Few living theologians can match the intellectual reach and vision of David Tracy as elaborated in his work across the past five decades. This volume aims to introduce and reintroduce Tracy’s fecundity for theological thought to new and existing readers. In the ninth decade of his life, Tracy has recently published two volumes of essays, many of them also quite recent, selected, edited, and introduced by Tracy himself.Footnote 1 The editors hope that an effect of this book will be to send readers to Fragments and Filaments as well as to Tracy’s other texts.
The chapters about Tracy in this book have been written without heed or sight of each other (although some contributors have had access to Tracy’s 2021 Boston College Lecture, also published here). Each explores some key theme or trajectory of Tracy’s theology, and many also showcase new fruit borne of these themes in the authors’ own contexts and concerns. Diverse as the chapters are, we claim that they exhibit Tracy’s work with notable coherence.
The twelve contributors to this volume, including Tracy, come from eight countries and four continents, with six different mother tongues and a mix of ages. The editors remain painfully conscious of remaining deficits of diversity in that all but two of the contributors are men and most are of predominantly white European heritage. Tracy himself is a North American man of Irish heritage. In a world rightly suspicious of universalities falsely projected, the universalising ambitions of Tracy’s theology-as-reason are likely to appear suspect to some. Some chapters in this volume defend Tracy on this contentious point while joining Tracy in affirming the appropriateness of the concern. Our sincerest hope as editors is for this volume to stimulate close engagements with David Tracy’s work from a yet wider community of readers.
The subtitle of this book emphasises Tracy’s ‘theological and cultural vision’ because Tracy is an unusual theologian writing today for his double fidelity to retrieving contingent theological vision, on the one hand, while programmatically resisting sectarian or ecclesiocentric theological retreats from the storms of history, politics, and culture, on the other. This can appear a vanishingly difficult trick to pull off, in a time when the storms can appear to rule out the vision (that is, outside of authoritarian retreats into sectarian church subcultures or aggrandising theological fantasies). Readers who engage with the chapters that follow can decide to what extent Willemien Otten is right in her concluding chapter of this book, where she celebrates Tracy’s unearthing of contemporary means by which to ‘adumbrate the future of theology now’ in a manner of open anticipatory conversation that is all the better able also to retrieve theologies of the past.
When Tracy’s The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism first appeared in 1981, it set a standard within much of the English-speaking theological world. For some, it became a ‘classic’ characterised (as Tracy formulated this notion in that book) by an ‘excess of meaning’ that ‘demands constant interpretation and bears a certain kind of timelessness – namely the timeliness of a classic expression radically rooted in its own historical time and calling to my own historicity’.Footnote 2 What might it then mean for the present volume to be titled ‘Beyond the Analogical Imagination’? If ‘beyond’ denotes ‘after’, then Tracy’s nuanced reading of post-modernity ought to apply here analogously: ‘the only powerful forms of postmodern thought are those that have seriously gone through modernity […]’.Footnote 3 For such readers, to have ‘seriously gone through’ Tracy’s The Analogical Imagination forbids ‘being through with’ it for good.
On the other hand, ‘beyond’ could alternatively designate a ‘plus’ that would take seriously Tracy as a living author whose thought has expanded and shifted over the forty years since The Analogical Imagination. In this time, Tracy has published further books that clarify, extend, and at times revise his baselines, as well as numerous articles, many paving the way towards a long-awaited book (still promised) on how to name ultimate reality, the Real or – as for many readers – God. Furthermore, Tracy’s literary productivity and many international public encounters have fuelled receptions of his work over these years, all of which have also gone beyond The Analogical Imagination. This volume witnesses to Tracy’s gathering development as a living author as well as the growing and multiplying presences of his texts.
Inevitably, many relevant aspects of Tracy are missing from this volume. Two absences seem worth singling out for their closeness to what is included.
First, this book lacks a sustained treatment of Tracy’s long-lasting fascination with Augustine, in spite of Tracy placing two major and relatively recent essays on Augustine at the opening of Filaments.Footnote 4 Indeed, more broadly, in what follows here readers will find little examination of Tracy’s increasingly prominent forays into historical theology (regarding Gregory of Nyssa, for example, or Dionysius, William of St Thierry, Martin Luther, or François Fénelon). Happily, Maria Clara Bingemer’s chapter does highlight Tracy’s appreciative interpretations of several women theologians of Christian history, especially Angela of Foligno and Jeanne-Marie Guyon. But it is Augustine whom Tracy has found his unparalleled partner for critical conversation in the theological tradition, exemplary for both Augustine’s theological ‘analogical imagination’ and his scarcely paralleled production of theological classics as powerful fragments or ‘frag-events’ (a category crucially important to Tracy and in this volume; see, for example, the discussion of Augustinian frag-events in the chapter by C. A. Chase). It is also by means of conversation with Augustine that Tracy proposes to rescue the category of tragedy for Christian theology (an effort that also receives significant mention in this book). Much light would be thrown on Tracy by a thorough examination of his engagements with Augustine.
Second, this book lacks sustained treatment of Tracy’s Christology. This is especially unfortunate as Tracy himself is prone to express frustration at the lack of attention paid to his formulation of the event and person of Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ, as first introduced in Part II of The Analogical Imagination. He thinks it is a good Christology, and he repeats its terms again towards the conclusion of his recent ‘Introduction’ to Fragments, at a point where Tracy is also outlining his further, more recently expressed case for the ineluctably ‘Christomorphic’ (rather than Christocentric) character of the Christian concentration on God. ‘For Christians’, writes Tracy, ‘the fundamental singularity of Jesus of Nazareth proclaimed and narrated by the New Testament as the Christ is the decisive particular event and person constituting the heart of Christianity.’ In and through this singular Jesus as ‘the unsubstitutable, particular event of Christianity’, Jesus’ own universality as the Christ is disclosed for Christians, up to and including ‘in the promised future coming of this Jesus the Christ’.Footnote 5 Amid much continuity and some subtle clarifications over the years, Tracy’s theology of Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ of God calls for more sustained critical and creative attention.
At the centre of this present volume sit three sections of three chapters each, prior to David Tracy’s own contributions and Willemien Otten’s concluding chapter. Each of those three sections – ‘Theology and Culture’, ‘Public and Beyond’, and ‘Church and World’ – is made up of a sequence of three chapters that the editors believe may profitably be read cumulatively. As the sections themselves also follow a certain sequential logic, we hope that the partial summaries and interpretations of each chapter in turn, coming next here, may add up into a form of introduction to Tracy parallel to the performance of the book as a whole.Footnote 6
Theology and Culture
The first section, ‘Theology and Culture’, leads readers into David Tracy’s enterprise by way of an opening chapter by Gaspar Martinez that treats Tracy’s theological project as a whole, followed by chapters on ‘analogical imagination’ and ‘fragment’ as two principal Tracyean categories of culture and theology.
The first half of Chapter 1 by Gaspar Martinez from the Basque Country – ‘David Tracy’s Theology-in-Culture’ – explores the arc of Tracy’s theological formation and production, diachronically, across more than five decades. The second half of Martinez’s chapter then outlines the main contours of what he styles Tracy’s ‘theology-in-culture’. Tracy writes in his ‘Reflections on the Essays’, Chapter 10 in this volume, that he has ‘never read a better interpretation of what I have tried to do over many years’.
Martinez stands out in this volume for highlighting the long-lasting influence on Tracy of his studies with Bernard Lonergan in the 1960s, and also the enduring significance of Tracy’s first major work Blessed Rage for Order (1975). In Blessed Rage, as Martinez explains, Tracy articulated a ‘critical not dogmatic’ theology, somewhat beyond Lonergan, that turned explicitly towards a disorienting ‘twofold crisis’: of Christian meaning in post-Christian times, and modern meaning in post-modern times. A ‘hermeneutical shift’ in The Analogical Imagination (1981) would then further clarify that Tracy’s theological method for correlating tradition and contemporary situation involves the mutually critical reading of both sides together. The theology that results opens itself maximally to radical problematisings of interpretation and culture in general – following Derrida, Foucault, and others – as well as to Tracy’s increasingly sharp sense of the ethical-religious significance of otherness for reason and theology. These are the sensibilities, Martinez determines, that then lead Tracy to identify the cultural and religious classics of hermeneutical and theological promise as ‘fragments’ and ‘frag-events’ (see also Chapter 3 by C. A. Chase), which Martinez presents theologically as the shattering and gracious resistance of divine Infinity to the tragic and sinful self-enclosings of human culture.
Martinez recounts Tracy’s theology-in-culture as following ‘an analogical paradigm that presupposes an unbreakable bridge (no matter how narrow and shaky) between God and creation’. Even while deeply wounded by sin and tragedy, the human creature remains grace-informed nature: apt to seek and find grace, being transcendentally driven. This is why art and dialectically enquiring conversation remain theological hopes for Tracy, and Plato still such a major teacher whom Tracy ‘come[s] back to again and again’ following every intervening elaboration and challenge. Tracy finds the noble and proud endeavours of modernity yielded today also to post-modern fragmentation, and yet even fragmentation remains hopeful for Tracy in part because, for him – in a certain development of Lonergan, perhaps – we have always inhabited an invisible infinity that exceeds the visible world. Tracy also highlights as especially pertinent for these times the fragmenting forms of apocalypse and apophasis that run deep within historical Christianity. Aided by the clue – traditional, phenomenological, and religious – of an actual (or absolute) Infinity, Tracy reads those two fragmenting theological forms as entailing together neither violence nor despair but instead the ever-dawning hope of a God of saving Trinitarian Love – in Martinez’s words, ‘[b]eyond analogy … but without denying it’.
The chapter that comes next by Barnabas Palfrey from England – ‘Analogical Imagination and Anatheological Believing’ – takes its cue from recent writing of Tracy’s to introduce and explore the continuing vitality of Tracy’s notion of ‘analogical imagination’ that was once more clearly central within Tracy’s texts. According to Palfrey’s reception of Tracy, analogical imagination is what prevents reason and theology – indeed, social life more generally – from collapsing ‘into equivocation or else hopeless stupid conflict’. A capacious reflective reason depends on imaginative habits and sensibilities that stay faithful to the discordant plurality and ambiguity of things at the same time as being also ready to behold their analogies, explained by Tracy as their ‘similarities-in-difference’: the ways in which, even so, ‘things are like other things’, people like other people, and shareable worlds are possible without reducing difference or blessing injustice. Aided by classic expressions of all cultures, this analogical imaginative possibility also shades into contingent vision when it becomes organised by ‘focal meanings’ that emerge to fashion some global sense of the world (for example, the focal meaning of Trinitarian intelligence and love which Tracy says Christians find disclosed in the event and person of Jesus the Christ).
For Palfrey, the continuing integrity and scope of an analogical imagination after Tracy depends upon understanding that the negations that belong to apparently contrasting ‘dialectical imagination’ – passionate for absent justice and suspicious of illusion and self-deception – reach ‘all the way down’ within analogical imagination, rather than functioning as external correctives to an analogical imagination. Palfrey interprets Tracy’s intervening notion of classics as fragmenting fragments (or frag-events), as well as Tracy’s recent attention to the category of Absolute Infinity, as together supportive of his reading on this point.
A second part of Palfrey’s chapter then brings Tracyean analogical imagination into dialogue with Richard Kearney’s comparatively recent notion of ‘anatheism’, conceived as a realm of imaginative thoughtfulness common to religious believers and non-believers alike. Conversation with Kearney helps Palfrey to explore here how Tracyean analogical imagination might maintain its imagination and ana- at the potentially perilous point that it becomes also a matter of religious believing.
Where Palfrey’s chapter extols a theme once more evidently central to Tracy, the concluding chapter to this section by C. A. Chase from the United States – ‘Closed Totality, Collage, and the Fragmentary Between’ – takes readers into the heart of the matter for Tracy today, concerning the fragment as a further specification of his notion of the classic. Chase begins with a close reading of Tracy’s recent programmatic formulations concerning the ‘strong fragments’ of culture that ‘shatter, fragment, negate any closed totality system’ as well as those ‘most powerful fragments’ that ‘show themselves not as substances but as events and positively open to liminal Infinity’.Footnote 7
Not all cultural fragments are strong for Tracy. Some present only ‘period pieces’ without enduring truth or transformative power; others present the dangerously nostalgic romance of pieces torn from some supposed lost totality. Chase highlights here the ambiguous example of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, whose ‘fragments … shored against my ruin’ (a line Tracy often quotes) are simultaneously nostalgic and yet also, as arraigned in Eliot’s poem, powerfully shattering of any pretended unitary culture. Chase suggests that Tracy’s fragment substances are most capable of acting strongly as verbs rather than falsely consoling nouns when they get collaged – as here in Eliot – into some ‘new form of witness against any false whole or claim to completeness’.
The pinnacle of the fragment for Tracy, however, remains the ‘frag-event’ that opens towards the creative liminality of an invisible Infinity. The latter portions of Chase’s chapter explore the transitions that Tracy’s theory implies between fragment-as-substance and fragment-as-event. Chase appears keen to hold together the materiality of the event with the event-quality that Tracy claims for the visible world.
Chase correctly identifies the ‘Marxist-Kabbalist’ Walter Benjamin as ‘the projective force’ behind Tracy’s forays into the fragment for all that Tracy finds Augustine the exemplary producer of theological frag-events. Reorienting the nostalgic Romantic fragment towards the future, Benjamin sought to unearth and assemble marginal thought-images that might interrupt the death-dealing flow of history in favour of ‘something more’. Engaging Tracy on Toni Morrison and Eliot’s Four Quartets, Chase emphasises the role of assemblage or collage for the Tracyean frag-event, stressing the role of edges and unexpected connections. Employing this notion of collage also in relation to a theological ‘gathering of fragments’, of which Tracy once wrote, Chase wonders how far Christian theology is really ready to think in a manner of collage.
Public and Beyond
The three chapters that make up Part II of this book, ‘Public and Beyond’, explore the trajectory and currency of Tracy’s ‘public theology’ – or theology as public reason – for which Tracy is justly famous. The first and third chapters in this section follow two avenues of approach towards testing and defending Tracy’s theological vision of public reason as a hope for dialogic ‘conversation’. Sandwiched between these, a jewel-like second chapter by Alejandro Nava showcases Tracy’s more recent category of ‘mystical-prophetic’ cultural-theological production, enabling Nava towards a notion of hip-hop ‘street theology’.
Dion A. Forster from South Africa begins his chapter – ‘Theology in the Public Realm? David Tracy and Contemporary African Religiosity’ – by noting that Tracy’s theology has often been well received in African contexts on account of its hermeneutical openness. And yet, Forster’s chapter goes on to explore difficult distances that may still remain between Tracy’s apparently post-modern framing of theology and contrasting post-colonial imperatives of ‘decolonisation and the Africanisation of the theological archive’. Can Tracy’s theology land in Africa otherwise than as one more expropriating import of Western universalism and self-importance?
In posing such questions, Forster draws especially on Tinyiko Sam Maluleke’s trenchant criticism of the universalising gestures of historic Christian theology, which Maluleke finds only repeated once again in recent ‘public theology’, and which Maluleke thinks can only efface the kinds of differences in power that follow from colonial domination. Maluleke argues that present African difference will not be overcome by ‘civility, courtesy and the portrayal of a benign public’, nor by ‘poetry and metaphor’.Footnote 8
Albeit that Forster is somewhat encouraged that no individual nor group may ever own a ‘classic’ of the kind that Tracy’s thought extols, Forster concedes at first blush that ‘[i]t is very difficult to see how the lived identity of subjugation, Afro-pessimism, and experience of western supremacism will ever be fully recognised and accounted for in relation to the classics’. For, the powerful who abide in entrenched traditions are rarely willing, ready, or able to re-evaluate sufficiently their readings of the classics. However, Forster nevertheless then proceeds more positively, on the other side of this initial judgment, to highlight how Tracy’s subsequent parsing of classics as ‘frag-events … that shatter, negate, and fragment all totality systems … including Christendom’Footnote 9 recalls the dialectical and apophatic seriousness already secreted within Tracy’s commitment to thinking analogically. Forster concludes his chapter with the consequent suggestion that Tracy can be read outside the limiting frame of Western post-modernity in support of new, really decolonising exchanges between subjugated African theological experience, on the one hand, and historically privileged perceptions tarnished by colonialism, on the other.
Where Forster explores the adequacy of Tracy’s thought for post-colonial theological reason, the chapter by Alejandro Nava from the United States – ‘From Public to Street Theology: The Mystical-Prophetic Fragments of Hip-Hop’ – takes up Tracy’s adjective ‘mystical-prophetic’ amid racialised North America. Tracy has employed this category since at least 1990 to indicate how all concrete theological expression brings together the mystical-aesthetic-contemplative (and apophatic) and the prophetic-ethical-political (and apocalyptic) in tensive conjunction. Nava recalls in retrospect that it was the hyphen in Tracy’s ‘mystical-prophetic’ that most imprinted itself upon him during his postgraduate studies at Chicago in the early 1990s, in a setting where Nava found his own previous liberation theological consciousness challenged by a widespread theological turn to aesthetics.
Nava applies Tracy’s term to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century hip-hop, to elucidate the tension between hip-hop’s early overtly political character – ‘the sudden eruption of black and brown voices on to the stage of American life, a rumbling and riotous explosion of sound and self-expression’ – and its later characteristically aestheticised (and commercialised) pleasures as primarily ‘renegade music, dance and art’. Evidently drawn to the politics, Nava nevertheless shows why none may rush past hip-hop’s multilayered artistic and participative exhilarations. In this vein, Nava moves into a rich reading of Childish Gambino’s powerful 2018 song and music video ‘This is America’.
Nava’s chapter showcases this category of Tracy’s finding relevance and application beyond religion narrowly defined, and this in turn allows Nava to speak of ‘street theology’ as a form of public theology that emerges when the genius of hip-hop is interpreted sympathetically as mystical-prophetic.
A chapter by Stephen Okey from the United States – ‘Conversational Reason: Ambiguities and Interruptions in a Digital Age’ – then concludes Part II of the book by returning readers to Tracy’s theology of conversation, this time viewed primarily as social and civil practice. As Okey observes, conversation is a theme ‘which animates … the whole posture and method of Tracy’s career’. Okey’s chapter introduces Tracy’s major text on conversation, Plurality and Ambiguity (1987), before bringing Tracy into conversation with cultural critic Sherry Turkle regarding our intervening era of digitalised communication and social media. As Okey reads Turkle, especially in her 2015 book Reclaiming Conversation, digital mediation characteristically magnifies the ‘interruptions’ of plurality and ambiguity that Tracy suggests mark all conversation. Turkle emphasises a widespread and urgent need for us to gain distance from our technologies if they are not to consume us at the same time as they dismantle conversation. The most far-reaching of several consequent lessons drawn by Okey’s chapter for theological conversation in our digital age concerns the necessity of deliberately ‘building’ theological culture through deliberate and detailed design. For, as Turkle and others will remind us, many of the most troubling ambiguities of digital communication have been deliberately designed into digital platforms with the organised purpose of maximising lucrative yet unhealthy patterns of interaction and encounter.
The author of one of very few book-length introductions to Tracy’s thought in print,Footnote 10 the attention that Okey gives in his chapter to the early reception of Plurality and Ambiguity is additionally valuable in this volume for two ways in which it helps to contextualise further the preceding chapters by Forster and Nava. First, Okey somewhat recalls Forster when he highlights some early criticisms of Plurality and Ambiguity: namely, that Tracy insufficiently considered the ambiguities of one’s interlocutors (not merely oneself) in the conversational encounter, and that he ignored imperatives for at least some participants in conversations to resist framings of the rational task proposed by powerful others. In so far as Okey’s chapter offers an answer to these criticisms of Tracy, it is by showing how our current digital situation highlights to us quite how ‘deep down’ plurality and ambiguity stretch within any given conversation. Conversational ‘publicness’ has never in fact occurred outside of ambiguous conscious and unconscious media designs, and these stretch all the way back into our very languages themselves. As Okey helps us to visualise this, there is always some particular design to ‘the table’ at which conversation participants convene – ‘size, shape, number of chairs’ (and for whom), and so on. And yet, at the same time, a focus on our digital situation can remind us how fragile and socially crucial the phenomenon of conversation always is.
Second, Okey’s chapter also sheds light on Nava’s chapter when Okey highlights Tracy’s personally chastened response to another early criticism of Plurality and Ambiguity, namely, that Tracy’s text failed to account properly for either his hope in conversation or that hope’s theological character. Nava’s chapter on mystical-prophetic hip-hop may be read here as fruit from Tracy’s subsequently renewed determination to name God and reason in a more theologically complete manner. Today, Tracy counts mystical-prophetic contemplation and rhetoric as a requisite ‘third form of publicness’ for thinking and theology, alongside argument and conversation.Footnote 11
Church and World
Coinherences and coincidences of particularity and universality are dear to Tracy’s theological heart, including in his crucial notion of ‘the classic’ as disclosive of truth by means of intense historical particularity. In Part III, ‘Church and World’, such coinherences and coincidences obtain amplified dimension within three concrete situations of human social living. Each of these three chapters deals with some frequently marginalised plural and ambiguous, lived experience that is at risk of being effaced by falsely projected universalities (‘totality systems’, as Tracy has called these). The experiences highlighted in these chapters have to do with gender, war, and church community. When these experiences are effaced by pretended totality, in Tracyean view, blocks appear against their truer events of justice, reconciliation, or mystical-prophetic vision and love. These chapters are each in their own ways political and they each concern the fragile hope of the Christian church in the world.
The chapter by Maria Clara Bingemer from Brazil – ‘Justice, Excessive Love, and the Future of Catholic Christianity’ – begins this section by drawing readers’ attention to a short chapter by Tracy from 1991 that celebrates feminist thinkers, in particular, for how they insist on contextualising all thought and experience at the same time as also pressing universal demands for justice. This paradoxical double-demand is for Tracy a key means by which feminist thinkers have countered entrenched gender injustice. And as Tracy goes on to note, many feminist theologians then add in their own further religious layers of material contextualisation and theocentric universalisation, in a manner that characteristically renders their work, in Tracy’s eyes, ‘the unexampled challenge’ for all theology.Footnote 12
Bingemer proceeds to expound her own Roman Catholic feminism in relation to liberation theology and the ‘option for the poor’, on a Latin American continent where women often find themselves ‘doubly poor’. Bingemer chooses also to draw upon Tracy’s favoured selection of European women mystics – from thirteenth-century Angela of Foligno to seventeenth-century Madame Jeanne de Guyon – who practised and contemplated, in Tracy’s expression, a divine–human ‘excessive love’ for God and often also the poor. As Tracy’s own contribution to this volume makes clear, excess – in Infinity and in Love – is for him a signal mark of what we may call God. Perhaps we may say that excess in loving is what most cares for the event of God in the world.
Meditating on excessive love, Bingemer is led also to Simone Weil and Dorothy Day, two remarkable twentieth-century women also valued by Tracy and yet whom many place outside the canons of feminism. Relatively unconcerned to draw boundaries around who qualifies as a feminist, Bingemer calls these two very distinctive women to the side of more recent theological feminism in her hope for a church and a future where divine–human love and desire for justice challenges patriarchy, sexism, and all oppressions of the poor.
The middle chapter in this third section – ‘Theological Dialogue amid Anger and Pain’ – by Zoran Turza from Croatia, is the most contextually and practically specific of the contributions to this volume. Turza applies Tracy’s theology of dialogue prospectively to Turza’s own troubled setting of Croatia, nationally Roman Catholic and politically independent since the 1990s civil war of the former Yugoslavia. Turza’s chapter seeks in Tracy an account of dialogue as the first hope of post-war forgiveness and reconciliation. Although Tracy has not written explicitly on reconciliation after conflict, Turza creatively identifies ‘a Tracyean route to the hope of dialogue’ for his own context, via a progress of emphases learned from Tracy regarding ‘history’, ‘tragedy’, and ‘fragments’. Dialogue becomes theological for Turza, rather as for Tracy, not solely on account of the religious contexts widely present in Croatia but also whenever dialogue approaches its proper goals and reach.
Turza begins with Tracy’s account of dialogue as a hope that is enacted within plural, ambiguous, and contested histories. As Turza summarises, frequently ‘[t]he genuine theological context is a practical-historical context of despair and violence’. Yet here Turza also values two further and more recent emphases in Tracy. First, Tracy has highlighted the value of a tragic sensibility within culture and Christianity, which learns to tarry imaginatively and reflectively with horror and suffering in ways that may perhaps allow for possibilities beyond simply despair. Second, since Tracy proposes we organise our hopes around strong fragments or frag-events, Turza finds these sorely needed to shatter ideological totalities widely projected within Croatia for ‘moving on’ without real dialogue or mutuality. In Turza’s innovative application of Tracy, some of the most powerful fragments in his own Croatian context are those ordinary people whose lives continue to witness to the country’s collective failures in addressing many of its inhabitants’ ongoing experiences of extraordinary injustice and suffering. It is to these uncomfortable ones that dialogue must be exposed, if Croatian society is also to open itself towards a divine Infinity of hope and forgiveness.
The chapter by Werner G. Jeanrond from Norway/Germany – ‘The Church in David Tracy’s Theology’ – concludes this section in a feat of compact constructive exposition and synthesis on a topic about which Tracy may sometimes have appeared reticent. Yet Jeanrond shows how Tracy’s evident desire to avoid falling into ecclesiocentric totality-thinking ought not to be misinterpreted as theological indifference to the site and event of the Christian church.
Beginning with Tracy’s more explicit dealings with ecclesiology, Jeanrond shows how, in The Analogical Imagination, Tracy proposes regarding the Christian church as a simultaneously sociological and theological reality, just like its theological partner-reality ‘the world’. This means that no concrete expression of the Christian church may pronounce itself wholly or uniquely adequate to its theological field, at the same time as no boundary between ‘church’ and ‘world’ can be rendered theologically determinate or fundamental. As Jeanrond observes, Tracy’s thinking consequently ‘focuses on the centre of the church, not on its boundaries’.
Jeanrond also shows how Tracy’s thought of the later 1980s and early 1990s imagines churches borne upon mystical-prophetic discourses and praxes that require ongoing searching theological dialogue with otherness that lies without and within. Tracy has written little more recently that is as theologically explicit about the church, but Jeanrond finds it a consistent rule that Tracy’s ecclesiology is everywhere a function of Tracy’s account of God and reality, which in turn evolves and recapitulates within an explicit simultaneity of church and world. Jeanrond therefore ventures to find further latent theology of the church within Tracy’s work on frag-events and God as Infinite Love. Chiming with his own work in this area, Jeanrond judges that a Christian church that learns a Tracyean route to naming God is one that aspires actively, contemplatively, and fragmentarily to realise itself in answering fashion as an ‘institution of love’.
Jeanrond is not suggesting here, I think, that institutions, as such, are capable of love, having reminded Tracy elsewhere about traditions that ‘traditions cannot love … only human persons, men, women and children, are able to love and thus to enter into and co-constitute larger bodies of love’.Footnote 13 Yet institutions are necessary dimensions of those ‘larger bodies’ to which Jeanrond refers. Somewhat as love must have its frag-events (and thereby also its traditions), love must also have its social-political institutions. Yet even so, it remains provocative of Jeanrond to conclude his chapter on Tracy with the hope of the church as an institution of love: not only because of the frequent and egregious failings of the Christian churches as institutional bodies, but also because Tracy himself has seemed theologically reticent about the church and sociologically reticent about institutions (Tracy can admit the latter has sometimes been a weakness).Footnote 14
In detailing three distinct ‘publics’ of academy, church, and society that host and receive theological expression – with all those publics’ mixed possibilities for theological argument, imagination, and rhetoric – it seems to me, following Jeanrond, that Tracy has nevertheless long been adverting, at least implicitly, to three concrete sociological (and consequently also theological) collective bodies, along with their accompanying political institutions.Footnote 15 To the bewilderment of some of Tracy’s theological fellows, as Jeanrond also highlights, Tracy’s whole approach has disallowed Christian theology from elevating its own peculiar ‘public’, the church, to theological sovereignty. And if this appears to some a departure from Christian tradition and practice then we might revert to an answer that Tracy gave to an early critic who doubted, on a parallel point, that The Analogical Imagination broached all that a systematic theology ought to. Tracy replied that pluralistic times require systematic theology in new and pluralising genres.Footnote 16 The ‘revisionist’ thrust of Tracy’s theology continues to this day as he first articulated this in Blessed Rage for Order: critical-correlational rather than dogmatic, amid the crises of tradition and reason made prominent by Western modernity and its aftermaths.Footnote 17 Adumbrating the future of Christian theological reason will require more than religiously talented restorations of Christian tradition now as a period piece.
In the wake of introducing these nine fine chapters, I venture to suggest that one way of beholding Tracy’s theology could be to spy it criss-crossing culture to and between thresholds of embodiment and community, including the thresholds of the Holy Name of Jesus Christ which are occasioned by Christian faith and believing.Footnote 18 Such thresholds or edges – Christo-located, corporeal, corporate – would demand and already entail argumentative, conversational, and mystical-prophetic theocentric theology of the kinds that Tracy insists upon: neither ecclesiocentric nor mistakenly ‘Christocentric’.
From David Tracy
Following those nine chapters that introduce and work creatively with his thought, David Tracy’s contributions to this volume begin with a short dialogue with these chapters in his ‘Reflections on the Essays’. Tracy’s second contribution – ‘On Naming God’ – then may be Tracy’s most succinct account in print of his emergent constructive theological investment in a metaphysics of the Infinite. (Tracy has written elsewhere at greater lengths about the idea of the Infinite in philosophy and theology – for example, in ‘The Ultimate Invisible: The Infinite’ (2016) and ‘Metaphysics, Theology and Mysticism’ (2020), both included in Fragments.)Footnote 19
As Martinez draws out near the conclusion of his chapter, the opening section of ‘On Naming God’ indicates Tracy’s determination to weave metaphysical and soteriological concerns together without any implied separation of these or, alternatively, premature collapse of one into the other. The latter parts of Tracy’s chapter, meanwhile, focus on how ‘Infinite Perfection’ came to prominence in Duns Scotus as the principal Christian thought-name for God, to ‘help theologians understand the positive (cataphatic) possibilities for naming God in the Bible and in philosophy as well as the negative (apophatic) limits of our knowledge’. Tracy has written elsewhere against Scotus’s rejection of analogical language for God,Footnote 20 but in this chapter here Tracy strongly commends Scotus’s confidence in abstract conceptual analysis and in ‘the power and ability of our finite minds’, which helped lead the Franciscan to crown ‘Infinity’ (above ‘Being’) as the highest name of the divine perfection. As Tracy notes, in this Scotus is also an ancestor of Descartes’s later modern discovery of the excessive idea of the Infinite within the human mind.
Postscript
The last word in this book belongs to Willemien Otten from the United States, a colleague of Tracy’s at Chicago Divinity School since 2007 and a historical theologian keenly interested in the ways ancient and medieval themes elaborate themselves across Christian history. Otten’s chapter – ‘David Tracy’s Constructive Theology: Impressions, Contours, Conversations’ – celebrates the broad invitation to Christian theology that she finds in Tracy’s work, describing how Tracy generously invites readers into ever-widening conversations at the same time as he himself is always also pursuing a precise theological ‘pointilism’ that calls for lengthy rumination. Generally, too, she finds Tracy’s concept of the ‘classic’ – cultural, religious, and theological – endlessly fruitful for the pursuit of theology within plural and ambiguous history.
Otten frames Tracy’s work overall as an attempt at ‘making the future of theology now’, adumbrating theological possibility in an insistently complicated and complicating present. She notes that Tracy’s major early works – Blessed Rage for Order (1975) and The Analogical Imagination (1981) – quite radically reconceived theology for more relatively adequate present-day theological self-awareness. And yet, equally, Tracy’s concept of analogical imagination, elaborated there, calls to mind for Otten the ‘third way’ between kataphasis and apophasis that, in the sixth century, Dionysius the Areopagite pretended to have written as his Symbolic Theology.
Otten concludes her chapter and this volume in appropriate fashion, commending Tracy’s recent collections of selected essays, Fragments and Filaments, for a reprise of the theological experience of reading Tracy in general. As fragments and filaments (‘ever unreeling … ever tirelessly speeding’ – Walt Whitman), the mutually resonating essays of these two recent volumes from Tracy quicken into theological events for readers who learn to read well, with Tracy, to ‘make the future of theology now’. The editors hope that the chapters of the volume here in your hands may play supporting parts in this also.
