Abstract
This contribution offers a review of David Tracy’s recent collection of essays entitled Fragments: The Existential Situation of Our Time (2020). This volume is quite an event since Tracy’s last monograph was published in 1994. This review gives an account of the continuity and discontinuity in Tracy’s oeuvre with reference to themes such as conversation, fragments, the Infinite, and an analogical imagination. It also mentions some other jewels found in Fragments by picking up on a conversation with Tracy that started with the author’s doctoral thesis on Tracy, completed in 1992.
Highlights
In 2020 two collections of selected essays by David Tracy were published by the University of Chicago Press
In an essay published in 2000 Tracy discussed classic “fragmenting forms” such as the theology of the cross and apophatic theology
He recognises the postmodern retrieval of such fragmenting forms in order to resist modernist attempts at totalising systems or closure, reducing reality to “more of the same”. He contrasts the category of “fragment” with that of “symbol” where either the Enlightenment or the Romantic hope is maintained to grasp something of the whole, of a lost unity. He argues that fragments fragment, shatter all totalities and oppressive closed systems, opening them for difference and otherness, to “liminal Infinity”, to being bearers of infinity (Tracy 2000:68)
Summary
In 2020 two collections of selected essays by David Tracy were published by the University of Chicago Press. In an essay published in 2000 Tracy discussed classic “fragmenting forms” such as the theology of the cross (which acknowledges God’s horrifying hiddenness in the cross) and apophatic theology (which acknowledges God’s incomprehensibility and fragments any intellectual totality system) He recognises the postmodern retrieval of such fragmenting forms in order to resist modernist attempts at totalising systems or closure, reducing reality to “more of the same”. He argues that fragments fragment, shatter all totalities and oppressive closed systems, opening them for difference and otherness, to “liminal Infinity”, to being bearers of infinity (Tracy 2000:68) In this essay he anticipates that the second volume of the trilogy on “This Side of God” will be entitled “Gathering the Fragments”.
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