This last week I was blessed to attend two excellent theological conferences in Boston: the Boston Colloquy in Historical Theology, and the Re-Thinking Scholasticism Conference. As often enough happens in the intensive information bath of an academic conference, a number of conversations and quotations began to cross-pollinate in my psyche in the best of ways, allowing a glimpse of something I hadn’t quite seen before. In this post I’ll bring quotations from Rahner, Anatolios, and Coolman together into a kind of florilegium-with-gloss. And I’ll attend to some wisdom we might retrieve from early scholasticism for Christian thinking and teaching and theology in the present.
In a conversation with Ty Monroe, the late great Karl Rahner SJ came up. We discussed, among other things, the fruitfulness, espoused by a group of younger scholars, of reading Rahner in a “Neo-Chalcedonian” (i.e. person-logically-prior-to-natures-centric, Christology-and-hermeneutics-forward) way. The conversation prompted me to look again at the first pages of my copy of Foundations of Christian Faith into which, in Rahner’s unforgettable Introduction, he deftly inscribes the writer’s (and reader’s) always-prior involvement in the theological existence which gives shape to the substance of the volume. Rahner, note, intends this volume as “an introduction to the idea of Christianity” (1) and yet he will immediately resist the thought that this is some merely objective, merely outside-of-us reality in which our existence is not always already implicated: “for one who is Christian and wants to be a Christian, we are dealing with the totality of his own existence.” (1) He writes:
For a Christian, his Christian existence is ultimately the totality of his existence. This totality opens out into the dark abysses of the wilderness which we call God. When one undertakes something like this, he stands before the great thinkers, the saints, and finally Jesus Christ. The abyss of existence opens up in front of him. He knows that he has not thought enough, has not loved enough, and has not suffered enough (2).
Our existence, for Rahner, invites a personal exploration in which we discover that we’ve already been exploring the mystery of the God with whom, all the while being always beyond the limits of our horizons, nevertheless we’ve all along been involved. As Rahner will pray in a famous prayer:
I should like to speak with You, my God, and yet what else can I speak of but You? Indeed, could anything at all exist which had not been present with You from all eternity, which didn’t have its true home and most intimate explanation in Your mind and heart? [Eriugena and Bonaventure and Maximus are cheering here! -Ed.] Isn’t everything I ever say really a statement about You? (Thoughts in Solitude, 3).
Into the wilderness of divinity!
Rahner, back in Foundations, notes that others — Augustine, Aquinas, Bonaventure in his Breviloquium (and to this work we will at length return) — have attempted to summarize the essentials of the faith in a short, “single whole”. But as we explore the wilderness of endless love, explorers are summoned to this task anew:
But there must always be new attempts at such reflection upon the single whole of Christianity…
There’s a single whole of Christianity because there’s a single person Jesus Christ, by whose divine-human natures the fullness of deity dwells bodily (Chalcedon, Col. 2:9).
… there must always be new attempts at such a reflection upon the single whole of Christianity. They are always conditioned, since it is obvious that reflection in general, and all the more so scientific theological reflection, does not capture and cannot capture the whole of this reality which we realize in faith, hope, love, and prayer. It is precisely this permanent and insurmountable difference between the original Christian actualization of existence and reflection upon it which will occupy us throughout… (2).
The ways we personally engage with God in faith, hope, love, and prayer in the arena of our existence always exceed our finite articulations of the God we encounter. And yet, with St. Augustine, Rahner might prompt us to doxologically cry, woe betide the one who fails to speak, who fails to confess the God we encounter within and at the horizons of our existence, while the chatterboxes go on saying nothing. (Love to Maria Boulding for her stylish Confessions translation echoed here.)
Thinking on Rahner quickly brought back some words of my teacher Khaled Anatolios (who, alas, departed this life at Boston College to go teach at Notre Dame), in which, though I had forgotten this, Anatolios credits Rahner by name. Describing a style of theologizing some have come to call “comprehensive trinitarianism,” Anatolios writes,
Trinitarian doctrine emerged not from some isolated insight into the being of God, such that its meaning might be grasped from a retrieval of that particular insight, or from some creaturely analogue that somehow approximates that insight. Rather, orthodox trinitarian doctrine emerged as a kind of meta-doctrine that involved a global interpretation of Christian life and faith and indeed evoked a global interpretation of reality. Its historical development thus presents a dramatic demonstration of Karl Rahner’s characterization of trinitarian doctrine as the summary of Christian faith. To appreciate the meaning of trinitarian doctrine today, one must learn from the systematic thrust of its development how the entirety of Christian faith and life means the Trinity. Put differently, the suggestion is that we may perform the meaning of trinitarian doctrine by learning to refer to the trinitarian being of God through the entirety of Christian existence (Retrieving Nicaea, 8).
The Trinity is not one doctrine among others. It is, for Anatolios (and Rahner) meta-doctrine, the limitless sea of all our personal existing and reflecting and praying and loving and confessing. Anatolios is clear on this:
the Nicene development of trinitarian doctrine does allow for the use of various analogies, psychological, social, and otherwise…. But it never makes an isolated analogy, or even a network of analogies, the main locus of trinitarian meaning. That locus is always, at least implicitly, the entire field of Christian existence (Retrieving Nicaea, 10).
The metaphor has switched — God has gone from being a sea or abyss to a field — but there are levels at which the meaning has not. I note in passing that thinking with Rahner probably deserves more weight in understanding Anatolios than I’ve previously given it. I’ve thought about this passage of Anatolios a lot since Retrieving Nicaea was published. It just seemed right. It even felt right. It was one of my guiding lights in thinking about how to read the patristic writers in preparation for my comprehensive exams, in which I tried to develop a way of thinking about patristic theology as evincing (in my own rich mouthful of a phrase) a “biblical trinitarian divine union project.” It has been in the background of articles I’ve published on Augustine and Jean-Louis Chretien. Point being, this passage of Anatolios is anything but new to me. But it still hits a bit different just by being contextualized under Rahner’s Foundations. The florilegium is a powerful scholarly tool. It fecundates memory and fertilizes intellect. This makes me remember that once when I was a beginning graduate student I went to speak with Anatolios about a trinitarian apologetics project I was thinking of in relation to Augustine’s De Trinitate. Anatolios’ first book recommendation to help me get a handle on high level contemporary apologetics: none other than Karl Rahner. “You have to read Foundations of Christian Faith,” he said. His second recommendation, by the way, was Walter Kasper’s The God of Jesus Christ.
In light of these contextualizations with Rahner and Anatolios, I’m thinking of my doctoral advisor Boyd Taylor Coolman’s recent and ongoing work, which has been in the foreground of my thinking in recent weeks in preparation for my time in Boston. Coolman has been working lately on 13th century scholasticism’s Victorine roots in relation to Mark Clark’s publications which convincingly situate Peter Lombard very intimately with the Abbey of St. Victor, its intellectual culture, and its library. In light of Clark, Coolman is rethinking the 13th century Franciscan and Dominican scholasticism of the University of Paris as decisively shaped by the Victorine legacy and practice. One benefit of this Victorine-heavy rereading that is certainly germane to this blog is that it will accentuate the way in which the Franciscans are at least as much the “main story” of early scholasticism as the Dominicans, a fact which is only obscured recently by the disproportionate ecclesial and academic focus on the not-truly-so-isolated genius of the great Thomas Aquinas. While attending to the ways in which the Abbey of St. Victor is the source of the intellectual culture of the University of Paris, Coolman is consequently articulating and proposing scholasticism as directed toward generating an intellectus fidei that is neither simply scientia (“science”) nor simply sapientia (“wisdom”). Coolman:
It is precisely their [medieval scholastics’] attempts to discern this nexus among the central dogmatic mysteries of Catholic faith that prompted the medieval doctors, from the early twelfth to the late thirteenth centuries, to compose summae of theology. They were keen, not only to come to grips, for example, with the doctrine of the Trinity or Christology or grace, discretely… but also in properly interrelating them with one another and in light of ultimate human beatitude. At least part of the project of fully appreciating (“re-thinking”) medieval scholasticism should be to approach it from this Glaubensverstandnis perspective. In a very basic sense, medieval scholasticism is the relentless pursuit of deep insight into the nature of God that emerges from a careful consideration of how all the mysteries of faith fit together.
One of Coolman’s points was that it is Hugh of St. Victor’s structures (described in Didascalicon and performed in De Sacramentis) that set the order of topics of for subsequent summae, including Peter Lombard’s Sentences which in many ways give a revised Victorine and Hugonian structure and practice, which Lombard has further focused and sharpened by the introduction of Abelardian dialectic.
Note Coolman’s description of a twin aspiration of the intellectus fidei sought by scholastic theology: to articulate the relation of the mysteries of faith to one another, and to us (“ultimate human beatitude”). Lonergan, of course, is attentive to the distinction between seeing things as they relate to us, and seeing them as they interrelate to each other (which is the way in which it is true in one way to say that “the sun rises" in the East” and in another to say that the Earth circles the sun), and Coolman suggests that we might interpret intellectus fidei as similar to “insight.” What is pursued by the scholastics, on Coolman’s telling, is a discipline that can work with both of these relational realities. We might say, following Hugh’s giving theological weight to the biblical “works of restoration” which re-form creation (so, divine soteriological action), that the personal engagement and activity of the God who saves us (“for us and for our salvation”) is the ultimately relational nexus in which the interrelation of the mysteries among themselves is discerned.
And this brings us back to Rahner and Anatolios. A Victorine re-situation of early scholasticism ultimately cuts against the grain of the tendency to think that scholastics are involved in something impersonal and abstract (in the negative sense) when they formulate their questions and their objections and their solutions: the goal, as careful readers of scholastic summae know, isn’t just the individual questions, but the structures that exist in the whole. The whole of theology matters because Christianity is a single whole, the revelation in and of the single whole Christ. That’s to say, the structure of the whole is Trinity, the first item on Hugh’s list, and also (per Anatolios) the meta-doctrine in light of which all the other doctrines treated in order (which for Hugh and subsequent early scholastics will flow in similar ways according to biblical-ecclesial salvation history). Hugh of St. Victor’s focus of theology on the “works of restoration” serves exactly to root theological reflection in the trinitarian meta-doctrine as God transformatively shows forth God in salvation history: for roots scholasticism as much as for Rahner, the focus in on the triune God with whom we’re always already involved.
The scholastic summary or summa doesn’t just relish excessive detail: rather, it relishes equally the elegance of economic fullness. It is to be taken into the mind, its questions lifted upon the lips, reflected upon and argued, as a whole — and by fragmented persons being reformed into a whole (individually and communally), that the whole might be lifted, a gift into a host, into union with God.
To say that the scholastics aren’t seeking to give excessive detail has another worth in the present is also to illuminate an area in which we have something to learn from them today. Rahner, in Foundations, is himself seeking to give the right amount of detail. Our age, as is well known, favors hyper-specialization. And surely there is a place for such detailed and focused study. But that is a different project than the project that teaches or seeks to effectively communicate the whole of a subject. In our age of hyper specialization, the give of economically and elegantly communicating a brief summa, a breviloquium if you will, is one that ought be retrieved and honed. And in it, per Coolman’s point, the interrelation shown among the parts of a whole matters as much as what is shown about each of them.
Surely, in these respect and others, St. Bonaventure’s own Breviloquium still has much to teach us. With its dense “concentration of word and phrase” (Jacques Guy Bougerol), Bonaventure’s style in the Breviloquium is “simultaneously compact and highly complex; his sentences are long and stately, with rhythmically balanced phrases” (Paula Jean Miller). The craft of Bonaventure’s communication marries form and content in a way that, as the 16th century theologian Jean Gerson found, elicits frutfulness in repeated meditation. And in our age it was none other than Henri de Lubac who lauded, “The Breviloquium of St. Bonaventure, in its harmonious density, manifests a power of total synthesis, perhaps never equaled.”
