Modernity Is a Word of Crisis: Cyril O’Regan on Christian Memory
Part of the Genealogies of Modernity Project is the exploration of different modes of genealogical thinking, in particular Christian genealogies. As I have argued, the work of the Christian genealogist is thinking through the intersection of time and eternity, transcendence and immanence. It is the work of remembering Jesus Christ in and through history. This work is crucial in these (post)modern times because of the ways this epoch is increasingly Christ-forgetting (at least in the Western world). Cyril O’Regan—an Irish theologian teaching at Notre Dame—has spent much of his intellectual life working through the problems of memory in the Christian tradition. In particular, he has explicated the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar in order to critique the philosophical theology of Hegel and expose the ways Gnosticism recurs in modernity. Exorcising Philosophical Modernity: Cyril O’Regan and Christian Discourse after Modernity, a recent collection of essays on O’Regan, explores his lifelong work on memory. This text challenges us to identify and respond to failures of memory while advancing a deeper understanding of Christian genealogical work, by showing the contrast between Christian memory and Hegelian misremembering.
O’Regan’s work—and this collection of essays—is motivated by two fundamental and complementary intellectual tasks. The first is a critique of modernity and its imitations of Christianity; the second is the positive work of deepening our memory of Jesus. Philip Gonzales, the editor of the collection, writes of the first that it is “a visionary belief that there are indeed counterfeit doubles of Christianity and that these must be discerned.” Christians, in particular Christian intellectuals, need to discern the ways Christ and the Church are counterfeited by modes of thought and communities that mimic the core features of Christianity while evacuating those core features of their true content.
David Szauder Failed Memory
O’Regan, since his Gnostic Return in Modernity and Heterodox Hegel, has worked to disclose the ways modernity forgets (by detaching itself from tradition) and misremembers (by distorting Christianity through a false imitation). Misremembering, as Aaron Riches and Sebastián Montiel write in Exorcising Philosophical Modernity, is a pseudo-recovery of “traditional memories that misconstrue the original forms of thought, modes of feeling, and ways of life of Christianity, now at the service of an end . . . that essentially distorts (or makes opaque) the ‘primal mystery.’” O’Regan is primarily focused on Hegelian misremembering as a pseudo-recovery. Christians can learn from Hegel, because he does provide the most comprehensive transcending of modernity. This pseudo-recovery appears to be deeply Christian, in large part because Hegel develops a theological story that is meant to surpass the Enlightenment. Hegelian dialectic depends on Christ—as God becoming immanent— and on the Pentecost—as the descent of the Spirit acting within the community. And yet, it does so by evacuating the core meanings of the Christian understanding, creating a kind of zombie Christianity that appears Christian and yet “subtly distorts and transforms Christianity into a counterfeit double.” The Christian may feel at home in Hegel’s philosophy and certainly is happy to see the Enlightenment sublated. As we will see, Christians tend to suddenly find that this ‘home’ is a false one.
The second task extends beyond O’Regan’s genealogical critique of counterfeit doubles. It extends beyond because it reveals that the critical work is “done out of love for the Lamb slain, and the result of his exorcism of love is nothing less than an anticipation of the wedding feast of the Lamb.” O’Regan’s critique of modern amnesia is at the service of the positive task of remembering Jesus Christ. The core task is remembering Christ. This remembering takes place in time through the Church as the Body of Christ. It requires the ceaseless labor of memory. This memory, though, is not past-oriented in the way our corroded sense of memory would indicate. Like Augustine, O’Regan sees memory as the task that holds together past, present, and future. It is thus best expressed in the memoria fidei recited at Mass: “We proclaim your Death, O Lord, and profess your Resurrection, until you come again.” This proclaiming and professing is about a past event but is worded as the present reality. To do the work of Christian genealogy is to participate in this proclaiming and professing in time by exploring how this proclamation and profession takes place over time. As O’Regan insists, this work is apocalyptic in that we proclaim and profess until you come again. In fact, we do so in service of this second coming.
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St. Ireneaus
Reflecting on Cyril O’Regan’s dual labor, we see that he is something of an Irenaeus of (post)modernity. Just as Irenaeus worked to critique and deconstruct the false memory of the Gnostics, O’Regan critiques and deconstructs the forgetting by Enlightenment modernity and Hegelian misremembering. More importantly, Irenaeus explored the recapitulation of Christ by showing how Christ draws all things (and so all time) into himself. Likewise, O’Regan—by working with the theology of Hans Ur von Balthasar—seeks to recapitulate the tradition of the Church as the Body of Christ. This recapitulation seeks to restore the memory of the Church in order to speak to and reorient the grammar of modernity.
The essayists in Exorcising Philosophical Modernity tend to operate primarily in the theological and philosophical register of continental thought. As such, they contend with figures like Gilles Deleuze, Paul Ricoeur, William Desmond, Merleau-Ponty, and Julia Kristeva. The goal of the writers is largely to establish a postmodern Christian intellectual response to both modernity and postmodernity. If modernity has been surpassed (a questionable claim), what comes after it? For these thinkers, the answer cannot be a restored Christendom structured around Thomism. But they also want to avoid a postmodernity wholly dominated by thinkers like Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault. They work in a space between the univocal certainties of scholasticism and modern rationalism—which sought an atemporal and non-historical scientia—and the equivocal indeterminacy of postmodern thought—which sees nothing but temporal flux. O’Regan and the essayists see memory as the between way of thinking. Memory does not deny the temporal but rather dwells in it through a narrative sourced by the eternal. It can thus speak to both constancy and contingency over time. The task of the Christian genealogist is to deepen this sense of Christian memory.
The reason O’Regan so exhaustively responds to and critiques Hegel is that he seems to be doing something similar to Christian memory. The great task of Hegelian dialectic is to see in time the full becoming of Spirit. It is marked by neither static univocity nor by equivocal flux. Instead, stasis and flux are surpassed by the Spirit’s sublation of both. History is the coming to self-consciousness of Spirit (in humanity). Spirit knows itself by surpassing otherness, by seeing otherness within its own History. What is known by Spirit is the history of Spirit. By dialectic, Spirit comes to self-knowledge. What Hegel thus denies is that we have “other-knowledge” in the sense that we can know what is other without the other being subsumed into my knowing. Hegelian knowledge of the other ultimately becomes self-knowledge. A robust account of “other-knowledge” is part of what William Desmond means by metaxology. We leave open the space between persons, and between persons and God, so that we can know each other without a union that eliminates otherness.
The Hegelian account is the story (or epic) of Spirit coming to self-knowledge by sublating difference. It does not hold open the between of memory. For even if memory is my own, it is always others that I remember. In fact, my memory is what allows others to be present without being subsumed into me. Memory as a personal reality allows for the reality of past, present, and future in relation with eternity. Further, Hegelianism denies what William Desmond calls the “God of biblical personalism.” It does so because Jesus is treated as a stage in redemption rather than as the indispensable person. In contrast, O’Regan holds up Balthasar’s take that the task of memory is to partake in the drama of history. A drama is a narrative in which there are persons who are differing centers of meaning, that are not just part of the self-becoming of Geist but are centers of meaning moving towards an end. For Christians, this end is the apocalyptic revelation of the director of the drama. D.C. Schindler writes that the "apocalyptic in its authentic sense entails drama,” meaning that one does not recount it from a position of comprehension but lives within it as a character of the drama. This is in contrast to Hegelian epic of self-becoming which claims a “capacity to grasp the ultimate meaning in a univocal fashion . . . which one comprehends, in the sense that one is able to fit it wholly inside one’s particular intelligence.” In Hegelian epic there is a history, but one in which I comprehend the history as completed by Spirit’s self-consciousness. In Christian drama, I live within the narrative, having a sense of the history without full comprehension. The dramatic means one is working towards and awaiting the conclusion. Christian drama is not one of self-consciousness achieved but of memory enacted through hope.
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In my past essay “Three Genealogies: An Allegory,” I dealt with three ways of thinking about modernity: Enlightenment, Nietzschean, and Christian. Exorcising Philosophical Modernity clearly stakes the claim that the Hegelian mode of thinking must be considered as well. For a Christian, we may have the most to learn from Hegel, who is arguably the greatest thinker of modern times. His retelling of Christianity is brilliant and rich. Christians need not hate Hegel, and yet we should be extremely careful when engaging with Hegel. This is because Hegel, like the Gnostics of old, is so close to us. A counterfeit is almost as real as the original, and we do not want to mix up the real with the counterfeit.
Jan Van Eyck The Ghent Altar Piece
What O’Regan emphasizes for Christian genealogy is the work of memory as a task that does not end. We all too easily forget. We are all tempted by misremembering. We must keep vigil for the return of our Master. This may be the defining feature of Christian genealogy. We work to remember amidst modern amnesia. In this we enact the Marian vocation of Christianity: “Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.” The critique of modernity, Gnosticism, and modes of misremembering is not an end in itself. The end is remembering the works of God in time, over time, until the end of time.
The title for this article comes from the opening line of Cyril O’Regan’s The Anatomy of Misremembering.
