Theology on One's Knees

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - October 5, 2007

During his trip to Austria last month, Pope Benedict XVI made a visit to Heiligenkreuz Abbey, the ancient Cistercian monastery that for two centuries has also had a famous school of theology attached to it. This beautiful setting, teeming with monks and theology students, provided a fitting context for the Holy Father to address what he thinks is one of the most urgent priorities for the Church: to reunite theology — or the study of God and what he has revealed — to a faith-filled living relationship with God.

This may not seem like a subject that affects most Catholics, but it does. It has an intimate connection, among other things, to how parish catechetical programs should be structured, how religion courses at Catholic high schools should be taught, how the opinions of some "Catholic experts" in the media need to be interpreted, and, most fundamentally, how each one of us is called to increase in faith, which is the subject of this Sunday's Gospel.

At Heiligenkreuz Abbey, Benedict said that for our faith to grow and "be sustained over a lifetime, there is a need for a formation capable of integrating faith and reason, heart and mind, life and thought. A life devoted to following Christ calls for an integration of one's entire personality."

There is a need, in other words, to integrate both aspects of faith: the act of trust in God (faith proper) with the act of believing in what this trusted God reveals (the content of the faith or doctrine). Unless both elements are united, the person's faith will decrease rather than increase.

"Neglect of the intellectual dimension," Benedict says, "can give rise all too easily to a kind of superficial piety nourished mostly by emotions and sentiments, which cannot be sustained over a lifetime." Unless we have a faith seeking understanding of the mysteries of the faith, as St. Anselm put it, we risk abandoning the faith when confronted by challenges later to which we think, erroneously, that the Church has no adequate response. The general phenomenon of "Catholic illiteracy" — due to a couple of generations of catechesis and preaching that in many places have emphasized feelings more than dogma — is one of the chief causes of the epidemic of young fallen-away Catholics today.

"Neglect of the spiritual dimension, in turn," Benedict continues, "can create a rarified rationalism which, in its coldness and detachment, can never bring about an enthusiastic self-surrender to God." This is what Benedict says has happened in many theology departments in Catholic universities and schools, where God has become an "object of study," rather than the "living subject" of inquiry as well. Just as a doctor can lose his passion if all he does is treat illnesses and injuries instead of persons with illnesses and injuries, so a student of God can lose passion if all she is doing is seeking to know about God instead of seeking to know him personally.

In many institutions of theology, the focus has become what we are saying about God, rather than what God reveals about himself to us. As a consequence, instead of the study of God's bringing the person into greater union with God, it has often not only left the student empty, but knowing less and less about God. It has also left the various branches of theology without their source of unity.

"In its desire to be recognized as a rigorously scientific discipline in the modern sense, theology can lose the life-breath given by faith," Benedict warns. "Just as a liturgy which no longer looks to God is already in its death throes, so too a theology which no longer draws its life-breath from faith ceases to be theology; it ends up as an array of more or less loosely connected disciplines" that instead of helping others to understand the faith better, leads to confusion. This is precisely what Benedict says has occurred in many places because of a flawed historical-critical biblical scholarship that, instead of nourishing a friendship with God, has sown doubts. One cannot prescind from faith in the study of God, because it is only through faith that we can have the deepest access to God and the truths he reveals.

"A life devoted to following Christ cannot be built on such one-sided foundations," of intellectual pursuits without devotion, or piety without study, Benedict says. "Half-measures leave a person unhappy and, consequently, also spiritually barren." The study of God and the worship of God must be integrated. We must all seek to become "theologians on our knees," to use the celebrated image of Hans Urs von Balthasar.

That's why Benedict applauded what the Cistercians are modeling at Heiligenkreuz Abbey: to unite study and prayer, theology and liturgy, reason and faith. Ever since the 12th century, the center of theological scholarship has been the university rather than the monastery. While Benedict says that this development has had some good aspects to it — namely, that the "discipline of theology be [considered] part of the universitas of knowledge" — it has also led to theology being done according to the methods regnant in other departments of the university, which, more often than not, prescind from faith. It is crucially important that there be academic institutions like Heiligenkreuz that allow for a "deeper interplay between scientific theology and lived spirituality," which are "two necessarily complementary and interdependent aspects of study."

This integration of the head and the heart in the study of God needs to occur in each believer and in our parishes and schools. Religious education programs are called ever more urgently to seek to integrate learning the commandments and sacraments and living them, professing and practicing the faith, mouthing and meaning one's vocal prayers. Post-confirmation and adult continuing education programs are needed to help the faithful increase both one's knowledge and one's love of the Lord.

The great models in this integration are the saints, like Thomas Aquinas, who wrote not just the tomes of the Summa Theologiae but the tunes of the Adoro te Devote; and Thérèse Lisieux, whose love for the Lord led her through study to become a doctor of the Church without ever going to high school.

They, and so many others, show us what theology on one's knees looks like and results in.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.