Theology, as a discipline that “aims to understand in a rational and systematic manner the saving truth of God”,1 is a spiritual exercise in permanent renewal that seeks to deeply delve into the revealed mystery in order to respond better to ecclesial and cultural challenges. The tension between its identity as a work founded on Sacred Scripture and the challenge to seek syntheses and answers that appeal to new contexts gives the theological work a somewhat unstable and paradoxical character. At the beginning of his essay on the religious philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa, Balthasar expresses it thusly:
The situation of the theologian in today’s world is strangely paradoxical. In terms of vocation, he is engaged in a study of the past, where God has manifested Himself. Even beyond that study of the past, however, he is a man dedicated to the contemplation of the Eternal. But by the fact of his existence, he is immersed in a world that is teetering on its foundations and seems on the verge of collapse.2
In Présence et pensée, the Swiss theologian highlights the ambiguous and paradoxical reality of contemporary theology amidst the dialogue between eternal truths and our many temporal problems. One such problem that Balthasar wanted to take up in the European context of the mid-twentieth century was that of the separation between theology and spirituality: “There is surely no event in the history of Catholic theology that has been less studied and yet deserves more attention than the fact that, since the great scholasticism, there have been very few saint theologians”.3
This is a problem he worked on tirelessly, as he expressed at the end of his days when speaking of one of the three great tendencies of his thought: “I insist on the inseparability of theology and spirituality; their division has undoubtedly been the worst disaster in the history of the Church”.4 Such a division is certainly heir to scientific reductionism and the “allegedly scientific fragmentation”5 of theological treatises; the result was the separation of what was once a single reality, “as flesh and blood must originally be kept together in order to live”.6 The fragmentation between dogmatics and spirituality affected the identity of theological work; it ceased to be a spiritual exercise and became a technique or a scientific field that has little to do with the spiritual experience of the subject, who does theology on his knees before the mystery.
In the studies on contemporary theological work in the three Christian traditions by Gibellini,7 Ford and Muers,8 Ratzinger, Cordovilla, González de Cardedal, Kristiansen and Rise,9 one can see the separation between theology and spirituality that Balthasar identified. It is worth mentioning that this concern was also present in the work of several of his contemporaries, such as Congar,10 de Lubac,11 Daniélou,12 and Rahner.13 These reformers succeeded in finding answers within the thought of the Fathers with which to respond to the problems of their context without falling into anachronisms; they understood the reditus ad fontes as a relay race in which the flame of love and evangelical creativity is passed on from one generation to the next. Their contributions bore fruit in the Second Vatican Council, which brought great renewal to Catholic theology and gave rise to a valuable dialogue with other religious traditions.
In the years following Vatican II, there have been many ruptures, biased interpretations, divisions and wounds, which led Ratzinger to say that “It is not necessary to provide much evidence to show that the climate in the Church is not only cold, but even biting and aggressive; the existence of parties that tear communities apart everywhere is part of our daily experience”.14 Alongside these tensions, a false theological bias is developing in which ressourcement is beginning to be displaced by aggiornamento, “an extremely complicated problem, in which the whole dilemma of theology, its division between ressourcement and aggiornamento, is concentrated and synthesized”.15 In this debate, the Fathers lived in a past era too remote to have any relevance to the renewal of the Church.16
Some theological productions of the post-conciliar period in Colombia17 and Latin America demonstrate the sharpening confrontational tension between ressourcement and aggiornamento, which correlates with the tension between theology and magisterium. Along these lines, Saranyana affirms that some theological productions in the post-conciliar period,
… very soon abandoned the Christian theological matrix and projected themselves into other fields of knowledge (ethnography, existential hermeneutics, history of religions), crossing the limits of the Catholic tradition and perhaps also those of common sense. The same could be said of some much more recent forms of Indian theology, which are sliding towards a theological syncretism alien to Latin American Catholic culture, which, on the other hand, they wish to serve.18
Despite the reinvigorating contributions of Vatican II,19 the Second Episcopal Bishops’ Conference of Latin America held in Medellín,20 and the different contextual theologies,21 the Colombian reception of the patristic ressourcement movement – which served the Council’s theologians as a source of inspiration to unite theology and spirituality – is still limited and precarious. In this sense, it is understandable that there is little knowledge of the enormous riches of the patristic golden century and of the Eastern Fathers, as well as the contributions of the patristic movement promoted by the Nouvelle Théologie.22
Ratzinger, speaking of the current challenges facing theology and the need for an adequate reception of Vatican II, proposes a return to the sources and an effort to unite theology and spirituality, because renewal “depends only indirectly on texts and groupings. The decisive factor is whether or not, there are men – saints – who, through the unshakeable commitment of their own person, succeed in creating new and living things”.23 Ratzinger stresses the “permanent significance of the Fathers for today’s theology and for all future theology”,24 because they are witnesses of a common past in which the Church breathed with two lungs “and in the rediscovery of this communion lies the hope for the future of the Church, the task for her present and for ours”.25
Francis, on the other hand, has been one of the Latin American voices that has recently challenged and invited us to a renewed theological work, insisting on the need to do theology on our knees and on the effort to unite theology and spirituality once again,26 explicitly following the Ignatian inspiration of Balthasar. Theological work for Francis is a spiritual exercise that implies a prayerful, apophatic disposition in dialogue with Tradition, because, as he himself affirms, it is “to be encouraged to think while praying and to pray while thinking […] (in) a game, between the past and the present, between the present and the future”.27 At the same time, in the midst of a wounded society, it has become an urgent task that cannot be dealt with from behind a desk. In this sense, he challenged “the narcissism of the theologians, of the thinkers”,28 which consists in closing themselves off from an encounter with God and not allowing this encounter to transform them and inspire them to live the Gospel in a synodal and missionary spirit.
The current context sharpens the need for theological renewal because, as Francis affirms regarding the renewal of theology in universities, “We are not only living in an epoch of change, but a true change of epoch [ … ] we find more and more ‘symptoms of a breaking point, due to the great speed of change’”.29 The new reality that is emerging in this liquid post-modernity, disenchanted and lacking in foundations,30 is marked by a strong anthropological, ethical, social, and ecological crisis, which has as its backdrop an epistemological,31 ecclesial,32 and theological33 crisis in which human beings have lost the direction of their existence, remaining at the mercy of “any wind of doctrine” (Eph 4:14).
With these concerns about the urgency of renewing theological work, this investigation focuses on St. Gregory of Nyssa and two works from the period of his theological maturity: In Canticum Canticorum and De Vita Moysis. Its impetus lies in the originality of the Nyssen’s theological work and how little explored it has been in the Latin American context, as well as in the revelation that it meant for the researcher to discover the exegetical, spiritual, mystical and dogmatic richness of these texts. Even though they have scarcely been studied in Colombia, they are of vital importance for theology and Eastern Christian spirituality34 and have been developed in great depth in Europe since the second half of the twentieth century.35 Therein, the Nyssen reveals his heart and his way of doing theology, which has served as inspiration for theologians such as Daniélou, Balthasar, and Cordovilla when addressing the need to renew contemporary theological work along the lines of what is developed above.36
This work is thus focused on the adoption of these two texts of antiquity, with the pretext of renewing the theological task from the context of the researcher theologian himself. Consequently, it was considered appropriate to use as a method the qualitative research approach37 from Ricoeur’s hermeneutic rationality of appropriation.38 In this hermeneutic approach, the meaning of being is “gathered in the works of man, for it is in such works that the original understanding of being crystallizes. And this understanding is first and foremost linguistic: only in language is all ontic and ontological understanding expressed”.39
The hermeneutic circle is established within language itself40 between explanation and understanding;41 the interpreter allows himself to be guided by the world that the text opens to him, to understand and appropriate it in an experience that allows him to discover new dimensions of his being in the world. Such appropriation is achieved only in a process of openness, of “exposing oneself to the text and receiving from it a vaster self, which would be the proposition of existence that would respond in the most appropriate way”.42
From the hermeneutics of appropriation, used as a set of “recurrent and interrelated operations that produce cumulative and progressive results”,43 the aim is to establish a fruitful interaction between the world of the interpreter and the world of the texts.44 An authentic encounter that, due to its depth, generates a transformative experience45 that allows the sense of being to emerge in language and open new horizons of interpretation, comprehension of reality, and of transformation of oneself and one’s context. The hermeneutics of appropriation is a hermeneutics of action; “in the process of interpreting a text or fact of history, the agent of interpretation transforms himself”.46 In the hermeneutic process, a conversational tension develops between the world of the text and the world of the interpreter, in which the aim is not only to understand and interpret the world of these mystical texts, but also to appropriate them and bring them into dialogue with the present context.
This became apparent in the research according to the text, context, and pretext chosen. I will first focus on the two chosen texts, the life that they themselves possess and which makes them subject to multiple interpretations. Secondly, I will study the context of the theologian himself, who placed himself in front of the texts and interacted with them from his own faith experience and historical-cultural context. And finally, the pretext,47 which arises from the interaction between the world of the theologian and the world of the text, which in this case is the research question and the hypothesis that guided the process of understanding-interpretation-application.
After working on the texts with discernment and discussing them with several “Gregorians” around the world, I formulated the question that guided my research: what does Gregory’s theological work in Homilies on the Song of Songs and On the Life of Moses give towards the elaboration of a conceptual framework that contributes to the renewal of theology today? To answer this question, I proposed as a hypothesis the possibility of elaborating a conceptual framework that would contribute to the renewal of theology from these categories:
The intention of the conceptual framework is to serve as a source of inspiration for contemporary theological work today, not in the sense of a new fundamental theology or a normative rule, but from the spiritual attitude of those who open themselves freely to the thought of the Fathers of the Church and allow themselves to be influenced by the vitality that they inspire. This conceptual framework and the hypothesis put forward are novel and significant proposals that have not yet been addressed in the international sphere and that can certainly enrich contemporary theological reflection. Based on the main objective, four specific objectives were formulated that structured the research as follows: (1) the voices that urge the renewal of theological work; (2) the context of Gregory and his works; (3) the hermeneutical analysis of the two chosen texts; and (4) the contributions of the Nyssen for the elaboration of a conceptual framework to the renewal of theological work today.
Therefore, Gregory’s theological work in De Vita Moysis and In Canticum Canticorum is not only intended to be understood within the six mentioned categories, but it is also proposed – according to the working hypothesis – as a synthesis between theology and spirituality that can contribute to the elaboration of a conceptual framework for the renewal of theological work today. The presentation of the investigation begins with the consideration of the present context, then looks to the sources of the Tradition in Gregory, and finally returns to the present to illuminate it with some contributions from the Nyssen’s texts.
International Theological Commission, Theology Today: Perspectives, Principles and Criteria, 2012, 19.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Présence et pensée, Essai sur la philosophie religieuse de Grégoire de Nysse, Gabriel Beauchesne et ses fils éditeurs, Paris, 194, p. VII.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Ensayos teológicos I. Verbum Caro, Teología y siglo XX, VI, Ediciones Guadarrama, Madrid, 1964, p. 195.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Discurso con ocasión de la recepción del Premio Pablo VI”, Communio 10, I (1988), p. 290. As will be seen later when we return to this problem in greater depth, holiness and spirituality, as well as theology and dogmatics, appear as synonyms in the Swiss theologian’s approach to and description of this problem. Thanks to the renewal of exegetical and patristic studies, there is a broadening of the concept of mysticism in modernity, in which the understanding of spirituality and holiness can be included (see Aimé Solignac, “Mystic”, Dictionnaire di Spiritualité, X, M. Viller et al. (eds.), Beauchesne, Paris, 1980, pp. 1891–1939).
Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Discurso premio Pablo VI”, p. 290.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Theologie und Spiritualität”, Gregorianum 50 (1969), p. 586.
Cf. Rosino Gibelini, Teología del Siglo XX, Sal Terrae, Santander, 1998, pp. 176–270.
Cf. David Ford and Rachel Muers, The Modern Theologians, An Introduction to Christian Theology since 1918, Blackwell publishing, Malden, Oxford and Victoria, 2005, pp. 760–761. Ford also includes in his work an article by McIntosh that is worth reading, McIntosh, “Theology and Spirituality”, pp. 392–398.
Cf. Staale Johanes Kristiansen and Svein Rise, Key Theological Thinkers: From Modern to Postmodern, Ashgate Publishing, Farnham, 2103. This work studies theological renewal today and the passage from modernity to postmodernity in the three Christian traditions: Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox. Ratzinger, Cordovilla and González de Cardedal are not cited here, because they will be dealt with in more detail in the first chapter.
Yves Congar, “Tareas actuales de la teología”, in Lonergan (ed.), Renovación del pensamiento religioso. Teología de la renovación I, Sígueme, Salamanca, 1972, pp. 27–50.
Henri de Lubac, Mística e mistero, Opera 6, Jaca Book, Milan, 1979, pp. 1–32.
Jean Daniélou, “Les orientations présentes de la pensée religieuse”, Études 249 (1946), pp. 5–21.
Karl Rahner, “Espiritualidad antigua y nueva”, in Escritos de Teología VII, Taurus, Madrid, 1967, pp. 13–34.
Joseph Ratzinger, Teoría de los principios teológicos. Materiales para una teología fundamental, Herder, Barcelona, 2005, 443.
Ibid, pp. 158–159.
It is important to mention that in the midst of this biasing, there is also the opposite phenomenon in the academic interest in studying the Fathers from a historical, philological and philosophical point of view, but detached from their theological and ecclesial matrix. Orazo identifies this problem as follows: “tutti sappiamo che nella cultura italiana già da decenni si è affermato un modo di accostare i Padri e gli autori cristiani antichi dal punto di vista storico-critico-letterario, che non intende pagare alcun debito a ipoteche dogmatico-dottrinali, e meno ancora a pronunciamenti del Magistero che possano in qualche misura relegare la ricerca storico-letteraria a una funzione di subodinazione e quiasi di ‘ancillarità’ verso la teologia sistematica” (Antonio Orazzo, I Padri della Chiesa e la Teologia. in dialogo con Basil Studer, Edizioni San Paolo, Milano, 1995, p. 7). It must also be said that many patristic studies in Italy and Europe have a different orientation to the one just alluded to, because they seek to give some renewing contribution to the challenges of their own contexts, see for example: Johannes Arnold et al., Väter der Kirche, Ekklesiales Denken von den Anfängen bis in die Neuzeit, Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn, 2004, p. VI.
Gilberto Duque, “La producción teológica diocesana”, Theologica Xaveriana 142 (2002), p. 331.
Josep-Ignasi Saranyana, Breve historia de la teología en América Latina, Breve historia de la teología en América Latina, Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, Madrid, 2009, p. 283.
Second Vatican Council, “Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, 18 November, 1965,” in The Documents of Vatican II, The Vatican Publishing House, Vatican City, 2014, n. 2, 8, 23 and 24. For the following quotations from the documents of the Second Vatican Council, only the initials with their numerals should be placed in the body of the text. See also GS 4, 44, and 62; AG 22; and OT 16–18.
The rest of the conferences are not mentioned here to emphasize the milestone that Medellín marks in the reception of the Council.
Cf. Olga Vélez, Teologías y métodos, Theologica Xaveriana 153 (2005), pp. 34–36. For a broad overview of the long list of contextual theologies that emerged after the Council, see: Raúl Berzosa, Hacer teología hoy. Retos, perspectivas, paradigmas, San Pablo, Madrid, 1994, pp. 108–135.
Cf. Brian Daley, “The Nouvelle Théologie and the Patristic Revival: Sources, Symbols and the Science of Theology”, International Journal of Systematic Theology (7) 4 (2005), pp. 362–382.
Joseph Ratzinger, Teoría de los principios teológicos, p. 453.
Ibid, 179.
Ibid, 180. “Let us say what seems to us to be definitive in the figure of the Fathers: the Fathers are the teachers of the still united Church. This is the true criterion for delimiting the patristic frontiers” (Joseph Ratzinger, “Significado de los padres para la teología actual”, in Selecciones de teología 8 (1969)).
Francisco, “Exhortación apostólica Gaudete et exsultate sobre el llamado a la santidad en el mundo actual (2018)”, n. 45.
Francisco, “Videomensaje del santo padre Francisco al Congreso Internacional de Teología organizado por la Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina (2015)”.
Francesco, “Discorso del Santo Padre Francesco alla comunità della Pontificia Università Gregoriana e ai Consociati del Pontificio Istituto Biblico e del Pontificio Istituto Orientale (2014)”.
Francisco, “Constitución apostólica Veritatis gaudium sobre las universidades y facultades eclesiásticas (2017)”, n. 3.
Cf. Zygmunt Bauman, Tiempos líquidos. Vivir en una época de incertidumbre, Tusquets, Barcelona, 2007, pp. 7–17.
Cf. Jordi Pigem, La nueva realidad. Del economicismo a la conciencia cuántica, Kairós, Barcelona, 2013, pp. 14–16.
Cf. Gustavo Sanchez, “Perspectivas de la teología en el siglo XXI”, in Teológica limense 1 (2015), pp. 22–25.
Cf. Joseph Ratzinger, Introducción al cristianismo, Sígueme, Salamanca, 1979, p. 22.
Gregory is called Father of the Fathers by the second Council of Nicaea,
Cassin lists more than eleven hundred publications on Gregory in the last fourteen years, in which it is evident that he has not been sufficiently studied in the Latin American context (cf. Matthieu Cassin, “Bibliography of Gregory of Nyssa”). Another very suggestive example is given by González de Cardedal in his book Cristianismo y mística, where he makes it clear that his work lacks a study of the mystical tradition of the Fathers and the Eastern tradition of the Church (cf. Olegario González de Cardedal, Mística y cristianismo, Editorial Trotta, Madrid, 2015, p. 11).
Cordovilla devotes three pages to Gregory in his chapter on the praise of theology, in which he sets him as an example that can help to recover the identity of theological work today (Cf. Ángel Cordovilla, En defensa de la teología, una ciencia entre la razón y el exceso, Sígueme, Salamanca, 2014, pp. 19–22).
Cf. María Galeano, Diseño de proyectos en la investigación cualitativa, Fondo Editorial Eafit, Medellín, 2004, pp. 15–23.
Cf. Daniel Garavito, “Hermenéutica de la acción. Apropiación para una teología de la acción humana”, in J. Meza (ed.), El arte de interpretar en teología. Compendio de hermenéutica teológica, Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, 2017, pp. 279–298.
Paul Ricoeur, Del texto a la acción. Ensayos de hermenéutica II, Fondo de Cultura Económica, México, 2002, 56.
Cf. Werner Jeanrond, Theological Hermeneutics, Development and Significance, SCM Press, London, 1994, pp. 5–6; 71–74.
Cf. Paul Ricoeur, Lo voluntario y lo involuntario, Docencia, Buenos Aires, 1986, 73.
Ricoeur, Del texto a la acción, 117.
Bernard Lonergan, Método en teología, Sígueme, Salamanca, 2006, 12.
Cf. Matthieu Cassin, “Cassin, Text and Context: The Importance of Scholarly Reading. Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium”, in S. Douglass and M. Ludlow (eds.), Reading the church Fathers, T&T Clark, London, 2011, pp. 109–131.
This hermeneutical approach is also present in a certain way in Nyssa, see Morwenna Ludlow, “Anatomy: Investigating the Body of Texts in Origen and Gregory of Nyssa”, in S. Douglass and M. Ludlow (eds.), Reading the church Fathers, T&T Clark, London, 2011, p. 147; Orlando Solano “Inculturación de la teología como ejercicio hermenéutico de apropiación: hipótesis desde el De Vita Moysis de Gregorio de Nisa”, Doctoral thesis in theology, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, 2014, pp. 333–357 and Eva Reyes, “Lo busqué y no lo hallé, lo llamé y no me respondió’. Pensar una lectura a partir del ComCant de Gregorio de Nisa y la cuestión hermenéutica de Paul Ricoeur”, Taller de Letras 4 (2016), pp. 123–131.
Daniel Garavito, “Hemenéutica de la acción”, 282.
Cf. Alberto Parra, Textos, contextos y pretextos: teología fundamental, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Facultad de Teología, Bogotá, 2003, pp. 297–326.
Mysticism, mystagogy, mystery, concatenation, darkness and forward tension.