BACK TO THE FUTURE

...The Ressourcement series recalls a theology that tends toward prayer and reminds us that among the count-less blessings we enjoy in our commu-nion is a wonderful way to talk in and about and to the modern world...

...They want to subvert modernity alto-gether...

...One need not believe that Father Balasuriya is a heretic, nor applaud all the opera-tions and tactics of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, nor long for the restoration of the Papal States and the Tridentine Mass and the churching of women and the starching of wimples to reply, "I sure hope so...

...Back to the future Michael O. Garvey When he is not catechizing as a professor of theology at the John Paul II Institute in Washington, D.C., or edit-ing the North American volume of the theological journal Communio, David L. Schindler is storing up treasure for himself in the Kingdom of God, and probably costing the Eerdmans Pub-lishing Company a bundle, by bringing out an invaluable new series of great Catholic books dedicated to "retrieval and renewal in Catholic thought...

...It will be (and has been) objected that to celebrate that difference too much is to advocate a boorish restoration of some illusory golden age-a disgrun-tled, sectarian retreat from the chal-lenges and possibilities of modernity...

...A saint," he writes, "is someone who has a sense of God's grandeur, who has found joy in God, and who, filled with this love, desires to communicate it and share it, just as one would desire to speak of whatever it is that fills one's heart...

...The great hillbilly Thomist, Flannery O'Connor, once famously remarked during what seemed to her a fatuous discussion of eucharistic symbolism, "If it's only a symbol, I say to hell with it...

...The intro-duction promises that future offerings of the series will include "works in the-ology, philosophy, history, literature, and the arts which give renewed ex-pression to an authentic Catholic sensi-bility...

...Schindler's list-to get that irresistible usage over with-consists mainly of the European theologians and philosophers from the middle of our century who mid-wived Vatican II, thinkers whose writ-ings are, in a manner that seems sadly exotic in 1997, permeated and sustained by the sacramental life of the Catholic church...

...Hans Urs von Baltha-sar's unsettling reflections on the death of the Lord-the dead Messiah's ulti-mate solidarity with all the dead-are memorably unflinching in their con-sideration of the obliterated humanity of the entombed Jesus: "In the same way that, upon earth, he was in solidarity with the living, so, in the tomb, he is in solidarity with the dead...

...Readers willing to leave aside the intriguing but not terribly promising question of whether or not he has de-served this somewhat diminished rep-utation will be rewarded by his four homilies on the creation narratives in the book of Genesis...

...Rejecting the reduc-tionist positions of literalists and ratio-nalists alike, his reflections on the orientation of creation toward worship and on the implications of humankind's having been made in the image of God are concluded by an essay on "The Con-sequences of Faith in Creation...

...Living people fall victim to this ineluctability...

...Nevertheless, those of us who are dissatisfied, confused, bored, and an-noyed by the protocols of contemporary academic theology will hardly find in these recently "retrieved" thinkers the easy pieties and spurious magisterial re-assurances we're sometimes accused of seeking...

...If we can't manage to discover and revere the Lord in our own peculiar household, how can we hope to tell the neighbors about him...

...Danielou seeks to remedy that situ-ation by providing the modern world with, ahem, saints...

...Reborn in this attitude, and "now freed from every organic link, the will can set its own goals, and by controlling natural forces rationally it can make the execution of these goals compulsory...

...They are given up to the caprice of their own goals, which have no organic relation...

...In other words, they saw clearly that the first step in what later came to be known as aggiornamento had to be ressourcement-a rediscovery of the riches of the whole of the church's two-thousand-year tradition...

...This recommendation particularly infuriates theologians who have done quite well by the academy, but it powerfully appeals to ordinary churchgoing nonacademic readers who believe, as Jean Danielou does, that "the tragedy of the modern world is that it no longer occupies itself with God...

...I don't for a single minute doubt that preconciliar church administration was every bit as clumsy and occasionally un-charitable as postconciliar church ad-ministration has been...

...It would be a good thing if a few more of us seemed to be alarmed by what seemed to alarm Guardini...

...A few days after the excommunication of the Sri Lankan theologian Tissa Balasuriya, a justifiably troubled editorialist writing in the London Tablet asked rhetorical-ly, "Are we back to the methods and con-tent of pre-conciliar theology...

...Eerdmans isn't exactly an ultra-montane outfit, and Mother Angelica's TV network hasn't yet begun to adver-tise the Ressourcement series, but because names like Schindler and Ratz-inger are involved, the undertaking is likely to be regarded (and dismissed) by many otherwise openminded peopleas a narrowly partisan traditional-ist project...

...The world needs it as badly as we do...

...And with this condition, seen here from the view-point of the separated body, Jesus is at first truly solitary...

...A heart filled with God speaks of God without effort, whereas it often takes effort because our hearts are not sufficiently enflamed...

...It's not terribly difficult to imag-ine the same author denouncing the sort of essay most Commonweal readers could write on "The Consequences of Faith in Creation for the Administration of the Catholic Church," but surely our church would be far better served than she is now if even our most strenuous dis-agreements could be wrangled out not on the world's terms but on our own, and by our own lights and in a lan-guage drawn from and replenished by our own tradition...

...That isn't to say that Maurice Blon-del's dense philosophical reflections on the Modernist crisis or Angelo Scola's exhaustive analysis of von Balthasar's theological method will have excited readers in the thousands sporadically leaping up from their Barcaloungers and bellowing "yesss...

...At least since 1981, when he assumed his present re-sponsibilities in the Vatican bureaucracy, Cardinal Jo-seph Ratzinger has been much more widely known for his administration of harsh ecclesial discipline than for his the-ology...

...If we do not speak enough about God, it is because our hearts are not sufficiently filled with him...

...It seems that few Catholic theolo-gians working nowadays would di-rectly disagree with Blondel there, but when it comes to "justifying both the capital and the interest" of church teach-ing, many of them-and nearly all of those with tenure-seem to become bashful, tongue-tied, or crankily de-fensive about triumphalism...

...In a magnificent essay adapt-ed for Commonweal a year or so ago, Luke Timothy John-son lamented the current "academic captivity of the church" and suggested that theologically imprisoned believers might begin to make their jour-ney out of bondage by simply acknow-ledging "that whatever the church's discourse is, it should not be the same as the academy's, nor should it be sub-ject to the same rules or the same crite-ria of validity...

...But I suspect that most dissenters from what Schindler, Stanley Hauerwas, Michael Baxter, and others might call the Americanist Magisterium have an even more ambitious project in mind...

...Contemporary theology, no less than contemporary literary criticism, is hand-icapped by surprising numbers of such scholars...

...And that's too bad, because whatever its provenance, this publi-cation is a marvelous moment for the "Church Literate" and provides an ad-mirable alternative to the methodolo-gical agnosticism that makes so much contemporary theology so dull to read...

...Each human being lies in his own tomb...

...The deceptive-ly plain style, like that of Danielou's meditations on the Our Father, or of his essay on "The Evangelical Spirit of Hu-mility," exemplifies a sort of discourse that owes a great deal more to the el-ders of the desert than to the middle-agesters of the Modern Language Association...

...One must allow to this 'solidarity' an amplitude and an ambiguity, even, which seem precisely to exclude a communication on his part as subject...

...and it is the church which, without re-jecting or neglecting the contributions of exegesis and of history, nevertheless controls them, because in the very tra-dition which constitutes her, she pos-sesses another means of knowing her author, of participating in his life, of Unk-ing facts to dogma, and of justifying both the capital and the interest of her teach-ing...

...cliffs of fall/Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed...

...But all of these works emphasize and deploy Blondel's conclusion that "something in the church escapes scientific examination...

...Ezra Pound thought that just as music became less music the further it de-parted from the dance, poetry became less poetry the further it departed from music...

...Surely theology becomes less theology the further it departs from prayer...

...Not only can these works be-come every bit as dense as a decon-structionist's daydream, they can also be downright scary, but that's the In-carnation for you...

...Obviously, there is no need to wait until our hearts are completely filled with God in order to speak of him, because we would end up waiting indefinitely...

...What these thinkers had in com-mon, according to the series introduc-tion, was "the double conviction that theology had to speak to the present sit-uation, and that the condition for doing so faithfully lay in a recovery of the church's past...

...Hold them cheap/ May who ne'er hung there...

...But these works certainly indicate that pre-conciliar the-ology, whatever all those censorious church administrators might have thought about it, was not bad at all, and was at the very least capable of pro-ducing arguments worth having...

...Such reflections call to mind Gerard Hopkins's lines: "O the mind, mind has mountains...

...In it, an argument for the inseparability of the doctrines of creation and redemption be-comes an invitation "to accept mystery as the center of reality, that is to say, to accept love, creation as love, and to make that love the foundation of one's life...

...Such dissenters seem to share with, for instance, Romano Guardini, a profound disapproval of "a human at-titude that no longer feels itself tied by living human unity and its organic com-pass and that regards as petty and nar-row the limitation in which an earlier time found supreme fulfillment, wis-dom, beauty, a well-rounded fullness of life...

...We should be grateful for the reminder, and we should set about relearning how to talk that way...

...This is her kind of series...

...Theologians who aren't preoc-cupied by prayer are like literary critics who aren't preoccupied by literature...