Abstract
Some early reviewers of this essay in creative theological thinking have decried what they regard as ‘Hart’s turn to heterodoxy’ (thus the title of Gerald McDermott’s review in First Things, 18 July 2022, https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2022/07/harts-turn-to-heterodoxy). Now Hart practises a style of writing that can be provocative—apart from being elegant and pellucid—and occasionally his rhetoric carries him away. Yet there is nothing heterodox in the substance of the argument put forward in Tradition and Apocalypse. Hart approaches tradition from the vantage point of its apocalyptic future, from what the Christian faith ultimately promises: the Kingdom, deification, loving union with the triune God. This approach complements and corrects current theory, challenging it where it is too certain of itself. Far from attacking tradition, however, Tradition and Apocalypse defends and strengthens it.
The subject matter of this book, then, is tradition itself: what, in fact, is it? Not much progress has been made in answering this question, our author contends, since Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine and Blondel’s Histoire et dogme. Both thinkers attempted to resolve the tension between historicism, on the one hand, and what Blondel termed ‘extrinsicism,’ on the other: they endeavoured, in other words, to avoid both the Scylla of reducing dogma to the accidents of its historical development and the Charybdis of regarding it as unchangeable truth essentially untouched by the vicissitudes of time. Both fell short, albeit brilliantly: Newman, in formulating his seven criteria for judging the health of doctrinal developments, relied constantly and uncritically upon the metaphor of biological organism while Blondel, after giving much room to history, was able ‘save’ dogma only by recourse to authority. Both erred, Hart argues, because they attempted to articulate the logic of tradition by looking either backward or upward instead of forward, ‘to that sole mysterious horizon where the historical and the ideal—the truth of time and timeless truth—naturally and necessarily coincide. And that is, and can only be, the eschatological horizon’ (p. 94).
Hart believes, then, that theology has fallen prey to the same forgetfulness of final causality, which is so characteristic of modern science. But living tradition can be understood only from the point of view of its eschatological fulfilment as it is simply impossible to derive its logic and unity from the retrospective analysis of historical data. To illustrate this claim, Hart examines the example of the Arian controversy. When one looks at the historical record, it is difficult to consider Arius ‘the very archetype of all heretics’ (p. 112): in fact, Arius operated well ‘within the ambit of the faith as he had received it from a long Christian past’ (p. 119). The problem with Arius was infidelity not to the past but to the future. He was unable, that is, to grasp that the eschatological promise of deification requires a conception of Christ as being both fully human and fully divine, rather than in some way subordinated to the Father: hence the notion of consubstantiality, for which there was no warrant in the past. It is Arius’s very ‘traditionalism’ (which Hart carefully distinguishes from properly understood fidelity to the past) that made him a heretic.
Hart finds the attempt to resolve the tension between history and dogma ultimately wrongheaded since it fails to recognize the essence of the Christian faith; for that which sets Christianity apart among religions is the ‘outlandish’ idea of ‘a particular and local history that purports to disclose itself as the eternal and universal truth of all things’ (p. 4). In Christianity, history is not simply the vehicle of some transcendent truth but it is truth: if Jesus was not the Son of God who was crucified and rose on the third day, no Christian dogma remains. There is, therefore, a ‘fragility’ (p. 4) to the faith which is expressed adequately only in a tradition that lives between the poles of the historical disruption of the Christ-event, on the one hand, and the church’s attempt to give it institutional and dogmatic form, on the other. Or, more precisely, the tradition of the church lives between ‘an originating disruption of the historical past remembered in light of God’s final disruption of the historical (and cosmic) future’ (p. 142).
Alfred Loisy scandalously said, Jésus annonçait le Royaume et c’est l’Église qui est venue (‘Jesus announced the Kingdom and it is the Church that arrived’). Hart approves, adding that this church has often taken an ‘almost comically corrupt and divisive institutional form’ (p. 138). Such a statement, which would once have been shocking, is a mere truism in our own day. Nevertheless, this situation is not reason for despair since it could not be otherwise: ‘the ever more visibly hierarchical and depressingly mundane civic institution of the church became the only concrete, tangible form that Christian hope and expectation could now take in this prolonged interval of indefinite delay’ (p. 138). Living tradition, however, will remind us of what risks being forgotten under layers of bureaucracy and dogma, and even in ‘quotidian religious devotion’: the power of a divine and disruptive gift that fuels ‘apocalyptic longing’ (p. 78). This is why tradition must be characterized by an ‘impulse to rebellion,’ an ‘indomitable and subversive ferment’ (p. 137) as it engages in a ‘liberating counterhistory’ that beckons ‘believers simultaneously back to an immemorial past and forward to an unimaginable future’ (p. 145).
Hart’s apophatic emphasis on the ultimate hiddenness of the divine gift that inaugurated the (Christian) past and calls us into the future makes it hard for him to formulate positive criteria for the soundness of doctrinal developments. On Hart’s account, the theologian’s fidelity cannot be directed at any statically conceived fulness of truth, but must be aimed at the ‘future disclosure of the full meaning of what little one already knows’ (p. 104). If there are criteria for such faithfulness, they must be negative. Also, we already know that they cannot be merely retrospective but must look at the future of the past, so to speak. Thus, Hart believes in an even ‘empirical power’ that history possesses to identify, through immanent critique, doctrinal paths that ‘exhaust their possibilities without creating new ones’ (p. 155). Likewise, he asserts no tradition to be ‘truly alive except one that anticipates and even wills its own overthrow in a fuller revelation of its own inner truth’ (p. 154). Tradition derives this power of self-overcoming from its fidelity to the promise of the Kingdom, which—always being more than we are able to conceive—‘dissolve[s] all of its own profane simulacra’ (p. 172).
Hart of course does not deny that ‘conservative’ impulses have a positive role to play in the transmission of the faith (p. 140). Neither does he gainsay the reality of divine inspiration (p. 148). As an Orthodox theologian, he is hesitant on infallible dogmatic authority (pp. 92–93). If one reads it as a whole, without taking sentences or passages out of context, Hart’s theory is well balanced, synthesizing elements of apophatic and kataphatic theology, stability and disruption, fidelity to the past and openness to the future. Given the sophistication of his argument, it is regrettable that the only examples he is willing to provide of clearly identifiable heresies concern matters like libertarian social theory and support for ‘a certain recently unseated Republican president of the United States’ (p. 169). These are matters of political prudence, not dogma.
A remarkable achievement, Tradition and Apocalypse is not beyond critique. In putting forward his theory of tradition, Hart sidesteps the contemporary literature, for his only interlocutors on this topic are Newman and Blondel. This creates the unfortunate sense that his ideas are entirely original rather than representing the culmination of significant theological discussion. Is it true to say that nothing ‘like a substantial advance in theological reflection’ on tradition (p. 2) has occurred since 1904 (when Histoire et dogme appeared)? One can argue about what constitutes a ‘substantial’ advance or ‘very great significance’ (p. 1). But it is still striking that a book on the theology of tradition should not mention the name of Yves Congar, author of the two-volume La tradition et les traditions, or show any awareness of Joseph Ratzinger’s theology of history, with its attempt to address precisely the relationship between history and dogma. (It is worth recalling that the future pontiff’s ideas were seen as so alarming in preconciliar Germany that they almost cost him his academic career.) Neither does Hart credit Alasdair MacIntyre for his philosophical development of Newman’s theory, despite the fact that several passages in his book could come straight from Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (pp. 108, 122, and 162 offer examples). In his famous essay ‘How Is Christianity Thinkable Today?’, Michel de Certeau laid out a theory of tradition whose emphasis on the disruptive power of the Christ-event, and the precarious existence of Christian tradition between the Old Testament and its fulfilment in the New, bears similarities with Hart’s account.
The key insight of Hart’s book, however, is Heideggerian in structure. For the notion of a ‘retrieval’ (Wiederholung) of the tradition in light of its future possibilities is seminally articulated in Being and Time. Ironically, with his notion of the ‘temporalizing’ of authentic time from the future Heidegger himself merely secularized Christian eschatology while giving it a nihilistic bent—Heidegger’s ‘future’ no longer being the Kingdom but the facticity of death. These are points that Judith Wolfe has thrown into relief in her work on Heidegger’s eschatology. Contemporary theology has retrieved Heidegger’s analysis of the structure of authentic time and reappropriated it within an orthodox Christian context. Jean-Luc Marion’s early essay on the Eucharist (‘La splendeur de la contemplation eucharistique’) goes in this direction.
But Hart has not composed a scholarly treatise that aims to document its claims in meticulous footnotes or present its ideas as a creative synthesis of the work of others. Tradition and Apocalypse can stand on its own as a decisive contribution to the theory of Christian tradition.