Welcome to another of the ‘Why Study’ series of the Department of Theology and Religious
Studies. With me today is Dr Karen Kilby who is one of the leading authorities, in the
English speaking world, on a German theologian Karl Rahner. Karen why study Karl Rahner?
Okay, well I think you should study Karl Rahner because I think he’s simply one of the most
fascinating figures of the twentieth century or really of the whole modern period in theology.
And I think the reason he’s so fascinating is the unusual combination he has of a really,
really, intelligent speculative mind with a very strong pastoral sense, I think people
often miss the pastoral sense in Rahner, and then thirdly with a deep rooting in tradition
of Ignatian spirituality. And I think those three things coming together make him a really
interesting theologian, and a really kind of valuable, important, significant theologian.
There are some impediments to reading him, some things that make him difficult, so you
have to get past the impediments, but that would be my short answer because of this combination
of sheer intellectual power, a pastoral orientation and that kind of spiritual rootedness of Rahner.
Can you give us an example of how you think he had intellectual power and some of his
big ideas?
I mean in a way people sometimes look for the leading idea of Rahner, and they might
say it’s his notion of the Vorgriff auf esse, which is a pre-apprehension of being,
or they might say it’s his understanding of grace, and there are some very powerful
ideas. But in a way what I find most fascinating about Rahner is the way he can turn his mind
to almost any topic, so the sort of sheer variety of the way his mind works. And you
find Rahner writing about, of course about Christ and about the church and about Mary,
but also you’ll find essays on the theology of power, the theology of leisure, the theology
of childhood, the theology of angels, anything under the sun Rahner will have something to
say about. And he will combine, in an interesting way, a real knowledge of the tradition, in
some of its, sort of, fascinating details, with a real concern for how a modern person
thinks, what can make sense to us today.
I remember being told as a student that his brother, Hugo Rahner, once said that his task
would be to translate his brother into German. Now you used a phrase there the ‘pre-apprehension
of being’. Now thirty seconds what does the ‘pre-apprehension of being’, that’s
one of the problems I find with Rahner, I’ve been reading Rahner since I was seventeen
years old, you sometimes meet a lovely technical phrase, now ‘pre-apprehension of being’.
Before I answer that can I tell you why I think there are technical difficulties to
Rahner, because I think that’s an interesting, there’s an interesting historical answer
to that. Because on the one hand Rahner was a student of Heidegger, he sat in Heidegger’s
seminar. Heidegger wasn’t his supervisor, he didn’t become a Heideggerian, but he
was somewhat influenced and he certainly picked up Heideggerian language. So the pre-apprehension
of being, the German is ‘vorgriff’, so that’s a word for pre-apprehension, that’s
a word that Rahner will have taken from Heidegger. And on the other hand Rahner was very steeped
in the neo-scholasticism of the period of his education, which was a very technical,
dry, complex system that everyone had to learn, and he presumed that his audience knew it.
So it’s the pre-apprehension of being, the word ‘being’ there, he’s using the Latin
for ‘being’, that would be used in the way that would be understood by his neo-scholastic
counterparts. So you get the interaction of these two different kinds of jargon into one
person which can make it quite a headache. So that’s my preamble to my answer. But
what is the pre-apprehension of being? Rahner thinks that in every act of knowing or willing
we have this kind of prior awareness, or this co-awareness of the infinity of being and
of God, so that we’re incapable of knowing that this is a chair I’m sitting on, this
is a person I’m talking to, without at the same time our minds reaching out to infinity.
So while we’re aware of particular objects, we always also have a kind of background awareness,
or an awareness of horizon against which the particular finite object sits, and this is
the infinity of being and of God. So God is not something we come across from time to
time according to Rahner but is like the water in which the fish swim, the air in which we
move, kind of, we’re always reaching out, moving towards having a sense of God.
So we can never sort of be outside of being, we can never be looking in on the universe,
we’re always somehow in the play that we’re observing.
That’s true and we can never look at God as one thing in the universe, you know write
a list of everything on the universe and God’s going to be the final one, or the first one,
or somewhere in the middle. So we can never know God in the way that we know other things
but always in knowing, we could never know anything Rahner thinks, if our mind wasn’t
always orientated towards a knowledge of God. It takes a little getting used to, it’s
quite a strong claimant, so this is why some people think it’s central, and it is fairly
central but I wouldn’t get too hung up on it as Rahner’s only claim.
Okay, what other major contributions would
you say that he’s made to the tool box of theologians?
I’ll tell you about a couple that I particularly like. I mean, I should probably start with
what he’s best known for. People who don’t know anything else about Rahner will have
come across his notion of ‘anonymous Christians’, the idea that some kind of implicit anonymous
face in Christ is possible, and maybe may account for the possibility of salvation for
those outside the church, in the ordinary sense of the word. He’s widely known for
this he’s quite widely criticised for it, but it’s usually read out of context, so
I thought I should just mention that because that’s the thing he’s most known for.
And actually in connection with that, that idea originally came up in a pastoral context,
it all arises from his question; what do you do for a fifty five year old lady in the pews
who’s very worried about her son who seems to have lost his faith, and do you have to
tell her he’s going to hell? And because of that kind of pastoral question he comes
up with, well we need to think about how much we don’t know, we don’t know what’s
going on in the depths of her son’s heart, we don’t know what accepting Christ means
and we can develop the possibility of an anonymous Christianity. But something I really like
in Rahner is an essay he wrote in his ‘Theological Investigations: Volume Four’, on the concept
of mystery in Catholic theology, and he’s the only person I know who’s written a really
interesting essay simply on the concept of mystery and on the fact that we should not
think of theology, as again these neo-scholastics did, as presenting a whole series of separate
mysteries, you know each one a little square box with something we can’t quite understand
in this life. But it must not be a list of different things we must believe, there must
be some kind of unity, there must be a single mystery, and this mystery must be both unknowable
to us but intimate to us. So somehow he completely reconfigures the idea of mystery in a really
interesting way and says ultimately God is the absolute mystery and all of theology revolves
around mystery. And this means that to be successful in theology you wind up knowing
less, you wind up becoming more and more clear on how unknowable things are, rather than
coming closer and closer to actually nailing everything down. I think that’s a very nice
orientation for a theology.
When Rahner engages with mystery, for a lot of us the word ‘mystery’ just means something
that’s a riddle and for theologians it often just means I’ve got to the end of my tether
and I’ll now call it mystery, can you just say a little bit more about what mystery means?
So Rahner wants to say mystery is what is so close to us that we can’t see it, or
what is so intimate to us too much, it’s closer to saying that a person remains a mystery
to me. I can’t say I’ve known my husband for twenty six years, or whatever it is, and
so now I know him completely. It seems somehow a bit more right to say I know a lot of things
about him, but as a person he remains somewhat mysterious to me. And in that way persons
share in the inner, intrinsic, mystery of God. So mystery is not something that can,
with a bit more information, can be solved but is something that is, sort of, beyond
pinning down, beyond what we might comprehend simply.
Does that mean the theology always has to cope with its unknowing and dark side?
It does absolutely and so you must be very nervous of a theologian who thinks that they’re
going to take you from not knowing very much to knowing quite a lot more, it’s never
really what Rahner wants to do.
You mention the ‘Theological Investigations’ when I last looked in the library they were
up to volume twenty one in English, have they moved beyond that now?
Twenty three is the final volume.
Twenty three, okay. So we know that he was one of the most productive theologians of
the twentieth century, what would you begin with, if someone says ‘I want to read something
by Rahner’ what’s a place to start?
Well I think a really good place to start is not with any of his proper theology but
with a book of published prayers that he wrote. I mean these are probably not prayers that
he simply said by his bedside, but he wrote prayers in the genre that Augustine might
have written prayers. So there’s a book called ‘Encounters with Silence’, it’s
very short, it’s very readable, it’s quite moving and it gives you a real insight into
Rahner’s orientation. If you like him from there then probably leap straight into volume
four of the ‘Theological Investigations’.
Okay and one last question; if you want to read about Rahner, I know you’ve written
something, would you like to tell us?
Okay well you made it very clear I had to bring my book, my books along and…
It’s called product placement.
I’ve written an introductory book on Rahner but unfortunately my English copy I left at
home, but I’ll show you two copies in Spanish and Indonesian here, but there is an English
copy called ‘Introducing Karl…, ‘SPCK Introduction to Karl Rahner’. It’s very
readable, you know, you can read it early in the morning or late at night, easy book
that’s not a bad introduction.
You gave me a copy and I can tell you that’s true.
Now if you get into reading Rahner and start to get confused by him and get a little further
along, then you might just want to read this other book I wrote called ‘Karl Rahner Theology
and Philosophy’, where I look into this question of what does this pre-apprehension
of being mean, and various issues about grace and about the relation of philosophy and theology
in his thoughts, so that’s another possibility.
Well thank you very much. So we’ve been looking at just one twentieth century major
theologian, and I hope that this has given us a little insight into Karl Rahner, the
man and his theology. Thanks Karen.