The Anatomy of Misremembering

What is it to remember the past? What sort of remembering is a genealogy? And can genealogy itself be a kind of forgetting or misremembering? Cyril O'Regan's recent book The Anatomy of Misremembering is a masterful exploration of these questions. In this book, O’Regan takes up Hans Urs von Balthasar, the twentieth-century Swiss theologian, and recasts him as a genealogical thinker. In O’Regan’s view, Balthasar’s plurivocal and profound corpus is at its heart a project of remembering. This remembering is more than just a matter of acquiring historically accurate information about the past. To remember the past is to be capable of understanding its spirit. Genealogy, in particular, is a form of memory that works by narrating the past so that its true spirit can be comprehended in all of its manifestations, expressions, and developments. O’Regan follows Balthasar in diagnosing modernity as a large-scale misremembering of the Christian past. Modernity, that is, generates genealogies of the Christian past that filter the past through false or distorted narratives. If the Christian faith is to remain viable in this modern age while still staying true to its historical identity, then Christian theology must be recast as a quest to remember and re-narrate the Christian past that modernity has obscured from view. O’Regan presents the Balthasarian project of remembering as the crucial task for a Christian theology that would confront the challenges and trials of modernity.

Across his corpus, Balthasar engages Hegel and Heidegger as the most significant genealogists of modernity. Both Hegel and Heidegger construct their uniquely modern self-identities through a genealogical retrieval of the past, especially of the philosophical and religious past of the Christian West. Hegel retrieves the historical Christian drama of creation, incarnation, and redemption from the scorn and disrepute of the Enlightenment’s religious criticism. But Hegel’s retrieval involves translating the Christian drama of God’s saving action towards humankind into a very different sort of story, one that more closely resembles a form of Gnosticism than of Christian orthodoxy. Heidegger, for his part, aims to retrieve philosophical possibilities that he believes Christianity to have foreclosed. But in so doing, Heidegger falsifies the relationship between faith and reason, philosophy and theology, love and wisdom in the Christian tradition. To tell the story of their philosophical modernity, Hegel and Heidegger obfuscate, erase, and deform modernity’s Christian heritage. Hegel and Heidegger appear to remember the Christian past, but their memory in fact systematically misremembers that past. It is against such systematic misremembering that Balthasar arrays his own project, what O’Regan calls a project of “counter-genealogical retrieval.”

What this project of counter-genealogical retrieval requires is nothing more nor less than a rediscovery of the narrative resources of orthodox Christianity. Against the misrememberings of Christianity foisted upon the Christian faithful by the modern genealogies of Hegel and Heidegger, Christianity must (re)learn to express itself in its own voice. Against the systematic misremembering of orthodox Christian discourse and practice, Christians must renew their memory of authentic Christianity. The great merit of O'Regan's work is that to read it is precisely to have one's memory renewed in the way that Balthasar intended.

Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus

In this task of memory renewal or retrieval, what is at issue is quite clearly not a "return." We do not, cannot, ought not return to a specific theological, liturgical, or cultural formulation of Christian truth. To do so would be to enact an injustice against the future, with its yet unspoken possibilities, the present, with its lived difficulties, and the past, with its history. Christianity is ever ancient and ever new. Renewed memory is not a mere untimely, affected archaism. Rather, Balthasar aims at recollecting a truly universal, catholic, Christian narrative grammar. As O'Regan argues, Christianity is a divine traditio, that is, as a matter handed on generation to generation but handed over first of all by God himself. What matters in Balthasar’s retrieval of Christianity is not a revival of past forms of Christianity, but rather a rediscovery of the traditio according to what O’Regan calls its “grammar.” This “grammar” of the Christian tradition is the general structure of the uniquely Christian mode of experience, belief, and action.

Balthasar views the Christian traditio as enacting a drama, one structured by a general grammar of dogma and narrative but populated by a plurality of voices and actors. This drama is always personal and interpersonal. Therefore, it must be continuously retold and remembered in its concrete, personal dimensions. Hegel and Heidegger, by contrast, aim in their genealogies of modernity to craft metanarratives that overlay the personal Christian witness of the past with foreign meanings. Such metanarratives are not suited to the work of remembering. Against Hegel and Heidegger, Balthasar’s counter-genealogical retrieval of authentic Christian discourse, practice, and forms of life aims instead at what O’Regan calls a “thickly rendered history of drama.” His counter-genealogy reclaims what is “wholesomely plural” and hence resistant to reductive meta-narrative in the Christian past.

Though it is oriented towards recovering an awareness of the plural possibilities lived by the Christian past, Balthasarian memory is not a mere recollection of diverse and interesting historical facts. This memory is rather a practiced anamnesis through which the meaning and spirit of the Christian past takes on renewed life in the present. Balthasar’s counter-genealogical retrieval aims to make the Christian past live differently in and through us, as a dramatic traditio of which we are the performative continuation. Through the practice of a memory attentive to the authentic meaning of the past, we can recognize ourselves precisely as the bearers of a tradition that lived in the past, lives now in the present, and will live in the future. To misremember the past, as Hegel and Heidegger do, is not merely to forget or to make errors of recollection. It is rather, much more gravely, to remember the past in a way that severs the free flow of its original, authentic significance into the present. For O’Regan, as for Balthasar, such a misremembering cannot but jeopardize the tradition of faith of which the Christian church is the steward. To inherit this tradition is precisely to remember it well. Misremembering means disinheritance and exile, and Hegel and Heidegger’s counterfeits have no purchasing power to match what they discard.

Karl Hahn is a 5th year Doctoral Candidate in Philosophy at Villanova University. He is writing on German Idealism and Schelling’s philosophy of nature.