Obviously on the issue of the phenomenological and ostensibly natural structures of gender and sexuality Butler has all kinds of direct relevance. In particular, she demonstrates exactly the kind of critique that one would need to rigorously lay waste to ‘theology of the body’ type thinking. It would be counterproductive to set it up as an issue of Butler vs. JPII, of course, but the structure of her arguments–which tend to identify the element in an account that intends itself as critical or subversive (e.g., the constructedness of ‘gender’) and extend that element to the point of subverting what that account takes as fixed or natural (e.g., the ontological stability of ‘sex’)–would work delightfully well against that style of thinking.

Obviously, too, her implicit but direct criticism of ‘theological’ or ‘religious’ thinking deserves to be mulled over. I don’t know whether or not this is consistent in her other writings, but in Gender Trouble, these adjectives take on a fairly specific Nietzschean meaning (especially clear on pp. 76-77). Thought is designated as theological or religious when it produces and absolutizes some unattainable law, an ‘inevitable and unknowable authority before which the sexed subject is bound to fail.’ I can think of two sources for this kind of designation: one, the (Lutheran) interpretation of Paul according to which the whole purpose of the law is to prove to us our sinfulness; two, the (voluntarist) idea of God as a wholly inaccessible lawgiver. Both sources have been subjected to quite a bit of criticism by theologians themselves of late, but Butler could be read as identifying these as structural problems for theological anthropology and ethics broadly speaking rather than just as issues for Jewish-Christian dialogue and the doctrine of God.

The connection that’s been occupying me most lately, though, is a bit less direct. I think it’s possible to read Gender Trouble as a series of theoretical interventions aimed at showing that any appeal to an ‘original,’ ideal, precultural structure of existence is bound to fail. Part of it is her radical social constructionism, of course, wherein it’s simply impossible to appeal to a precultural or prelinguistic anything. But there’s something else, too: she’s just as disparaging towards theories based on future ideals as on purportedly original ones. I’m not quite clear on how this argument goes yet, because it’s not quite as close to the surface of her text. (Perhaps it would be in some of her more recent political writings.) It has to do with at least three claims:

Appeals to extra-cultural ideals–i.e., ideals completely heteronomous to ‘the law’ as we know it–inadvertently reify the existing culture itself (the clearest statement of this in Gender Trouble comes in her critique of Julia Kristeva);

Ideals, even though they’re intended as critical alternatives to some existing culture, are more often than not effects of that culture which serve to quietly support it rather than subvert it;

The very structure of the ideal ultimately restricts cultural possibilities rather than expanding them.

This critique has plenty of momentum among other recent continentals, too: it figures in Nancy, Agamben, Ranciére. And it calls into question an enormous number of theological concepts. The kingdom of God, the body of Christ, the promised land, the exodus, the garden of Eden, the fall–all of these function, to one degree or another, as paradigmatic “original” instances of something (the state of perfection, the church, God’s saving work, the prelapsarian situation, etc.).

I’d like to see the same idea extended to classical thinkers. Especially for the medievals, but so too with many of the fathers, the secondary literature that does exist tends to be smothered in a certain kind of late modern piety that obscures more than it reveals. Franciscans write on Franciscans, Dominicans write on Dominicans, Cistercians write on Cistercians (the seculars falling almost entirely by the wayside), and their work is invariably a blend of exposition and veneration. As a result, rigorous critical conversation with these figures only appears in those few contemporary thinkers bold, intelligent, and eccentric enough to dive into these old, obscure, often untranslated bodies of work and create their own critical purchase ex nihilo–like Agamben himself, or a few from the Radox crowd.

A few good critical introductions along these lines would go a long way, I think. They could situate the stray tidbits of information batted around in popular academic conversation within a much more careful account of a thinker’s whole body of work. John Duns Scotus: A Critical Introduction could lay to rest an enormous amount of more or less ignorant squabbling about ‘the univocity of being’; Peter Abelard: A Critical Introduction could, if Adam Kotsko is right, rein in the superficial readings he’s so often given in atonement conversation. I’ve thought for a while that I myself would enjoy taking up such a project on Bonaventure.

(Postscript. Besides being good introductions to the thinkers, these volumes would do an enormous service just by indicating where the hell to find their texts, in the original and, if they exist, in good modern language translation.)

This aspect of the genuine question lends some credence, in my mind, to Barth’s insistence that one has to “begin” thinking not with human experience but with the concrete self-revelation of God. The reason for this is not that human experience is irrelevant to good thought; on the contrary, even for Barth, a theology that ignores the particular reality of human experience is blindly speculative and ultimately useless. But Barth sees that in order to ask the right questions about our existence, there must already be the outlines of a “secretly preceding answer.” In order to ask the right questions about our existence, that is to say, our existence must already have been claimed and to some degree ordered by our origin. Lacking some frame of reference for an answer, the world only presents us with an infinitely manipulable palette of experiences.

As with Parsifal, so with the Scriptures. The Bible itself demands to be decontextualized, never content to be read as an historical artifact, always appealing directly to the reading believer. In the structure of the historical events themselves, as presented by the scriptural writers, there exists a universal ambition that imposes itself on the reader. This is the sense in which it is perfectly legitimate and indeed necessary to speak of the Bible as self-interpreting. This is why Bonhoeffer is right to tell his students to read the Bible as appealing directly to them, in whatever moment they read it.

At theology’s very heart is a declaration of pure nonsense: God became a destitute human being who wept before being tortured and executed, and going to hell. And as John tells the story, he did all of this on purpose, being in full control of the situation. That’s God’s recklessness. God being God, her recklessness is bound to come out right (though why and how has bewildered Christians for millennia, and will for more). Ours won’t. Our recklessness will be proven wrong, stupid, and careless again and again. But if we keep trying, maybe our recklessness will occasionally prove to be in the same spirit that provoked God’s recklessness: the Spirit of fathomless and desperate love, according to which we would give ourselves up completely even for someone who hates us with a perfect hatred.

Properly understood, I’m sure this recklessness isn’t really opposed to patience. But forgive me; I’m being a bit reckless.

What Rilke says of the poet ought also to be true of the theologian: patience, rather than productivity, should be one’s distinguishing virtue. The theologians worthy of trust are those whose spirits have slowly ripened through prayer and common charity, whose words are forged in the fiery fusion of humility and confidence. Only with such an inner attentiveness is it possible to write genuine theology, not because my deepest self is the true source of all artistic work as Rilke would have it, but because it is only as I come to find myself in God that God himself really becomes fathomable to me.

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.

When did we stop writing in this wonderful array of different textual forms? What have we lost as a result?