What is Truth? From the Academy to the Vatican (review)

In a 1993 autobiographical essay, John Rist wrote: "Christianity is above all others the religion that speaks of God's presence in history, not only in the past, as in creation and in the incarnation, but continuously into the present and … through the Church into the future. Of course that does not mean that all religious and ethical advances will be made by Christians, let alone by theologians or bishops; God needs no such limitations. What it means is that Christians must claim that the Church will, at least eventually, be able to accept all that is best among such advances, whatever their origin." The present volume explores the promise of these three sentences, and the result is a capstone work, at once Rist's most ambitious, and his most personal.

The main chapters explore particular philosophical and theological themes, roughly moving from anthropology through aesthetics to politics. Chapter 1 considers the significance of sexual difference, attending especially to Christian attempts to account for the dignity of women. Chapter 2 considers the problem of original sin, human freedom, and divine providence. Chapter 3 traces the development of Christian aesthetics as a coming to terms with the power of beauty. Chapter 4 considers the problem of authority within the Church, followed by the problem of the Church's authority in the world—especially as manifested in the development of the Church's social teaching and the notion of human rights—in chapter 5. Chapter 6 takes stock of challenges presented by modern secular society to Christian culture.

Such a summary cannot do justice to the scope or texture of Rist's argumentation. Several individual chapters stand alone as significant contributions to their subjects. The first, and at 85 pages by far the longest, is essentially a monograph on the history of Greek and Christian perspectives on gender difference. But taken together, they serve a larger purpose, made explicit in the "Introduction": to describe the growth of Catholic culture, and argue for the intellectual coherence of this growth.

Rist frames his argument with something of a theory of tradition. Some accounts of the development of doctrine (as offered by John Henry Newman and Dominus Iesus) raise the expectation that any later position must be already implicit in earlier sources. Rist judges this to be "dangerous ground" (6), neither true to history nor useful for distinguishing proper from improper development. Rather than working by deduction from principles, an adequate treatment of the development of culture will reveal a dialectical movement: historically, Christian teaching responds to weaknesses within Christian culture and to insight from outside the Church.

Hence the individual studies that make up Rist's main chapters are mainly stories of critical appropriation. The topic of the first chapter will illustrate. Ambiguous passages in Scripture raise questions about the distinction between male and female (will it remain in heaven?), and whether women bear the divine image to the same extent as men. Early Greek speculation about the body/soul relationship complicates the question (is the soul gendered, or only the body?). Rist traces the evolution of these questions, and how they are reframed, from Greek mythology to modern feminism. Naturally Augustine and Aquinas play central roles in this story, and in familiar ways: Augustine mostly overcomes Platonic dualism, and Aquinas exploits Aristotelian hylomorphism to further articulate the union of soul and body. But in Rist's account these medieval treatments are not alone sufficient to address problems highlighted by modern thought. Rist's generous range—invoking Irigaray and Dworkin alongside Barthes and von Balthazar—is especially attuned to the significance of Catholic "nuptial theology" (or "theology of the body"), which reflects some insights of Christian Aristotelianism (the whole person, body and soul, is the image of God) and yet manifests genuine development, not wholly contained within the earlier tradition.

May this one example, inadequately summarized, suggest how Rist seeks both to vindicate the rationality of past developments and...