Defending De Regnon

Who would do such a thing?  Kristin Hennessy, that’s who, in a delightful 2007 article in the Harvard Theological Review .

She starts by noting that the current effort to rid theology of the corpse of de Regnon is nothing new.  He’s been buried before, four times by Hennessy’s accounting, “one funeral for each volume”: “He was buried first by French scholars, who adopted his portrait of “Latin” and “Greek” theologies, only to invert, reverse, or ridicule it. A second burial followed at the hands of neo-Palamite scholars, most notably Vladimir Lossky, whose Theologie mystique de l’Eglise d’Orient bears significant traces of de Regnon’s influence, traces which were largely effaced in the subsequent English edition.  He was buried yet again in English scholarship, which often assumed, but rarely accredited, de Regnon’s paradigmatic distinction between ‘Latin’ and ‘Greek’ theologies.  We could call this an unmarked grave, as his Etudes became the hidden spine supporting English textbook accounts of trinitarian development. Finally, a fourth interment seems even now underway: after Michel Rene Barnes uncovered the simultaneous omnipresence and invisibility of de Regnon’s thought in the last century, some commentators have begun to use the phrase ‘de Regnon’s paradigm’ as a shorthand category by which to lump overly schematic and inaccurate accounts of trinitarian development.”

Hennessy does not want to rehabilitate the paradigm, but to distinguish de Regnon himself from the paradigm that now bears his name.  De Regnon’s own intention was not the perpetuate the distinction of East and West in Trinitarian theology, but the opposite:

“de Regnon aimed, through his presentation of the two approaches, to offer what he saw as a necessary theological alternative to the increasingly rigid neo-Scholasticism of his day . . . . contrary to the narrow, divisive ‘de Regnon’s paradigm’ that later arose, de Regnon himself sought to bring about a rapprochement of these two approaches in light of the persistent mystery of the Trinity and the failure of any single system, even neo-Thomism, to express this mystery fully.”

Her defense of de Regnon serves contemporary Trinitarian theology in several ways: “First, it allows us to free de Regnon from the stigma of ‘his’ paradigm, for it underscores the real distance between de Regnon’s project and the paradigm that arose after him. Second, it repositions de Regnon with regard to the paradigm shift under way in our current moment in systematics and patristics, since it suggests how de Regnon’s intentions, ironically enough, prove not entirely incompatible with the new historiography of Ayres and others . . . . And, third, it illustrates only more persuasively how foundational ‘de Regnon’s paradigm’ has proven to the trinitarian thought of the last century. In light of this revised understanding of de Regnon, we see that later readers, not de Regnon himself, were the true authors of ‘de Regnon’s paradigm.’”

Hennessy has some shrewd and amusing observations on the way scholarship works.  For a variety of reasons, including the unavailability of de Regnon’s work, theologians generally don’t read the man himself.  Even after Barnes has exposed the subterranean influence of de Regnon’s paradigm, de Regnon himself remains untouched: “Recent scholars, following Barnes’s account of ‘de Regnon’s paradigm,’ continue the cycle of neglect—citing Barnes citing theologians who do not cite de Regnon—still not citing de Regnon.”

Ouch!  Still, even granting that de Regnon’s intentions were as Hennessy argues, even granting that Greek and Latin paradigms are not opposed but complementary, I remain suspicious. Even on her account, de Regnon aims to reconcile different approaches, but that of course assumes that there were in fact significantly different approaches.  As I understand it, that is precisely what recent scholars have denied.