Transcript for Episode 65

Ryan:

This episode is a re-run of my conversation with theologian Anne Carpenter. Anne’s new book came out in September, and Beatrice Institute is organizing a reading group on it. If you’d like to be involved in this remote reading group, please email us at admin@beatriceinstitute.org. We will be starting up in late November.

The book is called Nothing Gained is Eternal: A Theology of Tradition. This is from the back cover: Carpenter shows ressourcement to be a way not only of retrieving the past but of making moral judgments about both a former age and our own. The resulting account of tradition pushes back against sentimental and triumphalist interpretations of Christian patrimony.

And Jennifer Newsome Martin writes: The book unites detailed theological and philosophical analyses of history and temporality with an exhortative call to action against dark forces of racism and colonialism which shadow Christianity's past and present, making a compelling case that future systematic reflection on Christian tradition ought to be reconfigured to account for a direct confrontation against those powers and principalities."

So if you enjoy this conversation, consider joining us in a discussion of the book, part of a large conversation about genealogy and tradition that Beatrice Institute will be curating in the spring.

My guest today is Anne Carpenter. Anne is associate professor of theology at St. Mary's College of California. She's one of my favorite thinkers on theology and the arts, especially poetry. And she's an excellent poet herself. Her first book, Theo-Poetics: Hans Urs von Balthasar on the Risk of Art and Being, begins each chapter with an original poem that contributes to the book's argument in a way only poetry can. Now Anne has been working on the concept of tradition in her new book, Nothing Gained Is Eternal: A Theology of Tradition, is coming out soon from Fortress Press. I think you'll really enjoy this conversation.

Anne Carpenter, welcome to the show.

Anne:

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Ryan:

What do you wish that undergraduate students knew about tradition? Or, maybe, how would you teach the concept of tradition to undergrads and what are the competing concepts that you have to contend with?

Anne:

I think that the most common idea of tradition that my students have is a kind of game of telephone, where you have a phrase and you hand it down the line. And inevitably, the phrase gets garbled and messed up, and people forget. Like when we talk about early Christians in my class and I bring up St. Paul, they'll consider St. Paul too far away from Jesus to know anything, and I have to sort of concretely pull them into a historical imagination where tradition is the community dealing with its questions. That's what tradition centrally is. And it's, yes, about keeping things, but most of all about living.

Yves Congar, who's very important in Catholic theology, has this massive study of early Christians talking about tradition, and they all discuss tradition like it's the sharing of a unique experience of Jesus Christ, which sets up the conversation differently than a game of telephone that is going to mess up a series of propositions. Which isn't to say that Christians don't come to doctrinal decisions. We do, quite often. But that itself is the expression of a unique experience of Jesus Christ that we share.

So, getting students to, sort of, imagine historical people as intelligent and as communal is sort of the main challenge, because once you get that, the rest is not as hard. Yeah.

Ryan:

I wonder if you can help me unpack this quotation from Charles Péguy. He says, and you quoted this in your recent piece, "The world is the real rose window that is infinitely excavated; the world is the stone rose window, the real, stone rose window that is infinitely pressed, that is wonderfully, that is more than wonderfully, that is mysteriously re-grooved. History is the poor plaster tiles that, in our need, in our universal need, in our poverty, we put in roughly the same place." And so, just to try to help me understand the way this metaphor is working, so a rose window is like a circular stained-glass window that you would see at the back of a church, often. And the circle is complicated by patterns, and in between there are the pieces of glass, the colored glass. Is that the right image?

Anne:

Yeah. He's, so he's being a poet about it. He's taking an image that we usually take to be unmoving and, sort of, resting, and he's using it to try to express movement. Péguy likes odd metaphors, and it took me a while in the French to figure out what was going on. I think that's what he's trying to, to figure out. History approximates human life, but it's not human life. The window is continually regrooved in the metaphor.

Ryan:

What does that mean for it to be grooved or regrooved?

Anne:

I kind of imagine a living window that's...

Ryan:

Okay.

Anne:

...repatterning itself, like vines, like vines.

Ryan:

Ooh, okay. Now I'm getting it.

Anne:

Yeah. And so, that's life, which rushes at you. That's what Péguy will just call the present or reality. And it's always coming into being, it's always, he likes to say it wells up, inexhaustibly. Like, that's sort of the mystery of temporal existence is that it's always arising. And history is, sort of, just after the fact, approximating, not what's weaving into place right now, but the shape that just was just a second ago. That's the plaster tile.

Ryan:

Okay. Yeah. So, I mean, the image I have as I was trying to imagine that I was thinking, well, you could do it with animation.

Anne:

Yeah.

Ryan:

But then also that's what, kind of what a kaleidoscope looks like. Like when you're turning a kaleidoscope, you're constantly getting this patterning that's changing and changing and changing. But then if we, but then he's imagining history is what happens when we try to stop that and re-present it.

Anne:

Right. Yeah.

And he's a dramatic writer, so he's pretty negative about it, but he himself does a lot of historical readings. So, he's not, he doesn't totally hate history. He does resent the historicization of life.

Ryan:

Yeah. And that's a key term I find is really helpful in talking with my students, like the difference between history and historicism. How do you explain that?

Anne:

Yeah. I mean, I like Blondel's definition of historicism, which is just, if it happened, it had to have happened that way. It was inevitable. That's, yeah, that's historicism. It forgets that history is made of people making decisions and they don't know everything. They're just trying.

Ryan:

What is the difference between ressourcement and genealogy?

Anne:

My brain is going in two directions because there's Péguy's notion of ressourcement, which gets borrowed by, sometimes they're called the Nouvelle Théologie, some theologians about a generation, a generation and a half after Péguy. They go and read his writings and they discover this usage of his. And in the French it's just resource. And he's talking about, Péguy is talking about, the French Revolution as a tradition, and he says that what we have to do is come up with a tradition that's more human and more alive by resourcing it. Sort of reaching into the tradition to do it all over again, but better. That's, that's what renews the revolutionary, the French revolutionary tradition for Péguy. Which is very French because he's got to navigate several revolutions that are, kind of, messes ideologically and all over the place. And so, he's trying to find a place where revolution can be productive.

The Nouvelle Théologians, Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, who I mentioned earlier, others, they take this notion from Péguy and they apply it to all kinds of texts and figures from the Catholic past, and they bring them forward. A lot of, they do a lot of work on the church fathers, but there are medieval figures that they resurface as well. And why they do that is to renew their tradition. And I take a lot of genealogical attempts as, sort of, broadly, descriptions to say how we got here. And that's not really what either Péguy or these new theologians are doing. They're not, they, they do do some work about how theology came to be, where it is while they're writing, but they're interested in bringing to Catholic theology of the time a kind of new life through these old figures. So, they're not really, they're, they're introducing the notion of history to Catholic theology, but they're doing it with a kind of purpose to renew it.

Ryan:

Yeah, it's interesting that life is a key word for them because, I think, still, the part of Friedrich Nietzsche's work where we really get what he's trying to do over his whole life project is this early essay, "On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life." And that's all about how can history serve life and what gets, what ends up being called genealogy in the academic humanities today. I mean there is that, that, sort of, just, analytically neutral form of genealogy, which is just trying to give an account of how things came into being. But the other kind, which I think Nietzsche would prefer to call critical history, is really concerned to disrupt the present. And, you know, I wonder if it can even be seen as--that ressourcement in Péguy's sense—can be seen as the inverse of critical genealogy because critical genealogy in a way is trying to kill off certain options in the present by messing with their genetics in the past, it seems to me.

Anne:

Right, right.

Ryan:

But, but also, they would say, I think, for the sake of life, but it's, you know, it's a eugenicist kind of intervention in history in a way that ressourcement is not, I would say. Does any of that ring true to you?

Anne:

I mean, my first thought is, well, that makes ressourcement sound awesome, so obviously that's the case.

[laughter]

But I think, yeah, something broadly like that is more what's going on. And there is a sort of critical side for what happens in Catholic theology, because they're resisting the Thomas Aquinas-ization of Catholic theology. And by that, I mean, its particularly baroque form in Neoscholasticism of the time. They're trying to find a theology that can do something different than that. They wanna give Catholics options, give the life of Catholic history a new life by allowing Catholics to creatively ask new questions that are informed by this long, long, long history.

Ryan:

How would Hans Urs von Balthasar define modernity?

Anne:

That's a great question. So, he is like sort of a genealogical thinker, but not really 'cause he, it's a moving target. He doesn't ever really name only one person or movement as sort of "modern" or "modernity" itself. But I think, for him, the modern world is characterized by an interest in the human individual. That's something particular about modernity that Balthasar actually wants to preserve. But it's also characterized by what he calls "Titanisms," these efforts at control that prevent human beings, the human individual, from creatively appropriating their present and past. And so, Balthasar, like a lot of Catholics, really broadly will sort of line up late medieval eras with a sort of emerging modernism. But he's also capable of seeing the church's own efforts at control, even during the Middle Ages, as a kind of foretaste of modern Titanisms. So, he doesn't, yeah. He's, kind of, always developing a notion of the modern.

Ryan:

One of the things I love about your first book is that it has original poems at the head of each chapter. And so, this makes it like Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, a prosimetrum, which was a popular medieval way of thinking about philosophy and theology or actually doing it formally. And so, I think, as readers, we're asked, you're asking us to read the poetry as poetry and to read the theology as theology, but then to allow the two genres to interpret each other. And, as you know, medieval writers debated how prosimetrum worked, right? So, how are these things supposed to interact? And in fact, when Chaucer translated Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy into English, he rendered even the verse in prose.

Anne:

Interesting. Yeah.

Ryan:

But scholars like Eleanor Johnson will argue that Chaucer still wants us to see a difference in mode between what was verse in the Latin and the philosophy. So, he still wants us to see the prose parts as poetry and the other prose parts as philosophy, even though the formal distinction has been erased or, at least, Johnson says, transposed into the prose formalism of cursus, where there is still a kind of formal patterning, even though it's not verse. Could you elaborate on your theory of prosimetrum? And how you want your book to be read as prosimetrum?

Anne:

Oh, wow. Yeah, I haven't thought about this in a while. So, one story I like to tell is an experience I had while finishing the book. I was giving a presentation on Balthasar's reading of Rainer Maria Rilke, and it was to a group of people who were mainly artists interested in theology. And I could tell by their body language that they were annoyed at me 'cause I kept saying that art and theology are not the same thing.

[laughter]

And so, I paused and I said, "What this means is that you get to be artists without theologians telling you what to do. And, sort of, as artists, I can't dictate to you your dealing with your art. That's what this means." And they were much happier with that, 'cause they thought I was denying them something, and I was trying to, sort of, free up a sort of polyphonic universe.

So, I think the reason there are these, these differences that I argue for, there's a difference between my prose and my poetry, and yet they speak to one another, it's because we live in a cosmos that itself has many horizons. And we experience this all the time when we ask questions. Like, if I ask a question, it's a specification of being that I have to then come back to, even once I answer the question 'cause I haven't exhausted being. I've just answered a concrete question about, I don't know, that tree over there.

And so, Christian life is at its best when it can deploy a similar polyphony to the cosmos. And theology is enriched by borrowing that polyphony, whether we mean theology is borrowing from the sciences or borrowing from the arts. Theology still has to transpose those things to do its own work. So, it changes the art; it changes the science 'cause theologians have different questions than scientists do. Nevertheless, theology is always enriched by adopting the polyphony of the cosmos God has made.

Ryan:

So, the book that I was just talking about, it's called Theo-Poetics. It's about von Balthasar's theopoetics, but also, I think, it's a constructive argument that we can all be doing theopoetics. But I was interested that, for you and your read of von Balthasar, image is the defining feature of theopoetics, like image is what makes his, when his theology is operating theopoetically, it's operating so through images.

But why isn't linguistic form the, the key place where it's happening? Or if image is the key, then why not call it a theo-imaginary rather than a theopoetics? Why wouldn't the picture theory of W. J. T. Mitchell or someone like that be a more promising approach than poetics, which is historically the province of literary theory?

Anne:

Sure. Yeah. So, poetics has to do with me trying to organize Balthasar's experimental theological procedure. He doesn't call it a poetics. He does talk about poets a lot, and I do talk about some of the poets he talks about, but he himself doesn't call it a poetics. And so, my use of poetry is me trying to organize what really is a procedure he learned from his youth in his doctoral work in Germanistics. And so...

Ryan:

Which is like a literature PhD, right?

Anne:

Yeah, well, it's like history of ideas, literature, and philosophy all in one degree. That's, yeah. So, he tends to combine ways of thinking because that's what he learned. So, he's consistently referencing. That's one of the main ways he argues is by way of reference. He's consistently hauling in a lot of metaphoric content, which I term "image" because that's some of what he says in Theo-Logic. And he's also doing other things, like he's doing serious metaphysical, Thomistic-ish philosophy, all at once. Because, for him, that's theology more nearly approximating human experience and therefore theology being able to speculate more and better.

And so, you could, yeah, call it a kind of image thing. I wouldn't mind that. I think all the arts are helpful, just in different ways. And I am a poet, and so that was the organizing structure that I went for 'cause I understood that from the inside.

Ryan:

I've come to the understanding—and I hope you'll be able to correct me—that the doctrine of transubstantiation isn't the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist. But that, instead, it's a specifically metaphysical doctrine of the Eucharist. And Thomas Aquinas developed it, not in order to be the final word and comprehensive word on what the Eucharist is and how it works, but to address questions about the metaphysics of the Eucharist that had been posited by metaphysicians. And so, because it's a metaphysical explanation of what's happening in the Eucharist, it's not a comprehensive account.

And so, it's just as partial as a social doctrine of the Eucharist, such as what John Bossy implies in his historical work, then Henri de Lubac takes up theologically in Corpus Mysticum. Or then there's a phenomenological account of the Eucharist like Robert Sokolowski.

Anne:

Yeah, I was just thinking of him. Yeah.

Ryan:

And none of these is a comprehensive doctrine. All three are mutually compatible. But I have a feeling that you and—maybe you—and definitely other theologians would want to privilege the metaphysical account of transubstantiation. Why?

Anne:

Hmm. So, Lonergan calls metaphysics "the hole in knowledge, but not the whole of knowledge."

Ryan:

Who calls it that?

Anne:

Lonergan. Bernard.

Ryan:

Oh, Lonergan. I thought, you said Larkin. Sorry. Okay.

Anne:

No. Yeah. Bernard Lonergan. So, I think...what do I wanna say? At least the way I learned it from Balthasar, metaphysics is more like a framing device that allows for theological speculation to be braver, not because metaphysics is the point. I mean, the dogma of the Eucharist is the real presence. Transubstantiation describes an aspect of that. And so, I think what the metaphysics is doing is more like providing a mediating ground for the rest of theological speculation. And there are other philosophical structures that can do that. Metaphysics isn't the only way. But certainly a notion of the supernatural and of metaphysical analogy is really important to Balthasar because it helps guide him when he's gonna speculate about things that people really don't like him for speculating about. But it gives him a rule of thumb because metaphysics is heuristic. It's not everything. It just points at everything.

Ryan:

I've been reading around in pre–World War I Christian social thought, but particularly Anglophone pre–World War I. People like Ralph Adams Cram and Vida Dutton Scutter in the US. And it's remarkably optimistic. Like, Cram identified a kind of end of history moment where...

Anne:

Oh no.

[laughter]

Ryan:

We now, it's now come to the point where we realize that science and theology are just getting closer and closer together and are merging. And, you know, Robert Hugh Benson writes Dawn of the World [The Dawn of All], where all of medicine, like, miracles have been integrated into medicine, and it's just like this new kind of integralism. And that's what we're, we're just around the corner from that. And World War I happens and they have to completely start over.

But Charles Péguy wrote The Portal of the Mystery of Hope, his big book-length poem, or one of his big book-length poems, I think around 1907, which is right around the time these others are writing this optimistic stuff. And it assumes a really dark starting place, I think.

And so, you know, two-part question, was this just that the French context was different from the English? There was more reason to be pessimistic in France at the time? Or is it also the case that Péguy was granted the vision that the church would actually need after the wars, which is the insight that hope is the rarest and most important of the theological virtues?

Anne:

Yeah. I mean, part of it has got to be the French context, but it, it...hmm. There were ridiculous French optimists, but that wasn't Péguy. And I think part of that had to do with just his life, right next to a lot of big French names but not in those circles. And so, he's always at these borderlines and has to experience a lot of, I think, personal and professional disappointment. And, like he, one example is he felt really betrayed by his fellow socialists 'cause he thought that they were giving up the mystique of their calling as socialists for the sake of political exigency. And so, Péguy comes in with a life that's been pretty hard, where having the right ideas doesn't mean you'll do the right thing.

Ryan:

Hmm.

Anne:

Which is a very human problem. We all have that problem. And he responds with, with this incredible sensitivity to the suffering that that causes, this very human perplexity, which is ourselves, we're our own perplexity. And yet, we wake up every day and stumble along. And he has in mind always, sort of, the French peasant, who doesn't have much at all, but who gets up every morning. And there's something ridiculous about it because it's not purely logical. I might experience defeat such that I don't want to try anymore. Nevertheless, I continue to be alive, and I have to deal with that. And so, Péguy sees human struggle as this continual beginning again whose only source can be God, ultimately.

Ryan:

He has this aphorism, "There's the crowning of thorns, but there is also the crowning of hope."

Anne:

Yeah.

Ryan:

Is that what's going on there?

Anne:

Yeah. I think something like that. Jesus Christ for Péguy has to experience...I mean, it's like Pascal, a cosmic pain until the end of the world. And he does this out of hope for human beings, that the human being presented with this divine hope will answer back with a hope in God. And it, and the odds are against this. The odds are against this, but God bets everything first.

Ryan:

How do you think Péguy's and Jacques Maritain's relationship might've developed if Péguy had lived through World War I?

Anne:

Yeah, that's interesting. I'm not sure I know enough about Maritain to really say. I think they would've had a really interesting conversation about the role of Catholicism in France, because they both want to keep France Catholic, but they have to deal with this authoritarian strain in Catholicism. I mean, Péguy just will straight up call a lot of Catholics demagogues. And I think that would have been a really interesting conversation for him to have with Maritain.

Ryan:

What did Paul Claudel learn from Péguy?

Anne:

So, a thing I do in the book I just finished is I went through the trouble of comparing socialist Péguy's play on Joan of Arc and then returned-to-Catholicism Péguy's play on Joan of Arc. And they're really similar. But the main difference is Péguy in the second has this idea of the supernatural, by which I mean the radically disproportionate as sustaining the proportionate. He really has this idea. And he describes it poetically by, sort of, allowing God to talk first, giving a kind of primacy to God's agency. And I think Claudel's really similar. They've, I think, we could also talk about Claudel and repetition, but, I think, idea-wise Claudel picks up this notion that every effort is sustained by God. Right. Even, even the effort that fails.

Ryan:

Yeah. Yeah. And even the misguided effort, like in The Satin Slipper, you know, this crazy, impossible, adulterous or potentially adulterous love between the two main characters. And it's this eleven-hour play that's, that eventually reveals, kind of without the agents themselves being aware of it, but reveals to us, I think, that there is some kind of, you know, there's this, this disproportionate directedness that's been going on all along.

Anne:

Yeah. Yeah. And, I think, Balthasar puts it pretty well—'cause he loves both of these poets—and he talks about how in Greek tragedy it's not clear whether the world cares about human struggle. It's not clear, it's faded, we're all kind of helpless, but the gods sort of care and they sort of don't. And so, we face a possibly indifferent universe. But Balthasar will say, if the universe is in love with God, it is not indifferent. The horizon cares about me.

Ryan:

What difference does it make, if at all, to theologize in the landscape of the Ohio River Valley versus coastal California? You know, maybe you throw Milwaukee in there too, if you want.

Anne:

There's a couple of differences I've noticed. The main one is, at least among a large portion of the students, they're kind of like the future of where the Midwest is right now. They might have a grandma who was religious, but they themselves and their parents aren't religious. And so they really don't have a lot of religious grammar. And then the ones who do, they went to Catholic schools and stuff, it's still, it's not yet activated by a lot of intelligible content. And so, they just repeat things to me, like "Jesus saves us from hell." And I always say stuff like, "Well, hell sounds fun."

[laughter]

So, yeah, it's, they're a little farther away from religious traditions, which is one reason I started thinking about tradition because I just wanted to know what happens to Catholic tradition when it faces questions it hasn't asked yet. And for me, my students are all questions I haven't asked yet with Catholic tradition.

[laughter]

So, yeah. And they also, they're all pretty well versed in general Bay Area gender and sexuality things, in ways I'm just not at all. And so, they don't think gender is real and they have no patience for a medieval person that we're reading who thinks it is. [laughter] Stuff like that. But I always characterize myself for them as sort of like an alien, like weird, someone who is not going to understand them immediately but who wants to. And so, they get to explain themselves, which they like, and I don't have to intuit what they mean by things, 'cause we're trying to figure it out.

Ryan:

That actually might be a helpful concrete example for a broader question that I wanted to ask you, which the broad question is: what can theologies of experience learn from metaphysics, like metaphysical theology? We could also try to find another way of coming at that, but I was so intrigued by your conversation with Lexi Eikelboom about where, where she's working very much in a Schleiermachian vein and really, you know, experience is really the only way we can do theology.

Anne:

Right.

Ryan:

Like, that has to be where we begin. And because theology is ultimately, for us, at least insofar as we seek some kind of participation in the Godhead, that's where we end up ending as well. But, but you're saying that metaphysics is a) not in competition with experience, but also b) it kind of, you can't even, like if you're just doing a theology of experience, there's a lot that you can't do. I mean, that would be my rough-and-ready response, but maybe you can recharacterize that for me.

Anne:

Yeah. I have two thoughts about experience and metaphysics that I return to a lot. And one is that even those theologians and philosophers who give primacy to experience are using intellectual methods to approach that experience. And metaphysics is just another method to approach the experience of being. It's one of many, and we would need them all since we're talking about human beings. So, anything that we generate can also be used to understand us.

As my friend Jon Heaps says, "Experience is only potentially meaningful." Like, if you punch me in the face, I don't yet know what that means. I have to start asking questions about it and put it in the context of what Lonergan calls "a world of meaning." And that's when the richness of human experience emerges.

And so, metaphysics is, yes, just one tool. But I think that there's a certain existentialism that forgets that the creature asking the questions is an asker of questions. I have an interior life that is animated by this interest in knowing things, which is why I ask, "What does that experience mean?" And so, stopping at human experience actually prevents us from fully understanding human experience, 'cause I also experience myself as intelligent, as a creature of desire, as a creature who makes decisions. And if I want to talk about that experience, I again need to return to this polyphonic method.

Ryan:

That makes sense to me, but maybe you could go a little bit farther because it seems to me like you could say, it seems to me that your response could kind of fall under the rubric of hermeneutics. So, you know, experience in itself is never enough. It has to be, we have to interpret it. And to interpret it, we have to ask questions about it. But there's all kinds of questions we can ask about it, right? We can ask narrative questions about it. We can ask social questions about it. But metaphysics asks a very particular type of question. And what, why is it that we need to be asking those metaphysical questions in order to properly interpret experience?

Anne:

So, human beings come to judgments about what is the case. We can assent to truth. That's Newman's argument. And the mind itself is the measure that allows us to say this is true or not. And because our minds are able to do this thing, which is judge, by which I mean affirm that something is the case, that is not just the expression but also the knowing of being, which funds all of human experience.

And so, metaphysics is very abstract. It tends to organize operations and their relations to one another. But ultimately, it's about trying to say what's in common between my many questions, not just how am I interpreting them but what's in common with them. And that's the question of being. That's the only thing that holds them together.

Ryan:

Yeah, that's great. And I found your response to Lexi Eikelboom to be the most articulate and vivid, you know, just intuitively graspable account of the interface between experience and metaphysics that I've ever read. So, I...

Anne:

Oh, wow. Thanks.

Ryan:

…thought it was really powerful, and I commend it to all of our listeners, and we'll link to it in the show notes.

Anne:

Wonderful. Thank you. I was panicked about it. How do I, cause she, she, I think Lexi, rightly, was like, "Do you just want all your boxes in a row?" And I was like, "Okay, fair. How do I answer that?"

[laughter]

Ryan:

I gather that you're an avid video game player.

Anne:

I am.

Ryan:

How far back does that go?

Anne:

I think we got some kind of Nintendo system when I was maybe ten or twelve, so for a long time.

Ryan:

Okay. And I thought of asking, “do video games have theologies,” but of course they do. Every work of art, every narrative has a theology. So, what can video games do theologically that is distinctive to them? Although, based on what you said earlier, maybe you don't like that way of putting it. You can, you can tell me if you don't.

So like, there are certain things that only formal poetry can do and you can't just distill it down into discursive theology.

Anne:

Right.

Ryan:

Or you can, but once you've done it, you've lost something. And yet, I would say that it's something that's still being accomplished theologically, just not discursively. But so, anyhow, whatever you want to do with that, maybe video games could be the example.

Anne:

There's even a whole genre of video games that's just storytelling and...

Ryan:

And by that do you mean that you're kind of just participating in the story rather than...

Anne:

Yeah. There was one, What Remains of Edith. I forget now. It's a meditation on death. It's wonderful. And you move around this old house. You are not quite this character. You're someone else, but they're, they're explaining to you their family history. And there's not really any sort of game challenges or puzzles. There's some puzzling through rooms and stuff that you have to figure out, but it's all about unfolding the story.

So, there's a certain strong narrative quality in games that makes them like plays in literature. But what makes games different, I think, is that it is interactive, that I'm hitting buttons and making it come alive. And a lot of people want to pathologize this, which is interesting. But I think the more interesting question isn't the pathology but how does the narrative deal with that I, the player, am making choices and hitting buttons, like the Bioshock games are all built around showing the player that the player doesn't really have any freedom. So, that's one way to deal with it in the story.

But then there's the Zelda games, which are on the one hand puzzle boxes, on the other hand stories. But the game won't tell you how to win. You have to find that. And the whole world is, sort of, built to get you to acquire the things and skills where you can accomplish that. And that's a much less violent, nihilistic view of me hitting buttons. It's actually playful. It sort of sees play as this really serious anticipation of life. I really like the Zelda games, in case you can't tell.

So, yeah. I think video games are fun and they're fun to escape to, but I'm also dealing with a world that's trying to tell me something about what it means that I hit a button.

Ryan:

Does that have something to do with...I mean, I think that, just, absolutely fundamental to von Balthasar's concept of theo-drama, that essentially all the world is a stage and we are actors on it. I mean, that's derived, it's not derived from Shakespeare. It's derived from medieval cycle plays or early modern cycle plays. And what's key to those is that you, as a member of this community, will very likely at some point in your life play one of these roles in one of these plays. And so, it's not just about this analogy between the stage and life. It's like, there's an actual, there's an actual, real common point to that analogy, which is that I am, you know, as a miller and a father of four, at some point gonna play Pilot up on the stage in the Passion Play, and another miller and another father of four in the audience is going to see themselves there.

So, I guess I wonder is that partly what video games are doing is that they're allowing us to actually take part in the drama that the analogy is based on?

Anne:

Yeah, I think the best games can do that. Other games are just murder machines or some mix of wonderful and murder machine. I, like, one game I really liked is called Dishonored and there's a sequel. And the sequel is very, very good, but the thing that it loses compared to the first is that so much of the story is buried underneath what characters are saying and the dialogue you can overhear or read about, so that there's layers to the story. And, and that's much more interactive than just, like, I murdered that dude in a really cool way. And so, I think pulling players into stories so that they have to imagine alongside the game does something similar to the cycle plays. Yeah.

Ryan:

Syndicate, which is this, as you know, very cool and innovative crossover academic–public intellectual forum online. They did a 2020 report on the state of theology. You know, it was admittedly very partial and limited, but to me it was surprising just how partial and limited it was because it was very, very focused on academia. And to me, this was really, it was kind of ironic because this is at a point where academic theology is passing away. I mean, it's on life support.

Anne:

Yup.

Ryan:

Just because of the institutional realities, I mean, just because of the fact that religious studies departments are getting closed down and theology departments are getting shrunk, et cetera, et cetera.

So, how would you relate academic, professional theology to the other kinds of theology happening now? You know, even thinking towards the next generation. What is academic theology here to do? And then, what, where are the other centers of theology?

Anne:

There will always be theology in seminaries. But let me, sort of, approach this sideways. When I think about what theology has been in two thousand years, it's been in a lot of places in a lot of ways. Like, Jean Leclercq points that out in his wonderful book, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, which is an extended argument in defense of monastic writing as theological. And I love, he, I mean, I, in a lot of ways I'm, like, a Thomist and Scholastic, but I love his ax to grind that he has against scholasticism. It's just fun. But theology has been, as a commentary on what Christians believe and do, it's been all kinds of things. Which, this gives me hope, actually, because theology itself requires a lot of practice to do and be good at, but I think there will always be Christians interested in asking what it is that they're doing when they do it. Academic theology in the sense of beholden to a university-funded guild is dying. But I see a lot of my students, even, who really are not into organized religion are into theological questions. And, I think... I'm not sure what it is going to look like practically, sort of, where people will be housed, how they'll get stipends to do this, but I'm confident that Christians will need something better than YouTube channels that say angry things about the Mass in English. And that richness will be theology, actual theology, not—how do I put it? There's theology as contemplator of wisdom and lover of the poor, and then there's theology that just wants to, I don't know, dunk on people. And I think people…

[laughter]

…I think people are actually really desperate for the first and not the second.

Ryan:

So, I didn't realize that you had just finished a book. Is this the tradition book?

Anne:

Yes. Yeah.

Ryan:

Wow, you're fast.

[laughter]

Anne:

Yeah, sometimes.

[laughter]

Ryan:

What are the nonacademic ways of theologically engaging in tradition or for the tradition to be renewed theologically or the theological tradition to be renewed, that are, you know, that don't depend on the theological journals...

Anne:

Right.

Ryan:

...and the publishing houses and the universities?

Anne:

The main contribution that any Christian can make to God's plan is being who God calls them to be, which involves the very arduous task, as Blondel puts it, of doing the right thing in the right way. And there's nothing preprogrammed about having to make that decision to do the right thing in the right way. But when I manage to, or even when I try and fail, the tradition is renewed because I'm contributing my life to it, living the faith in history such that faith interprets history. And so, I think trying to be yourself before God is something we don't talk enough about. That is the central contribution we all make to Christian tradition.

Ryan:

Is there any place where we can find your poetry besides your book?

Anne:

Um...

Ryan:

Besides the Balthasar book? Oh, and I wanted to ask, do you have poems in the, in the forthcoming book? And is that part of the method there, too?

Anne:

Not for every chapter. I have one that I've been keeping that I would like to put before the introduction, but it's less of a poetic tour de force, I guess. I've got a couple of poems published in Macrina Magazine. Other than that, I'm not super well-published as a poet. I'm trying. We'll see.

Ryan:

That's great. That's great. Well, Anne Carpenter, thank you very much.

Anne:

Thank you. This was wonderful.