Genealogies of Truth: Theology, Philosophy and History

Abstract

Modern Christian theology still seeks to escape from the historical constitution of truth. This not only contradicts the Incarnation, but has its own genealogical origins in a dubious loss of Christian philosophy as an integral enterprise. In general, genealogy can be seen as negative or positive. Negative genealogy alternatively traces a break with myth, as with early philosophy, or else, as with Hindu thought, traces a break with the spiritual dominance of the One through the inevitable corruption wrought by the Many. Nietzsche offers a strange materialist version of this and Heidegger a nihilistic mutation of the same ‘Asiatic’ account. Some Catholics on the Right have instead stressed a Nietzschean decline through the dominance of a false, ‘herded’ One, abandoning the supremacy of personhood. Positive genealogy is rooted in the Incarnation, is at once natural and cultural, and seeks a blending of the One and the Many, the common good and the personal. Christianity is committed primarily to a positive genealogy and a positive development along these lines. However, theology can make use of a negative genealogy by tracing at once a decline from Unity (like the Hindu narrative) and a decline from a truly personalist fusion of the One with the Many that inherently involves a historical and incarnate generation of the truth.