The Crisis of a House (Still) Divided

Revisiting Troutner's analysis of Ressourcement Thomism

In April of this year, Tim Troutner outlined a diagnostic for contemporary Catholic theology. I am very sympathetic toward his assessment as well as his positive proposals. I’m giving my own rendition of his thoughts here in an attempt to expand the reach of this conversation and provoke more responses (as well as continue to think through my own thoughts on the matter). Thesis: Ressourcement Thomism needs to go—and the entirety of the 18th and 19th century needs to be theologically renarrated.

Paul Gaugin’s diatribe, L'Esprit Moderne et le Catholicisme, front and back covers, 1902.

The metaphysical core of ressourcement Thomism, as described by Troutner (and I largely agree with his assessment), rests on the following assumptions:

1. An unsurpassable analogical “gap” or caesura between creature and Creator, even in Christ’s own person

2. The “double gratuity” of creation and redemption (the counterfactual voluntarism in which God both could not have created and could have created without calling creatures to a supernatural end)

3. An insistence on faith’s inaccessibility to speculative reason.

Furthermore, in a two-pronged gambit, the heirs of ressourcement would

a) interpret other canonical figures before and after Thomas according to this basic grammar, and

b) offer genealogical explanations for “modern” deviations from it which would absolve “the tradition.”

The first problem with these assumptions is found in the interpretation of historical sources. By codifying certain features as the essential and non-negotiable grammar of Christian theology, the medieval and patristic authors are already placed into a strait-jacket whereby any passage that exceeds these strictures is either explained away or described as in need of a Thomistic “corrective”. See Balthasar’s hesitation over someone as foundational as Ps. Dionysius over exactly these issues.

The second problem with these assumptions is how genealogical narratives are composed. It requires any theological/philosophical speculation which exceeds these criteria to be an alien entrant into the lists of Christian grammar. A more robust sense of the necessity of Creation, the reach of speculative reason, and a more immediately unitive Christology are necessarily forced into the territory of some other grammar. These allegedly foreign grammars are variously described as Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Romanticism, and Idealism. Hegel in particular becomes a stand-in for a surreptitious perversion and substitution of Christian grammar; he becomes enshrined as a paradigmatic arch-enemy to “thinkers of analogy” or “metaxu”. This separation of grammars leads to the marginalization of thinkers who are clearly Christian and also clearly exceed these boundaries (Cusanus, Baader, Eriugena, Bulgakov). It also prevents a real discussion of the differences between the idealism of the Greek and Latin fathers and the idealism of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel (or Plotinus, Proclus, Iamblichus, and Damascius for that matter). The arguments and the solution have been predetermined. The problem always turns out to be “dialectical collapse of creature and creator” and the answer always turns out to be “analogical union”.

The third problem is that the possibilities of the ressourcement could, in theory, lead to some of these more radical formulations. I’m more convinced than Troutner that Radical Orthodoxy and DBH have already begun that process of unleashing the ressourcement. But I am somewhat frustrated that Milbank and DBH haven’t seen Jordan Wood, Tim Troutner and others as another adumbration of their own legacy and in deep continuity of their project. In the face of growing fundamentalism and political reaction, all of us should be focused on the larger contours of Christianity in North America (and the world more generally) and making our theological projects the united front it needs to be.

Troutner himself footnotes The Suspended Middle by Milbank which, as far as I can tell, was never accepted within ressourcement Thomism circles precisely because it highlighted the tap-dance that de Lubac was forced to do between Neoscholasticism and his own thought. Obviously, DBH and Milbank should point out their disagreements with Jordan Wood on the technical merits, but it is even more important and pressing (at least from my standpoint) that they valorize and promote the basic assessment of how so much of Catholic theology has functioned for decades and its fundamental incapacities (to name one instance—the failure of First Things to avoid right wing capture: first by the neoconservative and now of various nationalist and Integralist varieties). DBH and Milbank have always championed a cosmopolitan anti-capitalism which refuses these right-wing forms. Now R.R. Reno and Ed Feser seem to inhabit different worlds entirely.

Hat excites me the most about Troutner (and Justin Coyle, Taylor Ross, and Jordan Wood) is the radical rewriting of the story of modern philosophy and theology where we are no longer imprisoned by fears of Modernism lurking behind every thinker who hasn't been preapproved (usually limited to Ratzinger, JP2, Balthasar, Bouyer, de Lubac, Maritain, and Guardini) and therefore not really “modernist”. It’s becoming clear that the policing of ressourcement by a stricter Thomism was never going to work anyway. If Aquinas had all of the fundamental answers, why would you need Balthasar to express those fundamental answers in a less clear way? It simply makes things more confusing or precious. This is, in fact, something I myself used to think and now see it expressed by others (even some teaching in prominent Dominican-run programs). Troutner allows us to actually save the ressourcement from its watch-dogs. Otherwise, it has no future and is doomed to be reabsorbed into an earlier Thomistic consensus.

With respect to the formulations of analogia and analogia entis specifically, the problems revolve around three separate (but related) subjects: 1) theological predication 2) participatory metaphysics and 3) Christology. Troutner points out that affirming language of analogy over identity (following Przywara’s centering (and particular reading) of Lateran IV over any and all other dogmatic and conciliar formulations has overshadowed the very problems that theologians were trying to solve with analogy. Even though “analogy” means different things in different discourses (predicative logic, rhetoric and semantic analysis, ontology, dogmatics) they have ironically been flattened out into a catch-all for “orthodox metaphysics” and applied univocally as a criterion to suss out heresy across the board.

For 1) theological predication, Troutner notes that the problem has actually never been solved. In Aquinas, there is a tacking back and forth, starting with an earlier sense of predicative analogy as an analogy of attribution to a later treatment of analogy as proper proportionality and then back again to attribution even later on. Yet, even at this latest stage, Aquinas is formally admitting that terms like “justice” most properly apply to God, but semantically the determinate content of this is unknown to us. There is an apophatic reserve which makes the “meaning” of these terms ultimately a black box–signified but uncomprehended. Terms like “wisdom” and “justice” apply to humans and God but for Aquinas God is signified by those things in an "incomprehensible" way. Troutner reads Scotus sympathetically, not as resolving all the problems of theological predication, but as dialectically moving the ball forward and rightly seeing Aquinas' response as inadequate (even though late Aquinas is still more desirable than Cajetan’s and Suarez’ return to proper proportionality–a critique Troutner shares with Milbank). There are different ways of cashing out what could be meant of “signified but uncomprehended” but there is no broad agreement on what it does in fact mean–and it certainly doesn’t constitute anything nearly clear enough to function as a standard of orthodoxy.

In matters of 3) Christology, even a reader as sympathetic as Balthasar noted that Przywara’s account of analogy where the divine is, by definition, always that which is greater than and exceeds the finite would make the Incarnation an impossible contradiction of reason and the structure of reality. He says specifically of Przywara that “It is hard to see how such an understanding of analogy can sustain a Christology” (Theo-Logic II: The Truth of God, 94). For Troutner, Wood, Ross, et. al, this suggests that we should fundamentally reread 2) participatory metaphysics in light of what the Incarnation reveals, instead of trying to “preserve” the Incarnation from allegedly alien accounts of God-world identity. This involves an openness to modern philosophy insofar as their accounts can make sense of the Incarnation, but it is rooted in the Christological councils and the Greek and Latin fathers. It is only against the ressourcement insofar as the ressourcement tried to domesticate the Fathers and medievals in order to inoculate Catholicism from what they saw as unacceptable options in Romanticism, Idealism, and (some) of Sophiology. Balthasar in particular seems nervous that one could read Ps. Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus as proto-idealists. We are suggesting that this possibility is not a mirage, but a genuine and legitimate strain of orthodox speculative theology which necessarily involves rereading the engagement with philosophical modernity as more than an elaborate exercise in heresiology—it is instead a (partially) genuine fruition of speculative resources coming from Christianity itself. The task remains, as the Romantics and Sophiologists already stated, to unite Fichte and Spinoza. The significance of history, the problem of theological predication, the God-world relation, have not yet been resolved satisfactorily. Only by understanding modernity as genuinely new (in a good way) while appreciating its contextual emergence from previous conversations and dialectical encounters within the Christian tradition will we make authentic progress. Perhaps then instead of being trapped in the endless desiccated cycle of the division of faith and reason, we will see the unity of Wisdom.