My Theological Life: Recollections and Anticipations
It is not often that I am grateful for not living in Ireland. Yet, as I look at the title, this is one of them. Loud whistles and catcalls from friends; the wit shouting “what life!,” the wag greeting the adjective “theological” as if it were an expletive to be followed by a vehement “excuse me!”; “recollections” inducing the performance of Irish comic set-piece. Do you remember? “Will I ever forget” in order to drone out “uncle” on stage with his party piece of nostalgia; and to set things off perfectly someone miming Samuel Beckett, “I can’t, I must go on.” Even if discharged, to be a bastard in Irish humor is a living thing. Still, for a moment, I will take advantage of the courtesy of the American academy to bring shape to a set of accidents that speaking very politely might be called a “theological life,” and will do so largely by prioritizing the subtitle and interrogations, “recollections and anticipations.”
Recollections
By way of clarifying the space of memory, I want to say two things, though it turns out they are related. I want to distinguish the term “recollection” from that of “reminiscence”; in addition, I want to speak of “recollection” more nearly in the singular than the plural, largely because I conceive of it more as an ongoing process than a set of discrete results. With respect to the first distinction, as I see it, “to reminisce” is to call to mind particular scenes in the past that stand out for a variety of reasons, for example, for their vividness and tartness, but above all because they show up the subject well. Reminiscences are exercises in nostalgia in which we select out of the bric-a-brac of past impressions what is useful or amusing for the after-the-dinner occasion. Reminiscences have their charm, but they also have the unfortunate implication of suggesting that the charm-provider has become more or less superannuated. While the attractions of dotage are obvious and many, one can see why someone might feel inclined to turn it down. “Re-collection,” on the other hand, in phenomenology, but also in Augustine and the broader Christian tradition, has a different connotation and different intensity: on the one hand, it has to do with seeing broad patterns of meaning and, on the other hand, also making sense of who the discoverer and shaper of this meaning is. At the edge of recollection what and who seem implicated with each other. If in my writing and teaching of theology, unity or partial unities suggest themselves, how does this bear on the writer and teacher: is all that I write and teach expressive of who I am as a theologian, or do I come to discover myself as a theologian in the doing of it and recollecting the traces? Of course, the answer not only logically must be both, but in terms of experience is both. Certainly, I have neither a philosophical or theological interest in suspending the who that underlies all experience, active and passive, but I think that here I want to focus on becoming, the loop and reflux of being = made by what you make.
Recollecting What
I think that I can say with a measure of confidence that I came to be a Catholic theologian in and through being first a doctoral student at Yale and subsequently being a professor. Of course, in one way what I am saying is trivial. The formative years of your education are always important, as are your earlier years in the academy. I am, however, suggesting something more primitive. Being in that agreeable land of confessional unlikeness, which involved a fruitful alienation from my cradle Catholic self, was necessary for me to come to see the beauty and roominess of a form of Catholicism that allowed me to breathe and come not so much to own it as to be owned by it. While a doctoral student, though officially in the philosophy of religion track, I took as many doctoral seminars in theology as most theology students, and because I was more or less perpetually on overload maybe more. The Patristic scholar Rowan Greer was a favorite of mine. He had the Anglican gift of effortless reading of the Fathers that always remained beyond me. The other theological mainstay during my graduate years was Hans Frei, Jewish convert, the author of The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, lover of Karl Barth, and renowned teacher of a two-semester sequence on modern Christian thought. Frei, of course, was a central member of the “Yale School” that focused in a “Catholic adjacent way” on the community understanding of scripture and theological tradition that struck hard against my philosophical conceits and my tendency towards foundationalism. I am indebted to both of these exemplars and guides beyond words. It was not as if there was no Catholic theology taught at Yale. The very Confucian George Lindbeck taught Aquinas, and once even tried his hand at Balthasar. In addition, the stunningly intelligent David Kelsey regularly taught Rahner. In retrospect, I think I want to say they read Catholic authors quite brilliantly without necessarily being native speakers. Yet, there were quite a few Catholic PhD students, including a number who have graced the department of theology at Notre Dame, for example John Cavadini, Jean Porter, Joseph Wawrykow, and David Fagerberg.
When I entered the doctoral program at Yale, I vowed that I would not write on Hegel, since I had studied him in Ireland and felt I was done with him. Of course, life having an outrageous sense of humor, that would go sideways and I ended up writing a Sorbonne-like three-volume dissertation on him, from which eventually was hewn the somewhat forbidding The Heterodox Hegel (1994). I finished the dissertation, however, not at Yale but at Saint John’s University Collegeville, where I was essentially hired to teach the Trinity. I did that and much more, while writing poems published in Lower Stump Lake Review, soaking up Benedictine silence, going to vespers in the starkly beautiful Abbey Church, and healing from the recent death of both of my parents. Shortly after completing the dissertation, a position came up at Yale—it was Frei’s old position—for which I was invited to apply and eventually interview. The interview was a comedy moving towards farce, well worth the telling. Here, however, suffice it to say I got the position, despite the fact I was to be the quality control candidate and that I had my very nervous Doctorvater freaking out after my lecture on Hegel’s Christology in the Phenomenology and opining that only three people understood the lecture and he was not sure that he was one of them.
I fitted into the Department of Religious Studies like an old shoe. If for me the Yale School was “Catholic adjacent,” I was “Yale School” adjacent. I was now the colleague of the ethicist and moral theologian, Gene Outka, the theologian of theologians, David Kelsey, and the heavyweight New Testament scholar, Wayne Meeks, all of whom became in due course close friends. While the central plank of my teaching throughout was Frei’s old two-semester history course (which I taught for the Divinity School), in the Department of Religious Studies in Yale College I taught undergraduate courses in Evil and the Problem of God, Mysticism, Religion and Literature, and was all over the place when it came to doctoral courses: Philosophical and Theological Hermeneutics, Rahner, German Idealism and Theology, Liberation Theology, Romanticism and the Problem of God, Heidegger and Theology, and Postmodern Theology. During this time also began the pattern of heavy engagement on doctoral dissertations in just about all areas of theology over its entire history. I was happy at Yale until I wasn’t. Yale was not especially conducive to family life; and with retirements and new hires, the authority of the Yale School was in significant decline. After a decade at Yale, the opportunity to come to Notre Dame presented itself in 1999. I jumped at it. My old friend, John Cavadini, had become chair, and another old friend, Jean Porter, was on CAP. I think the interview must have gone well, because immediately afterwards Jean grabbed me outside the door and in typical beating-around-the bush fashion said “You’re coming, aren’t you?” Though there was an imperative quality to the request, it really didn’t move the needle. I was coyly noncommittal, while being more than ready to come to Notre Dame. In fact, in many ways it seemed that I was coming home. By that point, I felt that I had become—or was becoming at least—a Catholic theologian, though perhaps one with different sightlines than other Catholic theologians, having been prepared in “Catholic adjacent” Yale, but with the requisite amount of unfamiliarity that I seemed now to be making a real choice.
Now, at Notre Dame I was once again the Trinity or God guy, as I had been at St. Johns, Collegeville. This lasted until a kind of “death of God” blow was delivered when John Betz came here and assumed the emptied-out throne. At that point, I became the Eschatology guy, reduced to sojourn in the order of hope, whereas previously my teaching had in a sense participated in divine perfection. That said, though the range of my expertise extended far beyond any particular dogmatic assignation, I felt that there was something right about coming in under a particular umbrella and staying under one. On the one hand, it indicated a Catholic conviction of the importance of doctrinal loci and the desire to provide comprehensive coverage and, on the other, given the multitude of Catholic systematic theologians already on the ground, it flagged the need for a kind of downsizing that is incumbent on everyone hired in the Department of Theology, used to teaching elsewhere a more extensive bandwidth of theological topics. Contraction is a desideratum; the department can only run when we are not stepping on each other’s toes.
During my almost twenty-seven years in the Department of Theology I have written a fair deal without being especially preoccupied about it. The writing has had both an inner core revolving around the various challenges presented Christianity in and by secular modernity that not only makes the case for a rival authority that surpasses it, but also has demonstrated the capacity to mime Christian beliefs, practices, and forms of life. Thus, “the Gnostic return in modernity” project (two volumes published; two more waiting in the wings; and other essays). Thus The Heterodox Hegel (1994) and to a certain extent also Anatomy of Misremembering 1 (2014), which, of course, is also a detailed study of the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar. Around this core or central axis cluster essays on Catholic thinkers, for example, de Lubac, Newman, Ratzinger, Kasper, and, of course, Balthasar; essays on the nineteenth-century topics, for example, revelation, deification, the Tübingen School; essays on Protestant and Catholic forms of apocalyptic theology; essays on the intersection of theology with continental philosophy, whether Kant, Hegel (again), Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Marion, Derrida, or Žižek; essays on mysticism, mostly Christian, but also Christian Kabbalah; essays on the relation between religion and literature as well as essays on literary figures such as Dante, Hölderlin, Dostoyevski, Bernanos, Cormac McCarthy, etc.
As I speak to core and constellation in publication, I recall Isaiah Berlin’s highlighting of the distinction made in ancient Greece between the hedgehog and the fox: the hedgehog knows one thing, the fox knows many. I can only imagine the figure Berlin cut at High Table in All Souls, Oxford, as he pontificated post-WWII about one of the many distinctions for which he became famous. Of course, applying the distinction of hedgehog and fox is far from easy. Berlin thinks Tolstoy is fox (though wanting to be a hedgehog)—though on my reading not as much of a fox as Shakespeare, Dickens, or perhaps even Goethe. Sometimes I wish that Berlin had thought through the metaphors more. Had he done so, he might have understood a bit more about the darting motility constitutive of a Shakespeare and a Dickens (that in turn might provide a template of a Balthasar and de Lubac). It might also have encouraged him to have shifted from hedgehog to badger. Though they may be in your trash cans, attics, and soffits, badgers burrow underground, relentlessly, and often in the dark, and are known to have sharp claws. I have found mostly that hedgehog and fox, badger and fox come as a pair. I think most great literary writers are both. The same is true of great theologians, Nazianzen and Augustine, Aquinas and Bonaventure, Newman and Balthasar, and having made sure to cross out the adjective “great,” I dare say myself.
If I were to use an adjective to capture my mode of being in the Department of Theology at Notre Dame over the best part of three decades, it would be that I have been incarnate. By this I mean that I gave myself up to the immediate demands of the job, whether teaching, meeting with students, graduate exams and dissertation committees (now at 147), or department service such as Committee of Appointments handling all appointment and tenure cases and coordinator of the Systematic Theology area. None of this implies virtue. Rather, it expresses the need to be here and now and contribute with my colleagues to the mission of the Department of Theology, which though continually contested, seems centrally to involve persuading of the intellectual, moral, and aesthetic force of Christianity (and other great religions) in both writing and teaching. Like everyone else in the department, I have taught courses across the curriculum. As a development course I taught Sin and Redemption; at upper-level undergraduate I taught Traditions 2 (a kind of reprise of my Yale years), Religion and Literature, and courses on Newman and Ratzinger respectively; at the Master’s level I have taught courses on the Trinity, nineteenth-century theology, Newman, Ratzinger, Balthasar; and on the doctoral level, Trinity, eschatology, and various courses on postmodern theology (though I snuck in the last few years a few courses on nineteenth-century religious thinkers). The record seems to indicate that I was more or less successful at all levels; though more important than “success” was the fact that I had a chance a number of times each week to impress upon students the beauty of the Christian tradition worthy of their attention, a complexity commanding their respect, and an underlying honoring of questioning that prompted them to ask more questions, as well as dig deeper into the ones they asked.
As a teacher, I would describe myself as pedagogically undercooked—“underdetermined” would be the refined academic substitute—at least by the exacting Notre Dame standards that issues in highly developed syllabi that take account of different learning styles, clarity of goals, assessment of outcomes. I affirm all of this, though this being more or less a public confession, the fact is that throughout I have been a primitive. I stuck to preparation, delivery, and behaved as a fly to amber regarding any question thrown my way. And while in terms of teaching style, I admit that I am eminently not worth repeating, over the years I think I have managed to reach students, grow their literacy in Christian thought and contributed to making their articulation more intellectually sophisticated, while being mindful that in teaching and in my office the one abiding rule that guides our profession is essentially the same one that guides the medical profession, that is, DO NO HARM. Here I do not mean simply the avoidance of morally reprehensive behavior. Rather I mean, the mandate not to quench the spirit. That a person places value in the life of the mind, holds up the worth of the Humanities, and falls in love with theology, is a precious thing. It should not be dampened by our moods, our disappointments, our need to put someone in their place, as we have perhaps been put in our place. Rather the search for knowledge and intellectual poise should be fertilized and watered and allowed to grow.
In terms of teaching, the hardest course by far to teach was Traditions 2, which is a required course for majors in Theology. The reasons only gradually became clear. It was unlike Traditions 1 for any number of reasons. First, while the period covered was a mere 500 years compared with 1,500, from the point of view of the hustle and bustle of thinking, it comes across to the student as overwhelming. Second, from the point of view of coherence the arc tends depressingly downward rather than upward. Third, and finally, the modern period is characterized by continual contesting of mainline Christianity from within as well as without (Reformation, Enlightenment, Reconstruction), so much so that in my final years teaching the course, I called it the “trauma course.” I am convinced that it has been the most important and formative course that I have taught, what one very bright undergraduate referred to once as the supplying of the DNA of modernity. The most enjoyable course that I taught on a regular basis was Religion and Literature, largely because I had the opportunity to discuss great writers including Dante and Dostoyevski, but especially because I probed the issue of the stances literature takes to Christianity once it has grown autonomous.
It will not surprise anyone who knows me when I say that it was in doctoral seminars where I have felt most intellectually alive. In this setting I have had the good fortune to be surrounded by young adults with gifted intellects and marvelous souls, from whom I gained far more than I gave. In that environment, I found that I could be fruitfully irresponsible; I could push the intellectual envelope, be provided an opportunity to invent as well as record, and though talking much, listen even more to what is inchoate in a comment or question, enter it and move it. Though usually there was a great deal of historical and conceptual information communicated in these seminars, as well as close analysis of a particular text, I am tempted sometime, after Schleiermacher as much as Plato, to say that my teaching in the doctoral setting has been more or less Socratic in kind, since there was a lot of burrowing into and developing student questions and comments with a view, nonetheless, of them owning them. Perhaps I dignify what I did too much by wrapping it up in a gilded educational theory. Much of what I did was entirely instinctual: a bit more like a horse in a carnival pawing the ground as if it is doing math. In any event, on reflection a great deal of my behavior in the classroom seems to me to have been splendidly sub-cortical, similar to but perhaps not identical to my frightening unsocial talent of being able to guess a person’s weight.
Recollecting Who
Thus far, I have been involved in recollecting what in terms of writing and teaching bears upon the kind of unities that I came across given my badger and fox sensibilities, or if in need of translation, then my passions and interests. What about the other side of recollection averted to in the opening paragraphs, the self that expresses itself in these activities of recollection (who) or the one gathered or being gathered in and through them (whoing)? I would like now to speak to this more personal form of recollection, though it is intrinsically related to the former. To get at this form of recollection, you do not need to know the story of my life, but perhaps its general feel and contour might help. I grew up in public housing in Limerick, Ireland, a post-industrial city of about 100,000 people, a few decades after the period famously covered in Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes. Though things were not quite so harrowing as described in that best-selling memoir (often dismissed as fiction), they were depressingly bad. Employment oscillated between spotty and non-existent, petty crime was rampant (so much so that the police felt entitled to disregard your rights and run through your house, or make the kind of offer of giving a “hiding” (beating) to your kids in order to straighten them out). Of course, in my neighborhood, drinking was rampant and though the Catholic scandal of scandals was having children out of wedlock, this too was the norm. Everyone was in the same situation: three houses to the left of us a family provided the real symbol: seven boys who ended up in jail, seven girls with children out of wedlock. Though some families attempted not to fall into the pit and others did not, no one could boast. Our family escaped neither the unemployment, the drink, the petty crime, nor the low-grade despair that went with them. Like most other families, we helped when there was no money and food, and in turn were helped.
After giving up the idea of Pope at seven (with the example of Leo XIV before me, I might have been a bit premature) and of being a saint a few years later (ironically, I now write about them), I settled in to my real vocation (limited in scope) which was to give my mother no trouble. And, except for the pneumonias, the gangrenous hand, the staff infections, the parasites, and the multiple septicemias, I enjoyed a fair degree of success. One of these behaviors was being a “good student,” which, given where I came from, was destined to be a very temporary affair, since just about no one in my neighborhood made it out of elementary school. The first person who managed to go to middle school was held in such esteem that he was called “the professor,” though I should note he was also called “bomber” because of his deep and abiding affection for explosives. I survived the streets largely by staying off them, and when on them compensating for being a student by being a good soccer player and decent all-round athlete. For the record, my mother naming me Cyril was not a great help, but as things turned out she presciently made the connection between me and the theological enterprise. Still, there was the ridiculous humor, gangs of teenage girls shouting, as I passed at 15 and 16 on my way to school, “Fatty” (6 feet and struggling to hit 135 lbs); or even better, the greeting “Hi gorgeous,” and when I did turn around, “not you shipwreck.” I kept turning around. It was funny, and if you thought long enough about it surprisingly warm. It made me feel as if I belonged. And not to be despised: the put-down line was at once poetic and amazingly apt.
Two events, the first recurring, the second punctual, were pivotal and moved me out of the mechanical orbit of being “a good student” to a space for which at that point I had no name. Unfailingly, on Saturday nights, after the pubs closed, my next-door neighbor (15 years older), who worked on a construction site and who started his weekend drinking midday every Friday, would put on Mozart or Madame Butterfly and break his heart and my heart with longing. The second happened the Spring I turned 15 when I came into possession of the collected works of Shakespeare, squashed into a hardback of over 1,000 pages with tiny print and two columns. I read all 36 plays (or whatever number was agreed on then), the sonnets, and Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. I don’t know how much I absorbed, though it was probably not a good sign that my favorite reading was The Rape of Lucrece which, though it covered an important theme (rape) and had as its main vehicle a woman of enormous rhetorical power, most scholars of Shakespeare likely put it aside as artistic exercise and miming before Shakespeare hit his stride and blossomed into his full genius. That moment, of course, was not remotely about refined taste or critical acumen; it was pure symptom.
Once the summer pattern was established, it became habitual: Dostoyevski, Tolstoy, Joyce, Kafka, Musil, and Faulkner followed, so also did Yeats, Eliot, Tate, Lowell, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Neruda, Borges Mandelstam, Milosz, Brodsky, etc. Happily, I did learn to read better. My undergraduate years at University College Dublin, where I majored in philosophy, were even more quixotically arduous. In addition to what I was supposed to be doing, I read most of Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Marx, Voegelin, Levi-Strauss, but also Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, the Christian mystical tradition, and the Hermetic, alchemical, and Kabbalistic traditions. I was so busy reading that I didn’t always make it to class. Despite which, somewhat miraculously, I managed to earn a high first. If you asked me then why I was engaged in this inglorious von Munchhausen enterprise, I wouldn’t have been able to answer. In hindsight, I think I just wanted some light or beauty to bless my life. That was the beginning and end of it. No real flicker of ambition or plan across the vast waste that separated a new thinking me and the me that was able to survive on just about nothing. “Autonomy” and me were not familiars, I was a version of the “porous” self that Charles Taylor thinks got dispatched hundreds of years ago. My mother, who had wanted me to be a news-reader, never scolded me about my “waste of talent.” Given our poverty, that was an act of consummate kindness in a situation where kindness was a luxury. Kindnesses happened, and happened when you needed them most: a teacher who was in sequence my singing coach, my tutor in Irish, and my basketball coach, my teachers in college, one who accepted in handwriting my preposterous senior essay of 150 pages (quarto) on the relation between the formal logical systems of the Polish logician Lesniewski and the “Language is the House of Being” Heidegger and gave it a generational mark, another who got me employment as tutor in the Department of Philosophy when no one would help. These were moments of grace added to the continual grace of a mother who through illness and depression always seemed to rise phoenix-like from the ashes. And then the truly startling manifestation of grace, acceptance by the simply marvelous Geraldine Meehan (who strangely is my spouse), whose laugh is like the spirit over the waters of creation, at once an emblem of truth and goodness, and above all an emblem of the beauty that I gradually came to see was their bond and their shining.
With the excavation of these two patterns of recollection, the first thematic, constituted by passions and interests, the second how a “subject” marked by intellectual and theological passions and interests is recollected and yet fails to own itself, not only because of gaps and perforations, but also by an excess that he cannot contain, you can see that the script is that of Augustine’s Confessions. Sometimes you simply find yourself walking into the story that you have read. It’s a story about grace, given in moments of extremity, but also in the everyday gifts of friendship, common mission, and the bounce back continually experienced in teaching that you are given more than you give. Because it is this, it is a lifelong story in gratitude and the learning of it, or as the great oracle of Augustine we have amongst us at Notre Dame, John Cavadini, would say, a pedagogy regarding saying “Thank you.” And not once or twice, or even many times, but again and again till the very hour of your death. If you discover that the meaning of your life is gratitude and that it is what holds you together, what “re-collects” you, you will necessarily recall that this habit or disposition has a Christological figure: you are brought to imitate and participate in Christ. But, as Augustine also suggests, it has the surplus value of you coming to recognize that the Church is the privileged site of gratitude, of the memory of the hard-won articulations of belief , symbolic practices, and ascetic and joyous forms of life, yet also the place of our improvisations and experimentations, as well as our constancies, our howls of protest, as well as our ecstasies, and our enlisting of music, painting, sculpture, and literature to give glory to a God who is manifest in the universe, but not reducible to it.
Anticipation(s)
The crossroad in my so-called “theological life” that elicits recollection, also elicits projections and anticipations. There are principled as well as contingent reasons why I am not going to spend as much time on them. If the major contingent reason is the pressure of space, the principled reasons are more important. Though anticipation, as Augustine demonstrated (Husserl followed up), is the complement to recollection in both of its modes of what and who, it is necessarily less focused and more likely to make a liar of us by dint of time and circumstance. Which is not to say that some things can’t be suggested as plausible anticipations precisely because they seem to grow from the past through the present. While I entertain hopes that I will write truly unexpected and new things, I cannot guarantee that this will be the case. I have no power over the conditions (life and health) that will make it possible, no more than I can guarantee the intactness of the mind that would produce such work. What constitutes plausible anticipations has me over the next few years becoming a curator-developer of work already done. This will involve sooner rather than later finishing up volume 2 of Anatomy of Misremembering (Balthasar and Heidegger) (Crossroad) and later rather than sooner finishing up the two essential volumes in the “Gnostic Return” on German Idealism and English and German Romanticism. These very large books will for better or worse be the crown of what thinking-wise has been my scaling and diving. There will be a considerable amount of other publications: collections of essays on Hegel; collections of essays on Heidegger; collections of essays on apocalyptic theology; individual collections of essays on Balthasar, on Ratzinger, and on Newman. Happily, University of Notre Press is willing to publish these collections plus the major monographs. Before any of these see the light of day, the University of Notre Dame Press will bring out two volumes of articles originally published in Church Life Journal, the first titled, The Gift of Modernity, the second titled, Sirens of Evil: Glimpses of Heaven.
As I go forward, I do not foresee any essential shift in my intellectual and theological profile; it will exhibit the tendencies of badger and fox, digging deep and swift movement from topic to topic and person to person, and from discipline to discipline, even as theology remains at the center. And then there is the poetry that has accompanied me on my journey in both my recollected and unrecollected state, as flesh, gasp, hurt, hope, love, exclamation, and celebration. I will now be able to gather what I have published and not published together, but just as importantly notarize what has been true all along: the hope that my next door neighbor had that beauty is somehow transfiguring; endorse what Dostoyevski said about beauty saving the world, and laud Dante telling us in the Paradiso that though we hoped that truth would prevail over the lie, and goodness over ignorance, distortion and malice, what we ultimately hope for is that beauty would permanently saturate our lives always veering towards rank ugliness, that beauty would come to function, to use the words of a much later poet, W. B. Yeats, as the “gaiety transfiguring all that dread.”
Beyond that, I am left with guesses about my work, as well as the world. Should my health and my mind remain intact, and as long as we have a viable world, I expect that the final years of my life will be devoted to poetry and to feeding and appeasing the fox rather than the badger as an act of homage to all the things worth writing about, but for one reason or another did not become for me a passion. (Perhaps also a necessary humiliation of the passions that were at the core, by underlying their contingency.) The conditional respecting a viable world is not alarmist, though it is bleak. Even if the growth of the current barbarism slows, questioning the value of the university not only will not cease, it will grow, as AI is likely at the very least to make much of what we do obsolete. Doubtless, there will be opportunities as well, for example, to define what human knowledge is, to expose and exposit more clearly our animality that is enrooting and a vital measure against the angelic spirit of AI and the transhumanism that its advocates propose. The prospects of us being able to control what we have created grow dimmer by the day, because of polarization that is at once a result of our bad choices and maliciously engineered. Perhaps it is an effect of our time that everyone is a Cassandra. Yet, the times are dark. The darker angels prevail in the global economy, our language is crude and violent, and there is a crisis regarding truth, and an operative nihilism that has little got to do with Nietzsche and everything to do with the social manipulations that grant power. Where will Christianity be in all of this? Where theology? With respect to Christian faith, pressurized to give up on the gospel, as the political powers want to make it an instrument of dehumanization and war, there will be witnesses and martyrs. Pope Leo is already showing that he is a witness. As for theology, it too will be pressed. Its tradition will likely be ridiculed as useless, and the truths it points to inconvenient at best, treasonous at worst. We may or may not be in “last times,” but we do seem to be in a time of unveiling, more obviously at the moment of the darkness, that we can only hope precedes the light.
This mention of hope brings me back to the beginning. This stretching of hope through the darkness that is upon us, as well as its stretching in our case for the blessing of our humanity and that of others not only recalls Eliot’s John of the Cross reflection on hope in “East Coker,” but reminds also that even recollection is a partial satisfaction of hope pointing towards a future whose givenness will exceed any projection of it. Once again we are brought back to Augustine who shows us in Book 10 of the Confessions that something touches time that exceeds time, and makes recollection and anticipation possible.
In any event, I have never been so convinced that hope has to become who we are and what we do. With that in mind, I would like to end with a few stanzas of a long poem I am currently writing, called “I am Listening,” a kind of testimonial inspired by the first word in the Rule of Saint Benedict. Listen!
I am listening to the rhythm of the rain
That can’t help itself, the raised fist
Of the uninspired boxwood and the glistening
On the grass taking a leave from doubt.I am listening to the debauchery of impression,
My empty soul oodling naked afternoons,
My spirit forgetting all standings, forgiving everything.I am listening to the door left ajar.
The bells tinkling in the slight breeze.
The olive hush of the hydrangeas
Not yet in the height of white
When fully bloomed.I am listening to all the broken languages
Blooding my fingers on the shards, of finding
The safer path, rumbling through their scree
Of meaning, tumbling over moraines
Once dipped in the till of truth.I am listening to the sea kiss
The purple kelp, the spray take
Its chance of ending on her lips
This November twilight on the esplanade.I am listening to the hydraulics of grace
The vowels of water cooling
Consonants pledged to the black sun.I am listening to the dead who read me
In their implacable words and you
Somewhere who might read a word
I never meant to send to you.I am listening to what is written in stone
What goes down to the bone,
Leaves an angle and a cut
Of what was done and suffered
Or merely marked and remarked.I am listening to the silence of the birds
Whose song stretches the air, the absence
Of their fluttering hearts bringing out
The best in us, stained only by the promise
Of their indescribable eggs always more
Than their wanton and perishable lives.I am listening to the silence of forgiveness,
The impossible release of the victim and victimizer
Into the mercy of time and blessing of the future.I am listening to the cooing of the morning dove
Inviting the whoing of me, scant at first,
All reach and hunger, then filled by the warm
Bilge straight down the throat, now my bill
On guard wooing the strategic strike.
