Abstract
What is it about Michel de Certeau’s thinking and approach to the crisis of Catholicism in the (post-) conciliar years that gives it a particular capacity to inspire the advent of a synodal Church? The contribution attempts to answer this question by outlining the main features of de Certeau’s theological gesture. It will then clarify his perspective of the Christian community, which he approaches from the angle of a “missionary” itinerancy, or even an “exit” or “alteration” provoked by the encounter with the stranger, giving rise to linguistic creativity and requiring a new practice of authority. In the end, it is this “way of doing things” according to Certeau, which can be found in the Scriptures and is constantly being reinvented in very different cultural spaces that can enable ecclesial communities, and the Church as a whole, to embark on the “uncharted path” of synodalization.
1 Introduction
The current Synod on the Synodality of the Church invites theologians to “imagine a synodal theology.”1 It is from this perspective that I wish to explore the thoughts of Michel de Certeau. What more particularly gives his ideas the power to inspire the emergence of a synodal Church today? So I will not be satisfied with just re-reading his work through the lens of the current synodal experience but will look for spiritual and intellectual insights that can apply to a Church genuinely striving to be synodal. The Church’s “open” and “uncertain” future is built on faith in the Holy Spirit’s influence and a new “synodal” approach, necessitating both practical application and intellectual reflection at the same time. Indeed, a commitment to a synodal Church doesn’t mean “less theology” but requires its “transformation.” Michel de Certeau, more than any other thinker of his time, invites us to this shift today.
The work of this Jesuit (whom I had the good fortune to meet in the Rue Monsieur community in Paris) is vast and well-known for its developments and influence over time. Since the late 1950s, what Pierre Antoine Fabre calls “a unique trinity”2 – ethnology, history, and psychoanalysis – significantly influenced Certeau’s thinking. However, these influences do not diminish the importance of theology. Instead, theology is placed within the cultural history of our societies and presents itself as a “fault,” “fault line”, “breach,” or “rupture.” This “theological” aspect is something the Jesuit continually explores throughout his travels and within the intellectual and spiritual universe of his time. This theme runs through his major works, such as La fable mystique (1982), L’écriture de l’histoire (1975), and L’invention du quotidien (1980), as well as his numerous articles, some of which are collected in La faiblesse de croire (1987) and his earlier work L’étranger ou l’union dans la différence (1969).
I will first outline this “theological” aspect, that is, the Jesuit’s “theological approach,” particularly suited to the current “synodal approach,” which aims to shift the ecclesial spotlight onto the daily lives not only of Christians and their communities but also of a broader community of the many women and men among whom they are immersed. Then, I will concentrate on two more specific aspects that could inspire a Church in the process of becoming synodal: what Certeau says about a “common life” that allows itself to be “altered” by the presence of the other, following certain “mystics” like Ruusbroec; and his way of rethinking the relationship of these Christian communities to tradition and biblical hermeneutics by highlighting their “way of proceeding.”
2 A Theological Gesture
Several features of Michel de Certeau’s “theological gesture” make it relevant to what a Church on the path to synodalization is seeking today. At the forefront of these characteristics is the Jesuit’s primary interest in “the life of the people” as a “social mediation of meaning,”3 an interest that displaces Christian theology from its place of academic orthodoxy to what the Working Document for the Continental Stage of the Synod refers to as “the exquisitely theological treasure contained in the experience of listening to the voice of the Spirit enacted by the People of God, allowing its sensus fidei to emerge” (n° 8). This realtionship might indeed appear somewhat hastily brought together, if we were not to consider a second aspect of Certeau’s “gesture”. This aspect is his assessment of the Church’s crisis in the years following the council, an assessment that remains pertinent today. Indeed, while there are ways out of the crisis that have become impracticable, the Jesuit outlines a possible future orientation, based on “poetics of everyday life” and an “epistemology of belief.” These two approaches can form the basis of what I will call a “synodal reason,” not without analogy with the current search for a new “political reason,” anticipated by Certeau as early as 1968; this is a third trait of his “theological gesture.”
To phrase Certeau’s contribution differently, the current experience of synodality could be understood as an original and unexpected response to the crisis of the “ecclesial body” and its “authorities,” a crisis diagnosed by Certeau. This is the hypothesis for which I would like to put forward some arguments.
1. In his article on La misère de la théologie, Certeau identifies the attempts of certain theologians to take seriously “new theological topics;” in 1973 we are still at the beginning of so-called “contextual” theologies. As a seasoned traveller and teacher abroad, not only does he examine several contexts, especially in Latin America and the United States,4 but above all, he develops the importance of the socio-historical perspective on the “local.” He does this especially in a remarkable passage from his article on Autorités chrétiennes et structures sociales (1969 and 1970). The historian’s investigation corrects the “myopia” of theology and brings to the surface the forgotten parts of history repressed or excommunicated from an organization that sees itself as the sole place of truth; his study also corrects the “presbyopia” of theology, which limits itself to a global view and ignores what is “close” and “popular” and differs from the mentalities, ethical norms, and doctrinal formulations peculiar to the “clerics.”5 Citing Saint Irenaeus and the Second Vatican Council, Certeau then highlights the importance of oral tradition – “never objectively identifiable, enigmatic on the contrary, although it also constitutes an authority”6 – and calls for a better identification of Christian experiences, “omitted or unrecognized,” which “give a troubling content to the principle which, under the title of a consensus fidelium, granted them a necessary role in the construction of the languages of faith.”7
In the background of this interest in the “local” and “popular” is Certeau’s work as a historian of the 16th and 17th centuries, marked by his reading and critique of the archaeology8 of knowledge in Les mots et les choses by Michel Foucault (1966).9 At stake in this study is the limit or crisis of “representations,” be they political, ecclesiastical, or scientific, a crisis discernible only from a new “epistemological foundation” emerging after the classical age. This “heterogeneity” is manifest as Certeau depicts it, for example, in The Possession at Loudun (1970). Instead of deluding himself by repressing this strangeness to the past, he shows that it is part of history: “Normally,” he writes at the beginning of The Possession at Loudun, “strange things circulate discreetly below our streets. But a crisis will suffice for them to rise up, as if swollen by flood waters, pushing aside manhole covers, invading the cellars, then spreading through the towns.”10 This crisis of our “representations” – “lids” on the stage of our social theatre, which the Jesuit lifts due to his interest in the “local” and in what is forgotten or repressed – is like a red thread through his “theological gesture” and gives him a unique insight into the crisis of the Church in the post-conciliar years.
2. Certeau’s diagnosis – the second characteristic of his “gesture” – indeed relies on the relationship between “representation” and the “social body.” “In principle,” he writes in 1973, “Christian discourse maintains a relationship with a group: traditionally, the logos, or discourse, is authorized by an ekklesia, or community. But what becomes of this language when the body upon which it is articulated disperses? It cannot survive this detachment intact.”11 The analyst identifies multiple symptoms of this detachment, such as the “ecclesiological overproduction” around the time of the Council: “a discourse determined by the body is succeeded by a body defined by theology. […] It is no longer about an uncertain ecclesial reality that should be grasped from the texts but about the fabrication of a representation through discourse.”12 Certeau recognizes an “imaginary ecclesial body,”13 which progressively unravels, leaving in the wake of history “spiritual communities” whose “unmoored propheticism” is no longer backed by an institution grounded in foundations which could regulate it. This was an early identification of symptoms in 1973 that can be observed today on a large scale.14
I do not want to detail the “archaeology” of this ecclesiastical crisis here, one of great historical complexity, except to recall that it is precisely at this point that the divergence between Certeau and Lubac, as Carlos Alvarez has shown, is manifest.15 The years 1926–1930 show a Church emerging from a period when it could rely on an “integralist” and anti-republican coherence between its doctrinal representations and its socio-political presence; it enters “a half-century of ‘primacy of the spiritual’ which makes room for a plurality of human options, (freeing) the Christian experience from its socio-political determinations but (at the same time driving it) towards a ‘mystical’ recourse, and gradually towards silence.”16 While Lubac attempts to hold together the institutional and the mystical, Histoire et Esprit (1950) – a work cited by Certeau17 – and, in the post-conciliar debates, tries to maintain the fundamental structure of the Catholic body of the Church, formed of particular Churches within the universal Church (1971),18 the Jesuit historian records in these same years that “a half-century of the primacy of the spiritual, evangelism, or the pneumatology that results from it (as a result of a general evolution) make it very difficult to understand and represent the relationship that public institutions have with lived meaning.”19
Is this diagnosis of the seventies, which focuses on the Church’s difficulty in forming a unified body, still relevant? Socio-historical analyses on the “archipelization” of French and European20 Catholicism seem to confirm it, even though the “epochal change”21 we are currently experiencing forces us to consider other parameters, such as the ecological transition, in examining the Church’s crisis.
3. Certeau’s diagnosis is, however, solid enough for us to take into consideration the future orientations he advocated during the post-conciliar years. This third aspect of his “theological gesture” is precisely identified at the intersection of his analysis of the crisis in our public representations and the shift he makes towards the “local” and the “popular,” paying attention to what is forgotten or repressed. Far from capitulating to the Church’s difficulty in forming a unified body, his outline of a possible future connects two parameters, his “epistemology of belief” and his “poetics of everyday life.”
Certeau is indeed fully aware of the paradox facing the Church, as evidenced by this excerpt, one among many:
No orthodoxy guarantees the risk to be taken as a Christian. Certainly, there must be signs of recognition among communities that testify to the same singular option (Christian), but the production of a Christian language can only continue in the open, without the protection of an ideology provided by an institution. Caught in one of the determinations that compose the immense complex of a contemporary society, this work will have a fragmentary and random aspect. It will take the form of a risk, and of an “Abrahamic” journey.22
The epistemology of belief, therefore, must initiate a reflection on Christian “authorities,” “which refer to an act of faith for the communication between the history of yesterday and the experiences of today.”23 One of the first traces of this epistemology is found in the article entitled La faiblesse de croire (1977),24 which indicates the essential elements of the act of faith: “believing” [croire] as an unavoidable “other” of knowing, and “trust” as an indispensable condition of all communication. Certeau emphasizes the form of this act, which he later develops in his anthropology of belief. Regarding Christian faith, this form or “model” combines following Jesus and conversion, the former indicating a “surpassing” or “excess,” the latter a “transformation” of consciousness and behaviors, corresponding to it. This dynamic, Certeau says, is in no way compromised by the current dispersal of ecclesial “spaces” it has traversed, because fundamentally it does not pertain to a “space” but must now “be embodied” [faire corps] with the mortal body of our world. It is precisely here that he introduces what he calls “politics and poetics of the everyday,” concrete ways to move beyond the general views of Vatican II on the “people of God” and “the world” (from its “presbyopia,” one might say), to abandon false separations between the world and the Church, and to confront the divisions that also cross through the Church.25
What then, is the meaning of what mystics since the time of Ruusbroec called the “common life” and which Certeau mentions in the presentation of his epistemology of “belief”? This is precisely the central question that the current Synod on Synodality is seeking to answer, though obviously at some distance from a thought developed about forty years ago. But like Certeau, the Instrumentum laboris of the first session of the synod (October 2023)26 wonders about that which constitutes the “body” of the baptized (no. 20) and about “a synodal Church (which) promotes the passage from ‘I’ to ‘we.’ It is a space within which a call resonates to be members of a body that values diversity but is made one by the Spirit” (no. 25; my emphasis). This passage [from “I” to “we”] is therefore not something taken for granted but involves above all a kind of local experience. Right away the question of “inclusion” arises; a question that runs through the Instrumentum and concerns not only the poorest but also other groups like migrants, LGBTQIA+, etc. (see file B 1.2). It is remarkable – and here we find Certeau and his “sense” of what is forgotten or repressed and his critique of the “myopia” of theology – that “their inclusion” primarily calls for a capacity for perception and listening which is precisely the very heart of the synodal approach.
When, in the light of the ongoing synodal experience, one thus revisits the future orientations proposed by Certeau at the heart of the post-conciliar Church crisis, one discovers the outline of a “synodal rationality” that is shaped in the same way as his writing of history. The historian, who at the same time studies the present moment, primarily outlines this pivotal aspect and the extent to which our societal systems “exceed” this “rationality:” the listening for and decoding of what the social theatre is repressing or hiding and yet speaks of itself and must therefore be “authorized” to speak – which is the very first role of a synodal Church; and the constant reminder of the itinerant and therefore provisional nature of our reconfigurations of faith, marked by death as a condition of life – which a synodal Church must incorporate into its paradoxical function of “representation.” It is not impossible to attribute to Certeau the distant paternity of the “four principles related to bipolar tensions inherent in any social reality,” referred to by Pope Francis in Evangelii Gaudium (nos. 221–237), and more specifically the first and third principles – “Time is greater than space” (no. 223) and “Realities are more important than ideas” (no. 232); principles that outline the contours of a “synodal rationality.”27
4. Thus, the current synodal experience of the Catholic Church can be understood as a response to the systemic crisis of the Catholic “ecclesial body” and its “authorities.” The three characteristics of Certeau’s “theological gesture” – the shift of his thought towards the “local” and the “popular,” his diagnosis of the crisis of the Church’s “being embodied,” and his way of inscribing the “theological,” the “gap” or “excess” in the everyday as an “opening” or “establishment” of a new way of “being embodied”28 – in fact, anticipate a “possibility” which, in an unexpected and original way, likely provoked by the abuse crisis, is currently finding a beginning of realization.
It is not surprising that the problem I consider central to Michel de Certeau’s historical diagnosis, namely the modern and contemporary crisis of political and ecclesial “representations,” is also at the heart of the current Synodal Assembly which indeed extends, by theological necessity, the order of “representation,” but allows it to be traversed, altered, and wounded by a living oral tradition, gathered from the basic principles of an inclusive Church. As for the early insight into the discrediting of our “representations,” Certeau shares it with Karl Rahner, who (being of another generation), did not have the same access to the critical power of ethnology, history, and psychoanalysis. In any case, it is this insight that qualifies Certeau’s thought as a privileged source of inspiration in the advent of a synodal Church; so this is the first question to which I had promised to respond.
In what follows, I will bring out two more specific aspects of this inspiration, juxtaposing them with the two facets of the first part of the Instrumentum laboris (A), namely the distinctive traits of a synodal Church (A 1.) and the method of proceeding that characterizes it (A 2.).
3 “Common life” or the Presence of the Other
Certeau wrote in 1977:
No man is a Christian alone, for himself but in reference and in connection to the other, in openness to a difference that is called for and accepted with gratitude. This passion for the other is not a primitive nature to be rediscovered, nor is it added as an outside force, or garment, to our skills and achievements; it is a fragility that strips away our stability and introduces into our foundational strengths the weakness of belief.29
This very beautiful excerpt will guide my reflections on how to allow the emergence, in a synodal Church, of a “common life” (à la Ruusbroec): by becoming aware of the Christian meaning of social communication, by entering into what Certeau calls “the passion for the other,” and by reconsidering, at the end of this path, the place of “authorities” within the Christian tradition; a “reframing” that will confront us again with the thorny problem of “representation.”
1. According to Certeau, “the communal Christian expression arises from the demands of a nomination,”30 that of Jesus – I have already mentioned this; this nomination opens up a space for words and practices. To stay as close as possible to the origins of Christianity, these practices are expressed, even today, by a “mode of communication,” a “style of relationship,” a “way of living together” that the theologian would not want to see reduced to a “domestic economy” but situated within the “secular city,” recalling the “utopian writing” or the “madness” of Pauline thought (1 Cor 1:26–29) that introduces itself.31
If we accept this immersive perspective, the major challenge is to specify how to effectively recognize in this “style of relationship” its evangelical mark. While maintaining an inseparable link between communication and meaning, Certeau never gives up on the necessity of “common signs among the responses that believers give to the advent of the Word.”32 Thus, while analyzing the crisis of the ecclesial body and its “authorities,” he recognizes the necessity of the latter, “either as common representations or as criteria that authorize the designation as ‘Christian’ a personal or collective expression.”33 His thought oscillates somewhat, leaning towards the immersion of Christians in society (“like a drop of water in the sea,”34 he writes) but also recognizing at the same time the requirement of “credible references and signs of recognition elucidated in common.”35
2. Certeau gathers these signs of mutual recognition and concentrates this “common elucidation” into a formula of faith which, according to him, best expresses the evangelical mark of a Christian way of communicating within society. Observing the absence of the other, this formula expresses a desire, even a passion, for the other, by introducing a “not without you,” suggested by Heidegger’s phenomenology and transformed, indeed much earlier and following the Epistle to the Romans, into liturgical prayer: “Let me never be separated from you”.36 Conceived in La rupture instauratrice,37 this evangelical form or structure runs through the entirety of Certeau’s work, from L’étranger ou l’union dans la différence (1969) and the study on Les mots et les choses, indicating the theological background of his epistemology of belief, namely the experience of being altered by the other; a sentiment that Alfonso Mendiola captures as follows: “The only way to let oneself be altered [...] by the other, is to accept one’s own death. From this welcome [...] emerges the possibility of silence, the condition for listening to the different”.38 This unprecedented possibility, given to each and everyone, is the quintessential evangelical marker of a “truly communal life.” For it requires an act of trust that is constitutively tested by the nagging question: does one actually find in the other an interlocutor?39 Certeau also expresses this test in terms of “limit” and “lack;” no person, no community, and no Church being able to substitute for the other, each having to wait for a “response” coming from others, all thus signifying their relation to “the Absent of history.”40
We are here brought back to the very heart of the current synodal experience, precisely founded on a theology of listening. Beyond the recurrent dissensions and conflicts, the Instrumentum laboris (2023) ultimately addresses their root and their possible overcoming: “Trying to walk together also brings us into contact with the healthy restlessness of incompleteness,” we read, “with the awareness that there are still many things whose weight we are not able to carry or bear (cf. Jn 16:12). This is not a problem to be solved, but rather a gift to be cultivated” (no. 29). And further on, this phrase of Certeauian flavor: “Once the People of God are freed from the anxiety of inadequacy, the inevitable incompleteness of a synodal Church and the readiness of its members to accept their own vulnerabilities become the space for the action of the Spirit, who invites us to recognise the signs of his presence” (no. 31).
3. What then can be the role of “authorities” within a synodal Church? Indeed, it is not enough to stop at an analysis of their crisis. Michel de Certeau redefines their place in the Christian tradition and their possible non-idolatrous functioning:
Every figure of authority, in Christian society, is marked by the absence of (what) grounds it. Whether it is Scripture, traditions, the council, the pope, or anything else, what enables it is lacking. Each authority manifests what it is not. Hence the impossibility for each one to be the whole, the “center,” or the unique. An irreducible plurality of authorities alone can indicate the relationship each of them has with what it postulates as “Christian.” [...] The plural here is the manifestation of meaning. Christian language has (and can only have) a communal structure: only the connection of witnesses, signs, or different roles enunciates a “truth” that cannot be reduced to uniqueness by a member, a discourse, or a function. [...] Because (this “truth”) is the elusive condition of what it makes possible, it has only traces of multiplicity of signs: a surface of articulated places designates it, rather than a pyramidical “hierarchy” generated from its summit.41
One could not better express the stakes of a synodal reform of the Church and its authorities. In this text, Certeau anticipates the difficult departure from a pyramidal imaginary. Forty-five years after La rupture instauratrice, Pope Francis moves towards this interpretation by proposing the metaphor of an “inverted pyramid” – “in this Church, as in an inverted pyramid, the top is located beneath the base”42 – and by indicating a “common path” – another metaphor – on which different positions must be set out, each referring to others. The four modules of the Synodal Assembly in October 2023 on the characteristic features of a synodal Church, on communion, co-responsibility in mission, and on governance and authority within this Church precisely outline what Certeau calls a “surface of articulated places.” On this new “social stage” of the Catholic Church, this quadruple questioning not only opens a deep insight into the journeys of individuals and local Churches within our “common home,” but it also offers human societies the “representation” of a laboratory of “truly common life,” a laboratory that, drawing inspiration from what is experienced “in these communities, though frequently small and poor, or living in the Diaspora” (LG, 26 § 1), can be opened everywhere and by everyone.
However, the implementation of this goal requires a “way of proceeding;” it is the other side of a “truly common life,” which can inspire the current synodal practice. I just need to outline it briefly.
4 A way of proceeding
Indeed, it is the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius that are in the background of Certeau’s interest in the “way of proceeding” within the laboratory of our human existences, our societies, and in the Church. In 1973 he writes:
The libretto of the Spiritual Exercises is a text made for a music and made of dialogues that it does not provide. It coordinates with an “hors-text” which is nevertheless essential. Thus, it does not hold the place of this essential. It does not substitute for the voices. [...] The Exercises only provide a set of rules and practices related to experiences that are neither described nor justified, that are not introduced in the text, and of which it is in no way the representation since it poses them as external to it in the form of oral dialogue between the instructor and the retreatant, or the silent history of relations between God and these two respondents.43
1. Besides the fact that once again, we find here the Certeauian way of moving away from a logic of the “representation” of the individual and social body, the understanding of the text of the Exercises as the structuring of a possible “conversion” or a “process of transformation,” already mentioned, introduces a hermeneutic of the Scriptures and Tradition, decisive in the current synodal process. Certeau leads readers of the Scriptures to the abyss of the Christian Bible, introducing “a movement in line with that which articulates all Christian faith: the conversion of the Old Testament into the New Testament.”44 And he specifies:
The praxis of Jesus – which culminates in the silence of death – bridges two languages. It is, between the two halves of the Bible, the space in which transformative action occurs. Which one? Jesus never ceased to maintain the particularity of the Judaic institution and yet managed to create, through a deviation [écart], another meaning. [...] The adherence to the letter opened the letter to a spirit that would be stated for the first time in another written form. Overall, the New Testament was meant to denote a type of conversion inaugurated by Jesus, and which would be indefinitely something “to be done” in relation to this inauguration or to other ones. It was in a way a manual for the spiritual instruction of the Scriptures.45
This “mode” of a “lecture spirituelle” has two aspects. Both are “outside the text:” what the Exercises call the “composition of place” – Certeau places all his interest in the “popular” and the “forgotten of history” there – as well as twofold dialogue that occurs orally between the instructor and the retreatant, on the one hand, and silently, on the other hand, with God. The second part of L’étranger ou l’union dans la différence introduces here the dialogue between Jesus and the Samaritan woman.46 According to Certeau, the crisis of Christian language – a concern that runs through his entire work – cannot be resolved by partial adjustments, but requires a constant return to the abyss or the “space of transformative action” represented by Jesus’ death and his empty tomb, the “place” where the entrance to the laboratory of oral and silent dialogue happens.
2. This very brief outline of Michel de Certeau’s Christian hermeneutics leads us to the other side of the current synodal experience: “the awareness that a synodal Church is also marked by a particular way of proceeding” identified as that of “conversation in the Spirit” (Instrumentum laboris, no. 14). Indeed, the synod is not an “event” but a “process” and a “process of conversion” which, like that of the Spiritual Exercises, requires time, as it involves “spiritual conversation,” not between a retreatant and his instructor, but among all participants and with God. From the Preparatory Document, the conversations in the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles guide this process. And the presentation, with Certeauian accents, of this “way of proceeding” in the Instrumentum laboris clearly indicates the “place” where an ecclesial “consent” can be born, as universal as possible, and simultaneously, a new language:47
The interior traces that result from one’s listening to sisters and brothers are the language with which the Holy Spirit makes its own voice resound. The more each participant has been nourished by meditation on the Word and the Sacraments, growing in familiarity with the Lord, the more he or she will be able to recognise the sound of His voice (cf. Jn 10:14.27), assisted also by the accompaniment of the Magisterium and theology. Likewise, the more intentionally and carefully participants attend to the voice of the Spirit the more they will grow in a shared sense of mission (no. 38).
3. In his own way, Michel de Certeau reflected, after the Council, the pastoral and synodal modus operandi, avoiding its trivialization, thanks to his fight against the myopia and presbyopia of theology. The current synodal process can be understood as a new realization of this modus, as a response – as I have shown in the first part here – to the crisis of the “ecclesial body” and its “representations.” Ultimately, does the Jesuit’s thinking offer us resources to imagine a synodal Church? My answer is “yes and no!” No, because the unpredictable future of the Church is unrepresentable and remains entrusted to the action of the Holy Spirit and the communal practice of listening to His “voice.” And yet yes, because the effectiveness of a lived experience of spiritual conversation at all levels of the Church projects an image and activates the messianic vision of the Christian tradition, inviting everyone to enter into this ecclesial and societal laboratory of the future.
5 Conclusion
In conclusion, I would like to add that the fruitful distance separating us from the time of Michel de Certeau also requires a critique of his thought, one that goes beyond my inevitably partial approach. However, I have tried to show how and why his thinking allows us to understand the current experience of synodality as an original and unexpected response to the crisis of the “ecclesial body” and its “authorities.” When rereading his work today, it is possible to overlook its theological aspect by unilaterally emphasizing the critical perspective of his diagnosis, driven by his historical and analytical investigations. This would then miss the prudence and finesse of his discourse. By too quickly anticipating the possibility of a new configuration of the Church, one could have risked, in his time, downplaying the necessary passage through deconstruction, which was and perhaps still is necessary to accept.
Undoubtedly, today we can move beyond the opposition, inherited from the modernist crisis and still alive during the post-conciliar years, between the defense of a metaphysics of the “real” and the emphasis on the biblical narrative “as a fable that makes one believe.”48 The four principles of Pope Francis, mentioned at the end of my first part, actually outline the contours of a new dynamic ontology that integrates the critical aspect of Michel de Certeau’s thought, while aiming at or rather anticipating the “polyhedral whole” of the world (4th principle) and its “unity” (2nd principle).
In my opinion, the liturgy, which is too seldom present in Certeau’s work, is the “place” that is both decisive and oh so fragile for a synodal Church that, becoming aware of its “healthy incompleteness” (Instrumentum laboris, nos. 29 and 31), can receive it as a gift to cultivate (no. 30), in a movement of conversion or inversion and in the faith that the “Absent from history,” Jesus Christ, bears an “unfathomable richness,” that of God’s grace (Ephesians 3:8).
Translated from French into English by Joseph Hudson OSB.
Biography
Christoph Theobald was born in Cologne, Germany in 1946. He is a Jesuit of the Province of France, who taught from 1988 until 2021 as professor of Fundamental and Dogmatic Theology in the Faculty of Theology at the Jesuit university, “Centre Sèvres” in Paris. From 1993 until 2004, he was the director of the International journal Concilium, and from 2009 to 2021, chief editor of the journal Recherches de science religieuse. Since 2021, he has functioned as a member of the Theological Commission of the Synod “For a Synodal Church,” and was appointed Expert of the XXVI Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops.
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Certeau, Michel de: Le noir soleil du langage ! Michel Foucault, in: Michel de Certeau: L’absent de l’histoire. Paris: Mame 1973, pp. 115–132.
Certeau, Michel de: L’étranger ou l’union dans la différence. Paris: DDB 1991.
Certeau, Michel de: The possession at Loudun. Chicago–London: The University of Chicago Press 2 2000 [1996].
Fabre, Pierre Antoine: Préface, in Alfonso Mendiola/Michel de Certeau (ed.): Épistémologie, érotique et deuil, French translation and preface by Pierre Antoine Fabre. Brussels–Paris: Lessius 2023, p. 12.
Fourquet, Jérôme: L’Archipel français. Naissance d’une nation multiple et divisée. Paris: Éditions du Seuil 2017.
Giard, Luce: Cherchant Dieu, in: Michel de Certeau: La faiblesse de croire. Paris: Seuil 1987, pp. I–XIX.
Habermas, Jürgen: Espace public et démocratie délibérative: un tournant. Paris: Gallimard 2023.
Lagrée, Jacqueline: Délibérer. L’expérience des comités éthiques. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes 2023.
Lagrée, Jacqueline: La délibération en comité bioéthique ?, Études (3/2023), pp. 43–54.
Lubac, Henri de: Exégèse médiévale : les quatre sens de l’ecriture, vol. 1. Paris: Aubier 1959.
Lubac, Henri de: Exégèse médiévale : les quatre sens de l’ecriture, vol. 2. Paris: Aubier 1961.
Lubac, Henri de: Les Églises particulières dans l’Èglise universelle. Paris: Aubier- Montaigne 1971.
Mendiola, Alfonso: Michel de Certeau. Brussels–Paris: Lessius 2023.
Pope Francis: Address for the Ceremony Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Institution of the Synod of Bishops, 17.10.2015, https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2015/october/documents/papa-francesco_20151017_50-anniversario-sinodo.html (date of last access: 01.05.2024).
Pope Francis: Address for the Pastoral visit of his Holiness Pope Francis to Prato and Florence, 10.11.2015, https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2015/november/documents/papa-francesco_20151110_firenze-convegno-chiesa-italiana.html (date of last access: 01.05.2024).
Rahner, Karl: Pourquoi et comment pouvons-nous vénérer les saints?, in: Karl Rahner (ed.): Le deuxième concile du Vatican. Contributions au Concile et à son interpretation 21. Paris: Éditions du Cerf 2015, pp. 559–579.
Sixteenth Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops: Instrumentum laboris, October 2023, https://www.synod.va/content/dam/synod/common/phases/universal-stage/il/ENG_INSTRUMENTUM-LABORIS.pdf (date of last access: 01.05.2024).
See my presentation “Imaginer une théologie synodale” (forthcoming) at the Gregorian conference La teologia alla prova della sinodalità (April 27–29, 2023).
“une trinité particulière” (Fabre, Préface, p. 12).
“médiation sociale du sens” (Certeau, La misère de la théologie, p. 258).
This is evidenced, for example, by his two articles Les chrétiens et la dictature militaire au Brésil (1969) and Conscience chrétienne et conscience politique aux USA. La conspiration des frères Berrigan (1971), in Certeau, La faiblesse de croire, pp. 129–179.
Cf. Certeau, Autorités chrétiennes, pp. 116–120).
“jamais objectivement identifiable, énigmatique au contraire, bien qu’elle constitue aussi une autorité” (Certeau, Autorités chrétiennes, p. 121).
“donnent un contenu inquiétant au principe qui, au titre d’un consensus fidelium, leur accordait un rôle nécessaire dans la construction des langages de la foi” (Certeau, Autorités chrétiennes, p. 121).
The term “archaeology” in English carries specific connotations in the field of history or anthropology that are quite distinct from the way in which Foucault and Certeau uses them. However, it’s challenging to find a precise synonym for “archaeology” as these two thinkers use it because it’s a term they used to encapsulate a unique approach to the history of ideas, systems of thought, and knowledge. Rather than try to interpret the author’s intended meaning I have simply left the word as it appears in the original French (Translator).
Certeau, Le noir soleil du langage par Michel Foucault, pp. 115–132.
Certeau, The possession at Loudun, p. 1.
“En principe le discours chrétien se soutient aussi d’une relation à un groupe : traditionnellement, le logos, ou discours, est autorisé par une ekklesia, ou communauté. Mais que devient ce langage lorsque se dissémine le corps sur lequel il s’articule ? Il ne peut survivre intact à ce détachement.” (Certeau, Du corps à l’écriture, p. 270 et seq.)
“au discours déterminé par le corps succède un corps défini par la théologie. […] Il ne s’agit plus d’une réalité ecclésiale incertaine qu’il faudrait ressaisir à partir des textes, mais de la fabrication d’une représentation par le discours” (Certeau, Du corps à l’écriture, p. 271) (emphasis mine).
Cf. Certeau, Du corps à l’écriture, pp. 269–274.
Cf. Certeau, Du corps à l’écriture, pp. 274–278.
Cf. Álvarez, Henri de Lubac et Michel de Certeau.
“un demi-siècle de ‘primauté du spirituel’ qui laisse la place à une pluralité d’options humaines, (libérant) l’expérience chrétienne de ses déterminations sociopolitiques mais (la portant en même temps) vers un recours ‘mystique,’ et peu à peu vers le silence” (Certeau, Autorités chrétiennes, pp. 96–107, citation on p. 106).
“With his genius for grasping agile thoughts beneath the movement of the present, Henri de Lubac named the problem: History and Spirit (1950). The conjunction ‘and’ carries the whole problem.” (“Avec son génie pour saisir les pensées agiles sous la mouvance d’un présent, Henri de Lubac donna son nom au problème : Histoire et Esprit (1950). La conjonction et porte tout le problème” [Certeau, Autorités chrétiennes, p. 102].).
Lubac, Les Églises particulières dans l’Église universelle.
“après un demi-siècle de primauté du spirituel, l’évangélisme, ou la pneumatologie qui en résultent (par suite d’une évolution générale) rendent très difficilement pensable et représentable le rapport qu’entretiennent des institutions publiques avec le sens vécu” (Certeau, Autorités chrétiennes, p. 106 et seq.).
Fourquet, L’Archipel français.
Cf. Address for the Pastoral visit of his Holiness Pope Francis to Prato and Florence.
“Aucune orthodoxie ne garantit le risque à prendre comme chrétien. Certes, il faut des signes de reconnaissance entre collectivités qui témoignent de la même option singulière (chrétienne), mais la production d’un langage chrétien ne peut se poursuivre qu’à découvert, sans la protection d’une idéologie fournie par une institution. Prise dans l’une des déterminations qui composent l’immense complexe d’une société contemporaine, ce travail aura une figure fragmentaire et aléatoire. Il aura forme d’un risque, et d’un voyage, ‘abrahamique’” (Certeau, La misère de la théologie, p. 260).
“référant à un acte de foi la communication entre l’histoire d’hier et les expériences d’aujourd’hui” (Certeau, Autorités chrétiennes, p. 107) (emphasis mine).
In her introduction to Certeau, La faiblesse de croire, XVIII et seq., Luce Giard explains the composition of chapters 10 and 11 of the work: a significant portion of the article La faiblesse de croire, published in Esprit (April–May 1977), pp. 231–245, came from the unpublished text: Du corps à l’écriture, un transit chrétien, published in chap. 10 of La faiblesse de croire. Therefore, this first trace of an epistemology of belief is found in Certeau, Du corps à l’écriture, un transit chrétien, pp. 287–293.
Cf. Certeau, La faiblesse de croire, pp. 308–314.
Sixteenth Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, Instrumentum laboris.
It would be interesting to compare this “synodal rationality” with current research on “deliberation” within a new “political reason,” adjusted to the current crisis of our democracies. See, more recently, Lagrée, Délibérer. L’expérience des comités éthiques; Lagrée, La délibération en comité bioéthique?. Also see Habermas, Espace public et démocratie délibérative: un tournant.
“faire corps” (cf. Certeau, La rupture instauratrice, pp. 183–226).
“Nul homme n’est chrétien tout seul, pour lui-même mais en référence et en lien à l’autre, dans l’ouverture à une différence appelée et acceptée avec gratitude. Cette passion de l’autre n’est pas une nature primitive à retrouver, elle ne s’ajoute pas non plus comme une force de plus, ou un vêtement, à nos compétences et à nos acquis ; c’est une fragilité qui dépouille nos solidités et introduit dans nos forces nécessaires la faiblesse de croire” (Certeau, La faiblesse de croire, p. 313).
“l’expression chrétienne communautaire naît d’une exigence de nomination” (Certeau, Du corps à l’écriture, p. 278).
Cf. Certeau, Du corps à l’écriture, pp. 278–283.
“signes communs entre les réponses que des croyants donnent à l’avènement de la Parole” (Certeau, Autorités chrétiennes, p. 106).
“soit au titre de représentations communes, soit au titre de critères qui autorisent à désigner comme ‘chrétienne’ une expression personnelle ou collective” (Certeau, Autorités chrétiennes, p. 105 et seq.).
“comme une goutte d’eau dans la mer” (Certeau, Du corps à l’écriture, p. 304 et seq.).
“références croyables et de signes de reconnaissance élucidés en commun” (Certeau, Autorités chrétiennes, p. 106) (emphasis mine).
“Que je ne sois jamais séparé de toi.” In her introduction to Certeau, La faiblesse de croire, Luce Giard provides some historical insights into this prayer, Giard, Cherchant Dieu, p. X and following, note 18.
Cf. Certeau, La rupture instauratrice, pp. 212–218.
“La seule manière de se laisser altérer […] par l’autre, c’est d’accepter sa propre mort. De cet accueil […] émerge la possibilité du silence, condition de l’écoute du différent” (Mendiola, Michel de Certeau, p. 69).
We are not far, by the way, from Karl Rahner’s development on the identity of the two commandments of love of God and neighbor as oneself. One can refer in particular to his article Pourquoi et comment pouvons-nous vénérer les saints?, pp. 572–577. Unlike Michel de Certeau, Rahner emphasizes the astonishment that arises from the disproportion between the actual experience of the “respondent” trusting me and the fragility of this act and of those who perform it.
Cf. Certeau, Autorités chrétiennes, pp. 110–116 and Certeau, La rupture instauratrice, pp. 215–218.
“Chaque figure de l’autorité, dans la société chrétienne, est marquée par l’absence de (ce) qui la fonde. Qu’il s’agisse de l’Écriture, des traditions, du concile, du pape ou de tout autre, ce qui la permet lui manque. Chaque autorité manifeste ce qu’elle n’est pas. D’où l’impossibilité pour chacune d’être le tout, le ‘centre’ ou l’unique. Une irréductible pluralité d’autorités peut seule indiquer le rapport qu’entretient chacune d’entre elles avec ce qu’elle postule comme ‘chrétienne.’ […] Le pluriel est ici la manifestation du sens. Le langage chrétien n’a (et ne peut avoir) qu’une structure communautaire : seule, la connexion de témoins, de signes ou de rôles différents énonce une ‘vérité’ qui ne peut être réduite à l’unicité par un membre, un discours ou une fonction. […] Parce que (cette ‘vérité’) est la condition insaisissable de ce qu’elle rend possible, elle n’a pour traces qu’une multiplicité de signes : une surface de lieux articulés la désigne, plutôt qu’une ‘hiérarchie’ pyramidale engendrée à partir de son sommet” (Certeau, La rupture instauratrice, p. 215).
Pope Francis, Address for the Ceremony Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Institution of the Synod of Bishops.
“Le libretto des Exercices Spirituels est un texte fait pour une musique et des dialogues qu’il ne donne pas. Il se coordonne à un ‘hors-texte’ qui est pourtant l’essentiel. Aussi ne tient-il pas la place de cet essentiel. Il ne se substitue pas aux voix. […] Les Exercices fournissent seulement un ensemble de règles et de pratiques relatives à des expériences qui ne sont ni décrites ni justifiées, qui ne sont pas introduites dans le texte, et dont il n’est d’aucune façon la représentation puisqu’il les pose comme extérieures à lui sous la forme du dialogue oral entre l’instructeur et le retraitant, ou de l’histoire silencieuse des relations entre Dieu et ces deux répondants” (Certeau, L’espace du désir ou le “fondement” des Exercices spirituels, p. 118).
“un mouvement conforme à celui qui articule toute la foi chrétienne : la conversion de l’Ancien Testament en Nouveau Testament” (Certeau, La Rupture instauratrice, p. 222). In a footnote, Certeau invites “to re-read with this lense the admirable chapter of Henri de Lubac about the unity of the two Testaments or his notes about the analogy of faith” (“à relire dans cette perspective l’admirable chapitre de Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale. Les quatre sens de l’Écriture, Paris, Aubier, t. 1/1, 1959, p. 305–363 sur ‘l’unité des deux Testaments’, ou ses notations sur l’analogie de la foi, t. 2/1, 1961, p. 90–93”).
“La praxis de Jésus – qui a son achèvement dans le silence de la mort – articule entre eux deux langages. Elle est, entre les deux moitiés de la Bible, le blanc d’une action. Laquelle ? Jésus n’a cessé de tenir la particularité de l’institution judaïque et de créer pourtant, grâce à un écart, un autre sens. […] Une pratique de la lettre ouvrait la lettre à un esprit dont une autre écriture serait le premier énoncé. Globalement, cette écriture néo-testamentaire (avait pour signification) de connoter un type de conversion désormais inauguré par Jésus, et qui serait indéfiniment à ‘faire’ par rapport à cette institution ou à d’autres. C’était en quelque sorte un mode d’emploi spirituel des Écritures” (Certeau, La Rupture instauratrice, p. 222 et seq.).
Cf. Certeau, L’étranger ou l’union dans la différence, pp. 129–150.
It is almost as an annex that at the end of the Instrumentum laboris, the crisis of language is mentioned; cf. Sixteenth Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, Instrumentum laboris, no. 60.
“comme fable qui fait croire” (cf. Certeau, Du corps à l’écriture, un transit chrétien, pp. 293– 304).