1. The man himself.

An incapacity to read French led me to the discovery of the significance of J.-K. Huysmans. In his book A Time to Keep Silence, Patrick Leigh Fermor used Huysmans’ term ‘les paratonnerres de la société’ to refer to the monastic calling, the time spent in ‘silent factories’ reducing ‘the moral overdraft of mankind’. One would expect monks to act as tuning forks for the holy, but hardly in this dramatic fashion, which seemed more the preserve of liberal theologians with advanced views. The phrase resonated in this sociological imagination. It seemed to be an answer to a long-standing effort to link sociology to an understanding of liturgical performance, where the actors endeavour to attune those present to signals of transcendence emerging from the absent. Huysmans appeared to be awarding monks a striking success in their social activities in attracting Divine attention. Apart from needing to find out the context of the phrase, a puzzle arose as to who was J.-K. Huysmans.

Initial inquiries were perplexing. Huysmans was infamous for his work A Rebours, the classical pioneering study of the art of decadence. This was the book that so influenced Wilde in The Portrait of Dorian Gray, and which elicited the lofty mot at his trial that he never spoke of the morality of an author. Further inquiry indicated that Huysmans had become bored with decadence and had returned to Catholicism. An account of his return was given in his book, En Route. The paths of both authors crossed oddly in the present day, for the only copy of this work that could be located by the interlibrary loan service at Bristol University was at Reading. His dalliance with vice in A Rebours was well known; his return to virtue in En Route seems to have been overlooked.

What is the connection between the cross-cultural phenomenon of the gender subordination of women which has led to domestic violence, genital mutilation, Indian widow-burning, Chinese foot-binding etc., and, on the other hand, the contemporary ‘received’ Christian theological tradition on women? This was the fundamental question underlying the reflections and discussions at the 1989 Maryknoll Summer School on the ‘Global Agenda of Feminist Theology’

This is not a report on that Summer School; rather, it is a presentation of ideas that emerged at it. The 65 participants were drawn from 20 countries and all continents, and were made up of single women, married women, single men, religious sisters and priests. They came from a variety of Christian faith commitments, though the majority were Catholics, and from a variety of academic backgrounds and life experience. From their perspective of involvement with grassroots organisations, local support groups and women church communities, they addressed themselves to many issues which face humankind, but primarily in order to integrate their conversion to Christian feminism into a global discernment on the position of women. They gathered at Maryknoll to look at developments in churches and societies and critique them from a feminist point of view, pointing to the areas where the holistic, inclusive and non-competitive aspects were missing.

Feminism stresses the need to recognise ‘difference as a crucial strength’, to quote Audre Lord. If we do not do this, we will fall into the trap of patriarchy. The terms ‘feminism’ and ‘patriarchy’ are used to encapsulate different cultural and power systems, and ‘patriarchy’ is a system which is dividing and conquering, and doing this as a norm of control.

Introduction

To many, linking the two words ‘critical’ and ‘theology’ will seem at best a tautology. After all, since Saint Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, theology has been regarded firmly and explicitly as second-order reflection, which is of necessity ‘critical’ if it is genuinely reflective. And yet there is a sense in which this understanding of theology—and this understanding of reflection—as in some sense one single identifiable discipline is very uncritical. Some of the more recent developments in narrative theology, for example, do not lend themselves to such a generalised analysis. A concern with hermeneutic theory, too, leads one at least to doubt the notion that ‘theology’ is ‘always’ the same sort of enterprise; one need only consider the diversity of ‘local’ theologies in Central America, or Black Africa, to recognise the possibility of there being many different interpretations of ‘theology’. David Tracy’s magisterial study, The Analogical Imagination (London 1981), in which the vexed question of the relationship between theology and cultural pluralism is addressed, is arguably the finest recent examination of these issues.

What I want to do in this short essay is to reflect upon our modern definition of ‘theology’, and to consider to what extent it is genuinely critical. To facilitate this, I will concentrate upon two texts: Tracy’s The Analogical Imagination; and John E. McPeck’s Critical Thinking and Education (Oxford 1981). In the light of their work, I will advance some ideas and suggestions concerning the way in which theologians might conceivably go about their tasks.

In some ways we ‘know’ so little about Francis. We have many legends and accounts of his life, some written by those who were closest to him, some collated from earlier accounts by the Order as it grew in the century after his death. However, all of these chroniclers and interpreters shared one thing, they did not write as would an academic historian of today: they wrote to explain their devotion, to explain why one man should have had such a devastating and transforming affect on the religious life of his day. We can neither ignore these accounts because they do not fit the criteria that we demand of ‘history’ , nor unthinkingly accept them as a ‘scientific’ biography. We are called always to interpret.

We know that Francis underwent a conversion and gave up a wealthy life to become one of the poorest of the poor. We know that gradually there gathered around him a body of followers who formed themselves under his guidance into a Brotherhood, and were eventually transformed into the more organised structure of an Order. He travelled far from his base in Assisi, from France to the Middle East, but always returned. Francis continually struggled to resist the urge to become anything but one of the poor, always fighting the acquisition of houses, possessions, learning, or any self-conceit. Eventually he gave up control of his Order to people with a different vision of their mission, preferring to become just another brother to fighting for control as the head of a large and expanding organisation. Two years before his early death he received the stigmata on the feast of the Holy Cross. His standing when he died in 1226, the victim of a life of fasting and near continual illness, was as great as it had ever been.