The Charred Root of Meaning: Continuity, Transgression, and the Other in the Christian Tradition by Philipp Rosemann (review)

In this wide-ranging and ambitious book Philipp Rosemann articulates a view of the Christian tradition in which the emphasis falls decisively on discontinuity rather than continuity. For Rosemann, continuity has been privileged by most modern and contemporary thinkers of the tradition, even if all have gone far beyond the notion of tradition as a static deposit. In the context of the main aim of The Charred Root of Meaning Yves Congar is both an exemplum and synecdoche of a kind of consensus approach that needs to be challenged. Rosemann's impeccable academic credentials give the reader every confidence that he is up for the task: a lover of the Catholic tradition who is at the same time a distinguished medievalist and an expert in Scholastic theology, but also a theorist with a significant background in Foucault and especially the latter's reflection on genealogy, historiography, and tradition. It is Foucault who in fact supplies (13) the title for the book, in which his notion of "transgression" plays a key role. As I see it, The Charred Root of Meaning speaks to three "transgressions" or differentiations that only together are constitutive of properly functioning tradition: (1) the differentiation between the holy and the unholy introduced by theophany, and the correlative differentiation of human receivers; (2) the differentiation of Christianity from biblical Judaism; and (3) the continual differentiation within the Christian tradition beyond these related but different theophanic events.

The first and foundational differentiation focuses on theophany as the irruption of the divine into the nondivine area of existence, which in turn elicits the human response of felt elevation and separation from given culture and also other humans. This is the brief of chapter 1 in which Rosemann selects as his scriptural base the theophany described in Exodus 19 and Moses' paradigmatic response (25-32). The irruption of the divine is not only experienced as overwhelming, it divides reality into the spheres of the holy and unholy. In addition, Moses' response articulates a further split between a figure such as Moses who is granted privileged—if dangerous—access to the holy, and those down the mountain who are not. Crucially, for Rosemann, what he calls after Foucault "transgression,'' and which I am translating by the more anodyne "differentiation," serves as a pretext for plural and varied interpretations throughout the Christian tradition. Rosemann is more interested in getting the reader to understand the various types of reception of the theophany of Exodus 19 across the centuries of the Christian tradition rather than in giving an exhaustive inventory. Two types of reception come in for particular attention. The first is provided by the subtradition of mystical theology for which Pseudo-Dionysius serves as exemplar (33ff.). This highly stylized form of discourse in which the figure of Moses of Exodus 19 functions prominently (perhaps intratextually linked with Exod 33) provides the pattern for mystical ascent and encounter for which language and concept are not adequate. A second and very different kind of response is to be found in the Scholastic appropriations of Peter Lomband's Sentences. Here Rosemann presents a fascinating discussion of Pseudo-Peter of Poitiers' Commentary on the Sentences (42-50). He points out that instead of translating Exodus 19 in the direction of the privileges of contemplation and ecstatic experience, this text uses it to fold back on Scripture itself as the site of the numinous and the mysterious, and to make comments about different depths in interpretation (49). Concretely, this means that the mountain Moses climbs is Scripture itself, with Moses signifying what an apostolic rendition would look like, whose illumination both the best of patristic and medieval interpretation seeks to emulate. Importantly, The Charred Root of Meaning underscores both the translation of the Exodus theophany scene into mystical theology (38) and the particular...