Believing Scholars: Ten Catholic Intellectuals

Chapter 3: Forms of Divine Disclosure

c h a p t e r 3 Forms of Divine Disclosure david tracy introduction: the fatal separations of modernity A part of our difficulty in addressing the issues of contemporary theology is the failure to consider how the three great separations of modern Western culture have damaged our ability to reflect on modern theology itself. These three fatal separations are: first, the separation of feeling and thought; second, the separation of form and content; third, the separation of theory and practice. All three of these peculiarly modern separations are related to one another. Moreover, each is based on an originally helpful distinction that became, in modernity, a separation. Recall, for a moment, the original distinctions and their later modern separations as a part of the larger contemporary attempt to render them again distinctions, not separations. The modern separations contrast sharply with the relative ease with which either the ancients (see the work of Pierre Hadot) or the medievals (see the work of Jean Le Clerc on the monastic schools and Marie-Dominique Chenu on the scholastics) developed, in their different contexts and schools, valuable distinctions, that they all insisted must not be made into separations, the distinctions of feeling and thought, form and content, practice and theory. Believing Scholars 48 In this lecture, I will not discuss two of these distinctions that have become separations, namely, feeling and thought on the one hand, and theory and practice on the other. In the interests of the time, it seems best in this lecture to concentrate on the one that has received the least attention. For the fact is that, in contemporary theology, the separation of feeling and thought has been the most healed, that is, rendered again into a useful distinction, not separation. Consider the many discussions of experience (both personal and communal) as ‘‘sources’’ for contemporary theology. One may note especially how widely accepted now in theology is the practice of the new contextual theologies around the globe; the practice of sustained critical reflection on a people’s or culture’s experience; the sustained attempts to keep hope alive in the struggle for love and justice; and the solidarity of all Christian communities with the new communities in our now global setting, expressing in both academic and nonacademic forms their important new visions of reality. These new contextual theologies (especially but not solely liberation, political, and feminist-womanistmujerista theologies) do not hesitate to relate, even as they distinguish but never separate, feeling and thought, experience and reflection, witness and critique. There is, of course, need for further analysis of this first separation, but for the moment allied to the separation of practice and theory, spirituality and theology. The distinction of practice and theory (see the section below)—indeed theory itself as a distinct practice—was a natural distinction (never separation) in all the ancient and medieval schools, including the great Scholastics. This distinction, rendered a separation in the fourteenth-century nominalist crisis and in most of modern neo-Scholasticism, was a distinction again for the great Renaissance humanists (e.g., Erasmus, Colet, Ficino) as well as the great reformers (Luther, Calvin, and their contemporaries). The third distinction between form and content was crucial in the reflection of all the ancients, even if casually set aside by so many modern theologians and philosophers. As the least reflected upon of the three separations in modern thought, form and content deserves further attention in theology. Forms of Divine Disclosure 49 forms and forms What, on theological grounds, Hans Urs von Balthasar argued for theology, Louis Dupré argues for philosophy: no interpreter can understand the Western intellectual tradition without focusing on the phenomenon of form, from its beginning to its present crisis, which can now be seen as a crisis of form. Indeed, the central ideal of Western thought from its beginning in Greece (or even, before classical Greece, as argued by Mircea Eliade in his studies of archaic religious manifestations) was the idea of the real as, in essence, its appearance in form. Dupré interprets this centrality of form (the principal leitmotif of his study of modernity) so that form grounds the ancient and medieval onto-theological synthesis. For the ancients, the essence of the real and our knowledge of it consists ultimately of form. Form, moreover, shows forth the real in harmonious appearance: whether in sensuous image as in Greek sculpture; in mathematics...