Seeking Foundations for Faith: Symbolism of Person or Metaphysics of Being?

SEEKING FOUNDATIONS FOR FAITH: SYMBOLISM OF PERSON OR METAPHYSICS OF BEING? "Theology is the happy result of a daring trust in the coherence of faith and reason." 1 Much of the uneasiness posed for the contemporary critical thinker hy the phenomenon of Christianity stems from the awareness that Christian existence is predicated on a commitment that seemingly breaks continuity with man's secular existence in the dipolar domain of nature and history that he has humanized in the mode of contemporary culture. Somewhat surprisingly, this discomfiture does not so easily surface in any study of the period of antiquity or the medieval era, and one can but wonder why. These earlier epochs of Christianity emphasized the transcendence of God more readily and more radically than do we, and they thematized that transcendence from within an exacting intellectualism. True enough, this was done prior to the rise of historical consciousness and preceded today's all-pervasive secularity. But the feeling persists that this goes only part way towards explaining why and how earlier modes of Christian thought were able to maintain faith and reason in such a delicate balance. One clue lies in the refusal of early Christian thought to allow the transcendence of God to collapse into what the Stoics meant by apatheia, in which God remained at an ontological remove from the world, impassive and indifferent to its plight. The stress upon God's utter transcendence of the world was always complemented with an insistence upon his creating, knowing, loving and saving action in that world even to the point of assuming its history as his own in the human life of Christ and in the Spirit-directed life of the believing commu1 M. D. Chenu: Faith and Theology, transl. D. Hickey, (N.Y., Macmillan, 1968), p. 80. QQO WILLIAM J. HILL, O.P. nity. The real theological question was how the two-the transcendence and the immanence of God-were brought together . The answer usually lay in viewing God as the Pantocrator whose transcendence was such that he planned and carried out all things (moral evil excepted) in the oikonomia. In the Patristic period the categories used were Christian adaptations of sometimes Stoic, but more usually Platonic, notions. The advantage they offered is that they possessed a symbolic power that enabled believers to speak of the world as a vast sacrament of God everywhere present and operative in the depths of his creation. All reality, nature and history, bespoke the transcendent because the metaphysics at work nurtured within itself a symbolism. What was uncovered to the human spirit was a logos structure and a mysterious dynamism of symbol-both of which pointed the way to God. The thought forms borrowed from Platonism engendered a rich symbolic vision in Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, and (less successfully) Dionysius. The statements of belief worked out in the early Councils were called symbola because they were intended as a locus of encounter with God. For the Greek Fathers, the world and the Bible were two differing symbolic forms of the Logos of God from which the soul began its mystical ascent to God. For Bonaventure in the Middle Ages, the Word is the supreme exemplar cause containing all divine ideas, and moreover is present within the soul as the illuminating ground of all the truth to which it attains.2 But, if Medieval theology vindicated its foundations by discovering the isomorphism between the Logos of God that came to expression in his historical revelation addressed to faith, and the logos-structure of the real as God's creation that lay open to reason, it can be questioned whether this is any longer an option for theology in the post-Enlightenment, post-critical period. On the contemporary scene this has been thrown into further jeopardy by Heidegger's" overcoming" of metaphysics 2 Cf. Bonaventure's ltinerarium Mentis in Deum and his De Reductione Artis ad Theologiam. SEEKING FOUNDATIONS FOR FAI'.I'H in uncovering the "onto-theo-logical" character of Western thought. The influence of this on foundational questions in contemporary theology has been massive. Its implication i~ that the Greek discovery of logos was a mixed blessing--0n one hand, it led...