Tradition and Apocalypse

An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief

Hart, David Bentley

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781493434770
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia cristiana

In the two thousand years that have elapsed since the time of Christ, Christians have been as much divided by their faith as united, as much at odds as in communion. And the contents of Christian confession have developed with astonishing energy. How can believers claim a faith that has been passed down through the ages while recognizing the real historical contingencies that have shaped both their doctrines and their divisions? In this carefully argued essay, David Bentley Hart critiques the concept of "tradition" that has become dominant in Christian thought as fundamentally incoherent. He puts forth a convincing new explanation of Christian tradition, one that is obedient to the nature of Christianity not only as a "revealed" creed embodied in historical events but as the "apocalyptic" revelation of a history that is largely identical with the eternal truth it supposedly discloses. Hart shows that Christian tradition is sustained not simply by its preservation of the past, but more essentially by its anticipation of the future. He offers a compelling portrayal of a living tradition held together by apocalyptic expectation--the promised transformation of all things in God.

1
Tradition and Traditionalism

I

It seems clear to me that the concept of “tradition” in the theological sense, however lucid and cogent it might appear to the eyes of faith, is incorrigibly obscure and incoherent. This, I would argue, is true not only of the vague, popular version of that concept that a good many believers harbor but rarely think about. It is true also of the version that many (perhaps most) Christian theologians have tended consciously to adopt since the publication in 1845 of the first edition of John Henry Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine,1 which more or less set the agenda for discussion of the topic, and to which no alternative account of any very great significance has yet been proposed. To this day, in fact, only Maurice Blondel’s Histoire et Dogme2 of 1904 has made anything like a substantial advance in theological reflection on the issues raised in that text, and then more as a supplement than as an alternative to Newman’s argument. This is unsurprising, I suppose, inasmuch as “tradition” in this specifically theological acceptation is a very new idea, relatively considered, with no very deep roots in the tradition of the church. But the general neglect of the topic leaves a fairly enormous unresolved question in Christian thought lying quite conspicuously and troublingly open. When we speak of “Christian tradition,” what are we really talking about? Can we really prove the existence of—and then in fact identify—a particular living, continuous, and internally coherent phenomenon that corresponds to that phrase, or will any attempt to do so find evidence only of a product of pure historical fortuity, consisting in a mere mechanically determined series of consecutive viable forms united more by evolutionary imperatives than by internal rationality? In part, I suspect that theologians have generally failed to address this question with the rigor it merits because, when frankly confronted, it inevitably yields answers contrary to their theological interests. That, however, may be a baseless supposition. One must concede that it is still a fairly new question, at least in any explicit and salient form.

Newman’s treatise, after all, did not merely address the issue; it inaugurated the entire project of treating “tradition” as an object of theological inquiry in its own right, rather than as something merely quietly assumed—a vague designation, that is, for a dogmatic and spiritual continuity across generations that Christian thought had always presupposed in its understanding of itself but had never really properly reflected upon. As the first systematic attempt to demonstrate the intrinsic rationality of Christian doctrinal and theological history as a totality, obedient to general principles of logical consistency, the Essay was nothing less than epochal in its importance. But, for all its considerable richness and subtlety, it was at the last a self-defeating exercise; ultimately, it amounted to an inadvertently sophistical effort to transform a tautology into a syllogism. Newman really did, it seems, succeed in convincing himself; at least, his good faith in the matter appears beyond doubt, if for no other reason than that writing the book apparently precipitated his conversion from high Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. And his argument has certainly convinced or beguiled generations of devout readers. But the book remains little more than an illusionist’s trick for all that. It retains its power to enthrall and persuade only so long as one studiously maintains one’s willing suspension of disbelief and, so to speak, keeps one’s seat. If, however, one instead sneaks backstage and peers at the performance from the wings, the stage machineries and sleights of hand become all too visible, and the enchantment evaporates. “We must not let in daylight upon magic,” as Walter Bagehot said. And Newman’s Essay, to the degree that it succeeds in convincing its readers, is a feat of magic through and through.

This is not a complaint on my part, incidentally. Nor is it to say that the argument Newman attempted was not worth the effort, or even that it was wholly fruitless. His essential intuition was correct, without doubt: Christianity claims for itself the status not merely of a revelation of God’s nature, purposes, acts, and will for his creatures, but also of the one unique and unsurpassable revelation of these things. More outlandishly, it asserts (as perhaps no other putatively revealed creed has ever done) an essential identity between the particular historical events by which that revelation was vouchsafed and the content of what was thereby made known. Thus the very category of “tradition” in Christian theological terms cannot be easily subsumed into any wider, more general category of “religious tradition” as such. Using the term in that more universal sense, “tradition” is merely the faithful transmission down the ages of some invariable truth—theoretical or practical or mystical—often of immemorial antiquity. The Gospel, however, by its own account, is not simply a perennial wisdom delivered through—and so, at the last, severable from—the vehicle of the particular and local history in which it was first made manifest; it is instead a particular and local history that purports to disclose itself as the eternal and universal truth of all things. By its very nature, a claim that audacious cannot help but be marked by a kind of perilous if captivating delicacy, a fragility that calls for the most tactful and careful application of hermeneutical art. There is something so positively absurd in this precarious balancing of the whole edifice of eternal truth upon the tiny, tenuous, evanescent foundation of a fleeting temporal episode that it arrests our attention chiefly by its implausibility. And then too, of course, as Newman was obviously keenly aware, that episode can itself never be extracted from the flow of history, inasmuch as no historical event exists as a singularity; its meaning—its very reality—is unveiled only through history itself, by all that came before and by all that comes after; if this were not so of the event of revelation, no less than of any other historical occurrence, that event would constitute nothing more than an impenetrable enigma, without antecedents or consequents, and so would be incapable of making itself intelligible in rational terms. True, the potentially interminable interpretive labor inaugurated by that event may necessarily have acquired ever greater and more exalted metaphysical dimensions over time, ever more comprehensive propositions regarding the frame of reality in the abstract or of existence in general, ever more ahistorical asseverations about being or nature or supernature as philosophical categories; but the hard, obdurate, indissoluble matter of its reflections must always remain a set of occurrences that reportedly took place at this or that location, and of words that were supposedly spoken to this or that person, and of continuities of memory that have allegedly been sustained intact across differing ages and cultures and that have truly informed every “healthy” development of dogma and theology.

All of this being so, the authority that Christian tradition claims for itself is credible only to the degree that the story of Christian doctrine’s long, frequently ambiguous, painfully gradual emergence over many centuries can convincingly be narrated as at once the story of the unbroken preservation of a changeless, rationally coherent, always implicit dogmatic content and also the story of the dynamic process of an ever greater crystallization, clarification, and explicit disclosure of that content in ideas, words, and practices. That is to say, more simply, what is required is a concept of tradition that can simultaneously assure us of an essential immutability in Christian confession while also offering us a credible apologia for all the transformations through which that confession has manifestly gone over the centuries. Or, to state the matter more simply still, what is required is a concept that can account both for everything in Christian belief that has not changed over time as well as for everything that has. But then it seems obvious that, in principle, such a concept would have to do more than is logically possible. It would almost certainly have to possess such plasticity as to be useless: potentially, it could serve as a defense of anything and so, actually, it would provide an effective defense of nothing.

That is an issue I shall consider at some length below. What I would note here is that where Newman definitely erred—and erred hopelessly, I would argue—was in imagining that such a concept could be devised and then successfully fortified against critique purely by way of the historical reconstruction of doctrinal development. History is intractably resistant to such uses, no matter how good or how iron a will the historian brings to bear upon it. It simply refuses to submit to any reduction of its contingencies and intricacies to laws or principles of reason. More to the point, it allows of no univocal logic, no stable distinction between the essential and the accidental, no sure discrimination between intrinsic meaning and pure fortuity, no clear delineation between what happened because it had to happen and what happened although it ought not to have done so. The coursing river of history never abates long enough to allow the contours of its bed to be revealed, or in fact long enough to prevent those contours themselves from suffering constant alterations and erosions, and even the most indefatigable explorer will die before discovering all the river’s tributaries, much less its secret springs. Invariably, then, the effort to make the evidences of history conform to some more abstract rationality leads to nothing but an unending contest of narratives. And even if, at the last, one faction should claim victory and should establish (by either main force or dialectical finesse) that its version of the story must be preferred over all others, the guiding logic of the final narrative will prove to be the same in every case: that what happened must have happened in this way, and that we know this because it did happen in this way, and that we know this because it must have happened this way, and that we know this because what happened is what had to happen . . . (or something to that effect). Every claim made in the story’s defense turns out to be simply the story itself told in a slightly different way. And logical circles prove nothing. The great dilemma that Newman left behind for future generations of theological apologists, however, was not merely that he posed a question to which his answer proved finally inadequate (though in fact, vide infra, this is precisely what he did); rather, it was that the question itself, once raised, proved impossible either to forget or to evade. It was now an indelible feature of the apologetic landscape; more than that, it was an internal challenge to Christian self-understanding that needed to be confronted.

This said, it would not have been better for Newman never to have addressed the issue. The intellectual milieu of high Anglicanism in which he wrote the Essay was not quite as tensely poised at the cutting edge of historical and textual criticism as that of the German Lutheran academic world was; but neither was it ignorant of the new critical sciences. In his original native scholarly circles, what Newman was proposing might have been controversial, but it did not come as entirely surprising. Between the book’s composition and its publication, however, Newman converted to the Roman Church, and he soon discovered that his journey across the Tiber had effectively taken him backward a few centuries in academic culture. The Roman Catholicism of his time, although necessarily committed to a formidable collection of historical claims regarding its own authority as the one true church of the apostles, was for the most part shockingly unsophisticated in the quality of the historical study it cultivated within its own institutions. At the time of the Essay’s appearance, moreover, the Modernist crisis was not so much as a dark cloud on the horizon. Much of Catholic culture’s understanding of its own history was pervaded by a kind of dreamy guilelessness, which rendered it largely defenseless against the historical criticism that had been taking shape in the greater Christian intellectual world for a few generations. Newman was well aware that this situation was an unsustainable one. Modern historical science, even if much of it emanated from lands where the magisterium enjoyed no remit, could not be held at bay indefinitely. As a product, moreover, of Anglicanism’s then unrivaled patristic scholarship—historical, textual, philological—Newman entertained no gauzy illusions regarding the supposedly unanimous testimony of the earliest Christian centuries, or the purportedly manifest unity of Catholic history. He was acutely conscious that the record of Christian doctrinal development, when subjected to the gaze of the impartial historian, looked nothing like a natural, smooth, inexorable unfolding of the inner logic of a set of clearly identifiable, theologically primordial, and universally attested affirmations.

Quite the reverse in fact: that record had all the appearances of a sporadic, chaotic, diffuse, often random, rarely transparent, and even more rarely pacific series of accommodations with accidental cultural and historical circumstances, usually occasioned by forces wholly extrinsic to the internal rationality of Christian belief. More often than not, the record seemed to consist largely in the tediously reiterated tale of an institution at once increasingly socially powerful and increasingly subject to political authority, eager to promote the myth of its own internal unity and continuity but repeatedly embarrassed by the discovery of one or another area of profound theological disagreement and long-standing diversity within its own walls. In each instance, it had had to struggle mightily to impose a consensus that had never hitherto existed, to dissolve disagreements that had persisted undetected across many generations of believers, and then to alter the record to give the impression that the terms of the armistice thus achieved were no more than the purest possible expression of something boldly confessed ubique, semper, et ab omnibus (to borrow the brash phrase of Vincent of Lérins): “everywhere, always, and by all.” The final issue of each of these traumatic episodes, moreover, was without exception a set of demonstrably novel dogmatic formulations whose greatest strengths seemed to be cryptic terseness and conceptual vagueness. The ever more capacious, cultured, and independent critical schools of Newman’s time were not going to avert their eyes from these things out of any tender regard for Catholicism’s dewy innocence of the historical sciences, nor would Catholic culture be able to ignore those sciences indefinitely. Protestant critiques would sooner or later demand a plausible Catholic riposte. Otherwise, no intellectually respectable concept of Christian tradition was likely to survive a sustained encounter with the caustic solvents of modern scholarship. It is a testament to Newman’s penetrating intelligence and his immense erudition that he was perhaps the first Catholic thinker to grasp the full dimensions of the problem.

Again, however, the solution he proposed was a failure.

II

Before enlarging on that observation, however, I should perhaps retreat a step or two to make certain that the terms of the argument are clear. Above all, I should emphasize that the specifically theological concept of tradition is necessarily the concept of a rational and indivisible unity somehow subsisting within a history that encompasses an incalculable number of large, conspicuous, and substantial transformations. In one sense, it is an organic unity, within which every discrete part contributes to the life of the whole while no part is in itself wholly accidental or dispensable. It is also, in another sense, a logical unity, each of whose discrete developments is implicated in the dialectical sum of all its parts. And in yet another sense it is a causal continuum, at least according to the Aristotelian model of causality: the essential unity of a single identifiable “substance,” with an intrinsic entelechy that allows it to grow and change while remaining solely what it is. That is to say, a truly living tradition, as opposed to a mere series of mechanically related episodes, must possess the indissoluble rational unity of a material nature that has been shaped by a single real formal content and by an efficient power of development whose effects are determined by an inherent and purposive finality.

This, needless to say, is nothing like our most ordinary, most benignly vulgar notions of tradition. In most cases, what we mean when we speak of a tradition is something that, more or less by definition, lacks any internal criterion or logic for whatever unity it happens to possess. It is a continuity sustained not by intrinsic rational relations, but by a history of largely accidental associations, most of them having begun as purely spontaneous developments that were thereafter preserved not out of logical necessity, but merely by willful ritual repetition. That is not to say that such associations are any less culturally or spiritually profound or natural or enriching in their own ways than the kind of unity theological tradition claims for itself. But, even so, much of the special magic or allure of those associations arise...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Tradition and Traditionalism
• 2. Tradition and Causality
• 3. Tradition and Development
• 4. Tradition and History
• 5. Tradition and Doctrine
• 6. Tradition and Apocalypse
• 7. Tradition as Apocalypse
• Index
• Cover Flaps
• Back Cover