Continuing to think about
Faith and Culture

The condition inheres in modern society as well as in the individual. People work hard in order to afford eating-out or foreign holidays - and then do not even have the time for these pleasures. Or they perhaps do manage to get the time, only to find that such pleasures have been over-hyped by advertising. They are quite unaware of how we humans will always outpace our desires : that no finite reality can ever bring total satisfaction - not to a being with a spiritual capacity such that even the most sophisticated computer invented must be ascribed to this as a brainchild.

Spirituality, then (or transcendence or belief), will be the ultimate key in the search for human meaning and happiness - and any teacher of theology will see her or his role as being to accompany this search.

But many a typical modern searcher will be brought up short by the chief proposition of post-modernism, implicit everywhere - which denies to any of one’s positions the claim to have universal validity, to provide overall meaning. Such a searcher will most often, then, remain cocooned in a politically correct bubble of “truths for me”.

Post-modernism’s distrust of the meta-narrative or Great Story will allow only relative validity to one’s positions - as if they are just one `float’ or tableau in the parade of life, one carriage which can be decoupled from the train at a whim. One’s set of positions are regarded as being just as negotiable as affiliation to some pundit’s latest pronouncements or as any passing “lifestyle choice” - whether of grooming or fashion profile, of favourite food or television-channel. One is accorded the same entitlement to “live and let live” as anyone else : but there is no shared realm of discourse where conclusions ground themselves in an underlying unity. In such a climate even the searchers in fact claiming universal validity for conclusions, may hesitate to voice them too loudly. Others may give up the search completely; others again may continue, but abandon any attempt to find a language that connects with the culture.

There are various strategies for confronting the post-modernist climate : (1) One can “catch” contemporaries not being so post-modern after all - for instance, swallowing “science” hook-line-and-sinker as a Great Story to explain cosmic origins and development. (2) One can counter that the statement “There are no metanarratives” itself represents a philosophical stance - that this metanarrative-to-escape-all-metanarratives is itself metanarrative raised to the “n”th power. Paradoxically, however, the post-modernist climate can in some ways be supportive of the theological search: it sets limits to the Enlightenment version of reason. For one thing, the fact that God spoke is a datum of history and so not deducible from reasoning. For another, there can be methodological advantages to sometimes starting from a passing, localized human scene: the scene might yield some life-enhancing story which could be shown to intersect with God’s intervention (and it might leave openings to the affective, the intuitive, the communitarian).

James Corkery, SJ teaches theology at the Milltown Institute of  Philosophy and Theology, Dublin