Happy New Year! We’re kicking off 2024 with an excellent piece written by my friend and former classmate, Jon Wisnieski. Please enjoy, comment, and share!
Preface:
I still remember the first time I heard the term “deconstruct” in relation to Christianity. I was meeting up with a friend of mine for dinner. He was going through a difficult period of questioning and redefinition in his faith, and was trying to find the way forward. He had grown up in a small, heavily evangelical Christian town and found himself at odds with some of his family and friends as he started to raise more difficult questions about the foundations of his faith. Knowing that I was in school for theology at the time, he reached out wanting to meet up. He explained to me that he was in the midst of a process of “deconstruction.” That word caught my attention – it is a very particular word with a very particular history, but I wasn’t sure if he was aware of that. It turned out he wasn’t. I explained to him that I found it curious how a philosophical method originating in the lofty academic discourse of mid-20th century French linguists had found its way into the American pop culture lexicon, but it evidently had.
Coming across Sarah’s Substack recently, I once again found it interesting that she had written multiple posts on this phenomenon of deconstruction within a specifically Catholic context. It is clearly something that merits attention. Sarah and I were classmates in a theology masters degree program, and had bonded over our favorite professors and a love for writing. Since our time together in school, she has started a family, and I have been on an existential journey of my own, first exploring religious life and now continuing my studies after a year hiatus doing ministry work at a Catholic high school. I am now in a graduate program in English Literature at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.
I was delighted when she reached out to me asking if I would like to write a guest post for her Substack, and I could think of nothing more appropriate to write on than deconstruction, given the fact that I have just spent a semester-long literary theory course taking a deep dive into its history. For this post, I would like to (briefly) explore this history and its philosophical foundations, and then propose the work of the Italian priest and theologian Luigi Giussani as a healthier, more faithful approach for those who find themselves in a “deconstructing” phase like my friend was.
Why we deconstruct: Jacques Derrida
Deconstruction is most commonly associated with the work of the 20th century French philosopher Jacques Derrida, as well as a host of other “post-structuralist” literary critics like Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Post-structuralism, from which the philosophy of deconstruction arises, originated in discussions about the nature of language. Convinced that language itself was unstable and indeterminate, and that secure “meaning” and “truth” were simply social constructions, these thinkers asserted that literary texts were open to an infinity of interpretations. Their method was to deconstruct the text, pulling it apart and examining/debunking its various claims, showing how it doesn’t cohere, and then reconstructing it along whichever (mostly ideological) lines they chose, giving radical reinterpretations of traditional works.
For Jacques Derrida, all literary criticism – and all attempts to make meaning – is what he called bricolage, a kind of free-wheeling creative process, tinkering with the various components of a text and trying to say something new, different, and transgressive about it. A helpful metaphor is that of a Lego set. If traditional literary interpretation was about adhering to the instruction manual (provided by the author) and “building meaning” along these preconceived lines, post-structuralism, as the name would suggest, is skeptical of the author and the coherence of the literary structure, choosing instead to take it apart and “play” with the pieces, building something new instead. Fueled by the academic and cultural free-for-all that was the late 1960’s and 70’s, these theories broke out of a strictly literary context and were subsequently aimed at a host of cultural, political, economic, and religious structures. The fundamental attitude is one of suspicion: since “truth” is merely a social construction, any claims to objectivity are necessarily a power move and an attempt by the ruling class to assert control. This being the case, one of the unstated goals of post-structuralism is to unmask and disrupt oppressive power structures.
These theories have had a tremendous influence on late 20th and 21st century thought and culture. It remains the dominant mode in most university humanities departments, and has found its way into all corners of political and intellectual discourse, including discussions around religion. Just as deconstruction within the context of literary study encourages suspicion of the author and his intentions, so too does deconstruction within the context of religion encourage suspicion of author-ity, all structured belief systems that make totalizing truth claims. And just as the deconstructive literary solution is bricolage, so too the religious solution is a kind of bricolage, a “spiritual eclecticism” and syncretism that deconstructs oppressive belief systems and then reconstructs a patchwork worldview according to the preferences of the individual.
This is, I would suggest, what is often behind the increasingly common “spiritual but not religious” self-designation. It is not so much that people are becoming more atheistic, but rather that they are becoming dissatisfied with organized religion and are now in search of something more “authentic” and individually-tailored. So, for instance, a person may leave the Catholic Church or the Southern Baptist Convention and choose instead to dabble in Eastern religion, mindfulness/meditation practices, or New Age spirituality, without leaving Christianity wholly behind. For those who go through such a process, it can be simultaneously freeing and terrifying. Freeing, in the sense that the perceived narrowness of the previously inhabited religious structure is left behind, but also terrifying as the stability of an inherited worldview crumbles and one is left to rebuild it on one’s own.
As religious seekers, how do we engage this phenomenon of deconstruction? What are its truthful impulses, and what are its excesses? These are big questions that require more than a simple blog post to answer, but I would like to suggest that the thought of Fr. Luigi Giussani provides us with a more measured, intelligent way of engaging with the “crisis of faith” that many of us have encountered, either in ourselves or in those we know and love.
Tradition must become a problem: Luigi Giussani
Luigi Giussani (1922-2005) was a Catholic priest, educator, and public intellectual who is best known as the founder of Communion and Liberation, a lay movement within the Catholic Church that arose out of a need, during the cultural upheaval of the mid-20th century, to present Christianity in a compelling way. Giussani was an intellectual prodigy who left a promising university career to teach religion to high schoolers. He intuited, well before the emptying-out of churches in the latter half of the 20th century, that while the vast majority of Italians were ostensibly Catholic, most were poorly catechized and failed to see how the faith was relevant to their lived experience. His life’s work was dedicated to showing how Christianity is the answer to the deepest longings of the human heart, and that its coherence comes from its correspondence with these desires.
In his excellent little book The Risk of Education: Discovering Our Ultimate Destiny, he states that all true education should be “education to criticism.” It is worth quoting him at length here:
Up until ten years of age (or perhaps younger now), children can still say: “My teacher said so. My mom said so.” Why? Because anyone who loves a child will put in their backpack on their shoulders, all the best things they have experienced and chosen in life. Then, at a certain point, nature gives the child, the former child, the instinct to pull the pack around and place it before their eyes (the Greek word is proballo, from which we get the English word problem). What others have told us must become a problem! If it does not become a problem, it will never mature, and we will either irrationally abandon it or irrationally cling to it.
Giussani then goes on to say that at the proper age of intellectual maturity, one must take the backpack (which represents received tradition) off of one’s shoulders, bring it around before one’s eyes, and “sift through” what’s inside. He draws attention to the fact that the Greek word for sifting is krinein, krisis, from which we get our English words “crisis” and “criticism.” In a similar vein, the word “problem” derives from the Latin probus, meaning “worthy” and “good,” that is, something that has been tested, “probed,” and deemed solid and reliable. The unfortunate thing, Giussani observes, is that these words have taken on a one-sidedly negative meaning. To experience a crisis or to criticize or “problematize” something is now seen as a deconstructive affair, rather than as an opportunity for sifting, distinguishing, and judging, or as Giussani defines it, “taking stock of the reasons for things.”
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