"Spread Your Wings and Fly"

Henri de Lubac's Invitation

I wrote recently about the nature and purpose of speculative theology, noting that I find it liberating in my understanding of my work as a theologian. I note that this understanding of speculative theology depends, at least in part, upon an understanding that there are such things as definitive doctrines, taught authoritatively and irreversibly by the church, which are not optional matters of Christian belief. And I recognize that this commitment can seem, well, doctrinaire and restrictive.

While I can’t eliminate all of the scandal that comes with my assumption that there are certain things that Christians simply must believe, I also note that there are better and worse ways of construing this. The better ways avoid authoritarianism, though they cannot dispense with any notion of authority. (At some future time, I might reflect a bit more explicitly on “The Dialectic of Authority,” an essay by Bernard Lonergan that’s a favorite in one of my circles of friends.) The late Richard Gaillardetz has written very helpfully about the nature of the church’s magisterium, the ways in which the church teaches, and the different responses appropriate to those different manners of teaching. And I commend his work to those who would like a more detailed and nuanced treatment of the issues, but that’s not what I’m going to do here.

Instead, I want to share a passage from one of Henri de Lubac’s personal writings

that I came across while researching my book on his theology, and which I found captures my own sense of the matter. Writing amid the first year of his theologate, de Lubac observes:

I have this beneficial impression that there aren’t so many things condemned as one sometimes says, and that in any case, they are altogether things and ideas that wouldn’t tempt us. Thought moves well across theology, which opens to it vast horizons, it can even without danger abandon itself to a certain boldness, provided that in all its undertaking, it respects certain sure norms, of which I would like enumerate the principal ones below: jealous concern to safeguard the double divine independence, in the double work of creation and of supernatural elevation; hence, no explanation of the Trinity as a function of the world, and in speculations on the incarnation never to consider it primarily as an ascent of humanity towards God, but as a descent of God towards humanity; in short, maintaining an absolute religious feeling, without suffering anything that risks its deviation, against all pride and naturalism; translation of this feeling by a filial love towards God the Father, a true friendship with our Savior, a habitual serenity of thought and a joy of being a child of the church which are one mark of trust in the Holy Spirit. With that, and on the condition that one not forget one’s condition as a sinner, I believe one can, without, further embarrassment, spread one’s wings. (Recorded in volume 2 of Georges Chantraine’s biography of de Lubac, pp. 539–40. My translation).

I love that entire quote, but find especially striking the observation that there are actually fewer restrictions than we tend to assume, and that the pathways they foreclose are not especially attractive anyway.

While there are some self-styled cool kids out there who think that heterodoxy is somehow edgy or avant-garde, in reality, most heresy is banal, so bland that it could hardly capture the imagination. By facile resolutions of aporiae, heresy alleviates the creative tensions with which orthodoxy operates. It might feel fun to be transgressive, but that’s about it. There’s not much else to galvanize the intellect.

And so, when we find the idea of definitive doctrine (or even, *gasp* dogma) stifling, I think we owe it to ourselves to ask exactly what doctrines we find so restrictive. I suspect that most of the time, these restrictions stem either from umbrage at the idea of doctrine without considering what those doctrines actually are, or from an encroachment of non-doctrinal positions into properly doctrinal territory. In other words, the masquerading of mere theology as doctrine. (Here, once again, we find the utility of distinguishing doctrine and speculative theology, because speculative positions simply cannot function that way.) And in such cases, we ought to vigorously protest such encroachments. In a subsequent post, I’ll address the ways in which those encroachments cheapen orthodoxy.

A healthy doctrinal minimalism, which does not soft-pedal anything that actually is doctrine, while also recognizing that quite a bit of what the church teaches is not doctrine per se, provides just what we need for a renewed theological creativity.