Introduction by Isabella Bruckner[1]
Forty years ago, on January 9, 1986, the French Jesuit Michel de Certeau died—far too early, yet not without leaving behind a rich œuvre. His work ranges from early spiritual meditations and historical studies of early modern mysticism to cultural analyses of the everyday practices of ordinary Parisians, as well as reflections on the conditions, limitations, and motivations of historical writing.
In his contribution, John McCarthy, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Theology at Loyola University Chicago, focuses on the last of these themes. He reads de Certeau’s illuminating analyses of historiography as an invitation to undertake a similar reflection on “theography,” that is, the writing of theology. Such a reflection aims to elucidate the complex relationships within which theological discourse—or “God-talk”—is practiced.
As John McCarthy expresses his gratitude to Michel de Certeau, we in turn wish to thank him for his valuable contributions—not only to the RaT Blog, but also for his insightful response at the presentation of the JRAT issue Dancing with the Absence. Rethinking Theology with Michel de Certeau, on the occasion of de Certeau’s 100th anniversary, May 17th, 2025.
What follows is written under the banner of gratitude to a thinker, Michel de Certeau (1925-1986), who demonstrated the critical and constructive capacities of thought, at home walking the boundaries of academic disciplines and everyday practices. To express this gratitude, I want to focus on a few pages of de Certeau’s The Writing of History, that specifically deal with writing, chronology and construction in the practice of history. I want first to remark all too briefly on the rich contribution these pages make to an understanding of historiography as one form of a hermeneutics of temporality. And beyond this, I want to make a claim, namely that the relation that de Certeau sees between the importance of historiographical reflection and the production of history as writing is a model for a similarly important task that challenges contemporary theologies, namely the need for something like a “theography” to accompany “theology.”
De Certeau calls attention to historiography in the practice of writing history because of the complexities of time that are encountered in writing history. De Certeau’s descriptions of temporality are at once critical, constructive and open-ended. Surely critical of history as a representative recounting of a sequence of past events, he turns to a description of the temporality involved as more of a rhythmic exchange of the inversion of the relation of “past” and “present”, accompanied by inevitable exclusions, the impossible quest for origins, the necessary laws of narrating, the masking of powers and the ever present will for meaning. Historiography is so important for de Certeau because it is in the practice of writing history that all of the problems of “the other”– the other of the past, the other of the present, the other of an absent origin, the other of always incomplete, deferred, elusive, hegemonic meaning – come to roost. Unless this complexity of human temporality is shown and taken into account in the subsequent practice of writing histories, that practice becomes a too simple roaming through the archives, seeking citations and facts that seem to come together, as if by themselves, to make coherence out of contradictions, and reliable stories out of selected incidents. The relation of historiography to the writing of history is one which makes the practice aware, in de Certeau’s words, of “combining a semanticization (the edification of a system of meaning) with a selection (a sorting having its basis in the place where a present is separated from the past) and of directing an intelligibility toward a normativity”. (de Certeau, p. 92) The temporality displayed in the writing of history has a laminate structure, a time of the event, bonded to a time of the present, bonded to the time of narrative, bonded to the time of the human will to meaning. This “detour” through historiography as a form of a hermeneutics of temporality acts less as a preface to the writing of history and more as a ghostly partner that cautions against the closures of histories in nationalisms, religious privilege, economic advantages, racial superiorities, or gender blindness, and constructively calls for a dialogue of multiple, sometimes complementary, sometimes contentious, writings and re-writings dealing with “the history” of a chosen event or a chosen narrative frame.
What I have written surely is not adequate to the richly textured account that de Certeau gives us in detailing the necessity of keeping historiography and historical writing in a tandem relation. But I do hope that it recognizes an underlying dynamic in the turn to historiography and its typically narrative form. Tellingly he writes that the problems within the link between narrative temporality and history writing – the “construction of historiography” – “concerns a will for which temporalization provides a frame, allowing a sum of contradictions to be held together without the need for resolving them.” (de Certeau, p. 92) It is here that I want to pay my debt of gratitude to de Certeau for his reflections on the importance of recognizing the relationship between historiography and written history, precisely by suggesting that contemporary theology is critically and constructively in need of an attention to “theography.”
De Certeau writes:
Chronology indicates a second aspect of the service that time renders to history. It is a condition that allows a classification by periods. But in the geometric sense, it applies the inverted image of time upon the text, an image that in research proceeds from the present to the past. Chronology follows this path in reverse. Historical exposition supposes the choice of a new ‘vector space’ which transforms the direction of the path marked by the temporal vector and inverts its orientation. This reversal alone appears to make the connection of practice and writing possible. If it indicates an ambivalence of time, it posits first of all the problem of re-commencement: where does writing begin? Where is it established so that historiography can exist? (p. 90)
The question is the same for theology: where does writing begin? In a tradition? In a present context? In a set of citations? In a semiotic system? In time? In death? The complexity displayed by de Certeau in observing the critical importance of the ambiguity of the time of beginnings, of the time of the origin of the writing of history, is instructive when the focus becomes the practice of theology, the writing of theology. Many of the same dynamics that are revealed by the historiographical awareness in historical writing – the will for meaning, desire, the inversions of past and present, semanticization and selection, a vector toward intelligible normativity – these all have their analogous place in the practice of theology. De Certeau’s response to the question where the writing begins is typically shown in the interaction between the context and structures of the present, the temporality and structures of narrative, and the elusive issue of identifying a “beginning”, the beginning of a period, the beginning of an era, the beginning of a war, the beginning of history and time. And de Certeau labels this beginning “nothing”:
By allowing the present to be ‘situated’ in time and, finally, to be symbolized, narrative posits it within a necessary relation to a ‘beginning’ which is nothing, or which serves merely as a limit. The anchoring of the narrative conveys everywhere a tacit relation to something which cannot have a place in history – an originary non-place – without which, however, there would be no historiography. (de Certeau, pp. 90-91)
For the writing of history, historiography discloses “a will for which temporalization provides a frame”. (de Certeau, p. 92) Theography, I think, discloses a will for which god provides a frame. And like the complexity – the inversions, the selections, the masking – that de Certeau discloses in the reflections on historiography, I would suggest a parallel play of confusing, conflicting, exhilarating elements need to be taken into account in the complexity of the frame, god. Theography is constituted in the recognition of the boundaries of human thinking, of desires, of assumptions, of what is clearly seen and what is clearly masked in the locations of our present thinking. Theography, like historiography, must identify the passages from the multiple human desires – for meaning, for security, for power, for acceptance, for forgiveness, for a future – to the capacities and constraints of writing these desires in ever new ways, never stable, and always in question (like history). Temporality, to my mind, plays a key role in this, especially a difference between the temporality of existence and the temporality of happening. The elusive beginning of the writing of history does not exist; it is nothing, but a special kind of nothing, generative nothing, that energizes the will to meaning and the laws of narrative temporality. At least one of the sources of the beginning of the writing of history is “nothing”, a non-existent, but that does not stop the writing of history. History, like time, happens rather than exists. And it continues to happen in a way that seems uniquely captured by narrative. Theography, I think, similarly challenges theology to think of the frame of god, not as existing, but as happening, as consistently emerging, sometimes in the writings of traditions, sometimes in the practices of science, sometimes in acts of love or hate, but always within human practices. In this way, theography dares theology to be something else than a discourse of traditions, convictions, silences, securities. It instructs theology to explore the axiom that god is “no-thing”, but a “no-thing” that emerges in the mirror of human capacities, much like history for de Certeau emerges at the intersection of the present, of an absence and the narrative struggle that is never adequate to the intersection.
The words of Nancy Ellen Abrams capture some of my sense of a theographical awareness, and, I would venture, might not be far away from de Certeau’s sense of what we might be looking for in a framing of human capacities by god.
Humans didn’t create god like a car, but God emerges with the human, so it says something about what it means to be human […]. When you really come down to it, what makes us distinctive is that we humans change and grow not just because we have to in order to adapt to external conditions, but because we aspire to something more […] Aspirations are not the same as desires, like food, sex and security. Every animal has these desires from instinct alone. Aspirations reach beyond survival needs, to something that shapes each of us into an individual […] We humans are the aspiring species. (Abrams, pp. 48-49)
She goes on:
To be worthy of the name, the emerging God still has to do for us the essential things the divine has always done. Give us hope and confidence and a big new perspective. Nurture our aspirations. Open our minds and hearts so we can feel our deep ties to each other, to other living creatures, to the planet we share, and perhaps some special place on it, and to the future. Inspire our personal quest for meaning and bravery in an often-frightening world. Give us common ground. Less than that is not worthy of being called God. More than that is not necessary. (Abrams, p.58)
My sense is that a god frame of human capacities made present in the practice of theological writing less than what Abram’s describes is not worthy of being called god, and more than this is not necessary. Such a matrix-like god frame, I would argue, is the indispensable and elusive place from which the writing of theology begins.
The following texts were cited:
Abrams, Nancy Ellen, A God That Could Be Real: Spirituality, Science and The Future of Our Planet. Boston: Beacon Press, 2015.
De Certeau, Michel. The Writing of History, trans. By Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
[1] Professor for Christian Thought and Spiritual Practice at the Pontifical Atheneum of Saint Anselm in Rome.
Photocredits: (C) Metropolitan Museum of Art
RaT-Blog Nr. 01/2026