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We live in a world acutely sensitive to difference, but also blindly insensitive to forced sameness. Myriad choices proliferate, but many people do not have much choice about which choices to make, about whether or not to be bombarded with advertising while driving to the supermarket. The contemporary world's most stable selves would seem to be those non-Westerners or marginalized Westerners who lack the means to destabilize their identities—although they increasingly face such instability anyway, at the hands of the new colonization we call "global capitalism." Such postmodern peculiarities are the context for A Theology of Compassion by Oliver Davies, who was appointed to replace the late (and much beloved) Colin Gunton as Professor of Christian Doctrine at King's College London. Since its publication in Britain in 2001, followed by a U.S. edition in 2003, Davies' book has generated considerable attention, dealing as it does with this question of our age: Can I really feel another's pain—especially if I cannot even identify who "I" am?
A Theology of Compassion: Metaphysics of Difference and the Renewal of Tradition
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Davies' work is perhaps abnormally ambitious. Within part 1, "The Metaphysics of Compassion," he appropriates phenomenology as he seeks to reaffirm traditional Christian commitment to the necessity of metaphysics. At the same time, he also seeks to reform ontology in light of narrative categories oriented to compassion and thus kenosis (self-emptying, referred to in Phil. 2:6–11). Part 2, "A Theology of Compassion," proceeds to specify the content of such a "kenotic ontology" based on compassion defined by Christian doctrine, especially in light of the Triune God's Incarnation in Jesus Christ.
The project ranges from challenges in contemporary (often "postmodern") Continental philosophy to the information consumerism fostered by media to the stubborn reality of the Holocaust:
We are left therefore with a sense that Auschwitz is not an alien phenomenon imposed upon European history by a rogue state at an exceptional historical time but is rather, as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has argued, the 'apocalypse' of tendencies that are concealed in the very nature of modern European civilization, with its science, technology, Christian inheritance and advanced administrative and legal systems.
Grand philosophical projects excluded difference to the degree that they explained everything; even modern dismissals of them (e.g., Nietzsche) fostered or presumed assertions of cultural monopoly. If the apocalyptic modern "civilization" is a legacy of philosophy's drive to understand "being" in a unified way, then the Christian tendency to pursue metaphysics must be carefully reconsidered.
Accordingly, the book refers to three women whose lives were marked by horrendous suffering: Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jew who volunteered to go to Westerbork, a camp on the way to Auschwitz, where she worked in the hospital for over a year before being killed; Edith Stein, a Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism and, having seen her own death in Auschwitz as a call to share in Christ's sufferings, was canonized in 1998; and finally, an unnamed Bosnian woman who refused to condemn a captured opposition soldier despite believing her own family to be dead at Croatian hands.
The book's breadth is bracing; specialists in theological journals could have a field day debating the details. Davies' accounts of figures as various as Parmenides, Augustine, and Derrida are generally quite clear and at least plausible, although many may accept his invitation to skip chapters 3-6 in favor of the constructive material. Likewise, the readings of biblical texts in part 2 are in the main credible; Davies' effort to include biblical theology while formulating his constructive proposal, however debatable some of its results, is refreshing and commendable. A Theology of Compassion appeared amid an ongoing British debate regarding the way theology should be done; if you're curious, see the 1999 Scottish Journal of Theology interchange between David Ford and John Webster, over Ford's book Self and Salvation. Davies appropriates Ford positively; while aspiring to somewhat stronger unity of thought and method, he still displays extraordinary, almost diffuse, conversational range in his own approach—bringing the Bible and Catholic tradition into dialogue with everything from poetics to diaries, while moving beyond the typical subjects and concepts of "dogmatics."
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