There is madness in his method...

I had my first meeting with my supervisor yesterday. My first meeting, that is, as a new doctoral student. I'm proud of this, I admit. But, I suppose, I get to be a little proud--it's been hard going to get to this point and I am glad of what I've accomplished with God's help, and particularly grateful for my wife who has been patient, generous, and even edited my papers.

The meeting went well. He approved of my more 'philosophical' turn of thought, and my desire to move past death. But hey, who doesn't want to move past death? I have been assigned readings and papers concerning patristic and liturgical attitudes toward death. This will be my research for the next term. It should be, well, not fun exactly, but interesting.

I've been thinking, though, about methodology. By methodology I mean an analysis and evaluation of what sort of method, what sort of approach to use. That is, what sort of questions are appropriate to ask? What sort of filters should I have in place when reading) It's not possible to take it all in, so I have to conceptually narrow the field, just to make research possible. I thought and thought and came up with one idea: a historical-critical reading of the Fathers leading into a phenomenological synthesis.

Discourse on Method

If that doesn't sound pretentious and philosophical, then I don't know what will. And I do so long to sound pretentious and philosophical. It sends a little chill down my spine and gives me tingling sensations in my legs.

But what I mean is that I first have to put aside, bracket out, my own desires, my own goals of a constructive anthropology--something additional to what the Fathers are talking about. I have to leave all that at the door and just get a sense of what it is that the Fathers mean. The historical-critical method seems most appropriate here, because it helps me get inside their heads while still keeping my own. I ponder the who, why, where, when of a text, the situations which gave rise to it, what we know from elsewhere about the author, about his audience, about his concerns, preoccupations, assumptions. These are the sort of questions I throw at the text at first in order to finally be able to ask: so what is he saying about how we relate to death?

The trick is, I suppose, knowing when to make the leap from the historical questions (what Walter Moberly says Karl Barth called 'throat-clearing') to the question of what does it mean (what Karl Barth might have called engagement with the subject-matter of the text). I don't really know when that is. I tend, thanks to my own predispositions and a St. John's education, to make the leap somewhat prematurely. To read an introduction and then say 'great, now let's get to it.' So I need to postpone such judgment a little bit.

Having done all this, though, comes the next phase of the method. The phenomenological synthesis. Say it three times fast.

Then dunk your head in a bowl of jello and dance around for fifteen minutes.

Did you do it? If you don't do it, you won't get the surprise!

There now. Isn't that better?

Sorry. I really can't maintain for very long the level of seriousness developing in this post. I must have silliness. Much as a moose must drink a lot of juice.

Back to the phenomenological synthesis. By this I mean, I take what I have heard the Fathers say about our experience of death, our way of living toward death, our hope of resurrection, and I say: so what is necessary for something (a human being, specifically an Orthodox Christian one) to have this sort of experience? By asking this question, I allow the Fathers' thought to form the basis for a constructive attempt at anthropology. I can turn the question into: what must the human being be in order to have this experience?

Then it will get fun. Because then I can ask question of what it means simply to be human. To die and rise again, yet remain the same person. That is an existential can of worms. If resurrection is the answer we have been given to death, then it raises at least as many questions as it answers about what the human being is. The possibilities stretch out endlessly, though oriented nevertheless by the fundamentally patristic concept of the human being as according to the image and likeness of God. There, I think, I can mine more of the Fathers' thought to begin the phenomenological synthesis.

But, of course, this raises a much harder question of method. To what extent is it valid to put patristic theology and contemporary philosophy in dialogue, conflict, or just collision? They are two different worlds, two different sets of assumptions, ideas, conclusions, lives. To what extent can I take over philosophical ideas or allow philosophy to question theology?

Methodological Manifesto

I think these sort of questions are crucial for contemporary Orthodox theology. I think this for the simply reason that the 'big guns' or Orthodox theology (John Zizioulas, Christos Yannaras, Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos, Fr. John Behr, to name a few) love philosophy. They love to use philosophy. They love to do with it just what I'm hesitant to do: appropriate it, be questioned by it, adopt and interact with it. But it gets them into trouble. John Zizioulas has been (rightly) accused of subordinating a good reading of the Fathers to his philosophical concerns. The same could easily be said of Yannaras. John Behr appropriates philosophy more selectively, but has not offered a satisfying account of why he would do so at all--it hasn't added to his work.

So I am cautious. Selectivity is crucial. You can't just combine Kierkegaard and Heidegger. Or Hegel and Frege. Or any of the above and Gregory of Nyssa, or Maximos the Confessor, or Symeon the New Theologian. There are chasms between their thought. Incompatibilities, flaws, historical differences on the order of speaking different languages. From different language groups. So if we are Orthodox, we are first and foremost true to the Fathers, to the Church and the truth revealed to us only therein.

Yet there is and must be more to contemporary Orthodox theology than the Fathers. There is an assumption too often that 'if it's not in the Fathers, it's not Orthodox.' This is false. Absolutely false. It is true that if something goes against the Fathers, it is heretical. The Fathers, as the embodiment of Tradition interpreting Scripture within the Church, are absolutely the line drawn by the Rule of Faith. But they are not the totality of faith, just as a Rule of Faith is not its totality. The Creeds define a space, as it were, within which we are free to think and move and yet remain Christian. Beyond them we are free, but we are in error. This space, it seems to me, allows for the interaction of theology and philosophy (in the best tradition of the Fathers!), for just the sort of work that those like Behr, Zizioulas, and Yannaras are attempting. But this space must also define how it is that one moves. The sort of interaction that will produce valid and, more importantly, vibrant, living, Orthodox theology, is not unlimited. There must be critical methodological reflection on how the Fathers may meet Heidegger or Rorty.

Of course, what I've said so far is really an open-ended question, a manifesto which begs response and whose author (me, in this case) hopes for response.

I don't know exactly what I'm looking for in interaction. I don't even know how to look for it, really. Methods are difficult to pin down and, unless one is ready-at-hand and I just haven't noticed it yet, I have a lot of work ahead of me. I think that in some ways I will define the method as I go forward, which means that for now I grope blindly forward hoping.

What do you think? How should a patristically-grounded theology interact with outside thought, whether philosophy or science or poetry or anything? Or does it need to deal with different types of thought in different ways? How can I be true to the mind of the Fathers and yet speak to the present world?