From Genealogy to a Hermeneutics of Tradition
This is the first in a series of articles on Christian Genealogical Thinking centered on the theme Deep in History.
Jerome in His Study by Albrecht Dürer
Let me begin by identifying some basic tensions impinging on what the organizers of the Collegium Institute’s roundtable have termed “Christian Genealogical Thinking,” which in turn is nested within the larger undertaking of the Genealogies of Modernity Project. Not to bury the lede, my dual thesis will be that a genealogical approach to modernity is bound to replicate—both methodologically and substantively—the contours of what we seek to understand and, for that very reason, is inapposite to Christianity. To be sure, genealogical approaches to Christianity as a historical phenomenon are possible, and many such versions exist. Yet none of them are intrinsically Christian. On the contrary, I consider them incommensurable with a properly Christian culture of reasoning as it has taken shape over two millennia.
To suggest why this is so, let me begin by recalling Alasdair MacIntyre’s characterization of genealogy as itself a distinctly modern type of moral enquiry, purporting to “repudiate all the key features of accountability, understood in terms either of Socratic dialectic or of Augustinian confession.” Indeed, with their sweeping critique of politics, religion, and culture, writers such as Descartes, Vico, Hume, Voltaire, and Kant (to name but a few) sought to expunge once and for all the very possibility of knowledge as something received, both historically in the form of specific traditions and phenomenologically in the world’s “absolute givenness” in intuition. Instead, human knowledge was to be placed on a strictly immanent footing, that is, as something made rather than received. Being was no longer understood as transcendently revealed but, in its reality, was said to depend on our evolving ability to capture it as a system of secondary (efficient) causation. In ceaselessly re-narrating the story of modernity’s origins and development, the genealogist defaults to the intellectual pathos and discursive conventions mainly associated with the Enlightenment, in particular its peremptory rejection of metaphysics and its Pelagian embrace of unlimited, human-engineered progress in politics, economics, and culture.
What we call genealogy began to consolidate around 1700 as a fundamentally new epistemic stance, and its success can be gauged by the torrent of (axiomatically secular) genealogies purporting to narrate advances in economics, politics, philosophy, art, and even religion. As examples, we might recall William Robertson’s A View of the Progress of Society in Europe (1769), Hume’s History of England (1754-1761) and his posthumous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1776), Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1789), Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophical History of Humanity (1784-1791), as well as Kant’s “Conjectural Beginning of Human History” and “Ideas for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” (1783). The list could be extended to include the writings of Hegel, Comte, Marx, Michelet, Ranke, and the early-twentieth-century neo-Kantians. It continues in recent scholarship, such as Michael Gillespie’s The Theological Origins of Modernity (2008), Jonathan Israel’s triumphalist Revolution of the Mind, subtitled “Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy” (2011), Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006), Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined (2011), and Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2012). Indeed, of late Harvard seems to have established a kind of monopoly in the genealogies-of-modernity genre with its steady stream of intellectual histories recounting humanity’s cheerful advance on the yellow brick road towards a blissfully anthropocentric, more knowledgeable, more self-aware, more affluent and more peaceful modernity.
Already the Enlightenment, however, had also spawned an obverse or “declensionist” type of genealogical narrative that views history as a fatal and irreversible lapse from an original state. Arguably the most famous early version of such a “negative” genealogy would be found in Rousseau’s writings, particularly the second Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755). His decline-and-fall version of genealogy would be inflected by such writers as Burke, Chateaubriand, de Maistre, Spengler, Toynbee, and it has continued in lucid jeremiads of more recent vintage by Eric Voegelin, Allan Bloom, and the fictions of Michel Houellebecq. That the genealogical model should have ended up being deployed against the Enlightenment itself—most emphatically in the work of Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Foucault—not only attests to its formal adaptivity and universal aspirations but also betrays an underlying, curiously self-consuming tendency. Indeed, to quote MacIntyre once more, “the genealogical stance is dependent for its concepts and its modes of argument, for its theses and its style, upon a set of contrasts between it and that which it aspires to overcome—the extent, that is, to which it is derivative from and even parasitic upon its antagonisms . . . drawing its necessary sustenance from that which it professes to have discarded.” While not everyone may accept this analysis, what seems beyond doubt is that genealogical narratives—conceived as counter-narratives and in opposition to received, tradition-based inquiry—rest on a strictly immanent and secular conception of time that may alternately play out as a stridently progressive or as an inexorably declensionist narrative.
For a number of reasons, either version proves fundamentally incompatible with Christian thought and faith. To begin with, given its strictly immanent or intra-historical nature, genealogy must perforce exclude from its purview (or reject as unreal) the core tenets of the Christian faith. At least it is hard to see how notions of Divine Revelation and Unmerited Grace, as well as human Faith and eschatological Hope could ever be reconciled with a Pelagian-progressive or dystopian-regressive model of historical development that the genealogist posits as the only viable explanatory paradigm. As the epistemic naturalism and positivist methodology of Feuerbach, Strauss, Comte, Renan, Durkheim, and Weber show, eschatological hope in particular ended up being supplanted (or “explained”) by the cumulative certainties of historicism and modern sociology. In time, it was perhaps inevitable that a strictly immanent view of all reality as historical, and hence of all human knowledge as a contingent product rather than a transcendent gift, should seek to complete genealogical narrative in the chiliastic dreamworlds of modern political theology. Whatever its particular discoveries and projections, genealogical inquiry was and remains an intrinsically secular undertaking and, as such, appears incommensurable with Christian thought.
That said, modern theology has often been receptive to the siren call of genealogical thinking, as became once again apparent in the early stages of Vatican II. Tasked with reviewing the draft schema of what eventually became Dei Verbum, the young Joseph Ratzinger found himself rightly perplexed by that draft’s provisional title: De Fontibus Revelationis. As he notes in his memorandum to Cardinal Frings, already the schema’s very title “implies a peculiar narrowing of the concept of revelation. For truly, it is not Scripture and tradition that constitute the sources of revelation; rather, Revelation—God’s logos and self-disclosure—is the sole wellspring [unus fons] from which Scripture and tradition themselves emerge.” To the young peritus, the draft schema’s title reflects the confusion sown by “modern historicism” and a genealogical approach seemingly “incapable of distinguishing between the order of Being and the order of Knowledge. To be sure, Scripture and tradition are for us the sources whereby we come to know Revelation, but they are not in themselves its source.” Yet the very moment when we lose sight of this distinction, theological inquiry and Christian practice confront two equally perilous choices: either to succumb to a genealogical historicizing of religion such as had shaped the nineteenth century’s positivistic construction of religion (Comte, Renan, Durkheim, Weber), or to embrace a “scripturalism” (Skripturismus) of the sola scriptura variety that “conflates Revelation with its material principles [Materialprinzipien`].”
If the first approach inexorably estranges the human being from Revelation as a metaphysical reality, the second is bound to expire in the endless, literal and tautological repetition of the Word as putatively “self-interpreting.” Like Newman, Blondel, and the ressourcement theologians of his own time, Ratzinger views either framework as a dead-end. His own proposal—arguably the most compelling alternative to the twin perils of genealogy and fideism, radical immanence and radical transcendence, respectively, involves a hermeneutics of tradition. In closing, let me flag the main features of such a hermeneutic.
What sustains a tradition and ensures its continuing development and vitality is the practice of exegesis. Understood as a patient and humble drawing-out of transformative meanings found not only in Scripture and a vast array of natural and aesthetic phenomena, exegesis and, more generally, hermeneutic practice are essentially dialogic. If, to recall Bertrand Russell’s distinction, genealogy is committed to an ideal of knowledge by detached, historicizing description and, beyond that, to achieving conceptual dominion over the fruits of such descriptive efforts, hermeneutics embodies the Anselmian fides quaerens intellectum in that it frames human inquiry as an attempt to make explicit what we already know by intuitive acquaintance. Above all, a hermeneutics of tradition demands epistemic humility and what Merleau-Ponty calls “perceptual faith,” that is, the cultivation of both our responsiveness to and our gratitude for the world’s myriad phenomena—Scriptural, artistic, natural—whose abundant givenness enjoins us to participate in them both attentively and sympathetically.
Defining of hermeneutic practice is thus not the genealogist’s quest for univocal dominion over phenomena but, instead, a dialogical and trans-generational pattern of call-and-response (Wort/Antwort), exemplified by the rhythms of the Liturgy. What not only recommends but positively compels the latter approach is the essentially Augustinian view of knowledge as a gift (donum) and manifestation of grace (gratia). To suppose otherwise is tantamount to denying a core feature of Augustinian theological anthropology—stridently reinforced by Pascal against his naturalistic and Pelagian contemporaries: namely, that the human intellect and whatever knowledge it is capable of is always already damaged, marked by duplicity and sin. Hence, the epistemic humility that I identified as integral to a hermeneutics of tradition is no mere subjective preference. Rather, it means to guard human inquiry from its inherent tendency to barter away the Good and the True for the merely expedient by insisting that we see ourselves as thoughtful curators rather than autonomous producers of a knowledge that, like any gift, can only be honored by being given away to those who follow us.
Thomas Pfau holds the Alice Mary Baldwin Chair of English at Duke University, as well as appointments in German Studies and the Duke Divinity School. He is the author of several monographs, including Minding the Modern (Notre Dame UP, 2013), multiple essay collections and volumes of translation, as well as some 50 essays on philosophical, literary, and theological topics from the 18h through the 20th century.