Letters from Lake Como: Explorations in Technology and the Human Race.

When he is not catechizing as a professor of theology at the John Paul II Institute in Washington, D.C., or editing the North American volume of the theological journal Communio, David L. Schindler is storing up treasure for himself in the Kingdom of God, and probably costing the Eerdmans Publishing Company a bundle, by bringing out an invaluable new series of great Catholic books dedicated to "retrieval and renewal in Catholic thought."

Schindler's list - to get that irresistible usage over with - consists mainly of the European theologians and philosophers from the middle of our century who mid-wived Vatican II, thinkers whose writings are, in a manner that seems sadly exotic in 1997, permeated and sustained by the sacramental life of the Catholic church. What these thinkers had in common, according to the series introduction, was "the double conviction that theology had to speak to the present situation, and that the condition for doing so faithfully lay in a recovery of the church's past. In other words, they saw clearly that the first step in what later came to be known as aggiornamento had to be ressourcement - a rediscovery of the riches of the whole of the church's two-thousand-year tradition." The introduction promises that future offerings of the series will include "works in theology, philosophy, history, literature, and the arts which give renewed expression to an authentic Catholic sensibility."

Eerdmans isn't exactly an ultramontane outfit, and Mother Angelica's TV network hasn't yet begun to advertise the Ressourcement series, but because names like Schindler and Ratzinger are involved, the undertaking is likely to be regarded (and dismissed) by many otherwise openminded people as a narrowly partisan traditionalist project. And that's too bad, because whatever its provenance, this publication is a marvelous moment for the "Church Literate" and provides an admirable alternative to the methodological agnosticism that makes so much contemporary theology so dull to read. The great hillbilly Thomist, Flannery O'Connor, once famously remarked during what seemed to her a fatuous discussion of eucharistic symbolism, "If it's only a symbol, I say to hell with it." This is her kind of series.

That isn't to say that Maurice Blondel's dense philosophical reflections on the Modernist crisis or Angelo Scola's exhaustive analysis of von Balthasar's theological method will have excited readers in the thousands sporadically leaping up from their Barcaloungers and bellowing "yesss!" But all of these works emphasize and deploy Blondel's conclusion that "something in the church escapes scientific examination; and it is the church which, without rejecting or neglecting the contributions of exegesis and of history, nevertheless controls them, because in the very tradition which constitutes her, she possesses another means of knowing her author, of participating in his life, of linking facts to dogma, and of justifying both the capital and the interest of her teaching."

It seems that few Catholic theologians working nowadays would directly disagree with Blondel there, but when it comes to "justifying both the capital and the interest" of church teaching, many of them - and nearly all of those with tenure - seem to become bashful, tongue-tied, or crankily defensive about triumphalism. A few days after the excommunication of the Sri Lankan theologian Tissa Balasuriya, a justifiably troubled editorialist writing in the London Tablet asked rhetorically, "Are we back to the methods and content of pre-conciliar theology?" One need not believe that Father Balasuriya is a heretic, nor applaud all the operations and tactics of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, nor long for the restoration of the Papal States and the Tridentine Mass and the churching of women and the starching of wimples to reply, "I sure hope so."

I don't for a single minute doubt that preconciliar church administration was every bit as clumsy and occasionally uncharitable as postconciliar church administration has been. But these works certainly indicate that pre-conciliar theology, whatever all those censorious church administrators might have thought about it, was not bad at all, and was at the very least capable of producing arguments worth having.

In a magnificent essay adapted for Commonweal a year or so ago, Luke Timothy Johnson lamented the current "academic captivity of the church" and suggested that theologically imprisoned believers might begin to make their journey out of bondage by simply acknowledging "that whatever the church's discourse is, it should not be the same as the academy's, nor should it be subject to the same rules or the same criteria of validity." This recommendation particularly infuriates theologians who have done quite well by the academy, but it powerfully appeals to ordinary churchgoing nonacademic readers who believe, as Jean Danielou does, that "the tragedy of the modern world is that it no longer occupies itself with God."

Danielou seeks to remedy that situation by providing the modern world with, ahem, saints. "A saint," he writes, "is someone who has a sense of God's grandeur, who has found joy in God, and who, filled with this love, desires to communicate it and share it, just as one would desire to speak of whatever it is that fills one's heart. If we do not speak enough about God, it is because our hearts are not sufficiently filled with him. A heart filled with God speaks of God without effort, whereas it often takes effort because our hearts are not sufficiently enflamed....Obviously, there is no need to wait until our hearts are completely filled with God in order to speak of him, because we would end up waiting indefinitely." The deceptively plain style, like that of Danielou's meditations on the Our Father, or of his essay on "The Evangelical Spirit of Humility," exemplifies a sort of discourse that owes a great deal more to the elders of the desert than to the middle-agesters of the Modern Language Association.

It will be (and has been) objected that to celebrate that difference too much is to advocate a boorish restoration of some illusory golden age - a disgruntled, sectarian retreat from the challenges and possibilities of modernity. But I suspect that most dissenters from what Schindler, Stanley Hauerwas, Michael Baxter, and others might call the Americanist Magisterium have an even more ambitious project in mind. They want to subvert modernity altogether. Such dissenters seem to share with, for instance, Romano Guardini, a profound disapproval of "a human attitude that no longer feels itself tied by living human unity and its organic compass and that regards as petty and narrow the limitation in which an earlier time found supreme fulfillment, wisdom, beauty, a well-rounded fullness of life." Reborn in this attitude, and "now freed from every organic link, the will can set its own goals, and by controlling natural forces rationally it can make the execution of these goals compulsory. Living people fall victim to this ineluctability. They are given up to the caprice of their own goals, which have no organic relation." It would be a good thing if a few more of us seemed to be alarmed by what seemed to alarm Guardini.

Nevertheless, those of us who are dissatisfied, confused, bored, and annoyed by the protocols of contemporary academic theology will hardly find in these recently "retrieved" thinkers the easy pieties and spurious magisterial reassurances we're sometimes accused of seeking. Not only can these works become every bit as dense as a deconstructionist's daydream, they can also be downright scary, but that's the Incarnation for you. Hans Urs von Balthasar's unsettling reflections on the death of the Lord - the dead Messiah's ultimate solidarity with all the dead - are memorably unflinching in their consideration of the obliterated humanity of the entombed Jesus: "In the same way that, upon earth, he was in solidarity with the living, so, in the tomb, he is in solidarity with the dead. One must allow to this 'solidarity' an amplitude and an ambiguity, even, which seem precisely to exclude a communication on his part as subject. Each human being lies in his own tomb. And with this condition, seen here from the viewpoint of the separated body, Jesus is at first truly solitary." Such reflections call to mind Gerard Hopkins's lines: "O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap/May who ne'er hung there."

At least since 1981, when he assumed his present responsibilities in the Vatican bureaucracy, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has been much more widely known for his administration of harsh ecclesial discipline than for his theology. Readers willing to leave aside the intriguing but not terribly promising question of whether or not he has deserved this somewhat diminished reputation will be rewarded by his four homilies on the creation narratives in the book of Genesis. Rejecting the reductionist positions of literalists and rationalists alike, his reflections on the orientation of creation toward worship and on the implications of humankind's having been made in the image of God are concluded by an essay on "The Consequences of Faith in Creation." In it, an argument for the inseparability of the doctrines of creation and redemption becomes an invitation "to accept mystery as the center of reality, that is to say, to accept love, creation as love, and to make that love the foundation of one's life." It's not terribly difficult to imagine the same author denouncing the sort of essay most Commonweal readers could write on "The Consequences of Faith in Creation for the Administration of the Catholic Church," but surely our church would be far better served than she is now if even our most strenuous disagreements could be wrangled out not on the world's terms but on our own, and by our own lights and in a language drawn from and replenished by our own tradition. If we can't manage to discover and revere the Lord in our own peculiar household, how can we hope to tell the neighbors about him?

Ezra Pound thought that just as music became less music the further it departed from the dance, poetry became less poetry the further it departed from music. Surely theology becomes less theology the further it departs from prayer. Theologians who aren't preoccupied by prayer are like literary critics who aren't preoccupied by literature. Contemporary theology, no less than contemporary literary criticism, is handicapped by surprising numbers of such scholars. The Ressourcement series recalls a theology that tends toward prayer and reminds us that among the countless blessings we enjoy in our communion is a wonderful way to talk in and about and to the modern world. We should be grateful for the reminder, and we should set about relearning how to talk that way. The world needs it as badly as we do.

Michael O. Garvey is the author of Finding Fault (Thomas More Press).