Love Alone Recap

The presentation on Love Alone went well, despite several factors of my own making. I did record the presentation, although I think I sound really stupid, say "um, uh, ok" and alot of other dumb things. But if there's enough demand, I could be persuaded to post it, or email, or something with it. So, to recap, I gave a bit (about 15 minutes) of bio first, and then worked my way into the text (see Friday's post for my introduction to the text). Balthasar's critique of the cosmological method went over like herbal tea, which I found surprising as that's the one thing I think he dismisses too quickly; I'm holding out for a place for cosmology (I guess that makes sense as I hope to be deeply immersed in Balthasar's doct. of creation by this time next year). The group, as much comprised of by parishioners as university faculty, found Balthasar's treatment of such themes as the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and modern biblical criticism highly contestable. As I said in Friday's post, I feared as much; how does one compress a book which was already the author's compression of his own work - 7 volumes at that - much less the philosophical and theological background one needs to comprehend Balthasar on even an elementary level. Moreover, writing in 1963, vB was writing from a specific perspective, addressing a set of specific problems arising from the split with Rahner. I imagine his motivation came not only from a pure intellectual interest, but also a desire contribute to the greater movement surrounding Vatican II, seeing as how he wasn't invited to attend by his Swiss bishops. Some of the concerns raised about the critique of the Anthropological method - its gross gloss and homogenization of Reformed, Renaissance authors, and modern biblical crit - can be explained by looking to the relevant Herrlichkeit volumes for Balthasar's engagement with the primary texts. But even then, as I mentioned to a friend last night, Balthasar writing in the sixties, didn't have some of the tools we do today, with Kuhn writing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions only a year earlier. Moreover, his area of work kept him pretty firmly ensconced in either confessional theology (e.g. his attempts to dialog with Barth) or germanic literature, although he does bridge out to French literature. I don't have the breadth of knowledge to make Balthasar able to stand up under the scrutiny of modern philosophy of science or post-structuralist concerns.

That said, I still agree with him (and Hans Frei) that theology in the wake of Kant and under the Germany academy (Schliermacher>Bultmann) did kowtow to a kind of hegemony of Reason, a turn to anthropology. His explanation of how cosmology lost footing, how anthropology under a guise of natural religion stripped Christianity of more and more of its qualities until it was loosing not only quality but also substance (God's love and doxa), makes a lot of sense to me and I think it jives with a lot of what's being said today by the likes of Frei, Hutter, and my old advisor, Dan Treier. I remember the first time I heard a form of this argument was in Dan Treier's modern theology class shortly after he had read Hans Frei's Eclipse of Biblical Narrative and Types of Christian Theology.

But, back to the class, my sincerest hope is that many of the atendees came away not necessarily with a comprehensive understanding of the work, but rather two things: 1. that they see where Balthasar was coming from, both historically and theologically, as I agree with Rowan Williams that he provides a great set of resources for Anglican theology; and 2. that they understand his lament over theologies loss of doxa, of a sense of God's loving self-revelation as not only an instance, or the instance, of truth, but also and primarily as something inexhaustibly and transcendentally beautiful. "If the absolute were not love (and the doctrine of the trinity is the doctrine to assert this), then it would be a logos that either stops short before love (adventist), or in modern (and titanic) fashion over-runs it and 'digests' it--which can only be done by falling back into the sphere of 'understanding'--and implies an attetat against the (Holy) Spirit. (LA, 72)

I'll try to sneak more posts in about Love Alone as I have time this week.

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As usual, Business

Last week, I posted a photo of Johnny Depp, from his role as Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean III. As a result of my inclusion of that photo and the current interest in the movie among the masses, TLOU has received a crazy number of hits this week. So, if you're new to this blog, and even if you're just here for the photo of Johnny, welcome. Hopefully you'll stay for the content, which I'll admit is not usually along mass-media lines.
AD and I are in the midst of a unit on Theology and Art in the adult education at St. Mark's. Yesterday, AD presented Auden's Ars Poetica, The Sea and the Mirror, a continuation of sorts of the Tempest in poem form. AD had originally hoped to record it and post it here, as our first podcast. Unfortunately, that didn't work out, but I think he plans to share an outline and/or some of the more salient points of the discussion - maybe he'll even share one of his Auden songs with us, so there may yet be a podcast!

I'm up next Sunday with a discussion of Balthasar's opus proposal, which I was delighted (and somewhat chagrined after reading a heft chunk of the Herrlichkeitto find nicely summed up in Love Alone. Per Caritatem has hosted a cool series on Love Alone, so please visit her. I'm really interested in Balthasar's turn to the irrational via the concept of Love to explain the core of Christianity and delineate the task of the theologian. So, I hope to share some of that with you all over the next few days (as I come up with it).

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The Heroic Generation and Art Criticism's Tower of Babel

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.).

After posting on Reno's article yesterday, I began thinking more about the argument he made, that in criticizing the ethos of neo-scholasticism the Heroic Generation (HG) were in fact fatally disrupting the stability of RC theology. The so-called "baseline" deteriorated until at last the students of the HG had failed to develop the requisite tools to dialogue with the very generation of theology that the HG sought to "rebel against". What I want to reevaluate here is this notion that the HG is necessarily or entirely to blame for the atrophy of theological acumen Reno so detests in theological education today. Let me state that I, too, am unhappy with the lack of agility and breadth in the theological academy today. However, I am unconvinced that everyone he lists is culpable, or at least as culpable as he makes them out to be.

Balthasar, for instance, spends a good deal of time relating his own project to the last two centuries preceeding him. His analyses of figures like Bruno and Goethe, for instance, are some of the best in vol 5 of his Glory of the Lord. However, they are not disavowals of traditional catholic theology, but rather affirmations of traditional concepts in RC theology. Ironically, many of the arguments Reno makes against the HG are also arguments Balthasar makes about the orthodox theological generations preceeding him. They hadn't so much lead their students astray, rather they had relinquished the power of theology, whether in losing so much of the brilliance of the Fathers (Denys, Maximus), or in the lack of catholic scope in evaluating the movements of the Rennaissance or Romantic period. Reno calls for a Ressourcement of the Neo-scholastics as a base for theology, but why not go even further with Balthasar, Congar, and de Lubac - the orginal Ressourcement and unconvering the Fathers as a our stable base?

Going back to Milliner's argument, I am worried about his criticism of the post-moderns' rebellion against earlier movements like the New Criticism, which along with Clive Bell, Jerome Stolnitz, and most of the modern art world, elevated the work of art to an untenable status of "purposeless", "useless", and "an end in itself". Milliner's quote of Mondrian and Malruax's deification of art - "it is hallowed by its association with a vague deity known as Art" - only echoes stronger claims once made by Bell and reified (albeit in a more "responsible" academic form) by Stolnitz. Likewise, the French Ressourcement calls our attention to some of the more troubling foundations of modern theology laid by early modern theologians and philosophers. Seen in this light, they serve more as a agents of internal critique and less like Reno portrays them as external innovators and excursionists. In fact, Reno's argument might have fared better considering Rahner alone, as his theology served the purposes of the more liberal and unorthodox forms of theology today than Balthasar's.

Just as Milliner seems to be lamenting the confused state of Art Criticism today and seeks a stable and universal language with which to move the dialogue forward, so too Reno seems to wish for the good ol' days when theologians sat on the stoop and built the great edifice of scholastic theology, brick by brick, all talking the same language. I guess I'm just not very convinced we can or should return to such a tower.

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R. R. Reno on the "Heroic Generation" and Theological Education

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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This week with Hans Urs Von Balthasar (Huvb)

Dan and I are reading Volume 5 right now of A Theological Aesthetics, and we're going to be posting often on our reading and subsequent discussions. We just looked at his section on Nicholas of Cusa, who he definitely respects as being kind of a super-Catholic--I say this because Cusa, like Pico, was obsessed with explaining all phenomena and all religion in terms of the catholic faith. Kudos to Cusa says Hans. Apparently Cusa was down with the analogia entis as well, which Hans likes, but what we gleaned this past week was that the analogy may be a little too tight with Cusa, as Hans accuses him of preparing the ground (eventually) for Idealism, which equals loss of feeling for eros, and an inability to see eros and God in the same picture. Every metaphor must limp it seems. I agree here, we must be careful about tightening these comparisons too much. The analogy must grow in both directions. Advice I take seriously as I critique Carl Jung's notion of quaternity for my thesis, definitely an example of too clean a symbol. Wrapping up an analogy should always falter at the last step (between the 3 and the 4) like Bjork says in Dancer in the Dark, where she hoped the penultimate song would never end.

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