Reading Patristic Texts on Social Ethics: Issues and Challenges for the Twenty-First Century

10. The Church Fathers and Catholic Social Thought: Reflections on the Symposium

209 Richard Schenk, O.P. 10. The Church Fathers and Catholic Social Thought Reflections on the Symposium The topic assigned to me is to say something both of what was accomplished by the articles in this volume and of what tasks have been identified by them for future research. The volume brings to the surface a deep ambivalence about the legitimacy and extent of developing Christian social teaching today by reference to patristic texts. The manuscript seems to result in something of a “split decision.” The task for the near future of a set of ongoing quaestiones disputandae comes directly from that ambivalence. These notes therefore proceed in two steps, beginning with a restatement of the argument for a “retrieval ” of patristic insight for Christian social thought, as it seemed implied especially by the initial papers. Then some of the sources of the apparent “suspicion ” about the cogency of the projects of retrieval are identified. The Case for “Retrieval” The symposium began with comprehensive presentations of the thought of Paul Ricoeur (†2005), including the article by Reimund Bieringer in part I of this volume. It seems fitting then in conclusion to look back again at this acknowledged master theoretician of the narratives of memory. Especially in his later works, Paul Ricoeur wrote much on the necessity and the dangers of rec- 210 Richard Schenk, O.P. ollective narrative,1 the use and misuse of memory.2 Throughout his lifework, Ricoeur remained dedicated to his chosen role of a witness, even an advocate, for as much personal sovereignty and identity as can possibly and plausibly be acknowledged in human beings, while admitting as many limitations of human knowledge, freedom, and hope as are rendered necessary by the thought and praxis of our age. Perhaps reflecting the Calvinist sense of extrinsic justification and regeneration in the Holy Spirit, Ricoeur stressed programmatically, as is well known, the abiding need for a dual hermeneutic of suspicion and retrieval . Ricoeur admitted that, especially when striving for hope, meaning, and ethical standards, we are not “innocent” storytellers; thus, we have a need for (inevitably fallible and yet rational) strategies of self-examination as part of an ars memoriae that would otherwise be more easily misguided. In Oneself as Another , after recalling the case for understandable suspicion about personal identity and then making the case anew for the necessity of still speaking of a self, its potential for narrative development and the reemerging, ethical possibilities of the narrating and narrated self, Ricoeur returned to the thought of understandable suspicion. The eighth study of this book was dedicated to arguing for strategies of self-examination about “ethical intentions,” including the self-examination of all of one’s own proposals “aiming at the ‘good life’ with and for others, in just institutions.”3 Ricoeur pointed to Kant’s categorical imperative as one example of such strategies of self-examination, asking if the maxims by which we choose a practice for ourselves were also the maxims we would want to guide others in their choices.4 In Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricoeur referred at least twice to a sentence buried deep within M.Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927).5 Having stressed throughout the work the many ways in which our existence is enmeshed in its history, Heidegger had noted briefly that “remembering is possible only on the basis of forgetting.”6 Ricoeur expressed his surprise that the positive potentiality of forgetting, suggested here in the text, had not be1 . See Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), particularly within the Eighth Study, 207–. 2. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), esp. part I. 3. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 172. 4. Ibid., 208–9. 5. Ibid. 6. M.Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (1927): “so ist die Erinnerung auf dem Grund des Vergessens und nicht umgekehrt” (§ 68 a, 339). Reflections on the Symposium 211 come more programmatic in Heidegger’s magnum opus. Ricoeur might well have also cited at this point H.-G.Gadamer, who did much to elucidate Heidegger ’s insight on this point. In ways that are largely overlooked, forgetting belongs to the relation between retaining and remembering. Forgetting means not merely loss and privation, but, as F.Nietzsche stressed, it is a necessary condition for the life of our mind. It is only by forgetting that our mind receives the possibility of a thorough-going renewal, the ability...