MODERNISM

The word “modernism” is most often used as a covering term for the period of Western literary and artistic innovation that extends from the late nineteenth century until about the 1960s, although arguably it is a conceptually more complex and open-ended phenomenon - a type of historical disposition (which might condition philosophy or politics as well as art) characterized by a belief in the inevitable and even desirable obsolescence of human traditions, institutions, and conventions, and perhaps even the concept of the human itself. Nietzsche's name comes to mind. In fact as a concept “modernism” has seldom been adequately clarified. The International Review of Modernism urges the method of “thick description” as an approach to the subject because modernism is made of heterogeneous cultural practices invisible to views from above. As Fredric Jameson says, modernism is not so much a concept as it is a “narrative category” in which topics like nineteenth-century realism, self-reflexive language, and the impersonality of the artist get articulated and rearticulated in multifarious ways. It is certainly the case that modernism is defined more often by examples than by theories - serial music, nonlinear writings like Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, antiaesthetic objects like Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, as well as avantgarde groups like the Surrealists whose aim was often less to produce works of art than to develop new forms of experience and new dimensions of human subjectivity. In English the term “high modernism” is reserved for overshadowing monuments like Joyce's Ulysses and Pound's Cantos. I'm not sure there is a corresponding term among the French, who are apt to take their guidance less from Proust's Grand CEuvre than from the theater visionary Antonin Artaud, who thought that the task of the artist is not to produce masterpieces but to set in motion processes that dislocate rational, integrated, or otherwise settled forms of consciousness. On a certain view modernism is made of events, not of works. A museum of modern art might arguably count as a defeat of modernism.

AGAINST INTERPRETATION

For all of Foucault's reservations about modernity and authorship, his writings are typical of those of a modernist author in their demand for interpretation. Any writing, of course, requires some interpretation as part of our efforts to evaluate, refine, extend, or appreciate its achievement or to provide special background that readers outside the author's culture or historical period may require. But certain authors - in literature, the twentieth-century modernists are among the best examples - present themselves as so immediately and intrinsically “difficult” as to require special interpretative efforts even for those well equipped to understand them. The Wasteland, Cantos, and Finnegans Wake, for example, require explanation, even for culturally and historically attuned readers, in a way that Paradise Lost, the Essay on Man, and Emma do not. Philosophy, at least since Kant and Hegel, has also provided its share of “intrinsically obscure” writing. Although it may not be easy to formulate the precise difference, it is clear that Wittgenstein, the later Heidegger, and Derrida require a sort of interpretation that Russell, Dewey, and Quine do not.

Foucault’s penchant, particularly prior to Discipline and Punish, for the modernist obscure explains much of the demand for interpretations of his work. But the need to interpret Foucault sits ill with his desire to escape general interpretative categories. More important, as the enterprise of interpretation is usually understood, interpreting Foucault is guaranteed to distort his thought. Interpretation typically means finding a unifying schema through which we can make overall sense of an author’s works.

How fruitful is it to relate Foucault to Heidegger and Nietzsche? What can be learned about the genesis of Foucault's thought from such a comparison? How does it illuminate the nature and content of his thought? How does it expand our understanding of the phenomena that Foucault explores? Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow have shown us how much one can gain from reading Foucault and Heidegger together. Their book inspired Foucault to say to an interviewer, “Two of my friends in Berkeley wrote something about me and said that Heidegger was influential. Of course it was quite true, but no one in France has ever perceived it.” That does not mean, however, that Foucault should be read as a genuinely Heideggerian thinker, for one must also remember that he told the same interviewer that “Nietzsche was a revelation to me. . . I read him with great passion and broke with my life, left my job in the asylum, left France.” He never attributed an equally crucial role to Heidegger. In contrast to the thesis put forward by Dreyfus and Rabinow, I consider it, in fact, more fruitful to read Foucault in Nietzschean terms. One must remember what he said in his last interview in 1984:

I confess a deep reluctance to commenting on Foucault in light of his astute observation that commentaries only “say what has already been said and repeat tirelessly what was nevertheless never said.” How much truer this is when the commentator proposes to repeat an earlier commentary, as I propose to do here.

The vanity of my undertaking will, I hope, be offset by the modesty of my aim: to revisit the debate between Foucault and Habermas in order to dispel the notion that they are engaged in incompatible rather than complementary acts of social critique. Accepted wisdom has it that Foucault is an anti-humanist who rejects the emancipatory ideals of the Enlightenment. Habermas, by contrast, is portrayed as the arch defender of those ideals. Again, “common knowledge” holds that Foucault is a historical relativist with strong “anarchist” leanings, whereas Habermas is a “transcendental” philosopher in the Kantian vein engaged in rationally deducing universal and necessary norms.

In truth, both are humanists – despite their divergent takes on the philosophical coherence of humanism. Both readily accede to the value of such things as rights and democratic institutions in shaping and protecting modern critical aptitudes, and both accept the ambivalent nature of rights and democratic institutions in simultaneously constraining and enabling individual acts of non-conformism and resistance. Where they principally differ is on their choice of priorities: Foucault can be understood as a modern-day virtue ethicist fighting to liberate the capacity of individual self-choice and personal self-formation from oppressive conformism, whereas Habermas can be seen as a political theorist concerned with justifying and promoting a more just conception of democracy based upon an ethics of discourse.

FOUCAULT AMONG THE HISTORIANS. PART I

Michel Foucault's work always had an ambivalent relation to established academic disciplines, but almost all his books are at least superficially classifiable as histories. His first major work, in particular, seems to proclaim its status in the title: Histoire de la folie a` l'âge classique. One plausible way of trying to understand and evaluate this seminal book is by assessing its status as a work of history.

The reactions of professional historians to Histoire de la foile seem, at first reading, sharply polarized. There are many acknowledgments of its seminal role, beginning with Robert Mandrou's early review in Annales, characterizing it as a “beautiful book” that will be “of central importance for our understanding of the Classical period.” Twenty years later, Michael MacDonald confirmed Mandrou's prophecy: “Anyone who writes about the history of insanity in early modern Europe must travel in the spreading wake of Michel Foucault's famous book, Madness and Civilization.” Later endorsements have been even stronger. Jan Goldstein: “For both their empirical content and their powerful theoretical perspectives, the works of Michel Foucault occupy a special and central place in the historiography of psychiatry.” Roy Porter: “Time has proved Madness and Civilization far the most penetrating work ever written on the history of madness.”

Michel Foucault wrote extensively about historical reconfigurations of knowledge in what would now be called the human sciences. During the 1970s, however, he argued (most notably in Discipline and Punish [DP] and the first volume of The History of Sexuality [HS]) that these reorganizations of knowledge were also intertwined with new forms of power and domination. Foucault's works from this period have often yielded contradictory responses from readers. His detailed historical remarks on the emergence of disciplinary and regulatory biopower have been widely influential. Yet these detailed studies are connected to a more general conception of power, and of the epistemic and political positioning of the criticism of power, which many critics have found less satisfactory. Foucault's discussions of the relation between truth and power have similarly provoked concerns about their reflexive implications for his own analysis.

The principal purpose of this essay is to offer a sympathetic interpretation of the understanding of power and of knowledge that informs Foucault’s historical studies of prisons and of the construction of a scientific discourse about sexuality. Since Foucault discussed power in this period rather more thematically than he did knowledge, my discussion of knowledge will build extensively upon his remarks about power. The essay will proceed in three parts. First I will briefly recapitulate Foucault’s account of the interconnected emergence of new forms of power and knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Karl Rahner's accomplishment consisted in putting Catholic philosophy and theology on a transcendental footing. The undertaking spanned some fifty years, from his matriculation in philosophy at Freiburg University in 1934 to his death at Innsbruck in 1984. From beginning to end, the driving force behind the project was the seriousness with which Rahner regarded the transcendental turn in modern philosophy.

THE PROGRAM

Rahner’s program unfolded in two stages, the first philosophical and the second theological. (Only the former is the focus of this essay.) The first stage occupied him from 1934 to about 1941 and found expression in two works, Geist in Welt (1939) and Hürer des Wortes (1941). The first of those two texts marshaled central elements of the work of Kant, Rousselot, Mare´chal, and Heidegger for the goal of reformulating Thomism – its epistemology, philosophical anthropology, and metaphysics – as transcendental philosophy. In the second stage, which occupied him from the 1940s onward, Rahner used the transcendental Thomism of the first stage as the basis for rewriting Catholic doctrine as transcendental theology.

Speaking at a conference on December 7, 1968 on questions concerning the diaconate, Karl Rahner stressed that while the ministerial office (Amt) of the Church must always be affirmed as one, its division into different ministerial offices is much more flexible than has been imagined, particularly over the last few centuries. Less than eight years later, in July 1976, focusing on the theme of the spirituality of the priest today, he highlighted the extraordinarily complex historical dimension of ministerial office that was always a part of his theological reflection. And the following year, 1977, in an article that first appeared in the journal Stimmen der Zeit, he reiterated that the multiplicity of ministerial offices in the Church are fundamentally rooted and draw their meaning as part of the Church's one ministerial office.

The 1966 lecture and publication, The Meaning of Ecclesiastical Office, is essential for understanding how Rahner views church ministry or ministerial office (kirchliches Amt). He explicitly states in the preface to the 1967 publication, Knechte Christi. Meditationen zum Priestertum, which was translated into English in 1968 as Servants of the Lord, that this lecture must be used as a hermeneutical key to interpret the essays, written over a thirty-year period, that have been collected in Knechte Christi. Ministerial office itself, he argues, can only be understood within the context of the fact that God has united God’s own self in a direct way with humanity, and that this unity is necessarily historically manifested.

It may come as a surprise to include an article on Rahner's contribution to a theological aesthetics in this Companion. This theme in Rahner has hitherto received only little attention. However, it seems timely to consider this aspect of his writings here, as it will throw new light on Rahner's theology as such and demonstrate his continued relevance in theology and, in particular, in the current development of the dialogue between theology and the arts.

The quest for a theological aesthetics, including a theology of art, has become a significant theme in theology since the early 1980s. The numerous publications on theology and art, literature, music, and film, etc. and the setting up of whole programs and departments in theological faculties witness to this development. The overall aim in such endeavors is to investigate how the arts are sources of, and can play an active role in, theology. It is precisely such questions that Rahner addressed in his articles on the arts.

Rahner was in many ways a prophetic voice in twentieth century Christianity. His idea that the Christian of the future would need to be a mystic is reflected in today’s interest in diverse forms of spirituality, i.e., in the search for and reflection on religious experience in an age of pluralism. Rahner’s leitmotif is the God who reveals Godself in all realms of life, in human experience, as holy mystery, the God who communicates Godself through grace, yet who remains always wholly Other. Rahner saw the whole of human existence and of history as embraced by God’s transforming love and presence. In his many essays, meditations, and sermons he tried to bring across to the most diverse audiences, including those with serious doubts about Church and faith, this mystery of a loving God. In this context it does not surprise that he would engage with the question of the arts as sources of revelation and meaning and their role in theology.

'Christianity is first and last Christ himself. It is not, ultimately, a collection of doctrines and laws, dogmas and regulations, but a reality which is there, and which is present in our lives ever anew: Christ and his grace, the reality of God which, in Christ, becomes our own reality . . . For Christ is God's will for our salvation made historical, made flesh; God's personal, loving will does not encounter man in some unattainable, intangible 'inner realm'; since Christ, since the One who became man, all grace is Christ's grace with a body, grace dependent on the historical event that at one particular space-time point in our human history the Word became man and was crucified and rose again . . . If anything was not assumed, neither was it redeemed . . . But everything has been assumed, for Christ is true man, true son of Adam, truly lived a human life in all its breadth and height and depth . . . And hence everything, without confusion and without separation, is to enter into eternal life; there is to be not only a new heaven but a new earth. Nothing, unless it be eternally damned, can remain outside the blessing, the protection, the transfiguration of this divinization of the world which, beginning in Christ, aims at drawing everything that exists into the life of God himself, precisely in order that it may thus have eternal validity conferred upon it. This is the reality of Christ, with constitutes Christianity, the incarnate life of God in our place and our time. A reality to which belongs the word; a reality in which all human reality is called to God and blessed.'

In the above quotation Rahner answers the question regarding the meaning of Christianity with some key christological convictions that express the core of his faith. Christology for him is not simply one theme among others; rather, it constitutes the heart of his theology. Karl Rahner, S.J. saw himself as a socius Jesu, a “companion of Jesus ” - the poor and marginalized one - and as a member of his religious order, the Society of Jesus.

The following short essay will rehearse and critique one of the best-known Protestant engagements with Rahner: George Lindbeck's reading of Rahner in The Nature of Doctrine. This admittedly falls some way short of a comprehensive account of “twentieth century Protestant theology.” However, Lindbeck's criticisms of Rahner are probably the most important and most interesting, because of Lindbeck's influence upon Protestant theology, and because Lindbeck was an appreciative Protestant reader of Rahner.

Rahner has not been directly influential on Protestant theology, either dogmatic or philosophical, and in my judgment is unlikely to be in the future. This is not because Rahner is rejected in any emphatic way, or because his theology is deficient. It is for two reasons. One is that the problems Rahner tries to repair are often local problems: local to Roman Catholicism, and sometimes more specifically local to German Roman Catholicism. These local problems include, most obviously, questions of ecumenism (on the Catholic side) and questions of ecclesial authority. The second reason is that Rahner investigates the relationship between objective truth-claims and subjective experience, and the theories of truth with which he operates are no longer persuasive either to Catholics or Protestants. Whether one favours “linguistic” (Schleiermacher, Heidegger, Wittgenstein), or “pragmatic” (Peirce, Dewey, Rorty) tools, the theories of truth upon which Rahner depends fail to persuade contemporary theologians. Rahner is, like any theologian, a thinker of his age. Even Catholics who wish to learn from and use his theology will need to repair his philosophical apparatus.

Employing the riches of the Christian tradition, Karl Rahner developed a comprehensive theological vision that brought disparate doctrinal elements together as facets of a central mystery, the grace that is God's self-communication to the world. The heart of Rahner's theology is the divine self-gift evolving in history from creation to covenant to incarnation to vision and unfolding a “world of grace.” Rahner attempted to integrate the essentials of faith into a unified whole, drawing new life and unrealized meaning from the tradition. His vision toppled the neo-scholasticism that dominated Catholic theology since the mid nineteenth century and contributed to unleashing a Catholic theological renaissance. Rahner retrieved much that theology had come to overlook in its history of forgetting.

Influenced by Heidegger, Kant, and Maréchal, Rahner was rereading Scripture, the Fathers, and especially Aquinas, in light of the modern “turn to the subject.” In a radical inversion of Feuerbach, Rahner saw that if theology is anthropology, correlatively, anthropology is theology, since God’s incarnation forever united humanity and divinity.We cannot speak of God or humanity without at least implicitly speaking of both. The turn to the subject, then, is not inimical to Christian proclamation of human fulfillment as union with God. One finds in Christianity the fullest affirmation of the human as finite spirit open to holy mystery. In its thrusting toward this mystery the human person in freedom creates itself. Anthropology becomes the point of entry to the whole of theology. Theology will be taken seriously, Rahner thought, to the extent that it can show that humanity has to do with the question of transcendence.

TRANSLATORS’ INTRODUCTION

Shortly before his death in March 1984, Karl Rahner offered this brief retrospective on his life's work as a theologian in which he focused on four “experiences” which, as he approached the end of his life, he considered crucial to any form of theological reflection. With characteristic modesty he uses these experiences as a way of critically reviewing his own theological work. These experiences appear to us to be in order of priority for Rahner. Pride of place goes to what he calls the analogical nature of all theological assertions, since Rahner always favored an apophatic way of speaking about God. Yet this God does not remain distant but has communicated God's very self to humankind. This self-communication of God, an experience of grace, is the second experience discussed here and constitutes for Rahner the core of the Christian message. A third retrospective experience is that as a Jesuit his theology has some affinity with the spirituality of his religious order. At least, that was his hope – that he would be able to incorporate some of the “existentialism of Ignatius” into his own way of theologizing. A fourth and final experience is the “incongruence” of theology with the other sciences. Nevertheless, if theologians are not to preoccupy themselves with a purely abstract concept of God, they will see the various natural sciences and artistic expressions such as music, visual art, and poetry as revealing the hand of God.

Rahner's literary output was prodigious - even by 1974 it had reached almost 3,000 publications, including translations - and for the student approaching his work for the first time it can be a daunting task to know exactly where to begin. It is with this problem in mind that the following comments and selections have been made.

One danger for students approaching Rahner is that his often dense writing style will prove off-putting and result in a reliance solely on the extensive secondary literature. Such an approach, however, only leads to an impoverished understanding of Rahner. Moreover, it overlooks the fact that underlying themyriad of theological themes that he explores are a few basic convictions. Some of these are articulated in the last public address he gave prior to his death in March 1984, “Experiences of a Catholic Theologian,” included in this volume.

Rather than beginning there, an easier place to start is with a series of interviews he gave over a number of years (Karl Rahner in Dialogue: Conversations and Interviews 1965–1982, trans. and ed. H. Biallowons, H. D. Egan, S.J., and P. Imhof, S.J., New York: Crossroad, 1986). These interviews comprise an overview of many of the themes in Rahner’s theology in an engaging style. The passion and personality of Rahner come more to the fore than in his Theological Investigations. A further series of interviews towards the end of his life is contained in Faith in a Wintry Season: Interviews and Conversations with Karl Rahner in the Last Years of his Life, 1982–84 (trans. and ed. H. Biallowons, H. D. Egan, S.J., and Paul Imhof, S.J., New York: Crossroad, 1990).

For someone who never wrote a major treatise on the subject, Karl Rahner exercised a remarkable influence on the field of trinitarian theology. His main production was a chapter of eighty-five pages written in 1967 and titled “Der dreifaltige Gott als transzendenter Urgrund der Heilsgeschichte” (”The Threefold God as Transcendental Ground of Salvation History”)f or the second volume, Die Heilsgeschichte vor Christus (Salvation History Before Christ), of Mysterium Salutis: Grundriss heilsgeschichtlicher Dogmatik (Mystery of Salvation: Outline of a Dogmatic Theology Based on Salvation History). Two years later he wrote two substantial articles, “Trinität” and “Trinitätstheologie,” for the German original of the theological encyclopedia Sacramentum Mundi, the first being closely modelled on “Der dreifaltige Gott.” This (”Der dreifaltige Gott”) was published in English translation as a separate work (a book) titled The Trinity in 1970; and the English versions of the above-mentioned articles, “Trinity, Divine” and “Trinity in Theology,” appeared in volume vi of the English Sacramentum Mundi in 1970. In this chapter, the references will generally be supplied in the text so as to avoid overloading the footnotes. The majority of the references will be to The Trinity, whose title will be abbreviated to Trin. Of the two articles, only the first will be quoted. Finally, apart from the conclusion, the sections of this chapter will correspond in content and relative length to those of The Trinity.

The reputation of great figures is often eclipsed in the generation after their death, and there is no lack of commentators who regard Rahner's achievement as passé. At the end of this collection of essays on Karl Rahner, compiled in the year when he would have been 100 years old, an obvious question arises about the kind of significance Rahner's theology has for us now. Is Rahner's achievement now primarily a matter of cultural and intellectual history? Does it amount simply to a set of ideas highly influential on Roman Catholicism in the historically rather unusual situation of the 1960s? Are Rahner's lessons something we need to outgrow, whether in gratitude for what they have helped us to accomplish, or in repentance for the errors into which they once seduced us? Or do they still hold a message for the future? Is there still life in Rahnerian theology?

There is no doubt that Rahner’s work enabled official Catholicism rather belatedly to engage with modernity – a modernity of which it had been decidedly wary for four centuries, whether in its initial appearance as a Lutheran appeal to the individual conscience, or later in various forms of Enlightenment emancipation. For many thinkers both in Rahner’s own time and on the contemporary scene, there was something ignoble and mistaken about that engagement. Moreover, it appears ironical that Catholicism should have been trying to catch up with modernity just as the secular world was moving into something different, something so elusive that we can only call it “post-modernity.” It might easily appear that Rahner’s theology is at best an anachronism, and at worst a heretical muddle.