I am very grateful to the author and to Syndicate for the opportunity to enjoy this enjoyable and creative work, which though innovative, remains nonetheless thoroughly “traditional,” in the sense of the word “tradition” that the author shares with Maurice Blondel, her textual interlocuter with whom I am most familiar. Tradition, in this view, is not simply a retrograde force, a “ball and chain” that puts the brakes on progress, but a living reality, as much concerned with the future as the past. In looking backward to our theological inheritance from Catholic thinkers on Tradition, and in confronting them with questions of race and colonialism that they did not, for the most part, envisage in their lifetimes, this book is, therefore, authentically “traditional,” in taking direction from the past while straining forwards towards a not yet realized future.

Since this is not a book review, but a chance to delve more deeply into the theological framework promoted in this work, I would like to identify two quite specific areas for clarification and further elaboration. These are: (a) how the proposed approach ensures the necessary heterogeneity of Christian “Tradition” as Revelation and so under supernatural guidance, from the broader and more secular sense of “tradition,” which includes the “dead actions” of Christians as sinners embroiled in a fallen world; (b) while the book appropriates Blondel’s critique of those who would reduce supernatural religion to purely political realities (his adversaries that he termed “monophorists”), ending up in political religion rather than in a politics informed by supernatural religion, I would invite further precision as to how the author’s own methodology escapes Blondel’s prescient critique.

“Tradition” in Blondel

The authentically Catholic understanding of sacred “Tradition” is clear from dogmatic texts, e.g. Dei Verbum § 9-10: “Sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture form one sacred deposit of the word of God, committed to the Church.” Tradition, in this precise sense, therefore, is a source of divine Revelation, and one of the ways in which the supernatural gift descends into the concrete particularities of the human condition. Crucially, it manifests a divine intention like the other signs of Revelation, including Scripture. It is, therefore, necessarily heterogeneous from the understanding of “tradition” as giving rise to social cohesion, or to political and national cultures, even if in concrete actuality both “Tradition” and “tradition” are manifest through the medium of historical human action.

The author, of course, affirms the doctrine of (sacred) Tradition.1 Yet, the discursive methodology pursued in this book often seems at odds with it. Quite a few statements in the text present themselves as performative contradictions since they appear to sideline the notion of sacred Tradition as irrelevant, or even declare it to be non-existent. 

The reason is partly the author’s wholesale appropriation of Jennings’ critique of Christian tradition, which, unchecked, ends up in the theological “surd” of imputing the sins of historical Christians to Christian Revelation in itself:

Jennings implicates Christianity and Christian theology in the actions of race and racism. For him, Christian theology and its educational institutions emphasize white, male possession of knowledge as its central arc. This is a reiteration of a familiar theme, one where Christianity and whiteness are rendered identical to each other. Herein is Christianity’s sin and responsibility for Jennings, a situation that is not only ideological but also practical.2

This conflation of sacred and sinful realities, divinely guaranteed Tradition with historical human action, comes to the fore in the following passage:

It is possible, for example, (like Jennings) to speak of a deformation of Christian action as non-Christic while nevertheless calling that action, concretely, Christian, since it is the action of Christians. Catholics might want to supply here a distinction between “Tradition” and “traditions,” or between “sacred tradition” and “tradition,” but the point is that both would persist together because both are Christian action, and so there is no getting around having to discern that action’s reason. At the level of facts, all we will “see” is Christians acting (whether unto grandeur or misère).3

At times, the author appears to reject out of hand the very possibility of a sacred and supernaturally revealing Tradition:

One temptation, when trying to wrest tradition from the perspicacity of Jennings’ concerns, is to imagine a pure silver vein hidden in stone: a pure set of ideas, or actions, or writings, that escape accusation (in their meaning, or intention, or status). But this is to imagine a soul without a body. It is to say, if I recall Blondel, that the truth is not related to the facts (of history) (112).

This reference points to Blondel’s rejection of “historicism,” the equation of history with mere facts. It is not obvious to me, however, that the author’s own methodology escapes the same error, by equating Christian tradition with the acts of Christians: “I want to emphasize that tradition, in a Blondelian mode, is what Christians do.”4 

But no, this is not what tradition is, in Blondel’s view. It is not what we “see” already-out-there in the ambiguous historical acts of Christians, as latter-day spectators viewing from some imagined vantage point. That would be a form of what Blondel terms the “historicist” error, equating historical truth with facts, but what is worse, mingling sin with Revelation. Tradition, rather, is more akin to the living, synthesizing, subjectivity of the Church as mystical Body of Christ, as both revealed and revealing:

Something in the Church escapes scientific examination and it is the Church which, without rejecting or neglecting the contributions of exegesis and of history, nevertheless controls them, because in the very tradition which constitutes her, she possesses another means of knowing her author, of participating in his life, of linking facts to dogma, and of justifying both the capital and the interest of her teaching.5

Blondel maintains that two corollaries follow from his analysis of Tradition. Neither, however, seem reconcilable with the methodology adopted in this book.

First, the Church is her own proof, index sui est: “for it supplies the verification of what it believes and teaches in its age-old experience and its continuous practice … it has within it a power of self-justification which is independent of historical proofs or moral probabilities.”6 While Christians commit sin, their concupiscence and actual sins do not in any way eliminate the possibility of a sacred Tradition operating in the Church under divine guaranty.

Second, dogma is the fruit of Tradition, not the other way round. There is no path from positive historical facts to dogma without passing through Tradition, in direct contradiction to “historicism”. Not even the most exact analysis of texts or historical facts can lead through intellectual effort alone directly to dogma. Rather, “… the active principle of the synthesis lies neither in the facts alone, nor in the ideas alone, but in the Tradition which embraces within it the facts of history, the effort of reason and the accumulated experiences of the faithful.”7  

The sacred Tradition which gave birth to the Chalcedonian dogmatic definitions, to take one example, operated in a complex of historical human action, the acts of sinners, let us be clear about it, but that Tradition simply cannot be “equated” with historical human acts without: (i) falling into the historicist error and (ii) mixing sin with the supernatural gift of Revelation, the principle of which is Tradition rooted in Christian praxis. 

While the author contends that “ … a Blondelian frame stresses tradition as ‘consciousness of Jesus’s consciousness,’” (75) an insufficiently critical adoption of Jennings leads to an understanding of tradition which is foreign to Blondel, and which either sidelines or repudiates the very idea of a sacred Tradition.

Blondel’s Critique of Intégrisme

One of the most remarkable observations that Blondel himself made about the French intégristes, or “monophorists,” is that they end up acting as if all questions must be resolved through external and purely political power struggles, without reference to the supernatural order at all as it affects the human person in her intimacy: “Whatever they propose to do externally is totally divorced from anything internal or spiritual, indifferent or hostile to everything that is subjective interiority and personal spontaneity.”8

Blanchette, following Blondel, outlines the origins of this in the extrinsicist view of the relation between nature and grace in the human person. Grace is not seen as perfecting nature, as Aquinas would have it, but as imperiously imposing itself from outside for acceptance, unidirectionally, as it were. The natural then has nothing to do with grace as super-natural. Rather the supernatural order is nothing more than accidental and imposed on human knowledge for acceptance. 

When it comes to the question how the supernatural acts on the lower, natural order, the monophorist can only say “by command.” This utter lack of appreciation for the active nature of the “obediential potency” of the human person (Blondel’s “double afference”) is the root cause why monophorists were willing to back authoritarian movements such as Action Française despite its anti-Christian ideology, ending up in the unhappy state of reducing religion to merely political realities:

Such over-simplification, or all-too-human simplification of the relation between supernatural and the natural, or between the divine and the human, has always led to disasters in the history of the Church the confiscation of civil liberties or the mobilization of all forces in a society for purely “religious” motives, the organization, not only of a politics that is exclusively “religious,” but also of a “religion” that is purely political …9

A believer then becomes nothing but a citizen making common cause with dubious political allies, who share some brutal conception of authority, and “under the pretext of thinking about religion, is involved only in doing politics, under the august mantle of Christ.”10 One can easily transpose Blondel’s far-seeing critique into our own times—to the rise in populist regimes backed by religiously concerned constituencies.

The conceit of the present work, however, is to confront theologians from the tradition with the histories of race and colonialism. My reserve is that this critique makes appeal almost exclusively to political and secular categories, to merely human action and striving without giving attention to the supernatural gift as real. That is, Jennings (à la Carpenter) seems to keep political, human action strictly separate from grace, in an implicit and pernicious extrinsicism.

Now extrinsicism and authoritarianism go hand in hand, as we saw. Is it any surprise, then, that just as the French intégriste monophorists appeal to crushing authority and obedience in the reception of the supernatural gift, the critique of Christian tradition represented here smacks of a comparable authoritarianism, peppered with dogmatic assertions that the reader is simply asked to swallow? Are we given permission to question unnuanced theological declarations such as the following, or are they imposed imperiously with an authority that cannot be queried? 

Theology constricts Christianity to the European body, which by identifying the gospel and Europe (European culture and bodies), succeeds in supplanting the gospel with European “civilization.” For Jennings, such deformation occurs according to the energies of a much older problem, that of supercessionism: the replacement of Israel with the church (theologically, but also concretely in anti-Semitism) (108).

It seems that an authoritarianism prevails from which the reader dare not subtract herself. 

Consequently, this methodology risks replicating the “monophorist” errors of the French intégristes, despite the author’s best intentions: (i) reducing supernatural religion to political categories that ignore grace as real; (ii) adopting an implicit extrinsicism of nature and grace, accompanied by (iii) an authoritarianism that brooks no dissent.

Finally, intégrisme is associated with an implicit nationalism, as if the role of France were solely to teach and not learn from the rest of the world. Notably, while the methodology of this work deals in universals, the critical voices it amplifies are American, a shortening of horizons that is perhaps hard to avoid in a globally dominant nation, such as nineteenth-century France, or the contemporary United States, even more so when religion is reduced to political categories.

Anne Carpenter’s most fundamental contribution in Nothing Gained is Eternal is her analysis of Christian tradition as a problem. She treats Christian tradition with the care that a real problem demands, articulating how to live with the problem rather than solving it. Carpenter describes the problem’s conditions, lets go of ways the problem has been represented, and in this letting-go connects to what is fundamental in Christian tradition.

Carpenter avoids the simplistic position, found in so many treatments of the relationship between Christianity and colonialism, that sin and infidelity to the “real” Christian tradition is the problem. In other words, she doesn’t reduce the problem only to one of pseudo-theology or infidelity to a tradition. Rather, she sees Christian tradition as mediating “action and the history it effectuates” (37). That is, tradition bridges “the ‘gap’ between the truths of belief and the facts of history” (58). Tradition is thus a life (60). It is a creative act of “beginning-again” that reaches “more deeply into the resources of … the humanity that acts” (91). 

This reaching “more deeply” into our shared humanity is the ressourcement tradition that Carpenter brings forward in the book. She contributes to a less triumphal (and more interesting!) notion of ressourcement by emphasizing, via Balthasar, Jesus’ obedience that takes the form of kenosis. Christian tradition “repeats,” in ever new ways, the Christic act. That is, Christian action is “patterned after the creative, kenotic attitude of Christ” (149). 

Understanding tradition as a “beginning-again” rather than a form of representation persuades me on the most fundamental level. I want to use the perspective Carpenter offers to constructively think about tradition, with a different emphasis than Carpenter uses in the book–namely, the Kingdom of God. Making the Kingdom of God central poses the problem differently. One way into this concern is to ask what Jesus empties himself for. To what is Jesus obedient? And relatedly, what is the heuristic for beginning-again? That is, how do we repeat the Christic act? 

Liberation theologians like Jon Sobrino argue that Jesus’ creative and kenotic attitude is relative to the Kingdom of God. Powerlessness exists in relation to something—namely, a political or historical project—not as such. 

Sobrino sees the historical Jesus as a “safeguard” for Christ, returning to the early Christian problem of affirming Jesus’ humanity (39). Because of this commitment, Sobrino argues for the central position of the Kingdom of God in Christology. As a “final,” or “ultimate and eschatological,” reality for Jesus, the Kingdom of God structures the particular way divine love is incarnate. Sobrino sees this particularity to operate in opposition to modern European Christologies, which have tended to neglect both the historical Jesus and (therefore) the Kingdom of God (115). When accounting for this particularity of Jesus’ commitment to the Kingdom, Sobrino emphasizes the at-times violent nature of the Kingdom: 

[END]The Kingdom stands in combative relation to the anti-Kingdom. They are not merely mutually exclusive, but fight against one another, and this is massively evidenced in Latin America: the Kingdom is not being built from a tabula rasa, but in opposition to the anti-Kingdom, and the present persecution of those who are mediating the coming of the Kingdom is effective proof of this.1[/END] 

While this violence isn’t necessary on a metaphysical level, it is on a historical level. M. Shawn Copeland gestures at this combative relation, though in a far less direct way than Sobrino, by describing Jesus as preaching the reign of God as an alternative to the Roman empire: “he contrasted the future of bodies in God with the future of bodies in empire.”2 

This raises a question I had while reading regarding the problem of violence. Carpenter poses the problem as follows, with particular attention to the notion of race in the modern/colonial world: “This love [founded on the triune God and God’s love for the world] would be a struggle against the powers of iniquity and a struggle … for justice …. This love would suffer from dramatic heightening, as its increasing revelation provoked further resistance. Exposing race for its lie and struggling against it bears the marks of cruciformity, because it will be resisted” (161–62). The “because” here indicates the historical necessity of struggle in the particular context of colonial modernity when love is concretized—and here Sobrino might add, in a way that repeats Jesus’ commitment to the Kingdom of love of the God of the Kingdom. Carpenter recognizes this insight in Baldwin’s work moves, perhaps, toward something we might call violence, but also notes a difference from Baldwin. Siding with Balthasar, she writes, “though theo-dramatic reversal has something of Baldwin’s loving stripping away of masks, it is also differently ordered around love as ‘violence’” (162). 

If tradition mediates action and the history it effectuates, Carpenter is right not to avoid the historical sort of violence that Baldwin recognizes—as tragic as such violence is. Baldwin holds the problem of violence open, yet also—I think—takes a similar approach as Sobrino. For Baldwin, the present world-system structured by racism, various hierarchies, and a capitalist mode of production is profoundly opposed to love. If one has faith in love, as Baldwin invariably does, this love cannot but be enacted historically in opposition to—and with violence toward—the present world-system. Baldwin discusses, mourns, and accepts the inevitability of a violent quality of love in the present world violence without advocating it. He perhaps sums up his relation to the difficulty of this problem by admitting, “I do not carry a gun and do not consider myself to be a violent man: but my life has more than once depended on the gun in a brother’s holster” (472). 

I don’t know how to respond to this problem, beyond the sense that Baldwin is right that we can’t pass over the problem too easily. If we take love—or, for that matter, the Kingdom of God—seriously, there is a creeping sense that we might also be committed to what Fanon described as “the end of the world.” This is a historical struggle that, at least it seems to me, is violent. 

A second and related question concerns how the central position of the Kingdom of God for Jesus shapes the problem of Christian tradition. Orlando Espín offers a theology of tradition that is similar to Carpenter’s. He sees tradition to be in, in the first place, action and living rather than an articulation of that action and living. This leads Espín, like Carpenter, to prioritize faithfulness to history. But Espín ultimately moves in a different direction because of his emphasis on Jesus’ emphasis on the Kingdom. Espín’s faithfulness to history and tradition is “faithfulness to the meanings and hope constructed by their victims.”3 He thus focuses more on Jesus’ claim of the Kingdom within the anti-kingdom than, at least in the first place, his cruciformity: 

[END]Revelation’s contents…are not doctrines but the extraordinarily scandalous and dangerous (yet somehow reasonable) subversive hope that a Galilean peasant was right when he announced that God had begun to transform this world of asymmetric power and inhuman dominance into a radically new world (a “new creation”) where justice, equality, inclusion, and especially compassion would reign.4[/END]

Tradition includes the clarification and expression of this revelation. But this clarification—and here is again a crucial insight from Baldwin—takes the form of contesting the modern world-system in the form of a political and historical project. The Christian hope is that the transformation of the world Jesus announced, which includes a material transformation that is political and economic, is true. This hope leads to a praxis, a historical project, which is a “traditioning of Jesus’ subversive hope.”5 Tradition and the Kingdom of God must always go together: “Traditioning is about the hope and the faith and, consequently, about the Reign of God and the God of the Reign. It is also, inescapably, about that Galilean Jewish peasant who announced the dawn of the Reign.”6

Carpenter’s heuristic is crucial to living with the problem of tradition vis-à-vis the central position of the Kingdom of God. She also offers a direct way of posing the problem with her understanding of the option for the poor: “a turn to the oppressed not only mimics the gospel but also is a corrective to concrete historical circumstances, where the oppressed are precisely those who receive no attention in their fully human action and meaning in history” (33). But I also think we need the historical specificity, which includes a political-economic specificity, of the Kingdom of God as a central component of the problem of tradition. The focus in Nothing Gained is Eternal is on love as kenotic, vulnerable, and cruciform. I would slightly shift the emphasis: love is kenotic, vulnerable, and cruciform only as a result of being oriented toward the Kingdom while in the historical situation of the anti-kingdom. If tradition is “consciousness of Jesus’ consciousness,” as Carpenter puts it following Blondel (59), then the Kingdom cannot but be the final and eschatological reality that orients tradition. 

A final question has to do with what I take to be a possibility within the way that Carpenter poses the problem of tradition. Carpenter uses the specific problem of racism, and the notion of “race” it produces, to frame her entry into the problem of Christian tradition. Using Carpenter’s metaphysic of tradition, how do we best historicize a response to racism? I understand Carpenter’s theology of tradition to be materialist in the sense that Denys Turner describes Thomas to be a materialist. From Thomas’s perspective, today’s materialists and his Augustinian contemporaries both perceive matter as lacking meaning. The former sees meaning to exist in discourse about matter or life in relation to matter, while the latter sees something else (i.e., the “soul”) to exist, beyond matter, as meaningful. Thomas, by contrast, sees matter to bear meaning or form—that is, meaning comes from matter. Consistent with Thomas’s materialism, Carpenter sees Christian tradition as “a body of action” in the material world (175). She understands human beings in their material situation, as perpetually becoming (see 179–80). To return to my fundamental agreement with Carpenter’s posing of the problem of tradition, this way of understanding Christian tradition opens up a way of responding to racism. Through a creative resourcing, Carpenter offers a way to reject meanings imposed from beyond matter and rather restore the solidarity of human nature (see 33). In other words, I think Carpenter’s metaphysic of tradition successfully offers a possibility to respond to the specific problem that frames her presentation of the problem of Christian tradition. It is, I think, up to use to use this metaphysic in creative and historically particular ways. 

I share with Anne Carpenter an appreciation for Willie James Jennings’ excellent work illuminating Christianity’s contribution to colonialism and of the racialized scale by which we see and measure people. For me, reading Jennings’ The Christian Imagination was a turning point in my way of seeing. Jennings allows me to account for the theological production of race and racism. The book goes beyond talking about the way Christians supported and enacted colonial expansion, and shows the way that Christian patterns of thought gave rise to and infused meaning into “races” which, in turn, are constitutive of colonialism. Most significantly, Jennings helps me apprehend race as an ongoing theological problem. But the place where I find myself stuck, and what I’ve been turning over and around for many years now, is my own whiteness as itself a theological problem. The problem is a problem because it’s something all white people live and so it’s—regrettably—inescapable. Here I find a generative point of contact with Anne’s book.

Anne writes that she wants to develop a metaphysics of tradition, meaning that she wants to explore the “being of tradition” (xv). As easy as it might be to dismiss metaphysics as abstract, irrelevant, and hubristic—for who can capture or account for all that is?—Anne deftly appeals to a way of approaching being that is concrete and grounded, and not intended to be comprehensive of being (9). Late nineteenth- and mid-twentieth-century Thomists are her guides. With Bernard Lonergan and Maurice Blondel, Anne affirms that humans are only historical. The phrase “only historical” should be qualified and clarified. We’re only historical in the sense that we find ourselves fully enmeshed in time and place. At the same time, we’re not only historical in a materialistic or reductionistic sense. To the contrary! She appeals on this point to her Thomist guides to theorize the “supernatural density” of reality and history.

  In a sense, Lonergan and Blondel take a basic (Thomist) conviction that nature and grace operate together and add to it theoretical depth and complexity. Reality, for Blondel, is two realities, natural and supernatural. The horizons are “disproportionate” to each other and cannot be confused, and yet there is a kind of union between them. The supernatural realm always operates on the natural realm, even while remaining at the same time beyond it (53). Lonergan considers the same dynamic at the level of human action. Human actions occur in time and place—and so are natural. They are also enabled by a realm beyond the natural order. Additionally, our actions have a greater set of effects than what is immediately or readily apparent. “Premotion” is Lonergan’s term for capturing the idea that human action is situated between both past and future, and involves forces beyond ourselves. As Anne explains of Lonergan, premotion describes how we both respond to the circumstances given to us, and effect—indeed create—the future out of those conditions. We are “instruments” for Lonergan, capable of producing either more or less sin (12).

Anne thus uses Lonergan and Blondel to make the case that we never belong entirely to ourselves. This is a theological claim—a theological interpretation of the universe, reality, and human action, and gets to a basic tension that Anne works out in her project, that of freedom and constraint. To my mind, it forms a nice parallel with another discourse that I’ve found helpful—and provocative—for thinking about reality and being human, developed by philosophers who adopt and adapt John Dewey’s theory of habit to explain race. Feminist philosopher Shannon Sullivan uses Dewey’s biologically-inflected category habit to explain the relationship among morphological features of human body, social interaction, and “race” as a functioning and enduring feature of our world. 

To be white, in Sullivan’s framework, is to “body as white.” I’ll use myself as an example here. As a white person, I have a habit of bodying as white. This habit of bodying comes about through my transactions with the world. The world (more specifically, my social environment) responds to me as though I am white (this is one component of the transaction) and I respond back to the world by subtly communicating and conveying “I am white” (this is the other component of the transaction). I generate a feedback loop with my surrounding environment, and “deepen the grooves” of my habits of whiteness.1 

Because I’ve been talking in theoretical terms, it’ll probably be helpful to pivot to an actual example of what Sullivan has in mind. I recently listened to a roundtable discussion on a local radio show about black women in higher education. Higher education is my primary professional environment. I know these places well, and so the conversation stood out as especially relevant. The black women on the show reported a different set of feelings from my own. They described a lurking sense of not belonging, an intuition of being in the “wrong” place. I don’t share these feelings (or at least not due to my habit of bodying as white). In my experience, my white skin is “normal” and expected. I don’t tense up when I walk into a classroom at my university, for example. I feel relaxed at academic conferences, where the majority of folk share my habit of bodying. Listening to the women on the show—and thinking about my own experience—I was reminded of Sullivan’s argument that core to whiteness is the freedom to transact, to move throughout places and spaces, to expand and extend into them uninhibited. She refers to this uninhibited, free movement—acted out by white people like myself—as the ontological expansiveness of whiteness.2  

I, as an individual subject in history, am situated at the meeting point of or between two horizons. I am not entirely up to myself. There is meaning to me—a meaning, a density—that is more than the collection of my body parts, and what I think that I am. I am between what is “behind” me (for Lonergan, the past; for Sullivan, the morphological features of my body that are perceived and interpreted by figures in my environment) and what is “ahead” of me (for Lonergan, the future, which may be either more or less sinful; for Sullivan, the grooves of the habits of whiteness, which I either deepen or try to retread in another direction). My freedom is already significantly constrained. 

Anne appreciates the complexity of the position, though the exigence with which she’s concerned is the colonial sins of the Christianity traditions: “There is a real helplessness here, both in its concreteness (with no other situation to be in but the one we are in) and in its freedom (since to be different will require more than knowing, it requires doing). The situation is compounded when we realize how history and freedom condition one another, constraining possibility according to the reality of what has to be done” (74). What I think Anne means by “what has to be done” is the work of decolonializing a colonial world, which drives to the heart of her project. If there is one theme that Anne strikes forcefully and repeatedly in this book, its Péguy’s admonition that remaining as we are is condemnation, while changing offers redemption (76, 88, 103). 

But let me return to Sullivan and the habits of whiteness. “Social construction” is another, more familiar angle to go at the matter of whiteness: I am socially constructed as white. What Sullivan’s framework offers, in my view, is a finer-grained explanation of the mechanics of “social construction” (i.e., habit and the feedback loop between habits and environment) as well as a real appreciation for how deeply involved physical reality is in a racial category like “white.” Whiteness persists not just because white people (or others) have nascently agreed on its particular construction, but because it is entangled in materiality and embedded in environment. (To be clear, I’m not defending the objective aspects of whiteness, but pointing out that whiteness—like all racialized identities—have features that have become objective via these entanglements.) 

In Sullivan’s frame, we can think of European colonialism as a macro-scale, global-level exemplification of the “free license” that is core to whiteness. Feedback loops operate here in a couple ways. There’s the feedback loop between person and environment (i.e., I am received as white, I am given license to move freely about; I move freely about, I convey back to my environment that I am white), and another feedback loop between people who body as white and whiteness wholesale (habits of free movement across generations and through time solidify whiteness as ontologically expansive). Thus, when I body as white I also solidify—set, fix, deepen, shore up—whiteness itself.3

With Sullivan’s analysis in view, I think, the stakes of decolonializing a colonial world—of not remaining as we are—are raised (as if they weren’t already high enough!). Bodies matter for the continuation or disruption of colonialism. Bodies can’t—in a sense—just be socially constructed out of, or in any straightforward way over which one might have agency. This is not to say that bodies do not and have not taken on different and new meanings, and found their way into new feedback loops. They have and they do. The “value-added” of Sullivan’s Dewey-inspired framework is that freedom and constraint are corporeally-situated. 

A further difficulty comes, for me, when I follow Anne and give attention to my body, and also make space to explore its theological meaning. It’s not just past and present that I stand between, it’s also the supernatural that I receive, encounter, and take in in history, in, on, and through my body. There is a theological density not just to history but also to being human itself, which includes, I think, the habits of bodying as raced. I like Anne’s word choice for thinking about our place in history: helplessness. There is a kind of “helplessness” with respect to the bodies we arrive in. (Please let me acknowledge straightforwardly that I am sensitive to the many problems of associating whiteness and vulnerability. Helplessness in this context means only that we are, like any embodied being, bound by certain objective aspects, everyone.)

Yes, whiteness has been produced and maintained by colonialism, greed, conquest, exclusion, and any number of sinful human, historical acts. Just as “blackness” has been produced and maintained by the same set of forces working in the opposite direction. But we also find a long and rich history of black thinkers and theologians, and Anne joining with them, who affirm blackness’ theological density—as well they should! As Anne writes, “Every black ‘I,’ expressive of its own mysterious existence as personality, is an efficacious sign of God’s work in history” (179). But opening up consideration of blackness’s theological density—as both historical, historically produced, and also theologically dense—raises the corollate question: Is whiteness too historical, historically produced, and also theologically dense? What is the white “I” a theological sign of? If reality is natural and supernatural both and if we are instruments of more or less sin, then is it also the case that bodies constrain human receptivity and responsiveness to grace? This is a difficult and complicated question, and one I’m working out a response to, but which also goes beyond the scope of this reflection on the productive relationship with Anne’s work and my question as still only question.

Anne writes that our primary dilemma is “how to extricate ourselves from ‘living-out’ of colonial existence and its primary actions, most of all in race” (166). She is speaking here especially, I think, to white Christians, who have yet “so very much” to do, she writes, “in order to be freed of our whiteness” (182). I am left wondering about the viability of being freed from one’s own whiteness, particularly if the exigence of constrained freedom is further enriched by Sullivan’s theoretical framework and if we hold onto its theological density. And so I find myself below even Anne’s dilemma, at a prior one: We cannot extricate ourselves from the bodies we’re in—even while we can adjust the habits of bodying—and yet, they have theological significance. 

I was immediately taken with near unspeakable drama that adorns the cover to Nothing Gained is Eternal.1 Does a spectacle of billowing smoke and Notre-Dame ablaze gesture toward anything—lost, gained, otherwise? To quote Carpenter: “She’s the end of the world.” She welcomes drama to circulate as a keyword and image for theorizing tradition and its movement in free human action across history on the world-stage. Theatre presents action that realizes and augments the meaning of a dramatic script; drama denotes freedom. In any given production, the addition or subtraction of a gesture might make all the difference in how the play is received this time for this audience. Following Balthasar, Carpenter writes that “every ‘drama’ is simply an attempt, a gesture, even if that attempt unveils merely the ambiguity of being. Theater is, whatever its gesture, a confrontation with human action, transforming ‘even the event into a picture that can be seen’…” (127).2 I have, of course, taken this particular quotation far afield of its context to think about the picture on the cover of the book: both Anne and Hans Urs mean, here, to consider human gestures of intentional theatricality tuned for the sake of theology. Yet gestures—in theatre or in liturgy or in theological argument—point outward toward unforeseen directions with a productive ambiguity. Gestures invite thought and provoke feeling. Gestures refuse the pretense of a last word; meaning tumbles upward, outward, forward like the ashes of a burning cathedral.

I wonder, then, if there’s an application of Carpenter’s metaphysic that might shed light on the theological meanings of gesticulation as human meaning-making incorporated into the action of God. To recognize movement as gesture also notices interpretive choices. “Human beings ‘gesticulate.’ We create meaning. We at the same time wonder about ourselves and our meaning, representing both to ourselves” (141). My own wonders betray my haste to fill heuristics with content, to bind gesture to fixed choreography. Sitting with this book forced me to confront my own (mis)understandings of metaphysics. I do not know if I overcame them. Embodied experience helps me be at home in making those sorts of gestures physically, but, at first, I tripped a bit over how to generalize from the concrete without beginning from particular phenomenological experiences. But the book keeps gesturing, and I learned the great benefit in making room for abstraction that refuses disintegration, a theoretical turn to understand being that anticipates a filling (7). 

In order to understand the ressourcement-revolution that is performing the tradition always moving, there needs to be a way to think about what tradition is and does in addition to what it communicates, preserves, develops, and displays. Carpenter shows that in order to study the concreteness of tradition, one requires a theory that anticipates the whole of tradition without, in itself, representing or being that whole (8). Otherwise the tradition would be determined by its human content rather than free to be what it is and what it is for: human action that, articulated in the Balthasarian mode that excites me most, begets Christ (149). Engaging tradition—responding to its resources and playing along with an improviser’s “yes and”—makes its reality anew in the present. As Carpenter teaches, ressourcement-revolution is not retrieval of the same, but an original gesture. 

The stakes are high for a metaphysic of tradition. Carpenter intervenes in a debate already characterized by dramatic struggles between what or who harbors “real” tradition; it’s a debate I rehash on a regular basis with students, colleagues, and friends. Carpenter’s argument liberates tradition from imprisonment to previous human actions and decisions as if the legacy of some powerful acts in history provide the horizon of ultimate determination for actions in the future. For Carpenter (and Lonergan), the real is that which is truly affirmed—“the real is that which is judged to be the case” (111)—so the realest horizon for human action, the tradition alive, can only be God and the affirmation of really human being that is the Christ (cf. 75, 158). 

I learned a lot about how to do metaphysics by reading this book because of the way Carpenter fuses technical and poetic registers for her theological gesticulation. Tradition names the situation for Christian activity in freedom: life. “Tradition is alive; it is a life; it is a mediation that binds together thought and act” (194). Tradition’s scripts and sets and costumes and ideas are thus resources, freely given gifts able to be made original again (however deadly, marvelous, sinful, or ambiguous those gifts may be). The book begins in medias res—“The problem of Christian tradition is a stage play in the middle of its execution” (xi)—and so performs its argument from within that tradition’s temporality rather than speculate some ethereally neutral zone for metaphysics and theology. Carpenter’s metaphysic lights tradition to reveal “the shadow of sin and failure” (xii), primarily the interweaving of Christian tradition with colonialism and race. “Christian tradition is a body of action […] traditioned ironically, by its own sin. There is no escaping to somewhere other than where it presently is” (175). Answers to the problem of tradition fail when they retreat into a pure theory immune from a history of its abuses. Carpenter’s book proves, magisterially even without an imprimatur, the failure of “pure tradition” speak amongst Catholic thought to be not only a moral and pastoral failure but also a theological one. A triumphalist theory of tradition, especially one that sanctions the sorting of humanity into the colonial fictions of race because it has already happened, begets God incorrectly. 

But tradition still matters. And all the theatrical language helps recognize that the tradition as ongoing play need not be cancelled because it previously failed. The play of history is currently happening, so decisions about how to play the tradition sincerely matter now and in the future. “A body in action” is also good shorthand for explaining how theatre interprets. Actors lend their life to the making present of an encounter with human existence mirrored and re-presented through performance. Even the play they act (whether scripted or improvised) is an interpretation of what human living might mean. “A body in action” calls theatre to render life into art ready for reflection, and, in Balthasar’s case, a set of dramatic resources ready for theology. 

But theatre, too, has tradition. Carpenter adeptly anticipates a strong, but by no means damning, critique of Balthasar’s dramatic theory: his story of the Greeks to the present risks a theory “overdetermined by the drama of the West” (127).3 Balthasar is self-aware that “the choice of a particular play depends on its theological fruitfulness—an admittedly one-sided approach.”4 As such, so-called Western theatre remains an incomplete but nonetheless useful heuristic for understanding human action in time and space. Theatricality relies on a play of signs and surfaces, the availability of any body or object to be—that is, to perform as—something other than its usual role. Theatre changes meanings through action. So it becomes possible to talk about “theatre” as a phenomenon apart from the particularities of each play, the nuances of each gesture, even if the set of sources is limited. Before turning to theology, Carpenter’s heuristic unveils why we spend so much time debating performances and performativity. “I” perform who “I” am. 

And, like the Christian one that Carpenter investigates, theatre’s tradition remains inextricably bound up with colonialism and race. In the United States, professional, academic, and amateur theatres continually re-adjudicate showbusiness origins in the primordial soup of minstrelsy and blackface.5 That history reverberates, echoed every time a beloved play with racist tropes gets unreflectively restaged or its harm too hastily excused. Because theatre’s being is as event, theatre-making hands on its performance history intentionally or not. Perhaps Carpenter’s metaphysic of tradition might look back from theology to make a comment on theatrical praxis: to do theatre—as art or playing my “I” for and with others—means to participate in human action that carries glory and devastation in its wake. All the more so for doing theatre in the context of Christian action—whether this means a Christian who makes theatre or adopts church roles, performing or interpreting a play with theological themes, a Christian institution teaching drama as part of its mission.

 But if theatre might be heuristic for spectacles of human action, could theatre also offer heuristics for the meaning made by confronting dramatic events? While Notre-Dame burns, so does the presence of complicity in colonialism and the fashioning of racial ideology. So, too, the tradition’s justifications for misogyny, clericalism, sexual abuse, and warmongering nationalism. How could a firey gesture reveal anything about tradition other than a longing to protect its inheritance? Luckily, poetry interprets the image and historical referent. The whole of the book is, in some ways, “mothered urgently by the spectacle / of her, of our, of loss.” A metaphysic of tradition with attention to the surd of colonialism and race ransacks the sanctuary offered to whiteness by equating it with meaningfulness. Perhaps that is why drama displays something about tradition: “drama is not mere struggle but a struggle around meaningfulness, and a struggle around human being as situation” (130). After such loss, how could “I” still desire to play the tradition only in the comfortable ways, only by repeating familiar gestures? 

Roles become missions, and the role of the theologian becomes resourcing and playing and “representing” Christ (cf. 149). Rote repetition—going through the motions—is not, in truth, traditional. As Carpenter writes, “The question (of intelligence) opens the way, heuristically wedges into being, the being of an action that no longer merely repeats the past. The question allows the problem of colonialism and tradition to become the problem of an original gesture made today” (173). And so the drama and gesticulation of Notre-Dame on fire inspires me with two of my own concluding gestures in reply.

The first gestures toward cruciformity and kenotically making room under the conditions of finitude. Could a metaphysic of tradition provide any clues about when and how to transform resourcing beyond that it must be done? One clear benefit is how Carpenter’s account of human action (and its expansive canon of saints) teaches my own sense of tradition how to be “renewed by the present” (170) even though I, too, am “not an ‘I’ of the undersides” (163). I am increasingly noticing ressourcement-revolutions in my collaborations in theatre, like the Untitled Othello Project.6 New processes and practices might influence how we gesticulate theology via our questions, genre, performances, venues. 

The second gesture is physical and perhaps a bit dangerous. Could theatrical heuristics apply to sacramental gestures, the kind that enact the Eucharist as the “exemplary original gesture of both church and God” (101)? How does a metaphysic theorize something like elevation, a gesture so intimately present around the Eucharist? There need to be safeguards lest a generalized theory of elevation replicate the colonial gaze, implying that God hovers aloof above it all like a plantation master.7 Such a gesture awakens—theatrically, ritually, sacramentally—the impossibility for the singular agent to know the sum total of the human experience. Yet the direction of God’s willing from “within the human situation” seems, at least to me, to gesture towards a theology that needs to view the Eucharist from the literal underside in order to affirm its reality. Anyone can walk into a church and witness the gestures of tradition on the move, in action. Could that underside vantage be lay or excommunicated or unbaptized? Can metaphysics even be contoured by the ambiguous meanings of physical gestures and their drama? Even after and during the fire, the show goes on.

I find myself in the happy position of finding little in this book even to quibble with. While certainly there are things that I might have emphasized or others I may have said differently, I am convinced both by the argument itself and by its timeliness. I have known for some time that Anne Carpenter and I are fellow travelers on some particular theological road, seeking to walk through the wilds of our field of study with a deep love for Catholic theological traditions, a love deep enough to see those traditions as imperfect and yet still loveable, as limited but yet still wise, and a love deep enough to be willing to name the places where these traditions may still fall short. In trying to walk this road, we seem to some to be “too conservative” and to others to be “too liberal,” but these terms seem to have less and less purchase with each step we take. Anne and I have batted back and forth the question of what “ressourcement” is, so I am so delighted to see this book come forth so that many can learn, as I already have, from Anne’s considered argument. So my response to the book will more take the shape of an “ok, what now?” How do historical theologians like me, who look to the ressourcement theologians for inspiration, go about our work differently in the wake of Carpenter’s book?

Nothing Gained is Eternal offers a bracing new vision for ressourcement, not through a new retrieval of yet another hidden treasure from the early church, but through a new and renewed vision of tradition itself, a “metaphysic of tradition,” as Carpenter gently but firmly nudges us toward the deeper theoretical underpinnings of the very idea of ressourcement, “into the being of tradition.” (xv) Through the careful articulation of a metaphysic of tradition, Carpenter avers, we can begin to come to terms with the reality of Christian sin in history, with the fact that “the cracked vein of self-contradiction and irony runs its way through Christianity’s whole structure” (194). Some readers may be puzzled by this move, but I think it is essential: To articulate a “metaphysic of tradition,” which may seem to some too abstract or intangible, is to give us a framework within which we can face the hard truths of our failure and sin—here most particularly the deformities of colonialism and racism, in a way that is fully honest and yet still hopeful for God’s redemptive work. This is why the metaphysic of tradition she develops is tested and reshaped through the critical encounter with authors such as Willie James Jennings, M. Shawn Copeland, and James Baldwin. If ressourcement has a future in theology, it must be a way that our tradition can face its own failure to carry forward the truth of the gospel without despairing that such failure makes the past useless, the present rootless, and the future hopeless. 

This is a central Christian problem, since all Christian churches find their root and heart in the Word made flesh, in God’s decisive action in history, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, and in the (usually imperfect and sometimes warped) acts of discipleship that follow from it. But it is acutely and specifically a Catholic problem, since the Catholic understanding of the apostolicity and indefectibility of the church has led to efforts to separate out the purity of “the Church, holy and without spot or blemish” (Eph 5:27) from the individual actions of sinful Christians. This allows a too-easy (that is to say, an imaginary) “boundary between when Christianity was whole or pure and when it was corrupted.” (194). Indeed, this kind of gerrymandering of the past is a temptation that some find in ressourcement theologie as it has been practiced. A common received narrative about the movement that Carpenter annotates as the “capital-R” Ressourcement theologians such as Henri de Lubac and Jean Daniélou goes something like this: faced with a rigid, procrustean neo-scholasticism, de Lubac and Daniélou sought to go back behind these calcifying accretions to a purer, more authentic patristic theology. This received narrative is not exactly wrong, but if the implication is that the Christian faith (or perhaps just the theology) of the Fathers was without some particular corruption, prior to some modern collapse, then the narrative may fall prey to just the sort of “nostalgic” vision of the past, the “pure memory” that haunted Péguy, the nostalgic dream of a prior moment of past purity. A ressourcement theology taken up in this mode would be a mere pointing-back to that moment, that never quite manages to think-again the moment, in the present, toward the future, a ressourcement that refuses to be révolution. (91). It would be an historical theology that is merely (even if rigorously) historical, hoping that good description of the past has as such a kind of power upon the present. And, in fact, this is a place, I think, that scholarship inspired by ressourcement can and does often run aground. We are fittingly overwhelmed by the sanctity and the capacious theological vision of the fathers or some other theological writers “before the fall”(wherever we might locate it), and we hope that rendering that sanctity and vision visible with our best historiographical and philological skills is itself a kind of renewal. But the results are often thin. 

I have noticed this tendency—and the thinness of the result—in my own work and in those in my “guild” (we who might describe ourselves as “historical theologians”). My counsel thus far (to myself and to others) has been simply to be more intentional about the constructive implications what we have unearthed or described. But Carpenter’s account of tradition urges a more radical revision of the work: Our very model of the past upon which we cast our historical gaze needs to change, and so the very act of “remembering” that comes from our historical study must change as well. If there is indeed a “cracked vein of self-contradiction and irony” that runs throughout Christian history, we must continually winnow any vestiges of nostalgic retrieval. We must be quite intentional about the fraught ambiguity of the whole of the Christian past, both faithfulness and failure, and so our “remembering” of that past must be more than description or retrieval. It has to have more of the shape of prayer, a “prayer against pure memory” as Carpenter finds it in Péguy (81ff). Carpenter quotes the conclusion of Péguy’s Mystery of the Charity of Jeanne d’Arc, where Jeanne reflects on her own actions on the stage of history in her last prayer to God: “I beg you to accept this prayer as my true prayer for myself, because just now I am not quite sure what I will do when I am in the street… and in the square, and what I will say. Forgive me, forgive us all the harm that I have done, serving you. But I know I did well to serve you. We did well to serve you well” (84, emphasis mine). Jeanne’s prayer is both her own and the prayer of the church, that acknowledges both failure and faithfulness, without dissolving one into the other, but also without parsing one from the other. Our action in history is both faithful and failing, and so it bears a fundamentally tragic character. Only in prayer can that tragic simultaneity, paradox, and contradiction be transfigured and bear fruit. As Carpenter distills in Péguy, “prayer lets go of, surrenders, yesterday and today (and tomorrow) into the hands of God. Péguy makes of prayer a recollection that also relinquishes…. [Jeanne’s] last utterance is itself an act of hope that no one be left without redemption” (85). An historical theology that is undertaken under these lights will be a remembering that is an act of hope. It will be a kind of prayer, historical theology as “confession” in the Augustinian sense—a rendering into speech exactly that which is unresolved, mixed, and ambivalent, or, more pointedly, that which is at once an act of discipleship and a failure of discipleship. But not simply as speech, but as offering, praying “let your Spirit come upon these gifts to make them holy.”

In my work as an historical theologian specializing in the medieval period, I have seen many theologians turning to the Middle Ages to find “the moment,” the key time or figure or event that turned Western culture decisively toward “the modern.” The hope seems to be that we might get back behind that “moment,” whether we find it in Ockham or in Scotus or in Francis of Assisi, and then re-think our thoughts from this prior, untainted place. Carpenter’s metaphysic of tradition gives reason to doubt this strategy’s long-term efficacy. We may discern particular turns within the history of thought, and we may in fact learn from them, but we should be wary of any claim to have discerned the decisive defect. Our actions in history are always multiple and always complex, often with texture we cannot feel or implications we cannot see. Our attempts to speak the truth about the past, in both its glory and its failure, must culminate in the end in commending the whole to God, not in resignation, but in the effort to open our work up to “a memory which is renewal, and, in a breath of meaning, returns to the past, increased, the force which it received from it.” (90, quoting Jean-Louis Chrétien on Péguy). Recent works that are associated with the “new integralism” of the Catholic right have looked back to the sacramental kingship of Louis IX, prior to the modern separations between “church” and “state” in the liberal order. These works paint a compelling and beautiful picture of the political theological imagination and the social order of the thirteenth century. But they also neglect to discuss, e.g., the infamous “trial of the Talmud,” culminating in the public burning of as many as ten thousand  volumes of Talmud manuscripts at the Place de Grève in 1242. Nor do they discuss the several attempts Louis’s court made to expel Jews from the realm or Louis’s decision to enforce the Fourth Lateran Council’s 1215 decree that Jews wear a distinctive badge on their clothes, front and back, to distinguish them from Christians. Such partial retrievals of the political theology of the past represent the kind of nostalgic memory that Péguy worried about and that Carpenter’s book argues against.

Nothing Gained is Eternal is not a work of historical theology, and, in fact, it makes a strong case that ressourcement theology needs to be much more than a particular style or school of historical theology. Ressourcement and revolution are intimately connected; “…Péguy’s ressourcement is always accompanied by a revolution, achieved in the newness of today” (118). In her return to Péguy and Blondel behind the “capital-R” Ressourcement theologians, Carpenter is forcing open the door to ressourcement to broaden its reception beyond the patristic revival of Sources chretiennes and Histoire et Esprit. What Carpenter offers is more fundamentally a “metaphysic of tradition” that should be ingredient to all theological endeavor. With that in mind, but as someone so profoundly shaped and influenced by de Lubac and Daniélou, I still find myself continually asking what the proper form of historical theology should be, in this light? I can see, as I note above, plenty of examples of what it ought not or cannot be. But what positive form should it take? What does it look like to bring the considerable tools of good historical theology—philological, paleographical, cultural-historical, hermeneutical, etc.—in a way that does not simply “rescue” past moments from the oblivion of forgetting but remains open to the revolutionary possibilities within the living memory that we aim to uncover? I am not sure I have an answer to that question yet, and Nothing Gained is Eternal has given me more work to do in answering it. 

I suspect that, for someone like me, it may look something like this: A fair portion of my work, indeed, since my first book published in 2005, has explored the richness of patristic and medieval spiritual exegesis of scripture, in the interest of renewing the relationship between theology and biblical studies in our own age. Recent years have seen quite a lot of books that explore this relationship between scripture and theology with a kind of reparative intent. But there is also a sizeable and growing body of literature on anti-Judaism in Christian scriptural exegesis. Following Carpenter’s lead, we would benefit from a reading-together of these classic and critical voices with Carpenter’s metaphysic of tradition in mind. We will hope to find that, just as the encounter between Péguy and Jennings and Copeland orchestrated by Carpenter allows Péguy’s own insights into the tragic-and-redemptive character of Christian memory to be extended beyond the (rather narrowly European French) horizons of Péguy himself, we might allow de Lubac’s own resistance to anti-semitism to transfigure his own scriptural hermeneutic to lead theological exegesis beyond supersessionism.

Or so we might hope. After reading Nothing Gained is Eternal, I returned to Henri de Lubac’s Paradoxes of Faith, which I consider to be a hidden key to his own theological method. In light of Carpenter’s work, I could see that de Lubac was reading and pondering Péguy and Blondel as he wrote. The book contains one aphorism, set off to itself, without explanation or commentary. “Christianity is never triumphant.” In the weeks since I finished the book, these two phrases have haunted my imagination almost as a kind of koan: “Christianity is never triumphant. Nothing gained is eternal. Christianity is never triumphant. Nothing gained is eternal.” With profound gratitude to Anne Carpenter for this splendid book, I hope that this semi-koan may continue to yield some insight. The book has already given me much to ponder.