Being Between: Genealogy and Christianity
Attempting to understand Christian genealogies is one of the central aspects of the Genealogies of Modernity project. In a previous post, I outlined three broad approaches to genealogy: the Nietzschean/Foucauldian, the Enlightenment, and the Christian. The Christian account presents unique challenges. This is partially due to the general inclination of genealogies towards immanence, temporality, and historicity. For many genealogists, the core of their vision of historicity is that there is nothing beyond the earthly, nothing outside of time, and no providential guidance to the events of history. And yet, some of the best genealogies of modernity have been written by Christians—for instance, Rowan Williams, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Catherine Pickstock, Thomas Pfau, and William Desmond. Christian intellectuals should engage with these genealogical approaches, both to learn from them and to challenge them.
The Triumph of Time, Domenico di Michelino, 1417-1491
Moreover, Christianity has an implicit commitment to time and history. Augustine is one of the great philosophers of time, memory, and history. He did not see time as a pernicious falling away from God or as a necessary emanation of the One, two positions Neoplatonists posited. Rather, he argued that God created time out of love for temporality. Temporality is because Eternality willed it to be. For Augustine, God made humans uniquely temporal, as creatures of beginnings, as creatures of memory, and as historical beings on a pilgrimage originating in founding events in history, particularly the resurrection of Christ. If Christian intellectuals can map out genealogies, it is because of their commitment to temporality and history.
That being said, the temptation to avoid genealogical approaches is strong among Christian intellectuals. Within the Roman Catholic tradition, this aversion to genealogy is particularly strong among some Neo-scholastics. In large part, this is due to their commitments to non-temporal aspects of Christianity: substance-based metaphysics and liturgical practices from the Council of Trent (1545). They tend to denounce the modern, to express skepticism about genealogical work, and to advocate a return to medieval or Tridentine approaches (or both).
To understand this better, it may help to situate the tension that Catholic genealogists face within the context of trends in Roman Catholic theology during the 19th and 20th centuries. Catholics committed to genealogical thinking inherit complex debates from that time. These debates pivoted around three positions: Modernist, Neo-scholastic, and Ressourcement. The first position, condemned repeatedly by popes, is marked by tendencies to historicize church dogma and practice. This modernist position is characterized by an emphasis on flux. Different eras express changing ways of relating to the faith. Nothing needs to be constant across the life of the Church, because nothing is constant. Consequently, the contemporary church can be updated according to contemporary values and beliefs. On the flip side, Neo-scholastics, who worked tirelessly to rout Modernism from the Roman Catholic Church, tend to maintain the ahistorical constancy of Church teaching and practice. This often includes strong affirmations of Thomas Aquinas as the perennial philosopher and denials (usually untenable) of development in doctrine and liturgy.
The third position—called either ressourcement or the nouvelle théologie—was a movement in 20th century theology. The movement was interested in a return to the sources by reexamining scriptural, patristic, and medieval texts and practices (hence the name ressourcement). They did so to renew theology for the 20th century (hence the nouvelle). The oldness and newness is their odd amalgamation that marks their differences with Neo-scholasticism. The Neo-scholastics tended to be committed to Aquinas and the Post-Trent Church. The ressourcement movement set its roots deeper in the early Church (especially the Patristics) and the early Middle Ages (particularly by renewing interests in figures overshadowed by the High Medieval Aristotelians). While the Neo-scholastics tended to reject the intellectual methods and ideas of the contemporary world, nouvelle théologie thinkers were far more open to contemporary thought. The ressourcement/nouvelle théologie was both older and newer than Neo-scholasticism, because they maintained a hermeneutics of continuity through change. This is to say that they sought to understand continuity through historical change. They held that the Church is neither static (as with some Neo-scholastics) nor is it wholly changeable (as with Modernists). Their model was organic: they saw growth rather than the alternatives of stasis or revolution. They were mapping a family tree which had continuing developments from the early Church to now. Consequently, they were committed to historical work and to the continuing encounter of the Church with the world today.
These debates still dominate contemporary Catholic discourse. Neo-scholastics remain committed to the idea that Catholic thinking must be ad mentem of Thomas Aquinas. While applying the term "modernist” is a little more complicated (it is a heresy), we can see its contemporary form in thinkers like John Caputo or Gianni Vattimo, who seem more influenced by contemporary thought than by traditions of Catholic thinking. Catholic genealogists are the inheritors of the nouvelle théologie. This may take different forms, such as MacIntyre’s restoration of virtue theory by means of historical philosophy or radical orthodoxy’s “return to the sources” guided by post-modern thought. But in both cases, they take seriously the developments of tradition without abandoning orthodoxy.
Wind Direction, Fanou Mantel
Fundamentally, Christian genealogists take up what William Desmond calls a metaxological approach. This means more than that they stand between (metaxu) the other two movements, though this is also true. More importantly, the metaxological means that they seek to explore the “between,” that is, the milieu of the eternal and temporal, the transcendent and the immanent, the providential and the historical. Their work stands at this intersection, which means, to draw on Charles Taylor, they experience something like “that open space where you can feel the winds pulling you, now to belief, and now to unbelief.” Or more accurately, they feel the pull back and forth between the appeal of the static and the appeal of flux. I think that this is the right place for Christian thinking: trying to hold open the between by thinking the old and the new, the constant and the changing, the timely and the timeless. We must think this, because, theologically, the between is the place of creation, the mark of incarnation, and the epoch amid Christ’s redemption and Christ’s return. We stand between, and our task is to think this metaxu as we travel in time toward an eternity that both sets us on our journey and beckons us to it as our destination.
