07/01/14 09:27 Angelo Scola

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CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE AND THEOLOGY
Angelo Scola
The priority of experience over theology is ontological, and this priority reveals
plainly that man is primarily and essentially the receiver, not the producer, of truth.
In the history of Catholic thought, especially in our century, there has been a
complex, highly nuanced relationship between theology and what we may call
<Christian experience.> Scholars are unanimous that the credit for having freed the
concept of Christian experience from its principal formative inuencesin
particular those relating to the Modernist crisisbelongs to Jean Mouroux, who thus
enabled theological reection or experience to go beyond the initial task of
legitimating its subject matter. Nevertheless, the complexity attendant upon a careful
denition of the two concepts experience and theologyincreases prodigiously
whenever we try to make a single coherent statement about both. Therefore, it is still
necessary to work out a rigorous account of the notion of Christian experience. Only
then will we be able to eliminate all the impasses and to set the relationship between
experience and theology on a secure enough foundation.
It is not my task here to meet to this challenge. Nevertheless, I want to record a few
short reections on what is commonly understood under the rubric of Christian
experience (the entirety of a life lived according to the faith and, therefore, within
the community of the Church), in the hope that they may suggest some fruitful
clarications regarding its relationship to theology. My aim is simply to present two
brief reections and some of their implications as a kind of portico leading into the
articles on experience in the current issue of <Communio.>
In the rst place, we have to remember that Christian experience is ontologically
prior to theology. It is theology's proper horizon, whereas the reverse is not the case.
Theology, understood as systematic and critical investigation, is in itself incapable
of producing Christian experience by its own resources. What is more, theology is
born of Christian experience and must ceaselessly refer to the horizon that this
experience sets for it. Given this premise, there are good grounds for saying that
every crisis of theologyprovided that the requirements of its object and the rigor
of its method have been ensuredhas its ultimate explanation in a crisis of Christian
experience.
The foundation of the ontological priority of experience over theology lies in the
concept of Christian experience itself. In fact, when we talk about Christian
experience, we have to recognize that it contains its own principles of rationality
[<razones>], its own <logos>. The truth-criterion of Christian experience is inside
this experience itself, not outside or beyond it. Theology sinks its roots in this
<logos.> As a science theology is called to serve experience by reecting critically
and systematically, that is, organically, on its immanent <logos>, which is not
"produced" by theology. In rendering this service, theology stimulates experience to
measure itself against the totality of the <datum> of Revelation as it is attested by
the Bible and authentically interpreted by the Magisterium. This fact does away with
an extrinsicist, thus originally dualistic, conception of the connection between
experience and reason.
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"The community of Christian faith," maintains Joseph Ratzinger, "belongs to the
Christian concept of faith and reason." Consequently, talk of Christian experience in
the comprehensive sense of a life containing its own <logos> necessarily implies a
constitutive link with the Christian community, which is the commensurate subject
of this experience (<sancta contetur Ecclesia> [the holy Church confesses]). This
subject as communion, which does not absorb the person, but allows him to exist in
an ontological correlation with all who have received (by faith and baptism) the
grace of participation in the dead and risen Christ. It likewise imparts a distinctive
character to the method by which Christian experience begins and unfolds in relation
to theology.
The "communional" nature of the subject of Christian experience absolutely
precludes confusing it with <praxis.> This is because the original and archetypal
experience belongs to the primordial subject, Jesus Christ, and, in him, to all who
are "his own." Every authentic human experience of the Christian God is, therefore,
objectively included in, and formed by, the experience of Jesus Christ. As a result,
the Christian experience of the individual takes the form of a tension towards the
totality, hence, of an opening, of a way [<camino>]. Any temptation to lock
ourselves into a human measure reduces experience to something partial. This
partialness can be overcome only by the "gift from on high," in the Spirit and in
faith. Faith bestows the opening towards the totality that is the incarnate Son of God.
We therefore realize that from the methodological point of view the relationship
between theology and experience is not, and cannot be identied with, the
relationship between theory and <praxis.> Nor can the theologian understand
himself as a kind of Christian "organic intellectual" a la Gramsci. In point of fact,
the priority of experience over theology is ontological, and this priority reveals
plainly that man is primarily and essentially the receiver, not the producer, of truth.
Christian experience is born of the <sequela Christi>. Moreover, <Logos> is
constitutive of Christian faith, which shows that this faith, precisely insofar as it is
faith, requires reason, and that theology is therefore located at the heart of
experience.
We can draw three important conclusions from what he have just set forth:
(1) Every Christian is a potential theologian. That is to say, every authentically
Christian experience contains the rational structures [<razones>] which constitute
the principle of the theologian's task.
(2) It is not absolutely necessary that all Christians engage in theology in order to be
Christians.
(3) Those who engage in theologyas a vocation and, therefore, also as a
professioncan and must do so from within Christian experience lived in a tangible
Christian community. This is the condition of a deepening reection on the organic,
systematic and critical character of the <Logos> inherent in experience.
One nal observation in keeping with everything that we have said: In the history of
Christian thought, it is Christian experience (together with the criteria of rigor and
method, in the movement of <intellectus dei> [understanding of/in faith] of the
event of Revelation, Jesus Christ) that sooner or later has judged the quality of a
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given theological reection. Conversely, we can say that the life of the saints (just
think of Benedict, Dominic, Francis of Assisi, Ignatius of Loyola . . . ) has always
given rise to a fruitful "school" of theology.
Translated by Adrian Walker
This article was taken from the Summer 1996 issue of "Communio: International
Catholic Review". To subscribe write Communio, P.O. Box 4557, Washington, D.C.
20017-0557. Published quarterly.

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