Review of Tomáš Halík's The Afternoon of Christianity

This is a review of Tomáš Halík's book The Afternoon of Christianity: The Courage to Change

The review is written by Louis Roy OP, Dominican University College, Ottawa, Canada.

Tomáš Halík, a Czech theologian, conceived his informative, stimulating, and timely book through reading and exchanges between 2015 and 2020. It has the merit of demonstrating why our twenty-first century can be what he calls a kairos, an all-important opportunity and a drastic turning point in Catholic thinking about its relation to our global world (p. 19 - 23). 

He rightly states that genuine dialogue is happening among the innumerable spiritual groups which have mushroomed in the last fifty years or so, more than any other locus (p. 12-13 and 151-161). I also found helpful his Jung-inspired periodization of our collective faith experience (p. 31-37): (1) the morning of life (youth and early adulthood); (2) the noonday crisis (in which the Church is now and which is an opportunity for maturing, namely the kairos); and (3) the afternoon (mature age and old age).

Some readers will perhaps wonder at Halík’s “disdain for neo-scholasticism,” which he denounces as an “attempt at ‘scientific, objective’ theology,” adding that he had an “allergy to ‘metaphysical realism’” (p. 164; see p. 82). 

On the same page he writes, “The claim to know and present the ‘objective truth’ is something I have always suspected of pride and narrow mindedness.” 

Is this judgment, at once moral and intellectual, warranted? Surely neo-scholasticism was defective insofar as nineteenth - and twentieth-century Catholic thought was often merely theoretical or, better, “conceptualistic,” as Bernard Lonergan put it. But were all forms of that thought merely theoretical? 

Far from rejecting neo-scholasticism wholesale, the Jesuit philosopher-theologian Erich Przywara and the phenomenologist Edith Stein both thought that a combination of Thomism and twentieth-century philosophical thinking was not impossible. 

Halík’s list of Recommended Reading (at p. 213-221), however, does not include Przywara, Stein, Augustine, Aquinas, Newman, Maritain, or Lonergan, although there are a few comments, in the body of his book, about Augustine’s and Aquinas’s creative open mindedness.

Despite repeatedly recognizing the importance of the intellectus fidei in the churches, Halík’s post-modernist philosophy weakens his case for a faith devoid of certitudes. Despite its strong reaction against modern philosophy, post-modern philosophy shares with the former the assumption that the pursuit and the assessment of truth are the privilege of the free individual (or a group thereof) with the right to arbitrarily select a view of life not according to an objective sense of truth, but out of a subjectivist sense of meaning.

Regrettably, Halík has adopted the stance typical of both modern and so-called postmodern philosophies. Consequently, his radical pluralism stands in contrast to Lonergan’s pluralism, which is a moderate pluralism, that is, an acceptance of plurality of viewpoints (see Lonergan, Method in Theology, chapter 12, sections 8–12). 

I might add that Halík’s modernist and relativist construal of religious freedom is a misconstrual of the one that Vatican II taught in the “Declaration on Religious Liberty” (Dignitatis Humanae).

Halík does not keep together, as all the Church Fathers and Thomas Aquinas did, the apophatic doctrine that in this life we cannot know God as He is and the kataphatic doctrine that we do know God validly by analogy. 

Because of his unilateral emphasis on apophatic assertions, Halík unduly weakens the content of Catholic faith. Moreover, because he insists on a faith always permeated with doubt, Halík has no room for a sound apologetic of the act of faith in Jesus Christ and in his message as conveyed by the Church. 

He might be aided by Newman’s statement(and an influential slogan for Lonergan) that “ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.” Difficulties, which are intelligent questions, are existentially raised regarding aspects of revelation, whereas doubts, which are willful, amount to not receiving the risen Christ’s message as validly interpreted by his disciples and the New Testaments’ writers.

While talking about “educated conservative Christians,” Halík declares that “the fatal deficit of conservatives is that they are unable to offer a viable alternative [to the] superficial progressivism in the Church,” thus implicitly praising his own presumably non-superficial progressivism (p.90). But he does not mention the competing alternative put forward by those Thomists who know the thought of Aquinas very well but are classicists, convinced that there ought to be one Catholic theology (see my piece “Thomas Aquinas since Vatican II,” in The Lonergan Review of 2019).

Fortunately, there is another alternative, namely the moderate pluralist position expressed by Lonergan. By ignoring both of these alternatives, Halík seems unaware that his proposed radical pluralism—despite its praiseworthy elements—will not prevail in the Catholic Church. The result, I predict, will be the perhaps limited influence of the classicist Thomists and of the Lonerganians, in coexistence with a confusion of ideas among progressives (see the Conclusion of Lonergan’s “Dimensions of Meaning,” in Collection).

Notwithstanding Halík’s brave attempt at reforming the present thought of the Church, because much is at stake in the issues under consideration, I have been rather tough on central aspects of his enterprise.

I fear the result of his relativism (despite his assurances to the contrary) is that evangelization would be put on the back burner and adhesion to the Church would be almost discouraged.