Theology, Mind & Mystery

One of the joys of this blogging gig is meeting in person people who have not only read the odd post here and there (though I do enjoy meeting them too), but people who have been reading the blog over a number of years.

At my recent speaking engagement at Campion College, I met one such reader, who engaged both the material on the presentation as well as that on the blog as well. During a thoughtful conversation that was struck up following that presentation, the question was raised about my ongoing interest with the postmodern, which regular readers might have picked up.

While I have written on the subject in one of the very first posts on the blog, a number of years have elapsed that made it good to revisit some of those reasons. Of course, it would not be possible to comprehensively give an account in one or two blog posts, but I hope to at least touch on two key reasons.

Probably the first reason for the engagement with postmodern thought stems from the long standing relationship theology has had with modernity. By modernity here, I do not simply mean the thought of the last few decades. What I do mean is a tendency that goes back at least a couple of centuries, in which the categories of theology had become tied to a number of modern presuppositions.

Key among these presuppositions is one that demands that the claims of theology be rational before any validity is granted. This might strike some as odd for an academic theologian to say, especially given that my trade consists in making rational response to divine revelation.

The distinction, however, lies in the making of rational claims about revelation on the one hand, and the subordination of revelation to the tribunal of reason on the other. Whilst I have no qualms about the former, the issue I do take is with the latter. Because baked into the latter is a particularly modern presumption, what Eric Voegelin called a modern Gnosticism, wherein human reason is believed to bear the capacity to fully comprehend divine revelation, that is, fully capture what God has revealed to us within the categories of human reason. Embedded in such a presumption is a certain hubris that one is somehow able to know the mind of God, and that the human mind, rather than God, is the fundamental criterion for acceptability.

A second problem of the coupling of theology with modern categories is that the latter presumes that the human mind, created thing that it is, does not bear one of the key features of creaturehood, namely finitude.

Indeed, if teaching medieval philosophy at Campion College taught me anything, is that one of the key questions engaged by theologians and philosophers from Augustine onwards is the question concerning the infinitude of the creator and the finitude of his creatures, expressed in things like language and thought.

Another aspect of the subordination of the divine to the tribunal of reason also relates to the relationship between thought and mystery. If, as the modern presumption goes, the mind is the criterion of validity for things divine, then things divine that escape the confines of human reason (otherwise known as mystery), are either rendered as impossible or not worthy of consideration.

This too is a problem for two reasons. On one level, it is because mystery constitutes the inner heart of the Creator of all things. On another level, this then becomes a problem for creatures created by God, particularly for human persons who are created in the image of God. As St. John Paul II’s Theology has taught us, the human person is a profound mystery, and stripping both God and man of such mystery is what enabled the subjugation of human persons by the fabrications of the human mind, which occured through the totalitarianisms of both left and right.

I am grateful for the opportunity to revisit some of the foundational themes that underwrite this blog, and would welcome any other suggestions for themes of further exploration.