April 30, 2008
Natalie Zemon Davis on Michel de Certeau
Natalie Zemon Davis, professor of history emeritus at Princeton and professor of medieval studies at the University of Toronto, has published a long consideration of Michel de Certeau's thought and life in the new issue of the New York Review of Books. She usefully contrasts Certeau with Michel Foucault and Joseph Ratzinger and, though the piece seems truncated at the end, it provides a good general-interest introduction to the French Jesuit scholar who is perhaps better known in the US for his book The Practice of Everyday Life than his writings on religion.
Especially important in the 1960s were the changes instituted by Vatican II. The once-proscribed Henri de Lubac was summoned by Pope John XXIII to have a leading part in the council; Joseph Ratzinger attended the sessions and wrote approvingly of the Church's new openness to the laity and even to "elements of sanctification" outside the Church itself (to quote the phrase from the council's text Lumen gentium). From Paris, Certeau responded more radically. For him the reforms endorsed by the council were a creative "rupture" with the unbending hierarchical patterns of the past. They called for "multiple languages of faith" to express people's experience instead of remote clerical language. In his view, Vatican II should lead the Church to immerse itself fully in all the issues of the modern world and to recognize how much it still had to learn about these issues—about war and violence, about birth control, and what went on in the city streets and in the press and television.
And:
Jesus Christ, Certeau argued, is the central figure, the Other, present but also absent; his coming and death founded Christianity, but the signifying event is not the crucifixion but the empty tomb; "the 'follow me' [of Jesus] comes from a voice which has been effaced, forever irrecoverable." Still the Christian wants to believe, Certeau said; wants to take the risk and follows a way to Christ; but the character of the Christian life must be understood according to historical circumstances. In the secularized world of the late twentieth century, with nonreligious structures dominating everywhere, Certeau argued, Church institutions alone could not be the site for Christian intervention in the world. In fact, Christian belief and practices could no longer be associated with a place, or even with a single social milieu like "the poor," but could be only an uncharted path, a wandering, without power: the person, armed with the "weakness of faith," tries always to make space for others and to open closed systems to difference and plurality. One printed version of his radio debate with Domenach quotes Certeau as exclaiming, "Christianity is something particular in the totality of history.... It cannot speak in the name of the entire universe."
To read the rest, click here.