Discerning Genealogies: A Response to Thomas Pfau
This is the first in a series of articles on Christian Genealogical Thinking centered on the theme Deep in History.
Close-up of The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Caravaggio
At first read, Thomas Pfau’s “From Genealogy to a Hermeneutics of Tradition” left me puzzled. He evidently writes against “genealogy” in Christian theology and then proceeds to offer a genealogy of genealogy in the first four paragraphs himself. He also enlists for his case Alasdair MacIntyre, which only deepened my perplexity. MacIntyre’s After Virtue, I’ve always thought, offers an apocalyptic genealogy of moral theory in decline and fragmentation, and his later Whose Justice? Which Rationality? amplifies this jeremiad against modern putatively neutral reasoning. MacIntyre is not unusual amongst Catholic and non-Catholic Christian theologians who engage genealogical approaches to ward off or undermine the rational authority given to certain stories of modernity. Indeed, Catholic and non-Catholic Christian genealogies, such as those of Charles Taylor, Louis Dupré, John Milbank, and William Cavanaugh, are usually genealogies of modernity meant to re-narrate Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment (i.e., Nietzsche and Foucault) stories. These stories maintain that the goods (i.e., scientific discovery) of modernity can only be gained by the progressive sloughing off of religion, and especially Catholic religion, or, alternatively, that Catholicism and its tradition are nothing but a set of interests and power machinations.
In other words, these Catholic and non-Catholic Christian genealogies are, to a large extent, the defensive maneuvers of ground clearing intended to make intellectual space within which a positive and pluriform presentation of tradition that is received as gift might gain a hearing. To exclude a kind of polemical—even when irenically executed (i.e., Cyril O’Regan)—element to theology is to leave theologians bereft of an important tool that has been present since the beginnings of the theological tradition itself. Surely Irenaeus and Augustine each engage in genealogies meant to show the derivation of certain heterodox views from Marcion or Valentinus, or, in Augustine’s case, from Roman claims about Christianity rooted, ultimately, in the City of Man. Balthasar revives some of these same genealogical strategies as a defensive maneuver in modern theology. This hardly keeps him from receiving and presenting tradition as gift or, more accurately, a multitude of gifts from God’s excessive self-gift in Jesus Christ. None of these authors, so far as I can tell, recommend a kind of Nietzschean or Foucauldian reading of Christian tradition itself.
Of course, humility demands that, when at first an author’s essay appears puzzling, one must re-read, especially if that author is someone obviously intelligent, well-read, and thoughtful. In addition, the time of day one reads an essay can be important: before coffee or after? In a late night stupor just prior to sleep or when one’s faculties are at their most potent? So, bowing to the imperative of humility, I did in fact re-read and reconsider.
St. Ambrose silently reading
On second reading, I confess, I found some clarity contrary to my original impression. It seems to me quite clear, now, that Thomas Pfau is not so much arguing against a “genealogy of modernity,” but against genealogical method as the method of choice for understanding, interpreting, and passing on Christian tradition itself. In other words, his genealogy of genealogy is meant to show it to be a poisoned well of modern immanentism averse to the Christian theological tradition and its fundamental anti-Pelagian assumptions. That this is his concern becomes clear in his discussion of Dei Verbum and Joseph Ratzinger’s objections to early drafts that appeared to sacrifice the ever-greater sense of the biblical source as the divine Word on the altar of modern historicism. What Pfau would seem to have in mind is a kind of Foucauldian scouring of Christian tradition to leave it, at last, with but a few remains of its former glory that might not be entirely poisoned by the will to power. And so his effort is to remind theologians that their tradition is rooted in something other than the vanity of men. Perhaps better, it is a tradition grounded in something so other that it can and indeed has given itself relentlessly and excessively out of love for the world. Given this concern, it then makes sense to prioritize receptivity, patient exegesis, and humility as one receives the truth and gifts of the tradition granted in the first instance by the Source itself. The degree to which such a hermeneutics of tradition would require some form of theologically informed critical hermeneutic supplement is a more challenging topic that can be left aside at present.
Given this re-reading, then, a conditional affirmative response to Pfau’s genealogically inflected argument against genealogy is quite possible. The condition is that I am correctly reading Pfau as not rejecting genealogy in the defensive or strategic sense—after all, he deploys it in just this way himself—but rather as rejecting genealogy as a thoroughgoing hermeneutic strategy for Christian self-interpretation. Indeed, such a hermeneutic strategy would, in the end, be a faith-less disaster. A second condition would be more nearly in the realm of a suggestion than an assertion: the theological tradition itself requires an ongoing form of self-critical appropriation. Such appropriation should not be rooted in Nietzschean or deconstructive forms of memory, but must be capable of helping to discern what, having been passed down, is best forgotten and what is best remembered or re-presented for the Body of Christ today.
Anthony C. Sciglitano, Jr. is a professor in the Department of Religion at Seton Hall University.