Theological Integrity

Extract

What makes us say of any discourse that it has or that it lacks ‘integrity’? Usually we can answer this in terms of whether such a discourse is really talking about what it says it is talking about. This is not necessarily to make a pronouncement on the integrity or otherwise of this or that speaker, who may or may not know that the discourse serves a purpose other than what it professes. It would be quite in order to say—as a Marxist might—that eighteenth century aesthetics was an integral part of the ideology of bourgeois cultural dominance, that what determined its judgments and strategies was a particular pattern of economic relations, without thereby saying that Johnson or Hawksmoor was a liar, or that Bach did not ‘mean’ it when he wrote ad maiorem Dei gloriam at the head of his compositions. Somebody perpetuating such an aesthetic today, when we know (according to the Marxist) so much about its real determinants, would be dishonest: they could not mean what an eighteenth century speaker meant because they know what that speaker (on the charitable interpretation) did not—the objective direction, the interest in fact served by the discourse. The discourse is without integrity because it conceals its true agenda; knowing that concealment robs us of our innocence, the ‘innocence’ of the original speaker; for we know too that speech cannot be content with concealment.

Why is it so important that speech should not conceal its purposes? Discourse that conceals is discourse that (consciously or not) sets out to foreclose the possibility of a genuine response.