Book Review

Pilate's question revisited

What is truth? from the Academy to the Vatican

John Rist is one of our most significant scholars of ancient philosophy. He has also written on aspects of early Christianity - most famously in Augustine: ancient philosophy baptised. Recently a concern to contrast ancient thought with the styles predominant in secular modernity has come to the fore, most notably in his Real Ethics. With this new book Rist writes as a Catholic undertaking intellectual history with apologetic and constructive purpose.

Rist presents Catholic thought as adaptive and as promoting (at its best) the development of a broad Catholic culture, interested not only in the narrow bounds of "saving truth" but in truth as a whole. This insistence on the centrality of development in Catholic tradition - and the importance of development coming from Catholicism's engagement with the wider artistic, political and philosophical cultures in which it exists - is also presented as a challenge to rigorist tendencies within Catholic thought. But Rist also sees the "godlessness" of modernity and its ethical hedonism as a severe threat to Christian thought (and to the very existence of Christianity in Europe). Only by thinking within the Catholic tradition - and within the broad Catholic culture which Rist celebrates - is there a way forward. It is the attempt to walk that tightrope that makes this book so unusual and rewarding.

The first five chapters each trace the history of a theme in Catholic thought, showing the necessity of development and the role of Catholic culture in such development. The first of these investigations is an 80-page treatise on the Catholic treatment of women as (or as not) in the image of God. Rist begins with the manner in which Platonic and Aristotelian currents of thought have formed the warp on which Catholic theological discussion has been woven. He exposes the extent to which mistaken biological theories have governed our theological options. Only a "corrected" Aristotelianism, becoming possible after the high Middle Ages, allows us to begin to think towards real emancipation for women and a vision of equality that still allows the sexes different modes of thinking and being (his critique of those who refuse any such distinction is as sharp as his critique of Christianity's pre-modern failures at imagining the female).

Rist's clarity that these arguments are either inadequate or unpersuasive is in aid of a theme that will occupy him throughout the book, namely, "the tendency within Catholicism to confuse theology with the history of theology". By this phrase he means the tendency for Catholics to make a surface narration of opinions held by the Fathers, medieval or patristic, stand in for strong argument ("error needs to be admitted rather than explained away if genuine development is to be achieved").

A shorter chapter on Augustine and Julian of Eclanum argues that both (Augustine comes off worse) were bound by bad physiological theory. Rist's gnomic comments about the tragic nature of theological work are the gem here. Even the theological genius - Augustine - proceeds within his culture, and within his personality. When this is recognised we must then also recognise the need for development, and even rejection.

The third chapter, on beauty, reads Augustine far more positively. Augustine's embrace of the divine as beauty creates the possibility for the Church to engage artistic production more fruitfully. The struggle to emb       race the truth of all that does not actively imperil "saving truth" - the struggle for Christian humanism - is traced through the Counter- Reformation and named as a continual tension within Catholic thought. But then Rist chastises modern Western society for its inability to prevent the celebration of ugliness as art: just as modernity enables no defence of morality against hedonistic nihilism, so there is no way of holding out for beauty against the celebration of ugliness. It is, for Rist, the increasing rejection of certain Platonic themes interwoven with Christianity that has led to this state.

The fourth chapter, on the origins of episcopacy at Rome, is one of the most interesting. Rist argues that the emergence of monarchial episcopacy and then the claims of the Roman See within the wider Church are coincident with doctrinal dispute. Moreover, what emerges is a mechanism for judgement between opinions. The papacy (at its best) is thus not an organ from which we should so much expect continual teaching (W.G. Ward's encyclical with breakfast) but an authoritative organ of judgement, guiding the Church over the sea of exploration.

If you are bogged down in the first chapter I suggest you take a break and head for Rist on Caesaropapism in Chapter 5: "Chrysostom's promised land ... Mullah Omar, as well as Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian, would well have understood". I offer this as encouragement to explore all that my ellipsis hides.

Rist eventually argues that the modern world, permitting neither of a Catholic Caesaropapism, nor of a simple subservience of Church to State, enables a dialogue in which the Church may draw on its own tradition of rights discourse, but also learn from modern society.

Chapters 6 and 7 focus directly on the Church in the modern world. Rist explores the "godlessness" of modernity, its "anti-personalism", and fulminates against the modern and postmodern lack of appropriate ethical discourse. Then Rist turns to the slowness with which the Church has learnt to define the competence of the theologian vis-à-vis the scientist. The short last chapter ranges widely over contemporary challenges and to some extent disappoints. Rist's general proposals are rather vague and much time is taken up with further reflection on topics already covered. His message remains the same: "for Catholics... there remain only two alternatives: a theory of the development of dogma and culture on the one hand, and a Biblicist fundamentalism and literalism on the other. And the latter option - to be applauded for staunch maintenance of aspects of Christian morality - can in the end fight secularism only with ignorance and a denial of history and rationality."

Throughout Rist sacrifices theoretical definition in favour of historical detail. There is, for example, virtually no discussion of what Rist means by "culture". He is also oddly uninterested in recent theological discussion of the topics in fundamental theology about which he has firm opinions. There is little discussion of how he envisages doctrinal development - narration of developments gives us some idea, but that is about all we have. There are, however, few books which cover so much ground and maintain intellectual seriousness and historical precision. Rist's does. Read him.

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