Progress in Mystery in Hilary of Poitiers

Taking up our discussion of Trinity and mystery from Karen Kilby, I came across a similar discussion in Hilary of Poitiers (300-368). He is here, in On the Trinity, discussing how it is that the Son is eternally born from the Father–a basic confession of Christian faith:

Penetrate into the mystery, plunge into the darkness which shrouds that birth, where you will be alone with God the Unbegotten and God the Only-begotten. Make your start, continue, persevere. I know that you will not reach the goal, but I shall rejoice at your progress. For he who devoutly treads an endless road, though he reach no conclusion, will profit by his exertions. Reason will fail for want of words, but when it comes to a stand it will be the better for the effort made. (On the Trinity, Book II, §10; in Gunton, ed., The Practice of Theology, 229)

Hilary seems to be setting out on a quite different path than Karen Kilby in her recent article, “Is An Apophatic Trinitarianism Possible?” Making a comparison across disciplines, she argues, “[T]heology does not ‘progress’ in the way that mathematics does, and the doctrine of the Trinity which is the conclusion of a long hermeneutical struggle should not itself be taken as a fresh starting point for a new enquiry” (70). For Kilby, “[T]here ought properly to be … a resistance to, a fundamental reticence and reserve surrounding, speculation on the Trinity” (72).

The proper grammar surrounding the Trinity has been achieved: this is the result of great struggle in the first five centuries of the Church’s life. But that does not mean that we may now set off, as it were, from the Trinitarian definitions as a launching pad to deeper things. Instead, the Trinity remains most properly shrouded in a veil of apophasis. But Kilby makes an important additional distinction: apophasis is not simply a sheer act of denial–that we, for instance, have no knowledge whatsoever about the Trinity. Rather, the Trinity is so overwhelmingly excessive that all our attempts to “understand” what the Trinity is like fall short.

The Trinitarian dogmas, Kilby wishes to affirm however, do really teach us things about the nature of God’s life, even the immanent life of Father, Son and Spirit together. They also, importantly, hedge off certain wrong understandings. In her own words, “Or again, one thing the doctrine affirms is that there really is only one God, and to say this is to say something about the immanent Trinity, but this does not mean that one has a comprehension of – or even a feeling for – how the oneness of God fits with the threeness” (71). And here Kilby is much closer to Hilary:

Therefore, since no one knows the Father save the Son, let our thoughts of the Father be at one with the thoughts of the Son, the only faithful Witness, who reveals him to us. It is easier for me to feel this concerning the Father than to say it… We must feel that he is invisible, incomprehensible, eternal. But to say [these things]… all this is an acknowledgement of his glory, a hint of our meaning, a sketch of our thoughts, but speech is powerless to tell us what God is, words cannot express the reality. (§7; in Gunton, 227-228)

So what purpose, then, does theological writing on the Trinity serve? Karen Kilby and Hilary of Poitiers here offer the same answer:

So much I have resolved to say concerning the nature of their Divinity not imagining that I have succeeded in making a summary of the faith, but recognising that the theme is inexhaustible. So faith, you object, has no service to render, since there is nothing that it can comprehend. Not so; the proper service of faith is to grasp and confess the truth that it is incompetent to comprehend its object. (Hilary, §11; in Gunton, 229-230)

With equal elegance, Kilby: “What answers we may appear to have – answers drawing on notions of processions, relations, perichoresis – would be acknowledged as in fact no more than technical ways of articulating our inability to know” (67). Perhaps this, then, is progress: a recognition of the fundamental–indeed, theologically reasoned–need for a “trinitarian theological modesty” (67), or what Sarah Coakley calls “a theology committed to ascetic transformation.” Indeed, in the last analysis, “To know God is unlike any other knowledge; indeed, it is more truly to be known, and so transformed” (Is There a Future for Gender and Theology?, 5).

Karen Kilby on Apophatic Trinitarianism

Nottingham theologian Karen Kilby has an article in the January 2010 issue of the International Journal of Systematic Theology on the possibility of an “apophatic Trinitarianism.” Interestingly, she argues that there is something potentially rationalistic about an over-confident speaking about the Trinity, which, after all, is a fundamental mystery: how can we think of three persons in one essence? Father, Son, Spirit: these three are one? Instead, Kilby wants to throw up an important caution:

Or again, one might ask whether some versions of trinitarian robustness presuppose a rather elevated conception of the role of both theology and the theologian: it can sometimes seem that only if one has sat at the feet of contemporary theologians can one really see what it was … which was, all along, the deep meaning of the Christian revelation, the central thing it has to teach us. And ultimately of course one might wonder about the danger of idolatry, about the possibility of being so robust, so confident that we know what we are talking about when we talk about the Trinity, that we are in fact projecting our most pleasing ideas onto God and making those the object of our worship. (67)

Trinitarian theology is (perhaps) the deepest point of the Christian mystery. The only other point that is (perhaps) more mysterious is the self-giving of love we see in Jesus’ cross. For the theologian, then, who is charged by the Church to care for its speech about God, there is an incredible spiritual danger in speaking too confidently–of over-reaching what is given to him or her. But, as Kilby also reminds us, apophaticism–making negative statements of God, stating what we cannot say about God–has classically occurred (in the Church Fathers, for instance) in tandem with contemplation.

To define contemplation, Kilby states succinctly: “The Spirit allows us to contemplate the Father in the Son. This is the fundamental structure of Christian contemplation” (72). Christian contemplation, in other words, is structurally Trinitarian. This is something recognized also by Sarah Coakley: “[P]rayer (and especially prayer of a non-discursive sort, whether contemplative or charismatic) is the only context in which the irreducible threeness of God becomes humanly apparent” (Is There A Future for Gender and Theology?, 10).

But, Kilby notes, how can apophaticism–the making of negative statements–be associated with the Trinity, which is a reality and a truth preeminently rich and inexhaustible? Instead, Kilby turns this logic on its head to show that it is precisely the overflowing reality of the Trinity that cautions our speech:

Richness, excess, this overwhelming quality of what we cannot comprehend should, on the view I am developing, be located precisely at the level of our contemplation in the Trinity, rather than at the level of contemplation of the Trinity… And it is precisely because of the sense of excess and transcendence associated with contemplation in the Trinity that there ought properly to be, on the view I am exploring, a resistance to, a fundamental reticence and reserve surrounding, speculation on the Trinity. (72)

As Coakley states similarly elsewhere, “[S]ystematic theology without contemplative and ascetic practice is void; for theology in its proper sense is always implicitly in via. It comes, with the urge, the fundamental desire, to seek God’s face and yet to have that seeking constantly checked, corrected and purged” (Is There a Future for Gender and Theology?, 5-6).

Hauerwas on Suffering (Again)

I’ve posted this quote before, but have since started reading the book it’s drawn from. Republished as “Naming the Silences,” here’s the quote again:

There is no hope for us if our only hope in the face of suffering is that ‘we can learn from it,’ or that we can use what we learn from the treatment of that suffering to overcome eventually what has caused it (e.g., many children in the future will be helped by what we have learned by using experimental drugs on children like Carol), or that we can use suffering to organize our energies to mount effective protests against oppression. Rather, our only hope lies in whether we can place alongside the story of the pointless suffering of a child like Carol a story of suffering that helps us know we are not thereby abandoned. This, I think, is to get the question of ‘theodicy’ right. (34)

Hauerwas, I think too, gets this question exactly right.

Hauerwas on Obama’s Nobel Speech

Hauerwas writes a brief response to Obama’s speech here, where he enunciates once again the importance of maintaining our language about war. What, he asks, lets us know a war is a war? Particularly to proponents of “just war” theory, who list a number of criteria that make a war apparently “just,” Hauerwas asks what a war that fails to meet these criteria would be? Would one still call it war? For instance, one of the just war criteria is that it must be declared by legitimate authority. What if a guerrilla group or terrorist organization declared “war” on a certain country? Would one call this war? Another criterion is that the declared intention of a war must not be different than the actual intention. A country, that is, cannot declare a war looking for weapons of mass destruction, but actually be looking for oil. But then, if this is no longer a war, what is it? A point Hauerwas makes elsewhere, but only alludes to here in his reference to Cain and Abel, is that Christians ought to maintain our language of war as murder. If we fail to name war properly, that is, as murder, then we may lose the resources to see when the wool is being pulled over our eyes with the language of a “necessary war.” Because for those who live by the flesh and blood of one who would not take up arms, the one thing necessary is the peace that is given through the cross.

Žižek on “Forced Choice”

Slavoj Žižek is an interesting philosopher, combining very eclectic interests in Hegel, Marx, the psychoanalyst Lacan, and (surprisingly enough) Christian theology. In the following excerpt, he is explaining the “real” status of freedom—“real” in the sense Lacan uses it, where the thing itself is not real, it does not exist, but it nevertheless has various effects on the world. To use a controversial example, the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were precisely “real”: though they did not exist, they presented symbolic justification of a war in the Middle East. For Žižek, modern freedom has this same “real-impossible” status:

A few months ago, a Yugoslav student was called to regular military service. In Yugoslavia, at the beginning of military service, there is a certain ritual: every new soldier must solemnly swear that he is willing to serve his country and to defend it even if it means losing his life, and so on—the usual patriotic stuff. After the public ceremony, everybody must sign the solemn document. The young soldier simply refused to sign, saying that an oath depends upon free choice, that it is a matter of free decision, and he, from his free choice, did not want to give his signature tot he oath. But, he was quick to add, if any of the officers present was prepared to give him a formal order to sign the oath, he would of course be prepared to do so. The perplexed officers explained to him that because the oath depended upon his free decision (an oath obtained by force is valueless), they could not give him such an order, but that, on the other hand, if he still refused to give his signature, he would be prosecuted for refusing to do his duty and condemned to prison. . .

In the subject’s relationship to the community to which he belongs, there is always such a paradoxical point of choix forcé—at this point, the community is saying to the subject: you have freedom to choose, but on condition that you choose the right thing; you have, for example, the freedom to choose to sign or not to sign the oath, on condition that you choose rightly—that is, to sign it. If you make the wrong choice, you lose freedom of choice itself. And it is by no means accidental that this paradox arises at the level of the subject’s relationship to the community to which he belongs: the situation of the forced choice consists in the fact that the subject must freely choose the community to which he belongs, independent of his choice—he must choose what is already given to him. (The Sublime Object of Ideology, 185-6)

What strikes me is exactly the way this analysis confirms the Christian (especially Pauline/Augustinian) understanding of the nature of free will: when one chooses the good (and only the good), then one is truly free! But when one chooses evil, out of a free choice between good and evil, then one becomes bound to the evil and loses “freedom of choice itself.” It is a matter, then, of freely choosing the good set before us, already given us by God and in this way becoming part of the free community (the Church). But God does, paradoxically, command us to choose this freedom: “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life” (Deut. 30:19). “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31-32). To continue to freely choose evil is actually to elect out of the community. For this reason, the logic of excommunication enunciated by Hauerwas is exactly right: “Excommunication is not to throw someone out of the church, but rather an attempt to help them see that they have become a stumbling block and are, therefore, already out of the church. Excommunication is a call to come home. . .” (Matthew, 165).

Hauerwas on Grad School

Hauerwas, my theologian of choice, has a peculiar talent for being able to reflect theologically on almost anything. There’s an essay, for instance, in the book of his I am now reading (“A Better Hope”) on whether pacifists should read murder mysteries. But considering my current place in life, I’m glad he took the time—and he does seem to have impossible amounts of it—to write an essay on (religious ethics in) graduate school:

. . .I want to share with you an insight I had during a retreat of the theology department at Notre Dame. We were having our usual discussion on the same old topic—namely, what does it mean to be “an ecumenical department in a Catholic context”? Some of my colleagues described how they understood what it meant to do systematic theology in the Catholic tradition, or what difference being a Calvinist made for how pastoral theology was done, or how being a Lutheran shaped one’s work in historical theology. The discussion made me very uncomfortable since I could not think how being a Methodist made a difference for how I did Christian ethics. I suddenly thought, I am not a Methodist, I went to Yale! Accordingly I do not represent any identifiable religious tradition, but rather I do ethics, or better, I am concerned about the kinds of problems we were taught to think of as ethics at Yale.

I think this insight not unimportant to help understand that any attempt to account for the past and future direction of religious ethics turns on where we went to graduate school. You need only to add the qualification that our graduate school agendas may be modified by where we end up teaching. Yet it is the graduate school, rather than identifiable religious traditions, that determines the way most of us understand or do ethics. If we are what we eat, then insofar as any of us are ethicists, we are where we went. (“A Better Hope: Resources for a Church Confronting Capitalism, Democracy and Postmodernity,” 58-59.)

Now, while Hauerwas speaks specifically of ethics, while I want to do something between systematic and philosophical theology, the same rule applies: graduate schools are likely to suffer from the same detachment from ecclesial traditions that guarantee that one is more determined by a university than by the Church. In the development of religious ethics as a field, Hauerwas marks a definitive shift from training in seminaries to training in graduate schools. Only, however, by immersion in a community of saints (anticipated in a seminary in certain important ways) with practices sufficient to shape the posing of questions and the sources for answers can one resist the fundamentally secular, liberal formation of graduate schools. Like Hauerwas writes in his “The State of the University”: “The question is not whether a university might be open to a knowledge shaped by the practice of the church, but rather whether a church exists to produce a knowledge that is formed by the Gospel” (8).

Rowan Williams on Noah and the Environment

Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, recently gave an address on environmental justice and the urgent need for a recovery of human self-understanding: as called to connection with the material world and responsibility for its future. Beginning with a reflection on the story of Noah, he travels “some way from Mount Ararat” to the current ecological crisis and offers some incisive criticism. Here’s a snippet:

So we must begin by recognising that our ecological crisis is part of a crisis of what we understand by our humanity; it is part of a general process of losing our ‘feel’ for what is appropriately human, a loss that has been going on for some centuries and which some cultures and economies have been energetically exporting to the whole world. It is a loss that manifests itself in a variety of ways. It has to do with the erosion of rhythms in work and leisure, so that the old pattern of working days interrupted by a day of rest has been dangerously undermined; a loss of patience with the passing of time so that speed of communication has become a good in itself; a loss of patience which shows itself in the lack of respect and attention for the very old and the very young, and a fear in many quarters of the ageing process – a loss of the ability to accept that living as a material body in a material world is a risky thing.