Exhausted (theological) mindsets

I spent some time at the WPF ‘summit’ at Rhodes last week with Hans-Peter Dürr, a leading German nuclear and quantum physicist who worked closely with Heisenberg. In a paper he gave me, he describes the process of exhausting a particular way of thinking and having to change radically: in the case of physics moving from conceiving the world in terms of ‘matter’ to seeing it as ‘energy’. I quote “Quantum physics marks the farewell from an Aristotelian world view, in which everything still appeared explainable and takes us into a Heraclitean world view, where everything is in flow.”

Speaking with him and reading his paper brought back acutely a sense that I often have, even if I perhaps try to repress it, as a theologian. That certain ways of thinking, certain mindsets – not least in moral theology – are rapidly exhausting themselves, requiring us to change, ‘de-structure’, re-rhythm…  perhaps at some stage even to take a quantum leap. That we need to be talking in theology, certainly in ascetic theology, much more in terms of divine energy and of its patterns and logic.

It is all a bit like in the history of art. There are periods where you sense that a particular style has exhausted itself, is starting to turn around in circles and has to make way for something new.  You have it in Nederlandish painting around 1520 (just before the jump into Renaissance) and again in ‘Byzantine’ church art in Russia in the 17th century (before the jump to ‘Academic’ painting).  There is something in the discourse of the Russian Church right now which feels strangely similar, a certain turning round in circles which needs to make way for another mindset, another style.