About ten years ago I found myself in China teaching a weeklong philosophy seminar on the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Present were forty or so young philosophers from premier Chinese universities. Also present, acting as observers in the back of the room, were members of the Chinese Communist Party. I taught in jacket and tie, but everyone knew that I and one other Dominican professor were priests. The students talked to us more openly at the meals, at crowded tables, where it was not easy to be overheard. Most were non-Christian, but almost all were studying Western philosophy. I will never forget asking one of them why he was present at the seminar, given that the philosopher we were studying was a medieval Western Christian thinker. He said, “Father, the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s severed contemporary Chinese culture from its historical past, its traditional ethical resources. Today we know that communism is a failed system, but what we don’t know is the meaning of life. We wonder whether it might have something to do with Christianity.” I found these words prophetic.
We, too, have been severed from our historical past. It’s all too common to think that nothing can exist beyond the secular order, which represents a kind of stasis, the endpoint of Western history. And this mentality is increasingly attended by discontent, a sense that things aren’t working. This Chinese student, however, emerging from the most intensive attempt in history to stamp out religious belief, was aware of a profound and genuine possibility, a condition of naivete, that of a person seeking meaning, open to a religious proposal. He was envisaging the possibility of a post-secular order and a new religiosity.
He was correct, not only about the spiritual conditions in China, but also about those in our own societies. We live amid global religious conflict, the threat of nuclear extermination, amazing scientific progress, and Western existential malaise. The meaning of life is indeed a twenty-first-century question.
Philosophy and the natural sciences can give us answers, but only to a point. A very good philosopher might provide sound arguments for the existence of God, but he cannot introduce us to God personally. Moreover, there is a nucleus of personality in us, characterized by intelligence and freedom, which demarcates the existence of a soul. But no one knows what happens to the soul after death. And neither philosophy, nor politics, nor technology can deliver us ultimately from the problem of evil, whether moral or physical. Religion and claims about revelation remain always relevant and unavoidable. Thus our challenge—and our opportunity. In our historical moment, Catholic theology should seek to explain the meaning of life in its ultimate registers: with reference to God and the Incarnation.
This task requires being forthright about revealed truth. Catholic theology is not only spiritual, inviting us to union with God by contemplation and love. It is also explanatory. Only because of the mystery of the Trinity and the Incarnation do we fully come to know ourselves and the created order, in a way that protects and elevates the natural goodness of creation and human culture. With the knowledge of the Trinity we know ourselves and our nature most fully. Without it, we become opaque to ourselves. The Trinity and the Incarnation provide us with an ultimate explanation of the world. Allow me to prosecute the argument.
The first aim of twenty-first-century Catholic theology must be to engage intellectually with the creed. We must talk about the intelligibility of the creed in the public square, for all comers. Ancient Christians argued from the first generations about the meaning of Christianity and how to interpret the Old and New Testaments. They resolved their disputes by formulating agreed-upon creeds. The Apostles’ Creed is one of the earliest, perhaps from Rome in the second century. In 325 came the Nicene Creed, which is still recited in the Catholic Mass. Creeds do not merely demarcate tribal affiliation, like a ceremonial tattoo. They articulate claims about reality. They offer first and final explanations. They point toward mysteries, true, but a mystery is not unintelligible. It is super-intelligible, matter for study throughout one’s whole life.
What is theology? Aquinas says it is a peering into God through the medium of the creed. The doctrines of the faith teach us to look into God, the Holy Trinity, and to see all things in light of God: the incarnation of God in our human nature, the life of grace, the mystery of the Church, the sacraments, and of course human nature, explained most fully in light of the Holy Trinity. Theology involves seeing all things together in the light of God’s self-revelation. It is a science, a body of knowledge concerned with explanation, because it explains how all things come from God and return to God and are best understood in light of God. Above all, it tells us how all things reveal to us who God is in himself. The central premise of Christianity is that God wishes to communicate to us a share in his own eternal life, in what he is in himself.
Consider the summit mystery, the Holy Trinity. There is in God, from all eternity, spiritual fatherhood. For God is the eternal origin of his Word, his Logos, the Wisdom of God through whom he has made all things. And God is the origin eternally of the Holy Spirit, the love who comes forth from the Father through his Logos, through whom God made all things.
On this view, all that is comes to be from a higher source of intelligence and goodness, uncreated reason and primordial love, giving us our very being as a gift. For this reason, the world that comes from God is intelligible, and we can make progress in understanding it. Reality reflects his uncreated wisdom. It is also fundamentally good. Despite the presence of evil in our common history, creation is subject to the God of love, the God of atonement and resurrection, the God of reconciliation and mercy. This vision of God allows us to understand ourselves in his image—as beings made for logos and for love, the charity that develops into friendship with God, sacrificial love for others, and communion of persons. On this view, our nature is not a random product of physical accidents and evolution, though we are indeed highly evolved animals. More fundamentally, we are spiritual animals with immaterial souls, persons made for freedom and for love of the truth. We are persons capable of God.
Twenty-first-century theology should have confidence. Christians have something unique to offer the world, because only we can announce the revealed truths that explain the world most profoundly. Point toward the mystery of Christ and you indicate the inner mystery of who God is, and what man truly is. The eclipse of Christ in the world brings with it the eclipse of God and the eclipse of man. As the contemporary West has discovered, a world without theology is a world that knows and accomplishes much. But it is a world in which humans no longer know where they originate from, what they should live for, or who and what they really are. Karl Barth kept a powerful image above his desk. It was a print of an early-sixteenth-century altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald. The altarpiece was originally installed in a monastic hospital. Christ is depicted as a pox victim, dying gruesomely on the Cross, against the backdrop of darkest night.
It has been called the most hope-filled picture in Western European history. Even in the worst moment of history—in the darkness of sin—we have put God to death in his human nature; God is bringing forth the greatest good, the merciful forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the dead. Standing next to Christ on the cross is John the Baptist. He points toward the Son of God, who has achieved sublime solidarity with us in death. The Baptist’s hand is extended, his finger enlarged. This figure, Barth tells us, is the theologian, the one who, despite his unworthy stature relative to Christ, looks, stands, and points, indicating the mystery that is the foundational ground of the world, the trinitarian love that has made all things and can remake all things, even amid the disorientation and sin of the human race.
Theology in the twenty-first century needs to contemplate and to point, to indicate God, and with resolve and joy seek to explain the world in light of God. Theology must be creedal.
This brings us to Catholic theology’s second aim: to be against and for elements of secular liberalism. To my mind, global liberalism is not dead and has not failed. It remains the intellectual lingua franca of our national and international life, whether we like it or not. It is a solvent on dogmatic forms of religious belief. For secular cosmopolitan liberalism (represented in its origins by Immanuel Kant and more recently by John Rawls), the Catholic religion is a source of political disorder, because it claims to know too much about God and requires too much of citizens of the regime, asking them to shape their lives in relation to dogmatic commitments. Secular liberalism insists that dogma ought not live so loudly within our lives. Civic polity and nonviolent coexistence cannot be built on dogmatic convictions—those of Catholicism, or those of any other religious – tradition—and those who hold dogmatic views are perforce dangerous people. The religious person is a threat to peace and cooperation, because his commitments to supernatural belief threaten the equilibrium of political coexistence and continually threaten violence and coercion.
The secular liberal vision of human nature is not, however, entirely free from theological influences, or from its own implicit doctrinal stances. It retains key aspects of the theological teaching that man is made in the image of God, but this truth is reconceived in reductive ways, for political purposes. Instead of being persons made in the image of the Holy Spirit, capable of agapic love, we are now beings of freedom, made to will and to strive for the fulfillment of our desires. Concord through political compromise becomes the highest expression of our moral union. Instead of communion, we seek constitutional constraints on exaggerated forms of individual liberty. Instead of seeking a common truth in logos, or reason, we construct our own truths. Rather than seek a common mind, we seek political concord through the mutual tolerance of one another’s freedoms. This concord entails suspending any aspiration to a common metaphysical conception of human nature, the cosmos, or the divine nature. Whereas our ancestors sought social unity on the basis of a shared understanding of the transcendentals—being, the one, truth, goodness, beauty—we are told to bracket such questions for the sake of cultural diversity. Belief in the Trinity, and in man made in the image of the triune God, remains as an optional private belief. But it cannot emerge in discussions and disputations as explanatory. It is a subjective viewpoint, a therapy for those who desire it, perhaps for those who delusionally think they need it.
What secular liberalism has lost, then, is an ultimate perspective. We no longer know that we were created by Truth itself to seek the truth about existence, to encounter God in human flesh, to discover God in his eternal life. And we forget that we were made by transcendent love to be free—free to love in and through all things, even to become heroically strong with love, to live the truth of divine love in our human lives.
These losses have been costly. A human freedom without transcendent love is a diminished freedom. A life of logos without contemplation of the transcendent God is a limited life, which may readily turn toward distractions of the senses, of pleasure, or of power and conquest, because it has found no rest in transcendence. Within the horizon of secular liberalism we find ourselves continually on the borderlands of spiritual despair, frustration, rivalry, and acedia. Against all this, Catholic theology should speak confidently about the Christian vocation to contemplate God and to love with heroic charity.
Not all that is affirmed in liberal culture is counterproductive or misguided. The night before he was named a cardinal, John Henry Newman delivered a speech in Rome. He declared:
For thirty, forty, fifty years I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of liberalism in religion. . . . It is an error overspreading, as a snare, the whole earth. . . . Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another, and this is the teaching which is gaining substance and force daily. It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion, as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of opinion. Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste. . . . It is as impertinent to think about a man’s religion as about his sources of income or his management of his family. Religion is in no sense the bond of society.
However, Newman was no enemy of democratic society or of liberal education. In fact, he wrote twin defenses of these ideas.
His Letter to the Duke of Norfolk is one of the great tractates in defense of the role of human conscience in modern democratic society. Written to contest Gladstone’s unhappy claim that British Catholics could not make good citizens, it bears strong likenesses to the teaching of Aquinas on the natural human right to religious freedom, which was restated forcefully at the Second Vatican Council. Likewise, The Idea of a University advocates for liberal education in the arts and sciences, against a servile and utilitarian notion of education. He defends the university’s pursuit of integral knowledge in each discipline in accord with its object, a pursuit unified by philosophy and with ultimate reference to theology.
Newman’s defense of freedom and reason reflects the main lines of the Catholic Church’s engagement with modern liberal critics. The Church has acknowledged the importance of certain modern achievements in human learning: the historical study of the Bible and its human authors in their original contexts; the discoveries of the modern sciences; the role of philosophical reason in mediating arguments about religious claims and ethical quandaries in society; and the place of freedom, tolerance, and civility in a pluralistic society. The Church has developed a modern form of natural ethics out of her ancient and medieval sources, and she has done so fruitfully. Whereas secular society has been riven by dangerous and stupefying ideologies in the past century, the Church has created a common language of natural rights, virtues, and principles of social thought, which are integrated with a rational understanding of the human person and a metaphysical view of nature that is open to philosophical reflection on the transcendent God. Theology in the twenty-first century should strive to maintain and advance this project. Our age is burdened by the diminished rationality of secular liberal culture and its libertarian view of freedom, which in practice is paradoxically weak and unambitious. We should propose a fuller, metaphysically informed approach in ways that are strategic, courageous, and charitable.
More important still, we must address the spiritual poverty of secular liberalism. The Church in the modern world has maintained the reality of the supernatural knowledge of God. Modern people really can discover who God is in himself. This knowledge is available only in light of divine revelation, most fully in the mystery of Christ, by his incarnation, life, death, and bodily resurrection. The Church can show to modern men and women that a higher mystical life exists—that of the saints. We can know supernatural truths with certitude and participate in them sacramentally and numinously by contact with the divine, in faith.
The culture of secular liberalism is not our only conversation partner, however. This fact brings me to the third claim: Theology in the twenty-first century must engage with the major non-Christian religious traditions. Two are of special importance: Hinduism and Islam. Today there are as many Muslims as there are Christians, and nearly as many Hindus; both populations are growing rapidly. Both Hinduism and Islam are culturally and historically vast, internally complex, pluralistic religious traditions. They also both make, in different ways, strong claims that pertain to the truth of Christianity.
The classical religious culture of India is not opposed to the notion of an incarnation of God in history. The central claim of Christianity, that God has become human, is in one sense uncontroversial within mainstream Vedantic Hindu traditions. The problem with Christianity rests rather in the belief that God became incarnate only once and in a place outside of India, with its Vedic traditions and divine-human avatars, which are meant to indicate and govern our relationship with God. In a word, the problem is the Christian scandal of particularity: the notion that God inaugurated his special presence to the world in the people of Israel and fulfilled the process by becoming human in Jesus Christ, a process that flowers in the sacramental life of the Catholic Church. Against this view, Hinduism holds that there are many incarnations and distinct forms of incarnation, and this multiplicity permits a plurality of legitimate religious traditions and rites, schools of thought, and religious disciplines.
Islam teaches almost the opposite, taking up stances on the Incarnation and the Trinity that are not entirely unlike those of secular liberal skeptics. The Qur’an states that the prophetic writings of ancient Israel and of the Church have been altered and contain serious errors. God is not a unity of three persons. There has been no incarnation. There was no atoning death and resurrection of Christ. The Jews are not the chosen people. Jesus was a prophet, in continuity with a line of prophets stemming from Ishmael, foreshadowing one to come after Jesus, to whom the Qur’an was confided. The true mediator between God and humanity is the text of the Qur’an itself. All other mediations are dissolved—Hindu, Jewish, Christian, or otherwise—and their seductive, misleading teachings are superseded. Coeternal with God and dictated to the human race, the Qur’an is the sole vehicle for knowing and serving God.
How twenty-first-century Catholic theology will and should engage with Hindus and Muslims is a largely unexplored question, but I will note three approaches. The first is anthropological. The Church should cultivate a culture of religious logos and agape. Our aim should be rational conversation, advocacy of religious freedom and truth-seeking, respect for life and civic laws, and communion in shared common goods. In this context, Catholic theologians must study Islam or Hindu culture, much as they would have studied Enlightenment or Marxist philosophy in another age. To talk to others, you have to know who they are and what they believe, and have a sophisticated respect for how they think and act.
Second, we should note that these non-Christian religions can contribute to the remediation of the errors and impoverishments of secular liberalism. Both Hinduism and Islam are marked by profound metaphysical teachings regarding the nature of God and the contemplative life. Both have their mystics, who seek union with God by love, as in the Sufi traditions of Islam or Advaita Vedanta in Hinduism. We can identify elements of logos and agape in Hinduism and Islam, and thus cultivate friendships on the basis of comparative theology.
Third, in our engagement, we should return to the idea of the incarnation in Christianity. In his Theological Investigations, Karl Rahner discusses the nature of revelation as an unveiling of who God is in the most perfect way possible. He argues that the very notion of revelation implies a mediation to us, by God himself, of God’s immanent presence in the world. This mediation fittingly occurs in that which is greatest in the visible order of nature: the human being. In other words, he who speaks of revelation speaks of intimate knowledge of God and the presence of God made possible by God himself, through his own initiative. But there is no more perfect way for God to do this, to teach us of himself inwardly or to be present to us in what he is, than for him to become what we are, to become human. Thus, the very logic of revelation implies incarnation. Our perfect knowledge of the inner life of God is made possible because God communicates to us who he is, in his eternal Logos, within our human nature.
On this understanding, we have something constructive to discuss with members of other religious traditions. The Hindu idea of a multiplicity of incarnations or avatars of the divine may seem generous and inclusive, since it allows for presences in many times and places, but it carries within itself the challenge and disharmony of incompatible messages. The incarnations or manifestations of God risk creating rival truths instead of confirming and fulfilling one another. One thus understands the advantage of the Islamic claim that God has ended the conversation by forsaking all incarnations. He has emphasized his unbroachable transcendence, and the inapproachable divine has given us a word of revelation proportionate to our finite nature, without the possibility of any access to God in himself. At this point, Catholicism can advance Rahner’s argument: that the unique and solitary incarnation of God in history reveals to us once and for all who God is, in his inner life as the Trinity, and it does so in the form of the God-man, Jesus, so that we truly come to know who God is in himself. It is a bold claim: God can and does make himself utterly present to us in all his transcendence, precisely in what we are, so that we can encounter the transcendent God precisely in what he is, the eternal communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God deploys his omnipotent goodness and mercy not to withhold himself in his transcendence, but to make himself accessible to us, even in the fragility of human infancy and crucifixion.
This brings me to my fourth aim: Defend the arts and humanities. The notion of the Incarnation clearly affirms that God can take on human flesh, which means that the human form of our nature can become resplendent with the glory of God. If we think about the pre-Christian art of Greek and Roman civilization, we observe that it celebrated the human form. But awareness of the human capacity to embody transcendence sometimes makes for tragedy rather than triumph. The Greek child who died at age twelve is depicted beautifully in stone, commemorated precisely as a being who cannot last, who will perish, but whose transitory form, in all its beauty and splendor, recalls to us an unknown first beauty, primeval and uncaused, for which our souls may long by nostalgia, or yearn for by spiritual eros.
Christianity assimilated but also radically transformed ancient culture’s remembrance of and yearning for transcendence. Because the Word has become flesh and dwelt among us, the human form of God brings something of the uncreated into the fabric of our finite human existence. Even in crucifixion we find God. Even human death may be iconic of divine life. These possibilities have ennobled human art. No one is more human than God, and no art is more human than Christian art—poetry, portrait, music, statuary, and architecture. What Michelangelo and others laid claim to was the bold idea that to depict the humanity of God is to depict what is greatest in human nature, creaturely beauty, and evoke the presence of God, in its perfect manifestation among us. Christian revelation inaugurates an aesthetic revolution: divine beauty in human form, and the human form alive forever in the resurrection.
Literature and the fine arts coincide with our deepest philosophical and theological commitments, though they indicate truths in a different manner. They give us material individuality, particular gestures, distinct acts of history, movements and decisions in time. The sonnet about one person’s love for another, the sound of a piano sonata, the painted image of a child, the crucifix of San Damiano: Great art manifests the particularity of what it means to be human, and it invites us to consider the universality of the human condition in the same particularity.
Ask yourself: How are the arts and humanities doing in elite schools today, apart from their original inspiration and matrix of development? Not so well. They are increasingly eclipsed by STEM and continually subjected to political instrumentalization. Our culture, obsessed with the expansion of free possibilities, is obsessed with the power of technology, but seldom has the patience for the skills needed to preserve the arts and the serious study of humane letters. Attention to technological stimulation consumes us, while attentiveness to the aesthetic and philosophical dimensions of human existence is increasingly difficult. Nevertheless, man is an artistic animal. Good art teaches us that the cosmos is our home and that it exists to be humanized, and that our embodied life in this world can be turned toward what is most ultimate, the beauty of God. True intelligence organizes the external world. Beauty, then, reveals the mind to itself. It reflects the elegance of ordering intelligence back to the perceiver, who in turn intuits the grandeur of our collective nature. The beautiful things built by our ancestors reveal to us still today that we have a spiritual vocation, that we have transcendent aspirations.
During the last two hundred years, the Catholic Church has fought a battle on the fields of truth and of goodness. She has made great advances on behalf of true philosophy, sacred theology, and a sound modern ethics. She has made less progress on the field of beauty, in the domains of the arts and humanities. But these domains are related to the liberal freedom that I am suggesting can be converted into a freedom for love and contemplation. True splendor teaches our hearts what they ought to love. We need a Catholicism that is elegant, and profoundly so. Catholic theology in the twenty-first century should seek to be beautiful. It must reflect on the monuments of beauty we have inherited, sacred and profane, and it must prophesy a beauty yet to come, created in the power of Christ and by the innovation of the human spirit.
I arrive at my final aim: Catholic theology must emphasize the sacramental order and the contemplative, mystical life of the Church. Human art has great nobility, but not all art is human in origin. There is also the divine art of God, given to us in the seven sacraments instituted by Christ: baptism, confirmation, holy orders, matrimony, penance, anointing of the sick, and above all the Eucharist. The sacraments are symbols that indicate the real presence of Christ and convey grace to us, as a way of living contact with him. When God gives everything to us in the Eucharist—Christ’s body, blood, soul, and divinity—we are invited to give everything to God, our whole person, body and soul. The Church thus manifests herself as the mystical body of Christ, living in Christ and with him.
God did not institute the sacraments on a whim. He instituted them because our nature has need of them. We are spiritual beings, yes, but spiritual animals, who live in our bodies and in our senses. We need to feel the presence of God as well as know it, and to express our response to God in ritualistic and habitual ways. The grace of the sacraments allows us to respond to God in stable practices that gradually perfect our interiority. The sacraments provide an embodied, enacted pathway to a spiritual interior life, and they do so in a way that depends primarily not upon us but upon God.
All the mystical reformers of the Church, from Benedict of Nursia to Francis of Assisi, from Bernard of Clairvaux to Teresa of Avila, have depended upon a sacramental life that was deeply eucharistic and aided by regular confession. Grace is interior, but it arrives from the outside, through the signs and words of Christ, which bind us to the Church and to one another.
Catholic theologians in the twentieth century were sometimes ambivalent about the sacramental system, fearing uniformity and concerned about the deadening effect of the external authority of the Church. Fear of exaggerated authority is understandable. But the sacramental economy of grace does not come from human beings. It comes from God, and it is necessary to the mystical life of the Church, the life embodied by the saints. Any theology that seeks a renewal of the life of the Church must aim at the mystical life of union with the Trinity and union with Christ crucified. That same aim must, for the very reason that it is centered on Christ, be undertaken in and through the sacramental life. Theologians must first live the sacramental life in its depths, if they wish to show the way toward that life to others. We cannot love what we do not see. For that reason, theology as an expository and explanatory discipline has an important role. It points toward the mystery of the presence of God, so that the desires of the heart may be rightly oriented, and so that God’s gift of himself may be manifest to our secular world, in the liturgical witness of the Catholic faithful. Theology in the twenty-first century, as in every century, must highlight the contemplative lives of the saints, and do so in the context of the eucharistic presence of God in our world.
Let me close with a story. I know a missionary to southern India who worked for years in a Catholic shelter for people dying of AIDS. Every day, his religious community would expose the Blessed Sacrament in a monstrance on the altar of their chapel, with its doors open toward the street, so that anyone passing by could see the Blessed Sacrament and come inside to pray. For many months he observed a young Hindu man, the victim of a serious stroke. He was homeless and partially paralyzed. He would come in each day to pray. He typically stood at the back of the Church, staring at the Eucharist on the altar. One day the priest asked him gently why he came and what he was seeking. The young man replied: “They tell me it is God, and I try to believe it.”
They tell me it is God, and I try to believe it. That is our task: to tell, to indicate, like John the Baptist in the portrait of Grünewald, pointing to the truth. “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” Our world is spiritually homeless and half paralyzed, but many hearts are full of desire to see. If we will but tell them where to find God present in our world, the third person of the Holy Trinity will do the rest. It is the Holy Spirit who is the true protagonist of good Catholic teaching, and his work is evident in history, in myriad voices. They sing in polyphony, like a choir of saints and Doctors of the Church. Twenty-first-century theology must hope and toil for the emergence of such living forms. Their unity comes from above, as observed by Teilhard de Chardin in the statement that inspired Flannery O’Connor: “At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.”
