Mary as Created Wisdom, the Splendor of the New Creation

Abstract

MARY AS CREATED WISDOM, THE SPLENDOR OF THE NEW CREATION HERE IS GROWING EVIDENCE that an impasse as been reached in Catholic Christology, whether this e regarded from a systematic or from a historical viewpoint . The former, typified by the several versions of transcendental Thomism, appears unable to avoid subordination to an anthropological a priori; the latter, insofar as it imports a theology of history, is placed in the dilemma of either submitting to the secular stringencies of a critical method which balks at the Resurrection as an historical event, or of accepting that event in its historical concreteness as an explicit theological a priori without any clear appreciation of its impact on the meaning of historicity.1 For both approaches to Christology 1 For example, one may contrast the opposing theologies of history operative in the interpretation of the Resurrection offered on the one hand by Schillebeeckx, who characterizes any insistence upon the public or event-character of the disciples ' encounters with the Risen Lord as " ignorant," and on the other hand by Beda Rigaux, whose Dieu l'a ressucite (Gembloux, Duclot, Paris, 1978) rests entirely upon the premise of a concretely historical Risen Jesus as the insistent and unifying proclamation of the entire New Testament. In sharp contradiction, Schillebeeckx in his Interim Report on the Books Jesus and Christ (Crossroad Press, New York, 1981) terms such a point of view "virulently" ignorant: pp. 75 ff., 147 n. 8, 148 n. 4. What is at issue is the academic legitimacy of asserting that the Risen Lord is a real event in the temporal dimension of our fallen world. Decisions upon this question are finally confessional and doctrinal rather than academic-theological, but the confessional decision is always operative in theological method. Given the fact of a legitimate pluralism in theological method, it is all too easy to conclude to the legitimacy of a doctrinal pluralism, or what is the same thing, to the subordination of the confessional to the academic commitment . Newman noted a comparable confusion in the- fifth century School of Antioch ; see An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, new edition, edited with a preface and introduction by Charles Frederick Harrold, Longmans, Green and Co., New York, London, Toronto, 1949, ~64-~70. Such confusion, then and now, masks the continuing need for an explicitly theological understanding of 395 396 DONALD J. KEEFE, S.J. (their convergence would seem inevitable) there is a clear danger of identifying an orthodox adherence to the ecclesial tradition with a nominalistic sacrifioium intellectus. In brief, the properly academic insistence upon methodological rigor tends toward a doctrinally unacceptable monism, whether anthropological or historicist, whose immanent " necessary reasons " would eliminate the radical freedom and novelty of the Word made flesh, while the orthodox affirmation of the historical , public, and event-character of the Resurrection, although continuing to reject any methodological suppression of that articulum stantis et cadentis ecclesiae, has discovered no satisfactory resolution of the methodological dilemma posed by the Catholic faith in the radical intelligibility of the Resurrection as the central event of history, and the central reality of the universe. Now as always, the demands of methodological rationality seem to eliminate the historicity of truth. Conscious as we are that the truth is in fact historical, every methodological entry into that truth, whether by way of history or of metaphysics-or in fact, by way of any humanism whateverlends to the construction of yet another identity system,2 in which the structures of logical thought once more impose a timeless unity upon the truth of the Catholic faith. The present paper will propose that this dilemma is resolved only by taking seriously the historicity of the subject matter of history, or what is the same, for a recognition that any understanding of history incorporates a confessional decision. Unfortunately, many who write in this field suppose such matters to be of only philosophical interest and so cannot but miss the specifically theological dimensions of the problem of historicity, in a manner reminiscent of the metaphysicians before and after Vatican II. 2 H. U. vou Balthasar's prolonged and profound criticism of all theological systematizing as inescapably the construction of monist identity systems...