An Essay on the Development of Dogma in a Heideggerian Context: A Non-Theological Explanation of Theological Heresy

AN ESSAY ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMA IN A HEIDEGGERIAN CONTEXT: A NON-THEOLOGICAL EXPLANATION OF THEOLOGICAL HERESY 0 NE ROLE that falls to systematic theology is that of re-conceptualizing traditional doctrines in terms of shifting cultural and theoretical frameworks. What this essay attempts within modest limits is to show what dogmatic development would look like if it were considered within a Heideggerian context. The theoretical framework in which doctrinal development is usually considered is, we believe, implicitly Aristotelian. Development itself is as much a feature of experience as permanence, and a discussion of the nature of development leads into ontology, into the question about being, about identity and permanence, change and becoming. Even so diverse thinkers as Rahner and Whitehead acknowledge this point: dogmatic development is one characteristic feature of the world that must be comprehended in a general metaphysics of being and becoming.1 But there is something about Aristotle's ontology which is uncomfortable with change, which favors the substantial and the permanent, and which supports an understanding of truth as the permanently valid and immutable . In dogmatic theology this approach to being translates into doctrines whose meanings can be fixed for all times and which thereafter determine the limits of orthodoxy. Now, we do not mean to deny any dogma, nor to shift the ontological weights from being to becoming, from permanence to process, although it does seem to us that a theory of dogmatic develop1 See Karl Rahner's essays, " The Development of Dogma" and " Considerations on the Development of Dogma" in Theological Investigations, Vols. I and IV (Baltimore, 1961 & 1966), and A. N. Whitehead's Process and Reality (New York, 19~9), Part V, Chapte;r ~471 472 WILLIAM E. REISER ment must take novelty seriously; the history of dogma is not the endless repetition or re-conceptualization of old truths. Nor do we advocate a dehellenizing of dogma. Heidegger himself moves behind the Greeks in his task of destroying the history of ontology in order to recapture the meaning of the original Greek inquiry about being. It is precisely because the question of being and becoming is so important to a given conceptual framework that we have tied our concern with dogmatic development to ontology. However, our concern will be to show that the axis of the discussion must be shifted somewhat, for the notion of being, at least on Heidegger's terms, not only cannot be conceptualized but conceptualization itself is inimical to a proper grasp of the question about being. For this reason he spoke of destroying the history of ontology. In his manner of distinguishing art and science Aristotle elevated theoretical knowing to a primacy among the ways we have of appropriating the real. Metaphysical knowledge in scholastic philosophy is dominated by the bias towards theory and science, yet it is out of such a context that theology emerges as the fuller viewpoint on man and his world, the divine science itsel£.2 In this essay we shall try to move behind this context in Heideggerian fashion. In De Veritate, q.l, a.l, St. Thomas asked about truth and in what sense the true is convertible with being. " True expresses the correspondence of being to the knowing power"; when the intellect conforms to things, to being, we can properly speak of the true: "the knowledge of a thing is a consequence of this conformity; therefore, it is an effect of truth." 3 Strictly speaking, therefore, the true is not that which is; that is the definition of being. But insofar as being, that which is, is grasped by intellect, we add to the notion of being the notion of truth. By their ontological conformity to the divine intellect things are true: " Even if there were no human intellects, • For a neo-Thomist exposition of this see Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (New York, 1957), Chapter 20. 3 St. Thomas Aquinas, Truth, Trans. Robert W. Mulligan, S. J. (Chicago, 1952), Vol. I , p. 6. AN ESSAY ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMA 478 things could be said to be true because of their relations to the divine intellect. But if, by an impossible supposition, intellect did not exist...