Foundations of Christian Faith
Tracy, David
Simpson is good on Thomas's romantic vis- ion of himself, and in portraying that poet's increasing sense of failure. He is reasonably convincing when he claims Thomas was the icebreaker who ended...
...He addresses them explicitly and deliberately...
...Like Pascal's rigor27 October 1978:694 ous and pessimistic humanism, Rshner' s own cannot but invite the respect of any reader who honors integrity...
...The final three sections (pp...
...In a manner reminiscent of T.S...
...For the authentic human inquirer is driven by the very dynamism of questioning to the recognition that the human being as human always stands in the presence of radical mystery...
...The reason for this somewhat curious name--a seeming oxymoron--is clear in Rahner's case...
...Eventually, but belatedly, it is...
...These brief comments may serve to communicate the basic structure and thrust of the main parts of" this book (Sections I through VI, to be exact...
...That achievement is usually named transcendental Thomism...
...This is temptation, and a man needs a drink or two to deal with it . . . This is fine intuitive writing--incorporating imagery as Thomas no doubt would conceive it (the allusions to his own poem, "The Hand That Signed the Paper," as well as the six- pence and the tits...
...More exactly, the first 300 pages must be read...
...For three hundred pages, he produces what surely will come to be considered one of the great, perhaps even classical, statements of what Christianity means to one fast-rate mind in the twentieth century...
...So much is this the case that this reader is left with the impression that Karl Rahner, left to his own resources, might have been a great contemporary pes- simist...
...But even then, the ecclesiology strangely lacks the drive and power at the heart of the book...
...Rahner has writ- ten better and more enduring articles on the reality of church than here, Above all, that reality (in his language, the church as sacra- ment) surely should have been related more itnn~ediately and intrinsically to the Christol- ogy of the main part of the work...
...The two remaining sections (on Chris- tian life and on eschatology) return to the resources, and thereby the strengths, of ear- lier sections...
...He argues that human ex- perience drives every serious inquirer to rec- ognize the presence of a horizon of absolute- ness, indeed of mystery...
...In Jesus Christ, the God-man, the il-luminating and saving word has been spoken...
...As theologians, we know this holy and gracious mystery to be the God of Pure, Self-Communicating Love decisively expressed in Jesus Christ...
...Perhaps the very weakness of the last three sections ~hows anew that the great strength of Karl Rahner is the strength of a theologian who goes to the heart of the matter, who are...
...Rather in Jesus Christ God has spoken the "final," "irretrievable" word on just who God is and who we are...
...Yet Rahner insists over and over that if we will but listen religiously and risk thinking theologically, we can find our affinity with, indeed, we can, in Jesus Christ, "recognize" the compelling truth of both who we are and who this God we cannot escape really is...
...290,92), or his suspicion of any traditional theories of atonement which seem to involve an angry God "changing his mind" (p...
...In the finest and most original section of this remarkable book, Rahner summarizes and develops his notion of this "affinity" of God's self-communication to all honest in- quiry and all our existential searches for wholeness...
...With systematic talent unequaled in contemporary theology, he lays out the basic concepts and development of his own remarkable forty-year intellectual journey...
...Instead, Rahner achieves an original Commonweal: 693 greater than the self, a truth that gives life...
...Rahner does not...
...For the most part, A Revolu- tion in Taste offers the informed reader few surprises...
...He is willing to express his ambivalence on pluralism but he will also, reluctantly but really, affwm it...
...who is Jesus Christ...
...Eliot's declaration in the Quartets that the incarnation is, "'the hint half-guessed, the gift half-understood," Rahner drives all the arguments, all the persuasive and sometimes semi-mystical rhetoric of his philosophy and theology to make real that reality of a gracious and incomprehensible mystery at the core of human existence...
...He expresses his own vision of Christianity's non-ideological "pessimism" on the human utopias...
...The confines of any mere common sense emphasis upon sensation is left far behind...
...Yet Rahner is equally unyielding in his insistence upon a real, not a mythological incarnation...
...On the contrary Christian revelation meets and responds to the deepest needs of the authentic inquirer, the honest searcher for a cause FOUNDATIONS OF CHRISTIAN FAITH Karl Rahner Trans...
...who is God...
...The authentic inquirer now becomes no longer a philosopher analyzing a horizon of radical mystery, but a theologian articulating the reality of that mystery as both holy and gracious...
...Yet Christianity--and Christianity in a strongly dogmatic form--has clearly grip- ped him...
...Rahner's German tradition leads him to develop these two presuppositions of the "Schools" in a distinct and controversial fashion...
...Still, Rahner refuses to shirk the reality of death or the pervasiveness of sin in the human condition...
...No skill...
...This self-communication, this "revelation," is not, as Karl Barth believed, merely "hurled at man like a stone...
...Yet the inclination to a sturdy pessimism, checked throughout by the gracious realism of the Christian message, is clearly there in Rahner...
...Above all, these are his ontological commitment to the intrinsic relationship of being and intelligibility and his epistemologi- cal commitment to the grounding of even our most abstract ideas in human experience...
...He invites his readers to recog- nize both the creative grandeur of this un- quenchable drive as well as the fragility, the sheer brokenness of our everyday reality...
...We have just been studying yourPortrait of the Artist as a Young Dog," she whimpers, shoving her tits-in your face...
...As examples one may note his devastating analysis of popular notions of incarnation as God disguised "in the livery of a man," orhis forthright critique of careless language simply stating that "Jesus is GOd" (pp...
...His thought has become, almost despite himself, a firm if stern Christian humanism of universal grace...
...He is reasonably convincing when he claims Thomas was the icebreaker who ended the Age of Auden...
...Yet its very difficulty--the complexity of the concepts and the sheer drive of Rahner's thought--is precisely the book's power and attraction...
...Yet the last part of the book as a whole never recovers the intellectual power of the first major sections...
...Paperbound, $3.50 dDOUBLEDAY The main result of the first six sections (pp...
...As philosophers, we name this holy mystery with the personal name, God...
...Simpson, for a while, becomes Thomas: You enter, preceded by the puppymen, one carrying your bag, the other your coat, a big room where people sit Exploring the horizon of absoluteness in chairs and sofas pretending not to have been kept waiting...
...Indeed we are the hearers of a possible word of revela- tion...
...For we are creatures alive to real creativity and to real guilt, in the presence of real responsibil- ity to conscie.nce, to others, and to our histori- cal moment...
...In sum, this book should be read by all serious students of contemporary Christianity and its real intellectual achievements...
...I was often reminded in reading ~ this book of Ronald Knox's comment upon Pascal himself: "He might have been the village atheist...
...by William V. Dych Seabury, $19.50 [470 pp.] David Tracy K ARL RAHNER has written a masterful work...
...what is grace...
...The great French Jansenist temper- ament is surely not present in the Suabian metaphysics and mystical underflow of Rahner's thought...
...Yet we are also in the presence of a death which is really one's own and eta intellectual pluralism which no individual can any longer master...
...He will insist that any thoughtful person who will take the proper time and effort can do the same...
...She has auburn hair and legs made for long hours afield and abed...
...Despite the modesty of its subtitle, "An In- troduction to the Ideas of Christianity," Foundations of Christian Faith is difficult and demanding reading from beginning to end...
...It lacks as well the subtlety of analysis and the criticism of current church practices of Rahner's other work...
...On the central issues Rahner is there with all his real strengths: his powerful philosophical mind, his passionate devotion to retrieving existential meaning from the doctrines, his radical and persuasive evocation of the in...
...On other issues, as well, one always knows where Rahner stands...
...We find that this God has not left us merely striving, simply cognizant of our creatureliness and our real guilt...
...II and often daring articulation of a new philosophical and theological language, even a system...
...288...
...1-322) of Foundations, therefore, is an ex- traordinary retrieval of the intellectual strength and the profound existential reality of the"high" incarnational Christology of John and Paul, of Nicaea and Chalcedon...
...The book's best parts occur when Simpson--an excellent poet himself, and one whose poetry continues to strengthen (his re- cent collection, Searching for the Ox, is his finest)--abandons the role of biographer and emotionally empathizes with his subjects...
...For Karl Rahner, moreover, there is no doubt that this revelation has occurred...
...In a lesser theologian, they might serve...
...Simpson reaches some questionable con- clusions on Lowell's History...
...If for some Simpson closes gaps between the lives of his poets and their works of art, and if some readers still need convinc- ing that in a modern bureaucratic state there is value in poetry that expresses the life of an individual, then the book was worth doing...
...As his earliest works (Spirit in World andHearers of the Word) demonstrate at length, and as the first two sections of this book show with re, markable clarity, Rahner's commitments to certain main line Thomist positions remains firm...
...How well you know them: the rich woman's hus- band, smirking and offering the hand that decides men's fate down at the office, but here lies dead as wax...
...But in their ; disturbing contrast to the tension and power of Rahner's earlier anthropology and Christol- ogy, they are a curious mixture of strength and weakness...
...I just wish there were more passages like it...
...New from Image Book s CATHOLIC PENTECOSTALISM Ren Laurentin An in-depth study of the most dynamic development in the Church since Vatican II--the Catholic neo-pentecostal move-ment...
...Here is a work worthy of its subject matter: the idea (more exactly, the concept) of Christianity in its own self- understanding...
...At the same time, Rahner does not hesitate Io de- mythologize when he finds it necessary...
...One instance occurs when he proclaims, "No skill is needed to write fourteen lines without rhyme...
...And, may Heaven pre- serve a poet, their daughter who has come all the way from Wellesley Col- lege in the East, just for the occasion...
...tions, in fact, are anticlimactic...
...The last three sec...
...He will "'retrieve," not reject any dogma...
...A splendid example occurs in the last three pages of his Thomas chapter...
...The result in Rahner's case is never some uneasy set of eclectic compromises among divergent posi- tions...
...His Christian humanism is strong and clear ("man is the event of God's free and forgiving self-communication...
...Human experience will now involve the social and, above all, the historical charac- ter of all experience...
...He does so under the rubric of a "transcendental Christology.'" In a series of observations (some very con- crete, even surprisingly everyday, others necessarily abstract and philosophical in the German sense) Rahner sketches the human being as one struggling from matter to be- come spirit and then recognizing in the very struggle that human spirit is always a spirit- in-the-word...
...Section VII, on the church, is surprisingly disappointing...
...Theological language, as distinct from its originating religious language and experi- ence, must include this drive to the concept, even to system...
...There is, after all, an impor- tant truth in Alfred North Whitehead's fa- mous dictum: /'Christianity is a religion in search of metaphysics.'/ In Karl Rahner's case, he accepts this challenge by developing a metaphysical theology through the appro- priation of two demanding philosophical tra- ditions: the Thomism of the "Schools" and the ontology of the German tradition from Kant through Hegel to Heidegger...
...but grace caught him and he became a Christian pes- simist...
...we...
...Indeed the book as a whole sounds a strongly Pascalian note...
...These are the questions so many wish to sidestep in the rush to other issues...
...And Grandmother, blue hair and white cheeks, a hectic spot the size of a six- pence in each...
...332-448) can be cead with profit, but, for me at least, with no great urgency...
...And yet he will constantly affirm that "all is grace...
...Simpson is also good in explaining why Ginsberg's "Kaddish" is Modernist and "Howl" is post-Modernist, and in describing what he perceives as the evils of the old New Criticism...
...He is adequate at perceiving the elements of autobiography and myth in Plath's writing, but not so good on Lowell-- perhaps because he seems to resent the ele- ments of the spoiled child and the pathologi- cal adult in Lowell's personality (as he sees it...
Vol. 105 • October 1978 • No. 21
