Crisis of a House Divided

Jordan Wood and the End of the Ressourcement Thomist Settlement

[This is the first part of a “review” of Jordan Wood’s 2022 monograph The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor. The second part should be coming in the next week or two.]

This post is an attempt to get to the bottom of why, from the moment of its release, The Whole Mystery of Christ was a lightning rod for theological controversy.

Rather than a review, in the standard sense, which engages with the artifact on a granular level, it is a meta-review of the work’s reception and an assessment of its significance in today’s overall theological landscape.

My claim is that the responses to Wood’s work point are symptomatic, in the psychoanalytic sense; they are substitutes for an unconscious, repressed conflict which cannot be articulated.

Wood’s narrative has not merely challenged key tenets of contemporary theological orthodoxy (little “o”)—although this is certainly the case. More profoundly, the work’s polarized reception exposes the way in which these tenets are politically load-bearing; how they lie at the foundation of an uneasy alliance between a cluster of otherwise differing theological schools. I will call this loose alliance “the ressourcement Thomist settlement.” This precarious alliance has for some time been in the process of dissolving; Wood’s book is dangerous because it directly challenges of the narrative which still (if just barely) holds the settlement together.

Despite their inability to articulate precisely what, Wood’s critics are right to sense that something is at stake here. The publication of The Whole Mystery of Christ is an event which marks a new era in theology, both intellectually and politically.

Symptoms

To the degree that one can speak of such things in the academy, the book’s publication was an “epochal event” (to cite Milbank) which continues to reverberate. Speaking anecdotally (as someone who has spent a good bit of time in both Notre Dame and Boston College theological circles), the work was the talk, sometimes in hushed tones, of grad students everywhere. Online, in the world of podcasters, and among other non-specialists, it was if anything even more ubiquitous.

Meanwhile, the responses of tenured faculty were (and are) considerably more cagey. At the risk of waxing autobiographical, there was a distinct sense that to endorse the book was politically “taking a side,” although exactly what was at stake was not always clear (something about the God/world “difference,” although this was rarely spelled out and seemed to bleed into other concerns). The only comparable case I can think of is the firestorm caused a few years earlier by Hart’s That All Shall Be Saved.

At the time, Wood was a stay-at-home dad struggling to find employment in the dire academic job market. Thus there was something a little surprising about established scholars taking time out of major public lectures to single the work out for criticism (bookended by grudging praise). This was especially puzzling given their proximity to Wood’s overall theological ethos.

Meanwhile, formal academic reviews were both remarkably critical and—for the most part—rather short on engagement with the actual argument.

There are, as is always the case, many more anodyne reasons for the work’s polarized reception: academic jealousies, simple failures of reading, etc. But such idiosyncrasies are in the end neither intelligible nor interesting. My claim is that there is something deeper going on. These are what Freud might call symptoms, substitutes for an unconscious, repressed conflict.

The book has clearly touched some third rail, some neuralgic point in contemporary theology, which cannot be clearly articulated. The following is an attempt to substantiate this diagnosis.

The Settlement

Wood’s thesis, I believe, threatens to explode a political settlement reached in the Catholic theological academy in the decades after the Second Vatican Council. This settlement bound together theologians who had three things in common:

1. They were still interested in dogmatic and philosophical questions, which (in their view at least) many were abandoning after the Council in favor of political and economic activism

2. They shared a longing for some kind of doctrinal stability in the chaos of post-conciliar upheaval

3. They were united by shared sympathies regarding the ecclesial culture wars, on issues like dissent, church governance, and, yes, sexuality

Of course, there were theological obstacles to uniting all who shared these characteristics in a common cause. Famously, there were the battle lines which emerged in the 1930’s and afterward between neoscholastic Thomism and the nouvelle theologie, who fought back by the Thomistic bottleneck established with Aeterni Patris. Many Thomists had seen something deeply dangerous in this twin project of patristic ressourcement and engagement with modernity, and these suspicions lingered long after the council.

Yet an alliance seemed politically both possible and useful, since many of those who had supported the new theology and spearheaded the reforms of Vatican II now shared the concerns of “traditional” Thomists with the church’s radical progressive wing.

In practice, I suggest, a sort of compromise was formed, whether consciously or unconsciously. The speculative daring of patristic ressourcement would be restrained by the grammatical strictures of mainstream (if not quite neoscholastic) Thomism. Through a strategy of containment, nouvelle theologie’s controversial and potentially destabilizing liasons with patristic and modern figures would be tolerated by the devotees of Aquinas, but with an important caveat. More eclectically-inclined theologians would signal their allegiance to a lowest-common-denominator Thomism.

Of special importance were the following stipulations:

1. An unsurpassable analogical “gap” or caesura between creature and Creator, even in Christ’s own person

2. The “double gratuity” of creation and redemption (the counterfactual voluntarism in which God both could not have created and could have created without calling creatures to a supernatural end)

3. An insistence on faith’s inaccessibility to speculative reason.

Furthermore, in a two-pronged gambit, the heirs of ressourcement would

a) interpret other canonical figures before and after Thomas according to this basic grammar, and

b) offer genealogical explanations for “modern” deviations from it which would absolve “the tradition.”

Such a position was more or less endorsed by the giants of nouvelle theologie themselves. Balthasar had to assure readers that Nyssa and Maximus, despite initial appearances (and his own early writings), were not proto-idealists but thinkers of analogy.¹ And de Lubac, with less than total consistency, labored a) to find his beloved natural desire for the vision of God in Aquinas, while b) still retaining the “double gratuity” sought by Humani Generis.²

Although these eminent figures tended to concede that the Eastern fathers needed the medieval corrective (at least in emphasis) towards the “autonomy” of nature, they insisted that their basic structure remained Thomistically sound. By contrast, Hegel and company could be traced back to the historical recurrence of heresy and esoteric influence.

Ironically, therefore, it was the ressourcement movement that played a key role in shoring up a Thomistic consensus temporarily threatened by the intellectual discreditation of neoscholasticism. For the former endorsed the latter’s essential grammar as non-negotiable and contributed greater historical grounding and genealogical sophistication.

Even recent theological challengers, such as David Hart and John Milbank’s “Radical Orthodoxy,” fail to finally jeopardize this settlement. For although both quibble with principle 2) (a voluntarist account of “gratuity”) and to some degree 3) (faith’s “inaccessibility” to reason), they remain firmly committed to 1), which proves to be the consensus’ load-bearing beam. In both cases, moreover, this unsurpassable analogical interval goes hand-in-hand with an ongoing allergy to Hegel. Milbank’s Aquinas may be exotic, but note that it is still the 13th century Dominican who is history’s protagonist and guarantor of orthodoxy, and that it is a Franciscan “univocal” arch-betrayal of 1) which leads to idealism! The shadow of Aeterni Patris is long, and its bedfellows prove strange.

Wood’s Challenge

Enter Jordan Wood’s ground-breaking work. Here the idea of a God-world identity which sublates, rather than being qualified by, an analogical “interval” between creature and Creator emerges not as a modern deviation or heretical recurrence but as the very linchpin of conciliar orthodoxy. Wood’s thesis challenges the foundational principle of the ressourcement Thomist settlement, untouched by Hart and Milbank. Unless one admits that humanity and divinity are concretely (or hypostatically) identical in a way “analogy” cannot think —at least in the case of Christ—Wood argues that one stands defenseless against a subtle but unmistakable Nestorianism. And once a Christological “exception” has been granted to analogy’s dominion, as demanded by the speculative yield of the later ecumenical councils, why not cosmically extend this same Incarnational metaphysics to the entirety of His Body?

Crucially, this systematic challenge is rooted in and doubles as a historical refutation of the genealogical narrative described above, upon which the settlement is predicated: the idea that talk of “identity:” between God and creatures is a foreign imposition from without. No less a canonical than Maximus the Confessor insisted on precisely this extension: “the Word of God… wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of his embodiment” (Ambiguum 7.22) Accordingly, Maximus posits no hard boundary between immanent and economic Trinity and denies that our fallen phenomenal world yet constitutes true creation. Indeed, in the synthesis retrieved and staged by The Whole Mystery of Christ, these positions emerge as central to the appeal of Maximus’ vision.

Here, it is the ultimacy of the analogical interval, rather than its eclipse, which reflects “pagan” metaphysics (the Platonic “limitation of act by power”) and has “heretical” implications (rupturing the unity of Christ’s person). The door now is open—hinted at in Wood’s conclusion—for potentially viewing German idealism’s language of “identity,” if glossed in Maximian fashion, as a faithful unfolding of Christo-logic. No longer can such speculative daring be reflexively foisted off on the tradition’s “other.”

Wood’s work thus calls for a revision of both the “grammatical” bounds of orthodoxy as sketched by ressourcement Thomism and its narrative supports. But perhaps most radically, it questions the very idea of a fixed doctrinal “grammar” isolable from the ongoing work of speculative theology, the questionable contribution of postliberalism to the settlement’s uneasy compromise.

For Maximus could only defend Chalcedon as authoritative by refusing to treat its meaning as yet clear enough to be treated as a rule to be passively received. Only a speculative account which went beyond the Council’s letter and retroactively (over)determined its (otherwise ambiguous) import could vindicate it. For such a task, every ready-at-hand model of the God-world relation proved inadequate. If Christian philosophical theology has a “grammar,” this episode illustrates, it is discovered only dialectically and speculatively. Tradition’s logic emerges in and through the task of determinate negation, discovered through crises rather than regulating them in advance.

If Wood is right, then ironically ressourcement theology to date, as policed by Thomistic and postliberal constraints, has failed to “retrieve” either the content (the Incarnation’s structure and scope) or the (speculative) form of the Confessor’s genius. His wager is that the mantle of the Fathers—and nouvelle theologie’s vitality and promise—can be taken up only by those willing to break with the defining pieties of the political settlement which has calcified in their wake.

Cracks in the Foundation

I note, parenthetically, that hesitancy has been apparent on the settlement’s Thomist side for years now: see the “neoscholastic revival” and the accompanying development of a traditionalist institutional network parallel to the mainstream academy. Under these conditions, one wonders how long strict Thomists will find it useful to partner with their Balthasarian and de Lubacian comrades. For despite the latter’s lowest-common-denominator Thomism, they have never proven sufficiently doctrinally clear or reliable for the former’s tastes (i.e. de Lubac’s rejection of “pure nature” and Balthasar’s nuanced approach to divine impassibility). Given such concerns, and if ressourcement itself concedes the need for a medieval corrective of patristic speculation and warns of modernity’s heretical pedigree, then (one might ultimately ask) why bother with the Fathers and the moderns at all?

With Thomistic fundamentalism on the rise and mainstream theological institutions collapsing, the heirs of nouvelle theologie who wish to preserve the alliance are placed in an increasingly delicate and defensive position, as they attempt to appease their increasingly radical confreres.

It is this political dilemma, I suggest, which partially explains the polarized response to The Whole Mystery of Christ.

A book like Wood’s places the settlement’s left-wing in an impossible position, because it seems to vindicate the worst fears of their Thomist allies: the Fathers, without a medieval corrective, were proto-Hegelian all along! If Balthasar and de Lubac were consistent, they would lead to a speculative spirit which breaks decisively with Aquinas. German Idealism cannot be foisted off onto heretical deviation from any “grammar” but is a possible route opened by the tradition itself. Indeed, grammatical settlements are impossible tout court.

To which I reply: the question is not whether these claims are inconvenient, but whether they are true.

Wood’s thesis does indeed threaten to further drive a wedge between the settlement’s theological constituencies, but a split was already well underway.

A settlement is based on compromise, and a time will always come for choosing. Perhaps Wood’s book will lead some to find it is already here.

1. I refer to Cosmic Liturgy and Presence and Thought. See Wood, 3-4, as well as Taylor Ross’ unpublished dissertation, which has inspired much of my analysis below. “Gregory of Nyssa, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and the Hermeneutics of Historical Theology.” https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10161/26843/Ross_duke_0066D_17049.pdf?sequence=1

2. See Milbank’s The Suspended Middle for the tensions and hesitations in de Lubac’s thought.