold together even now, if we have the eyes to see. I think it would be hard to accuse Augustine of seeking out premature intellectual closure; his is a theology intimately aware of the incompleteness of human knowledge and the impossibility of completeness, and a theology which is tormented (in a way that most contemporary proponents of the precariousness of truth are not) by human helplessness in the face of our own lives. Yet it is because he takes that helplessness seriously, because he takes seriously the fact that there are unanswered questions and unattended pleas intruding from every side of human existence, that he is also driven to take seriously the hope that God hears and God answers. The incoherence and embattledness of human life is not something to be disdained or swept aside for Augustine, to be sure, but it is to be battled through in the hope of a genuine rest and a genuine understanding in a God whose unity is the sole solvent for human fragmentariness. That’s precisely the work of the Confessions: to find in the madness of his past life a coherence that could only be understood by referring it all to God. And that’s also the ground of Augustine’s grander, more systematic theological elaborations.

Aquinas also well knew, and not just toward the end of his life, that all his work was like straw, a feeble guess after the inner coherence and beauty of things. Balthasar wrote what he wrote under the conviction that theology was the enormously hard and humbling work of opening oneself up to the God who dwells at once in inaccessible light and in the visible forms of all things. Hart understands theology not as a closure of truth but as a kind of gift offered in love, whose truthfulness is proved or disproved precisely by its hospitality. The Christian tradition witnesses over and over again to “holistic” theologies that are offered precisely in the spirit of kenosis. Next to these, the recent reaction against systematic theology can seem to insist on making permanent the fragmentation and fracturing of human knowledge and experience that belongs (because of sin) to our earthly life. At least, these other examples make it difficult for me to see why theology would refuse to look within and beyond the tumult in hopes of glimpsing, as through a glass darkly, the rock and rest of God.

26 September 2008 | Comments (1)
Tags: Augustine, Method