Forgetting as doctrinal development

I’m beginning to read Mary Carruthers’s The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. It’s one of those books that I really should have read by now, & I’m finally remedying that. One of the points she makes in her preface to the second edition concerns the relationship between memory & forgetting: for the medieval memory, forgetting is not always a failure of memory but may in fact be “the sort of forgetting that itself results form an activity of memory.” (This is one of the contrasts she draws between modern & medieval notions of memory.) We must forget some things in order to remember others. I’m looking forward to learning more about how this ‘selective forgetting’ (as Carruthers terms it) works as a function of memory.

But in the meantime, I’ll hazard a theological reflection. This idea of forgetting as not merely deficiency but function of memory raises considerations for the role of tradition in Catholic theology. One way we might think of tradition in Catholic theology is as the church’s memory. I think this is consistent with the view of tradition put forth in Dei verbum, but I’ll have to do a more careful study of the text to be sure. If tradition is something like the church’s memory, & if memory entails some forgetting, then it may be the case that the Catholic church must “forget” some aspects of its tradition if it is to continue to discern God’s revelation in its history. That the church might forget some aspects of its path does not undermine the idea that the church’s tradition is its memory, if we understand memory to include forgetting.

Indeed, this memory-as-forgetting may be one way of thinking about doctrinal development: doctrine develops when the church forgets some aspects of its past. An example might be Nostra aetate, in which the church affirms the freedom of religion & so “forgets” its past violations of religious freedom. Of course, the “forgetting” that’s happening here is a particular kind of forgetting. It is not be a forgetting in the sense of an erasure of the past or a willed ignorance with respect to the church’s past failings. Rather, this is is a forgetting in the sense of recognizing God’s revelation only negatively in that aspect of the past. God does not reveal Godself in the church’s past denial of religious freedom, except in that God reveals Godself not to be in violations of religious freedom. The church’s past of denying religious freedom is not lost to oblivion (forgetting in the modern sense); rather, the church forgets denials of religious freedom as parts of “this living tradition, whose wealth is poured into the practice & life of the believing & praying Church” (Dei verbum 8).

Some of this idea of forgetting in tradition is also inspired by Philipp Rosemann’s excellent The Charred Root of Meaning: Continuity, Transgression, & the Other in Christian Tradition & Boyd Taylor Coolman’s (my Doktorvater’s) account of historical theology as “ongoing re-narration.” I’m looking forward to returning to those texts when I’m a little further into The Book of Memory.