A Humble Genealogy: On Christian Hermeneutics
This is the first in a series of articles on Christian Genealogical Thinking centered on the theme Deep in History.
Newton by William Blake
Building on my previous essay at this journal and on the conversation at last December’s colloquium, I would like to respond to suggestions that the genealogical method may yet have a significant role in, or can be effectively repurposed for Christian intellectual enquiry, it being understood that the scope and nature of such enquiry remain far from settled. Even so, any attempt to align theological and exegetical practices with genealogical method for such enquiry would have to operate with a substantially different concept of genealogy than the one spawned by European modernity, which I continue to regard as incommensurable with Christian thought and its underlying metaphysics. My earlier remarks conceived genealogy as the preferred and subsequently dominant conceptual framework for the project of critique developed during the long Enlightenment (c. 1660-1830). On this view, genealogical thinking understands itself as producing a counter-narrative at once parasitical on inherited modes of philosophical, theological, and political inquiry and intent on unmasking and supplanting them. Its underlying objective is one of sudden rupture (e.g., Descartes, Hobbes) or, alternatively, a dialectical, step-by-step “sublation” (Aufhebung) of inherited forms of moral and philosophical inquiry (e.g., Hegel, Comte). Either way, the central intention is substantially the same, namely, a comprehensive and definitive overcoming of the past, undertaken by finite human agents intent on consolidating their autonomy by asserting full narrative control over the flow of historical time.
Lest the term genealogy be used equivocally, it seems important to distinguish its modern, variously critical, dialectical, or encyclopedic iterations from an entirely different, much older concept of genealogy, such as we encounter it in Homeric and Old Testament narrative. Here genealogical affinities are primarily conceived in terms of descent, most obviously reflected by a specific family tree but also, and sometimes more controversially, as the foundation of ethnic and religious communities. Yet consanguinity with one’s ancestors is not just a biological fact but, more importantly, is taken as evidence of an indissoluble kinship with the past, which in turn serves as a source for moral obligation and orientation in the here-and-now. Indeed, the seamless link between a biology of descent and a genealogy of moral and spiritual meanings suggests, to Homer’s protagonists no less than to the people of Israel, an ontological link between the order of history and that of the divine. Far from seeking to disrupt ties with the past, the underlying pathos of this type of genealogy is covenantal in kind. Whereas modern genealogical narrative would liberate human agents from their spiritual and cultural inheritance and help establish modernity’s Promethean fiction of what A. Giddens termed the “disembedded” self, pre-modern genealogies of descent tend to reinforce an intuitive sense of historical continuity and consequent moral obligation (e.g., the story of Jacob). On this view, to be “deep in history” precludes any assertion of unilateral authorship over the direction and meaning of past history and what it may yet reveal. Instead, covenantal genealogy is both lateral, between different generations of individuals and their kin, and vertical, that is, suffused with intimations that the dramatic structure of lived history is inextricably, albeit for the most part unfathomably, entwined with a divine order.
Saints Peter and Paul by Carlo Crivelli
In a recent essay, Ryan McDermott has characterized such genealogical filiations as forms of “consanguinity,” and he proposes a number of criteria as essential for genealogical thinking: (1) its dynamic character (“genealogical relation is always in motion”), (2) its bilateral temporality (“Genealogical relation depends as much on the future as it does on the past”), (3) its shifting valence, “depending on what is taken as the origin point,” and (4) the fluctuating significance of its components, determined both by temporal distance and the specific objective of inquiry (“different rules of proximity, depending on their various purposes”). I find McDermott’s criteria entirely à propos. Indeed, having made similar arguments about historical (as opposed to conventionally “historicizing”) inquiry, I would merely note (as a friendly amendment) that his criteria comport with J. H. Newman’s idea of tradition as a distinctive type of “development.”[1] What bears keeping in mind, then, is that a covenantal understanding of genealogy, even where at first blush it would seem to rupture an older model of genealogy as inheritance and descent (e.g., Matt. 23:9; 19:29), remains at all times indexed toward a transcendent God, rather than to contingent historical objectives such as those integral to the immanent frame that Enlightenment rationality came to (mis)identify as its exclusive and all-encompassing domain.
Yet, we must ask, where does that leave the ever-looming question of how Christian thinking (genealogical or otherwise) ought to frame the relation between the Old and New Covenant, and whether the Gospels ought to be read as either superseding or fulfilling the Old Testament narrative? It was this issue which, implicit in a point raised during the Q&A part of last December’s forum (see 1:12’37”), prompted my passing suggestion that when inquiring into genealogy’s potential bearing on “the history of Christian salvation” (as per Ryan McDermott’s question), a sensible point of departure would be the history of typological interpretation. Let me elaborate on that point by outlining why modern genealogy’s attempt at invalidating and superseding all inherited frameworks of moral and intellectual inquiry (e.g., Nietzsche, Foucault) are inapposite to the ever-present hermeneutic challenge of articulating the relationship of the New to the Old Covenant.
For one thing, theological enquiry can never lay claim to the kind of epistemic confidence characteristic of modern genealogical projects, grounded as they tend to be in a set of abstract principles, be they of the Cartesian-rationalist, Lockean-empirical, Humean-skeptical, or Fichtean-performative type. Consequently, an interpretation of Christianity’s relation to Hebraic, Greek, and Roman culture cannot unfold as a straightforward deductive undertaking but, instead, pivots on the inherently open-ended practices of Scriptural exegesis and theological reflection. In contrast to modern philosophical “principles,” typically introduced as self-certifying, non-contestable propositions, the logos of Scripture constitutes a reality and gift transcendently received, not a set of axioms immanently conceived and asserted. It is the source of all meaning, not a historically contingent iteration of it.
Ultimately, the distinction at issue—akin to Pascal’s juxtaposition of esprit de géometrie and esprit de finesse—is that between a process of deductive reasoning from abstract first principles and a hermeneutic inquiry seeking to advance toward the revealed logos. As the primordial (Jn. 1:1) manifestation of the logos, second only to Creation itself, Scripture demands to be approached from a position of Anselmian fides quaerens intellectum, that is, as an inexhaustible trace of the divine logos. What this entails for theological reflection and practical exegesis is luminously expressed in the opening and closing lines of Hölderlin’s “Patmos”:
Near is
and difficult to grasp, the God.
Yet where danger threatens
That which saves from it also grows.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But what the Father
Who reigns over all loves most
is that the solid letter
Be given scrupulous care.[2]
As it responds, patiently and humbly, to God’s manifestation in Creation and Scripture, Christian enquiry must always bear in mind that access to the logos is never unmediated, just as Newman liked to remind his readers that Scripture is “not self-interpreting” but forever “needs completion.” It was Ratzinger’s important reminder that the logoi of Scripture are not to be confused with the logos of Revelation, and that Scripture is to be continually engaged as an enigmatic gift begging fuller discernment, which had prompted me to emphasize the importance of epistemic humility, a virtue notably absent from modern genealogical thinking.
This is not to deny that Christianity, too, has honored the virtue of humility more in the breach than the observance. For whatever else it may be, Christianity has also been one long and complicated history of self-betrayal, alternately succumbing to bouts of epistemic pride and Pelagian self-assertion or complacent, self-certifying fideism, typically followed by belated acts of self-castigation. The temptation to resolve the myriad conflicts, incongruities, and sufferings of the saeculum, which after all is also the Lebenswelt of Christianity, undoubtedly goes a long way toward explaining its receptivity to the siren song of modern genealogical and dialectical method. Yet to embrace such models, at least without serious qualifications, is bound to obscure Christianity’s eschatological dimension, which any immanent method of inquiry will (rightly) perceive as inimical to its finite, pragmatic objectives. For while the ends of Christian intellectual practice can never be wholly disconnected from the domain of historical time and finite knowledge, neither can they ever be wholly confined within it.
Instead, the proper domain of Christian thought is not a function of epistemic certainty but a process of constant trial, ever begging to be tested in practice. This, it seems to me, also holds true for Paul’s writings, which, even as they seek to supplant the Old Covenant, always exhort his various addressees for their continued backsliding and for manifestly failing to achieve the core goods of Christianity to which they would lay claim. In the end, for Christians to be “deep in history,” to recall Newman’s pithy formulation, means nothing less than to bid farewell to two closely entwined axioms defining of our anthropocentric modernity: that of a radical Chiliasm promising nothing less than the definitive overcoming of history by immanent, historical means; and a dogmatic naturalism intent on reducing action, meaning, and value to so many projections or epiphenomena ceaselessly generated by historically contingent and death-bound human actors.
St. Jerome Reading in the Wilderness by Giovanni Bellini
Careless acceptance of these two axioms helps us understand why the Enlightenment project of sweeping genealogical critique, however inflected, always had a strong whiff of epistemic and spiritual hubris about it. By contrast, Christian thought (exegesis, homiletics, dogmatics, speculative theology, theological ethics) must at all times remain mindful of certain epistemic limitations intrinsic to it, beginning with the fact that some divine auxilium is always required for any intellectual act, and for theological inquiry in particular. This precarity of Christian hermeneutic and speculative practice, so palpably at odds with modern genealogy’s methodological certainties and procedural confidence, is time and again thrown into relief by the aleatory nature of Scriptural exegesis and other forms of textual interpretation. Rather than being conjured away by the Shamanism of modern method (genealogical, dialectical, analytic, or otherwise), such limitations are something to be welcomed and embraced. For they remind us of Pascal’s quintessential Augustinian insight: that the antinomy of grandeur and misère is not something extrinsic to us—and hence something we may expect to resolve at some point in the future—but is, instead, something that defines our very being.
[1]See Chapter I (“The Development of Ideas”) and Chapter V, containing Newman’s much-scrutinized “Notes” on the concept of Development in Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. On Newman’s account of tradition, see Pfau, Minding the Modern (Notre Dame UP, 2013), pp. 35-75 and “Tradition: Newman & Some Contemporaries.”
[2] Nah ist / Und schwer zu fassen der Gott. / Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch. … // der Vater aber liebt / Am meisten, daß gepfleget werde / Der veste Buchstab, und bestehendes gut / Gedeutet“ (Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, trans. M. Hamburger, Cambridge UP, 1966, pp. 462-77).