Transcript for Episode 76

Ryan: Welcome to part two of the Genealogy and Tradition Reading Group's interview with Anne Carpenter about her book Nothing Gained Is Eternal: A Theology of Tradition.

If you haven't heard the first part, you can go back and listen to that in the previous episode. And we left it on a bit of a cliff hanger, so I'm going to play the question that prompted the cliff hanger at the end of the last episode, and we'll launch back in right there.

You can find an introduction to Anne and this book at the beginning of the last episode. If you haven't heard that, I'd definitely encourage you to go back and start there.

And with that, let's continue.

Anne: And that's the necessary thing, I think, is collaboration in this immense task that requires thinkers and not only doers cause we want our doing to be effective.

Ryan: So, assuming much of our audience, as far as I'm aware, are not academics – in fact, I think many people who listen to the podcast listen to it because they don't have time to read – would the answer be the same for them? Or, what would you say to our imagined podcast listener?

Anne: I'm going to start off with an indirect answer and then maybe be more direct. I've got this icon of the Virgin and Child. So I was suddenly thinking…

So one of my favorite things to do is to daydream random stuff about what it must have been like in the Virgin Mary's life, which is an old Catholic pastime. I mean my first name is like, “He must have had a grandma! She has a name. Let's give her a name.” Anyways and when I think about her, I think about, “Well what was it like for her to deal with her neighborhood, this sinless person?” And one of the ways we typically imagine Mary is as – Bernanos does this; this is one of the things about him that I don't like very much – she has a kind of wondering innocence at our sin, total befuddlement at our strange cruelties. But I think that she knew who the bad husbands were. She knew the kids that didn't get enough food. And I picture her and tiny Jesus walking across the street with a basket of their last bread to give to the mom and her kid while Dad is passed out drunk or whatever – you know, something super bleak because I'm imagining it, so it gets to be dramatic. And I say that because I see that kind of canny awareness in Jesus. He's moved with pity, frequently, by the people around him. And that requires an incredible amount of thoughtfulness. Yes, it's practical. But there's a contemplation of the people around her, I think, from God's point of view that's profoundly necessary. We need wise people like that and that's going to require a great deal of grace, but also thoughtfulness. So while the scholars are far away theorizing, which of course is important, also, we have neighbors to worry about and to worry about intelligently and doing the unexpected thing that's most necessary.

So I think, hopefully the book helps. I don't know how readable it always is for the various reading levels, especially the artsy stuff. But hopefully it gives some people some tools so that the collaboration is more than academic, but also takes place in parishes and daily life. And translating that will of course require taking stock of what one's daily life in fact involves and the needs that it has. And yeah, I actually have a lot of hope for that. I think people can be quite amazing at those kinds of things.

Ryan: So Anne, tell me about the genesis of this book, because it's not the book that I would've expected if someone said, “I'm writing a new Catholic theology of tradition.” It is not only that; it's a beautiful conceptual account of what tradition is that I think not only functions within Christianity; I think it's a model that in many ways is applicable outside of Christianity to things like literary history, literary tradition for example. But central to the book is Christian sin and its historical weight on tradition, and specifically, colonialism, racism and the oppression of non-white people. How did you get to that point where you said, “This has to be central to how I'm thinking about tradition?”

Anne: I will do the cheesy thing and say Janelle Monáe taught me. She confessed the truth of our age, in her music, to me, in a way I could finally hear. And so now that I saw…

And just to sort of get background, one of the central themes in a lot of her music is this sense of danger, the creativity of escape, the fragility of escape. It's always temporary. This remarkable confrontation. She says, in this – What does she call them? “Emotion pictures?” She's an artist. She gets to call a music video whatever she wants. And so she's under the gaze of all these machines and these people make her say, “I am a dirty computer.” So the machine makes her say, “I am inadequate, I am disallowed, I am broken,” essentially, “I am that which cannot be, that this machine needs me to be. For it to be, I have to be fundamentally negated.”

I mean, that's the heart of the experience of colonialism’s operation in the world on people of color. They are forever disallowed, while also necessary, and who can't be moved by that? And what's amazing about Janelle Monáe isn’t just the way that she makes that terrible proclamation into a song of defiance. It's that her song includes anyone in it who would identify with that moment. So there's this incredible act of charity, mercy, in the breadth of her creativity.

And so, and oh shit! I have to also know about this. I can't unknow it. I can't unsee this. It's true. And if I want to write about my tradition, I have to confront the way Christianity for her for many is fundamentally the one that offers redemption and denies it, that finds her necessary by negating her. And man, that's hard. But, who can deny Christ once you've seen him, right?

So, I had to add this to my book, even though I think in a lot of ways I'm the worst designed for it. I'm busy in liberal arts land, reading dead white people. That's my comfort zone. And I didn't want to be pressed beyond it. But I was. So I wrote this book that tried to put together things I love with this problem revealed to me. I've totally forgotten what your question is, but, ah! that's what the book is about: me, the things I know well finally tasked with confronting the truth that this artist first showed me.

Ryan: But it’s not like you just added that at the end. I mean, it’s central to your whole conception of tradition. So, say something about that.

Anne: It threatened to be that, in my head, always. I have much better tendons and flexibility, for the white people. I'm good at that. Right? So making it central and not an addendum was actually quite hard and still feels that way. So yeah, of course it's a central concern.

Ryan: I'm going to play a question from Anthony Shoplik who is a PhD student in English at Loyola University in Chicago.

Anthony: Hi Anne. Thank you so much for this really wonderful book.

So, the first set of questions I have is about history and how we make meaning out of texts and traditions. So one of the really important distinctions that you make in the book comes from the comparison you do of the work of two theologians, Jennings and Copeland. And one of the things that this comparison registered for me is that I'm much more comfortable in the domain of Jennings: the materialist account of history that uncovers the facts of the matter…

Ryan: I am just going to pause here and say this is Willie Jennings and Shawn Copeland.

Anthony: …which in the case of his work and your book is the ignoble past of the Church and its relationship to colonialism.

But one of the moves you make is to say that this understanding of history is necessary but not sufficient. This is where Copeland, I think, enters as a major player as a theologian who returns us to thinking about God's role in action in history, that human history isn't just chaos and contingency, but something willed and guided.

So this is making me wonder: do you think that genealogical thinking, one of the key methods of the humanities today, is fundamentally misguided? And how would you explain the flaws of genealogical thinking to a person of faith versus to a secular person?

Anne: Ooh, fiery question. Genealogy. That's interesting. How about this? I'm so embedded in certain scholarly locations that I only vaguely know what genealogical thinking is. I have a vague idea.

Ryan: Can I just gloss that real quick? I think… There’s lots of kinds of genealogical thinking and I think what Anthony's referring to is what Michel Foucault names his method that's commonly interpreted in the humanities – I don't agree with this interpretation – but commonly interpreted as being “to unmask the will to power beneath every claim to noble origins.”

Anne: Right. Yeah. I was thinking of Foucault, who I've never read but I know. I think part of the difference here is just that I have different instruments that I'm going to use. And so it's not really – at least in my own mind because I don't know enough – it's not really a direct critique of Foucault’s genealogical thinking, or Nietche, also. I've read some Nietche.

But I've been talking about this with my friend Lyle Enright, who got his PhD also in literature at Loyola in Chicago. And he's quite well-trained in that exposing gesture. And something that intrigues us both is what kind of work do we hope exposure can do, and, “what's weird about Anne that she isn't really intrigued by it, doesn't even know how to do it. What happens then to my theology?” So he's sort of watching me think about stuff. And so, I think, as far as I know, in literature there is a present discussion about how far exposure itself can go. The Limits of Critique, I think, is one book.

I may be most familiar with the way the hermeneutic of suspicion governs certain theologians as their basic stance. And I think it works fine, but it also sets up certain options and closes off others. I'm interested in a hermeneutic of compassion. I don't want to say charity because that implies critique can't be charitable. And that's weird. Of course it can. But it's a kind of like understanding someone from the inside and the correction is going to sort of come out of affection for them.

Anthony: And the other question that I want to ask you on this topic has to do with an account of interpretation and meaning making that I think you're putting forward here that I also find really challenging. As a literary scholar, I'm really comfortable with the idea that historical context, particularly authorial intention, determines the meaning of texts. There's a certain amount of stability of meaning present in the methodology that I'm describing, that really, I think, strives to “do right” by history to “do right” by authors of previous generations, previous moments. In contrast, it seems to me that a metaphysic of tradition is going to think about text as something that's a lot more alive and dynamic and on the move, and I guess for me that seems like a really challenging place to be, because it constantly poses and reopens the question of meaning to the next generation of readers, which might be a good thing, if the next generation of readers has the right ideas about the world. But it's totally possible that the next generation of readers might be deeply misguided. They might be like the previous generations of readers, who are interpreting tradition in misguided ways.

So how do we know the difference? How do we know which interpretations to trust and which ones not to? How do we know which accounts of the tradition or the traditions are true?

Another way of saying this maybe more directly is, in a metaphysic of tradition in which truth and meaning is alive and shifting and on the move, can one thing be true in one period and false in another? Does a metaphysic of tradition need to be consistent with itself?

Anne: So I have two ideas. First I'll just say briefly that the problem of hermeneutics, which I know a few people are working on, is slightly distinct from a metaphysic of tradition, which is just going to set up the operations by which interpretation happens. And so there's going to be a lot of really difficult hermeneutical issues that we can clarify the operations of, hopefully, is my goal, so that we're not caught in, at least in, say, “Catholic land” between “Only the past can speak. Who cares about the present?” and “Who cares about the past? Only the present should speak.” Those are the two extremes. In fact, Catholic scholars are all very worried about tradition, of course. But you get these either-or’s that are really missing – in thinking that the source itself is the source of tradition instead of being an instrument of tradition, which is a big difference. And if we know it's an instrument, then our sets of problems shift hopefully, hopefully, for different fights. That will be no doubt very intense and messy.

And so there's that. And then I was reminded of… So I want to approach this idea of “how do I know it's true?” in two ways. That's the thing I had two ideas about...

One is I was talking to some friends about dissent because the problem of dissent had been posed to me. I was invited to this thing I couldn't go to, and they were asking where dissent against authorities is in a metaphysic of tradition. So I of course went to my little troop of Marquette friends with this because I was thinking about it still, and I needed to ask them because I trust them and trust that they'll correct me when I've got it wrong. And two of them are ecclesiologists, so they would also really know. And so I said I actually think dissent, it seems like it's not part of the operations of tradition but actually is a specific judgment of the community and the judgment can be overturned. That this is dissent, it can be then overturned. Joan of Arc again is a big example. Like you're outside the bounds, that decision itself is overturned, and in that sense you've got “Oh no!” two different decisions by Catholic people. But it's actually a prudential judgment which communities have to make, and all prudential judgments are part of circumstances that have to involve people doing their best to interpret the gospel in the situation that they're in. And they're of course in dialogue with the past and can offer corrections. And that's all good. That's all itself just part of the body of action that is tradition.

And that's different than – so dissent is a particular category vis-a-vis communal authorities. Deciding whether an interpretation is right, whether the tradition has got it right, that's different. And that I think has at least two vectors. One is – and this was a tool of the Nouvelle Théologie, I think, although other goals were more than this – accessing the historical person in their historical context. This renewed Thomas Aquinas fundamentally in the Catholic church in ways that continued to reverberate in really helpful ways. Lonergan was part of this, actually, in his own way. He dug up Thomas's theory of causality and did really good, boring work that's very helpful because Thomas's theory of causality had been buried by the centuries. There's that, but there's the further question of whether any of those things are Christlike, whether it's true in that sense. And that's going to be different, right? Thomas Aquinas has some really trash opinions on slavery. Those are wrong, even if in their historical context they make sense. And what appears there is the community's interior relationship mediated, of course, sacramentally and historically to Christ is a further judgment that has to be operant when we look at tradition and its trueness. Because whether a person in the past thought something and we understand what they thought as one thing, and we can make fair hermeneutic judgments, whether it's good, whether it's an affirmation of Christ or a denial of Christ, we also have to ask. And there, I think, there's a way to be true to Thomas Aquinas that redeems him by being different from him. Let's not have his opinions on slavery. That's quite good and redeems him. And so actually it's quite complicated and there are several judgements to make. Like the Nouvelle Théologie, I think something they were very interested in were those further questions and they broke up these rusty gears to try and, with historical resuscitation, to also try and help the Church ask further questions which is: How do we be Church for the present world?

Jake: I have a number of my own that I selfishly want to ask, but I promise Anthony, I'd ask – this is a question that I can't remember if Anthony or Ryan brought it up.

Ryan: You should ask your selfish questions. I have a whole list of Anthony's questions that we can ask.

Jake: Oh, great. Well then, just so it's out there, someone, Anthony or someone else in the group would ask about, thinking about the Nicene creed, the stability of the text of the Nicene Creed.

But I guess the most pressing question I'd have to ask is about the poem that you wrote and then going forward – you've mentioned this – I love the way you talked about your love of poetry, just throwing your brain into a different planet.

Are you working on much poetry now? Is one question.

The second question: Is this poem that structures the book, did this come and the book followed, or did they proceed in tandem?

Ryan: And Jake could you just describe the situation that we're dealing with here in terms of the poem and the book?

Jake: Yes. So it's something, in the direction for the readers, one of the texts I had to read as an undergrad was Calvino's “If on a Winter Night, a Traveler,” where the chapter titles form a poem. Similar to that, but under the chapter titles you get lines from a poem, which are then, in beautiful fashion, presented alongside a print of the cover image in the back of the book, the poem titled “Notre Dame on Fire.” So it's a poem which is presented as being crafted alongside the argument, and then you get it in its entirety at the end. Which is a beautiful way of thinking about tradition and temporality of the poem in the book.

But, yeah, I guess anything you could say about your own poetry and composing that poem, I'd love to hear.

Anne: Yeah, I do still work on poetry. I'm very haphazard in my attempts to get it published, but I do like writing poetry. I am a reluctant poet. God should have given my talent to someone more grateful, because I can be very cranky. But anyway. Yeah, I love poetry and the way it plays with sound, the way the meaning is on the page but not on the page, the way I have to read a poem twice to understand it. I just can't read it one time through and understand it. I love that. How frustrating and how gorgeous. Do we ever do that in life, right? Stop and look again?

And the poem I wrote a while before I wrote the book. But I knew I had sabbatical coming up and I knew in a basic way that I wanted Notre Dame on the cover. So when I managed to put together a poem on it, I just kept the poem. And the poem was fun to write because it was kind of like… When Notre Dame was on fire, my favorite thing was everyone just sort of posting a photo of it and social media and saying “Look! The church.” Like I could instantly understand what they meant but why could I? I would have to guess. And then there were these think pieces and it turned out that the church on fire could mean whatever, because that's how historical facts work. It's an event. It can mean a lot. Human acts of meaning are something further than the event itself. And I thought that was great. I was like “This is so fun. I love the failures of meaning. I love the assumption that I'll just get it because I live in your head. I love these think pieces that think there's only one way to look at it. Like this is chaos; it's fantastic.”

And I thought, “All right. I'm a poet, some days. What would I do to give it meaning? And how could I invite someone in on the acts of meaning so that I'm not gesturing wildly and saying “Look! It's on fire! Do you know what I'm thinking?” And so it took me a few months. Like I wrote an overly elaborate one that was just like “Anne Carpenter wrote a bunch of stuff about Notre Dame Cathedral.” But then I thought, “Yeah, someone experiencing an apocalypse in faith. That's what this will be.” And so what carries the poem is it literally is talking about a church on fire but it's governed by the book of Revelation and a Christian apocalyptic understanding of history. And that's what, in Lonergan speak, would be the control on meaning in the poem that makes it a successful interpretation. And I had fun doing that because I thought, “Well, yeah, how do we look at history? We look at it apocalyptically.” And so it was my editor – I showed it to him, you know, like my favorite pressed flower, “Can we please include this in the book since we have this cover now?” And he came up with splitting it up across the chapters and then having it at the end. And I was very very pleased with that.

Molly: Anne, I have a question from one of our absent members, Mark Perkins. He asked whether you would distinguish between the practices of the Church and things Christians happen to do. Your definitions of history and traditions seem to touch on a distinction there in some way. Are our sins the things Christians happen to do, or is that a way to understand the practices of the Church? Are we cordoning off Christian practices artificially or is the distinction something necessary?

Anne: Yeah. First, I want to talk for a minute about the way Blondel talks about Christian practice, because it's very wide-ranging. Christian practice is what Christians do, and that includes explicitly things like the Eucharist, liturgy, practice in the nitty-gritty, daily prayer kind of way. That's Christian practice. So also me wondering about the world praying and not praying, going to Mass and not going to Mass, that's Christian practice. Christians making judgements about what to do. That's also Christian practice. Christian practice with its reasons. And in that sense, Blondelian Christian practice involves judging doctrines and proclaiming them, figuring out what they mean. That's all Christian practice. It's a very wide category.

And so I don't want to be understood as saying, “Well, my moral life is over here and liturgy’s over here. And one of those transmits tradition or is tradition.” They all are. They all are Christian practice, Christians going about in the world. But Christian action is ambiguous. It can be good; it can be for ill.

So from the outside it's just Christians doing stuff. I think I talk about this. And technically from the outside, things that are in Christian tradition are, like, the Crusades, which I'm going to say are a bad idea, just on a limb, they were a bad idea. And technically that's part of our tradition. But of course we don't want to say that that's “Christian tradition” in a deep sense, the sense that connects us to Jesus sense. We don't want that. Which is part of what the judgments of doctrine and stuff are for, is differentiating: “All right, well this is good. And that's not good.” Differentiating for ourselves.

The trouble of course is that, once one has sinned – which for Lonergan is a “not acting,” It's not even an action, technically. It's a not doing. Not doing what was to be done – that introduces nonsense to the situation of Christian tradition. It's part of the concrete circumstance. And so now there's an intelligibility that's part of the facts of Christian practice in this very broad sense.

And so we have hard work to do to differentiate, in those facts, what is sinful, ought not to be repeated, never to be done again, and what is intelligible, what ought to be done, an intelligent repetition of Jesus Christ and the truth of who he is.

And so I also described that as a kind of action in Christian tradition that helps make it what it is. And so it's a, as Blondel says, it's a kind of body and bodies are made up of many actions, and those actions are not all the same. But that total body is Christian practice and that mediates the truth of who Jesus is in history, because it's intelligent.

And so yeah, that gives us difficulties since it's not going to be… I mean, in some cases it's obvious. The Crusades are very easy to say were bad. I am not brave for saying it. But there are much more difficult questions also that we need to ask, like, “In what ways do I teach the text I assign so that I and my students have to assume a western perspective that always already disavows those who do not come from inside it, or that always already presupposes a specific kind of human being as its member.” That's hard and it's proven quite difficult, practically speaking.

I mean one of the huge things the Catholic Church faces is round after round of scandals around abuse, which involve all kinds of systematic acts of hiding the truths, of protecting Mother Church's reputation, and asking what to do about that when obviously a lot of our daily practices are going to be in some way implicated. That's quite the soul searching that we will have to do.

And on one level, I think we will have to do our best, and our best won't be enough. And we have to trust that grace will render it enough. The task is superhuman.

Ryan: Anne Carpenter, thank you. You've given us such a wonderful gift over the past two months as we've read this book together. Thank you.

Elizabeth: Thanks so much, Anne. Really appreciate your insights and sharing so generously with us.

Molly: Yeah. Thank you so much. It's been wonderful being able to hear from you in community with those who've read your book with us as well. Thank you.

Anne: Well, thank you. And I’m so grateful to talk with you about this, and I'm glad not to be alone thinking about it.