Method for Latino/a Theology: Passion, Awe and Wonder, Personalism, and Philosophy

Method for Latino/a Theology: Passion, Awe and Wonder, Personalism, and Philosophy

A Response to Cecilia González-Andrieu and Gilberto Cavazos-González

Sixto J. García

St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary, Boynton Beach FL

 

My response to Cecilia’s and Gilberto’s insightful and provocative presentations is best expressed by my own journeyof theological toil, joy, challenge and commitment as a member of ACHTUS. Orlando Espín served as the midwife of my gestation and birth as a Latino theologian. He called me to his office sometime during 1988, after the founding meeting held by the one founding sister and the seven founding brothers, and introduced me to the Academy. I had finished my Ph.D. in 1986, with a dissertation on Friedrich Wilhem Joseph Schelling’s Christology in his Philosophie der Offenbarung, and I challenge anyone here present to find a realm of interest (seemingly) more alien to Latino theological concerns with popular religion and lo cotidiano than my dissertation topic.

 

Yet somehow, by dint of divine grace or connatural madness, or both, I felt Orlando’s invitation kindling an unsuspected fire within me. Oh what a moment that was! I felt it was so great to be alive, to be Hispanic, to be a theologian! On leaving Orlando’s office, I felt that I could raise my arms straight up and tickle the umbilicus of the Trinity! In a manner of speaking, we were starting from zero: we faced issues of form and system, method and mystery that seemed so remote, yet so inviting, so teasing.

 

I have often reflected on my ACHTUS infancy narrative. As did Matthew and Luke, I was appealing to memory and mystery. As I came to realize later, memory implies, of its own nature, interpretation. We cannot use our memory without immediately interpreting what surfaces there. To enter into a journey of memory means to interpret—what? To begin with: my own theological and philosophical history. Twenty years later, I have come to realize that my own retrieval of method for Latino/a theology became integrated around four defining categories.

 

Passion

 

I have reflected on this in previous essays/book chapters and presentations I have given elsewhere, including my own ACHTUS Presidential Address.[1] Quite obviously, in this context passion does not mean a passing emotional fancy or irrational exuberance. Rather, passion best defines the integration of faith, reason and love found at the heart of the great masters of our tradition. Thomas Aquinas, in his phenomenology of faith, says that: “Spurred by an ardent will to believe, the human being loves the truth in which he (she) believes, contemplates it in his spirit, and embraces as many reasons as he can find.” [2] Love, reason, faith: rather implicitly, Thomas is nuancing Augustine’s remarkable insight, uttered in his letter to Faustus, the Manichean bishop of Milevis: “Non intratur in veritatem nisi per caritatem.”[3] Love, truth, faith, and reason dancing together in a mad, wild, Dionysian perichoretic embrace! Somehow, I sensed from the beginning that this was, should be, the sine qua non of methodology for Latino/a theology: passion!Augustine’s unbridled spasm of joy can be heard echoing through the hallways and in the spirits of Latino/a theologians: “O caritas, Deus meus, accende me.”[4] Now, honestly, how can we be Latino/a theologians and not be passionate? The question goes, and should ever go, begging for an answer.

 

Awe and Wonder

 

Plato has given us this precious gem of wisdom and insight in his Theatetus: Socrates speaks to the young, aspiring Sophist philosopher Theatetus, whose endless inquiries and wondering have impressed him: “This feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy.”[5] Thaumazein—awe and wonder—at what? A beautiful sunset, the unutterable joy of being unconditionally loved? Yes, but also wonder at the story-pregnant smile in our abuelitas, awe and wonder at the unceasing clamor for justice that seems to express paschal hope in eventual redemption, the joys and celebrations, sorrows and vicissitudes that we celebrate, either as fiesta, liturgy or somber farewell to the departed, the wonder of a transcending Latino/a spirit that denies death the last word. Without awe and wonder as a defining and foundational attitude, Latino/a theologians can hardly claim the necessary humility to listen to the voices, clamors, songs and cries of our sisters and brothers. Quite the contrary: the moment we dismiss awe and wonder, the only possible result is manipulative and arrogant theology.

 

Personalism

 

Personalism means encounter, embrace, allowing ourselves the ultimate pain and risk of paschal vulnerability: to be addressed by a word of trust and love from the our Latino/a sisters and brothers. To listen, receive and respond to a word of love, from within our Latino/a environment, is a an act of grace, a mystical moment. Gabriel Marcel’s often quoted (and misquoted) utterance comes to mind. In one of his plays, one of his characters says to an afflicted friend: “To love someone (to tell someone ‘I love you’) is to tell that person: ‘You shall not die forever’.”[6] This is dangerous, bold, even prophetic. Yet, how awe-inspiring, how sacred, how utterly beyond words it is! Latino/a theologians are called to somehow articulate into credible forms the promise of redemption, of healing, of liberation—hence, of absolute love and immortality—to our sisters and brothers. This is the only reason for the existence of ACHTUS; everything else is derivative. Really, can there be a higher, more beautiful and—yes—riskier calling than this?

 

Philosophy

 

Ah, this is treading in quicksand, particularly in the face of post-colonial critique; yet, Emmanuel Levinas can help us here. He argues that, as we know so well, philosophy is the love of wisdom. He muses further, “Philosophy is the wisdom of love at the service of love.”[7]Levinas, ever reminding us of how ethics, spirit and the good find expression in the human face, the face that says “Thou shall not kill” (i.e., oppress, discriminate, exclude) offers that love is the determining quality of wisdom. It is the connatural desire to redeem the suffering face of the other, and heal his/her wounded spirit.[8] Karl Rahner has expressed this intimacy between philosophy and love (analogous to the intimacy between faith and reason, holiness and scholarship) in peerless fashion in his Hearers of the Word: “In the final analysis, knowledge is but the luminous radiance of love… In the heart of knowledge stands love, from which knowledge itself lives…knowledge… knowledge and love constitute originally the one basic stance of the one human being.”[9]

 

In my own work, I have appropriated much of Maurice Blondel’s philosophy of L’Action, discerning how the ever-transcending flow of human response to reality within the tension between the willing will and willed will, illumines the furthest possibilities of our theological efforts. Xavier Zubiri’s own retrieval of the intimacy between faith and reason, drawn from, yet again, Augustine. Schelling—yes even Schelling—can speak to me as a Latino theologian. His Philosophy of Revelation is an awe-inspiring story of process and Spirit, history and mystery, that flows into Incarnation, community and church.[10]

 

Conclusion

 

Finally, method in Latino/a theology must yield pride of place to the practice of theology. Method often suggests itself on the go, along the way. Something of this sort was suggested to me by reading Roberto Goizueta’s Caminemos con Jesús: Antonio Machado’s tantalizing line, “Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar,”[11] retains (in spite of everything) an abiding truth. Latino/a theology is all about encounter, beholding, in speechless awe and wonder, the face of the other, ultimately, becoming the love of the other. Allow me to invite John of the Cross to close out my presentation. In a poem written during his nine-month incarceration in a fetid dungeon at the regular Carmelite convent in Toledo, titled In principio erat Verbum, he expresses the deepest defining song of his entire mystical theology. He says:

 

                                                En los amores perfectos

                                                Esta ley se requerìa

                                                Que se hiciera semejante

                                                El amante,

                                                A quien querìa[12]

 

Encounter, personalism, embrace, heart and mind, spirit and mystery: these, ultimately, and nothing else, are what define Latino/a theology: to make ourselves, the lovers—the Latino/a theologian/lovers—one in koinonia, communion, with the beloved, begging them to renew us, to bless us, to define our lives with the grace of their life and love.

Notes