David Schindler is Gagnon professor of fundamental theology at the
John Paul II Institute
for the Study of Marriage and the Family in Washington, D.C., and editor of
the North
American edition of Communio, the international theological review. A
nationally recognized author, teacher and lecturer, his latest book is
"Heart of the World,
Center of the Church" (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Mich.). He spoke with
"Threads" recently
from his Washington office.
THREADS: How would you describe the central themes of 20th-century
Catholic theology
-- the main accomplishments and reversals over the last 100 years?
SCHINDLER: Let me begin by focusing on one theologian in particular, and
then point
out some of the themes that revolve around his work. The theologian is
Henri de
Lubac, and his life, interestingly enough, spanned most of the century: He
was born
at the turn of the century and died just five years ago. In a certain
sense, De Lubac's
work was part of all the major controversies from the late 1930s right up
until the
last decade or so of his life -- both the pre-Vatican II debates and the
post-conciliar ones.
The basic theme of the 20th century -- and in a way, it's the theme of
every century,
but it has a particular urgency in our time -- is our sense of God in light
of the
problem of atheism. This finds its abstract formulation in the question of
nature
and grace, which was so controversial from the beginning of De Lubac's
career up through
the years following the council. The question has to do with the way in
which relation
to God becomes constitutive of the human being, such that life is
fundamentally a
drama, an engagement with God.
What De Lubac understood [most profoundly] was this problem of atheism; one
of his
best known books is "The Drama of Atheist Humanism." The battle before the
Church,
as she faces the culture in the 19th and 20th centuries, is the question of
atheism.
In the 19th century, you had an atheism of the style of Nietzsche. In the
20th century,
at least in America and in Anglo-American liberal society, the problem of
atheism
takes the form of Jack Kevorkian or the philosopher Richard Rorty --
I'm curious why you'd pick De Lubac as pivotal, rather than
Balthasar or Congar or
some of the German theologians.
The quick answer is that, in a way, De Lubac was first. His work became
the galvanizing
point of debate. His book "The Supernatural," published in 1946,
criticized what
he saw as too much dualism in the modern Catholic tradition. In other
words, he
perceived that Catholic theology, by excessively separating the natural and
supernatural
orders, was actually colluding with a kind of naturalism in the culture.
That's
putting it abstractly. But the point for De Lubac is: Is the relationship
to God
constitutive for the human being, does it constitute his being, or doesn't
it? Is God something
accidental and abstract, or Someone the relation to whom goes very deep in
the creature?
De Lubac's work became the classical point of reference, and even though
Balthasar may one day be seen as the great interpreter of the Second
Vatican Council,
the one whose writings most profoundly grasp the council's main themes,
still the
council itself was really shaped by the theology of De Lubac.
The aftermath of the council was marked by the divergence of
"Concilium" and "Communio"
theologians in interpreting what Vatican II actually intended. What was
that split
about?
In the opening phase of the council, theologians shared a common view that
a certain
kind of traditional Catholic theology had to be renewed. That had a lot to
do with
the sense of God and the relation of the natural and supernatural orders.
But, as
so often happens when you have a negative unity, a common enemy, you
discover that once
you're victorious, not much positive unity remains. So as the council went on, theologians
seeking renewal bifurcated into one group that wanted to adapt as much as
possible to modern culture, post-Enlightenment culture; and another group
who insisted
that, in order to achieve renewal, we had to go back to the sources and
immerse ourselves
in the tradition. As Charles Peguy said, one has to go to the bottom of
the well
to retrieve the freshest water.
This divergence continued into the years after the council and resulted in
the creation,
first, of a review called "Concilium" --
Who were the motive thinkers behind "Concilium," as opposed to
"Communio?"
For "Concilium," they were Karl Rahner, Schillebeeckx and Hans Kung. For
"Communio,"
De Lubac, Danielou, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Ratzinger and Karol Wojtyla
[now John
Paul II]. The difference between them, again, was this nature/grace
question. Theologians like Rahner tended to emphasize human experience.
The "Communio" theologians
tended to stress the need to start from within revelation, within the
tradition,
as the key interpreter of human experience.
You're currently editing a new series of books on Catholic
ressourcement
theology. What exactly does that term -- ressourcement
-- mean, and why would a traditionally Protestant, Calvinist house like
Eerdmans
have an interest in publishing a series about it?
I'd go back to Peguy: You find the freshest water at the bottom of the
well. The
idea of the series is to translate for the first time, or bring back into
print,
the main books of the thinkers who engaged this task of
ressourcement
, i.e., going back to the sources. People like Romano Guardini and his
book. "The
End of the Modern World." Or De Lubac himself and Georges Bernanos, one of
the great
novelists of the 20th century. Balthasar said that Bernanos gives us the
greatest
paradigm of the priesthood of the laity. His novel, "Diary of a Country
Priest," offers
us perhaps the most vivid example of what the council meant when it talked
about
the vocation of living out the call to holiness in the world . . .
Anyway, our purpose is to make these authors available to a generation
that, since
the council, hasn't had access to this kind of literature.
But why Eerdmans?
Eerdmans made a decision some time ago to broaden its offerings, but beyond
that,
I think they see some parallels in the relationship Karl Barth had to
Protestantism,
and the work of Balthasar to Catholic theology.
Why did you embark on this project personally?
Because it extends the purpose of "Communio." When Ratzinger, Wojtyla and
De Lubac
began "Communio," they wanted to recover the sources of Catholic thought,
and that's
very much my objective in the ressourcement
series. Of course, in Europe you don't have the dearth of writing by
these [ressourcement]
authors that you face here.
In this country, Kung and Schillebeeckx seem far better known than
Balthasar and De
Lubac. Why?
In a way, they're more popular because they fit the zeitgeist better; their
patterns
of thinking are more congenial to the American spirit, especially in light
of the
secularization of our culture. We live in a post-Enlightenment culture,
not a patristic culture.
With De Lubac and Balthasar, the retrieval [of Catholic sources] requires a
kind of
reversal, turning our [post-Enlightenment] thought patterns upside down and
inserting
ourselves inside revelation -- and through prayer, obedience and
participation in
the life of the Church, reading culture from a Christological point of
view. It involves
discerning the signs of the times through the mind of God. That's not a
matter of
hubris, but of prayer and obedience.
When you say we live in a post-Enlightenment culture as opposed to a patristic one,
what does that translate to for the average layperson?
The autonomy of the individual. We have a self-centered, constructivist
view of the
self. We emphasize doing, making and the creativity of the self. As a
result, our
thinking, being and doing are not inserted sufficiently into our
relationship with
God. "I want to make my own world and have my own thoughts" -- that
approach is pervasive
in democratic, capitalist societies like the one we inhabit today.
So what would a truly Christian, patristic culture look like?
A good way to understand that is to read some of the recent encyclicals of
this pope
-- Evangelium Vitae, for example. At the heart of Evangelium Vitae is a
deeper,
contemplative, Marian sense of reality as gift; a primacy of recognizing
people for
what they are; a culture of being rather than having.
Compare that to the culture we have today, which is highly instrumentalist
and utilitarian;
where we value things and even people for the pleasure they can bring or
how they
can be used for profit. This is the instrumentalism and utilitarianism
which the pope sums up in what he calls the "culture of death." But the
core error in all
of this is our defective relation to God.
You bear some personal scars from the debate over how to interpret
capitalism in light
of Catholic teaching. You're aware of Cardinal Ratzinger's critique of
consumer
capitalism in the '80s, and the economic writings of this pope. How should
Catholics
think about capitalism, and how would you answer the argument that
capitalism is the
healthy alternative to things like Marxism?
Again, it comes back to communio theology. The idea of communion. We're
called to
love others as God loved us; to participate in the Trinitarian communion of
love
within God Himself through His son Jesus Christ. Now, that may sound
highly abstract,
but it's the nub of everything else. The call to love needs to penetrate
every phase
of our existence.
We have to order our economy within this call to love. The fact that
Marxism-Leninism
has been eliminated doesn't mean that the only alternative is a capitalism
to which
the Church must provide a moral correction. The Church proposes something
different from both -- namely, communio. That should provide our basic
context. In other
words, the call to sanctity should form what we do in our economy. So,
with a notion
like self-interest: Of course we can't suppress that impulse forcibly; if
we try,
we end up in totalitarianism. But that doesn't mean we should bless it as
a virtue of
necessity. The call to sanctity requires a transformation of self-interest
and its
replacement, insofar as possible, with love.
Adam Smith [author of "The Wealth of Nations"] is undergoing a kind of
rehabilitation
these days. Some people claim there's a support [for his thought] in
Centesimus
Annus, as though what is privately a vice -- self-interest -- well, if we
channel
it, we can make it socially a virtue. I don't think the pope affirms that;
in fact, I believe
he sees that as residing at the core of both spiritual and material poverty
throughout
the world.
But then how should we interpret Centesimus Annus, because it
certainly has been hailed
as a document that blesses a modified democratic capitalism.
It blesses a free market, and of course freedom is an essential element of
any adequate
understanding of the human person. But it puts this in the context of a
call for
integral, authentic human liberation. Liberation comes first -- liberation
from
sin. It involves forgiveness by the Holy Spirit and conversion, and the
paradigm is Mary.
So yes, there's an approval of a market economy, but precisely in the
context of
this radical conversion, the call to love.
OK, given what you've just said about capitalism, how should we
think about technology
as Catholics -- and particularly the new communications technologies? I mean, capitalism
runs on technological innovation, and we're not going to be able to escape
that, given the nature of progress.
Bernanos said that we should assume intellectuals are imbeciles until they
prove the
contrary. That insight has a particular resonance in a technological
culture. All
of us, in this culture, grow up with the presumption that a technique or a
method
can solve problems that require genuine intelligence, interiority, morality
and spirituality.
This happens in a comprehensive way in academic circles -- the reliance on
critical
methods -- where it becomes a substitute for wisdom, which requires depth
of contemplation.
It's been our temptation since the world began -- we find a technical means
to solve
a spiritual problem. But today the temptation is greater than ever,
because our
techniques have greater potential than ever before.
A good place to begin thinking about these questions as Catholics is the
issue of
contraception. Built into the Church's rejection of contraception is a
certain
understanding of technology. We can't just blunder into any old mechanical
or chemical
means to solve a human problem. Technical means need to be penetrated from
within with
contemplation, morality and a sense of God and the order required by God.
Now, all
of this is at the level of principle, but it's also concrete, because it
affects
everything we think about and do.
This is one of the great battlegrounds of the future. Catholic theology
must engage
with this issue much more radically than it has in the past.
I wonder if the roots of this nation in the religious wars of the
old country -- the
need to escape the bitter sectarian divisions of Europe -- haven't resulted
in a
contemporary American mindset of, "Let's agree to go with what works."
Well about those religious wars, I would say we need to look at whether
we're really
any less violent, now that we've achieved a certain civility and an
agreement to
cooperate. One could argue that we're every bit as violent as we were 300
years
ago, but now we're killing different people more subtly and calling it
humane, thanks to euthanasia
and abortion.
This leads to the question of utilitarianism, because [as a culture] we've
said, "Let's
set all these important questions about the meaning of life aside, and
instead let's
just agree to do what works." The trouble with "doing what works" is that
it tends to create a lowest common denominator mentality. In other words,
we agree to focus
only on what feeds us, clothes us and gives us comfort --
It also creates a completely instrumentalist mindset.
Exactly. Things that obstruct my comfort have to be moved out of the way.
But I
don't think our response [as Catholics] can be romanticism. By that I
mean, there
are always advances in history which are coincident with corruptions, and
corruptions
which are coincident with advances. And history is real -- so we don't
have the option
of a nostalgic reaching back to some mythical society in the past. We have
to ponder
these technology issues much more fundamentally than we have to date, and
understand
the role they play in creating an instrumentalist culture.
The irony of technology is that while we're speaking here, you're
being recorded onto
a computer's hard drive for uploading onto the world wide web, to be
listened to
by people anywhere from Ireland to Antarctica. What you say will
potentially be
heard just as easily in Johannesburg as Los Angeles. Obviously, these
technologies have some
positive value, but how do you sort through it from a Catholic perspective?
As technology develops, we need to probe it and bring into sharper relief
the dangers
involved. I mean, there's a certain abstraction in these new communication
technologies,
because the communication is not incarnate. There's an elimination of space and time, and we need to reflect on the meaning of that.
You recently edited a book by Romano Guardini, "Letters from Lake
Como," that dealt
with some of these technology questions. He was writing some 60 years ago,
but do
his thoughts contain anything we can draw sustenance from today?
His letters were a reflection on what he observed as Southern Europe
industrialized
-- thoughts on the changing nature of tools and the idea of a craft, and
what the
changes were doing to the landscape. He's not just hearkening back to some
ideal
past; rather, he's trying to highlight the dangers inherent in
mechanization, and our need
to be clearly conscious of what gets lost. The best thoughts by Guardini
on this
subject are found in the last chapter of his book, "The End of the Modern
World,"
where he really outlines the dangers. Technology changes consciousness.
Industrialization
changes consciousness.
It changes vocabulary too.
It changes everything. As Allan Bloom said many years ago, there's a world
of difference
between one great thinker who grasps and integrates the whole,
and a
thousand mediocre thinkers who understand only part of it. To the degree
we allow
ourselves to be a culture ordered to immediate self-interest, with everyone
working
on a part without an interest in the good of the whole, we will be
fundamentally
fragmented.
Among your many other tasks, you play a key role at the John Paul
II Institute for
the Study of Marriage and the Family. What's the future of the institute?
Why is
it so important right now?
The origins of the institute are found in then-Cardinal Wojtyla's reading
of the reception
of Humane Vitae by Catholics in the '60s and after. He felt that the
problem with
the encyclical was that it didn't have a full enough anthropology; in other
words, it wasn't integrated adequately into the larger question of the
nature and destiny
of the human being. The purpose of the institute is to develop that
anthropology,
in other words a full understanding of the nature of the human person in
community,
in light of the main doctrines of the Church --Trinity, Christology,
Mariology, ecclesiology,
etc.
The point is that the family is the basic cell of humanity, of the Church
and civil
society. If we lose the basic integrity of the family, then we've lost
civilization.
The pope's foresight on this issue has really become clear since [the U.N
conferences in] Cairo and Beijing. What's going on now is not
fundamentally a battle of economics
or the threat of an arms race, but a struggle over the meaning and destiny
of the
human person.
One value of the institute seems to be as a countersign to
contemporary academic life.
So much of today's secular academic research seems focused on reducing the
family
to a relative, cultural construct.
Absolutely, even on questions as fundamental as: "Is there a basic
difference between
men and women?" It's paradoxical that the Church has become the last
bastion of
defense of authentic differences between men and women. The Church is the
only one
speaking unequivocally, internationally, to this point. What's at stake is
the integrity
of the love at the heart of the basic human community -- namely, the
family.
Take the question of gender: Anyone who hasn't been sleepwalking in
America over
the last three or four decades knows how urgent the question of gender is
-- same
sex marriage; whether there are two genders or five. In the context of
Beijing,
there's increasing pressure to make five genders normative. These issues
need profound responses.
Intuitively, most people properly formed see problems with that idea [of
five genders].
But it's one thing to understand things intuitively, quite another to
articulate a response so that people can sort these issues out as they
reflect on the culture.
One final question: Why did you write "Heart of the World, Center
of the Church."
For some of the reasons we've talked about here. The problem in our
country is atheism.
But it's a peculiar sort -- a practical atheism. Nietzsche embodied a
European
unbelief that was sensitive to the question of the infinite and presumed
that since
God had died, humanity had to fill the infinite void left by Him and become
infinitely
creative.
In this country, we have an atheism with a shrug of the shoulders, a kind
of relaxed
unfolding of random finiteness. Our atheism is not a matter of reflective
principle;
instead, we're not even conscious of God or His absence, because we're so
busy consuming.
Atheism with a happy face.
Right. So, as a culture, we have an enormous problem -- and it's a
religious
one. Catholics need to respond by working to reinstate a sense of God so
that we
can regain an adequate sense of our own creatureliness -- in other words,
"I'm not
the source of my own being, my own moral norms. I'm not the author of my
life and
therefore not the one who decides about my death."
What's happened in U.S. Catholicism -- thanks in part to [Jesuit Father]
John Courtney
Murray, who did many good things otherwise -- is that we now assume that we
can't
bring God into the heart of this discussion because, there are a lot of
non-believers
out there. But that's precisely the point. It's because religious
questions have
been so radically removed from our culture that we're so vulnerable to
phenomena
like Jack Kevorkian and abortion.
As the philosopher Will Herberg observed in his book, "Protestant,
Catholic, Jew,"
Americans are privately very religious, but then in public we all agree to
subscribe
to the virtues that make us good democrats and good free marketeers, so
that faith
becomes essentially a fragmented, private reality. In effect, we're private
theists and
public atheists.
Do you have one particular source of apprehension and one special
source of hope as
the century closes -- from a Catholic theological perspective?
Grounds for hope? Americans are religiously sincere and morally generous.
This country
has a tremendous energy and abundance of good will. In the light of God's
infinite
mercy, that's always a good reason to hope.
My fear is that we don't see the subtlety of how -- as the pope says in
Evangelium
Vitae -- democracy can invert into totalitarianism. We have the illusion
that we're
free because no one tells us what to do. We have political freedom. But
at the
same time, a theological and philosophical set of assumptions informs our
freedom, of which
we're unconscious. A logic or "ontologic" of selfishness undermines our
moral intention
of generosity. We don't have the requisite worldview that would help us
address
abortion or the more general, current threat to the family.
Can we unmask the assumptions of our culture and deal with them in a way
that will
free the latent generosity of the culture? Or will those hidden
assumptions overcome
our generosity? This is the real battle, both globally and in America. It
calls
for a new effort of evangelization -- which consists, above all, in first
getting clear
about the ideas in Evangelium Vitae; understanding the logic of
self-centeredness
in a post-Enlightenment liberal culture. Alasdair McIntyre has a great
line: that
all debates in America are finally among radical liberals, liberal liberals
and conservative
liberals. That's how I would sum up. If we don't come to terms with
liberalism
--
But liberalism in what sense? Quite a few people who would
describe themselves as
conservative or neoconservative are, in fact, liberal . . .
That's the point: They're the conservative wing of liberalism. And in a
sense, they
wouldn't even deny that, insofar as their project is to show that a benign
reading
of American liberal tradition is harmonious with Catholicism. That's what
I'm challenging. Their approach doesn't go to the roots of our [cultural
and spiritual] problem,
as identified in this pontificate and in the work of theologians like De
Lubac and
Balthasar.
[Contemporary U.S. culture is rooted in] self-centeredness. A false
sense of autonomy
centered in the self; an incomplete conception of rights. So we need to
reinstate
a right relation to God on all levels -- not only at the level of
intention, but
at the level of the logic of our culture. Our relation to God has to
inform not only
our will, but how we think and how we construct our institutions.
(This interview is condensed and adapted from the full audio
recording, available
in RealAudio 2.0 at www.archden.org/archden. Audiocassette copies are
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