Editor’s note: The prominent Catholic theologian Fr. David Tracy (1939-2025), who was known for his writings on pluralism, religious diversity, and interreligious dialogue, died on April 29th, at the age of 86. In this essay, aspects of his thought are considered and critiqued.
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The great philosophical theologian, Fr. David Tracy (1939-2025), in the 1987 book Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (University of Chicago Press) considers the matter of religious diversity. Tracy distinguishes the fact of religious plurality from a possible response to that fact, namely, as Tracy calls it, “pluralism—more accurately, a pluralistic attitude.” He adds, “It is an attitude I fundamentally trust.”
Is Tracy a religious relativist? Are all religions in some sense equally true? According to the 2000 document, Dominus Iesus, “relativistic theories . . . seek to justify religious pluralism, not only de facto but also de iure (or in principle).” (§4)
In response, on the one hand, Tracy takes religious pluralism seriously by arguing that the “plurality among the religions is not reducible to claims that they all bespeak the same enlightenment or practice the same way of liberation.” He argues that it is implausible to think that ultimately all religions are finally one. In other words, “there is no single essence, no one content of enlightenment or revelation, no one way of emancipation or liberation, to be found in all that plurality.”
In this connection, Tracy differentiates in what has now become typical between what he calls “Ultimate Reality itself,” reality as it is in itself, and the different ways of talking about that reality: “God, Emptiness, Suchness, the One, Nature, the Many,” even “grace-ful,” as Tracy refers to that reality. Is there one God or more? I surmise that the Trinity and the Incarnation is just a different way of talking about “Ultimate Reality.”
The Real and relativism
The central problem with this familiar approach to “Ultimate Reality” derives from insisting that this “Ultimate” transcends all concepts, personal or nonpersonal conceptions. If so, then it cannot explain religious diversity; it cannot be causally responsible for the religious experiences of the different religions, and, most significantly, since there is no will of God, says then Cardinal Ratzinger, “neither, then, is there any ultimate distinction between good and evil.”
Ratzinger discusses, in this connection, the philosophical views of the late British theologian John Hick (1922–2012) whose starting point in reflecting on religious diversity is the Kantian distinction between phenomenon and noumenon, that is, the world as it appears to us and the Real in itself. In short, says Hick, “our awareness of the Transcendent is . . . necessarily mediated to us through our own conceptual apparatus.” As Ratzinger describes this distinction: “We can never know ultimate reality in itself but only ever its appearance in the way we perceive things, seeing it through various ‘lenses’.”
Furthermore, Hick seeks to hold a monotheism that still recognizes religious diversity such that ultimate reality, what he calls the Real in itself, is present in world religions. He distinguishes religious pluralism, as he thinks of it, from relativism. In other words, for Hick, this ultimate reality, which is the ontological basis for religion, is “present to all forms of existence as the ground of their ever-changing being.”
But this means, as Hick himself affirms, that “the Real in itself ‘cannot be said to be one or many, person or thing, substance or process, good or evil, purposive or non-purposive’.” In fact, Hick addresses the question as to “why we should ‘use the term “Real” in the singular’” since “‘the Real’. . . cannot literally be numbered.”
Anglican philosophical theologian Roger Trigg’s critique of Hick’s view dovetails with that of Ratzinger’s. It is also a critique of David Tracy’s view of religious pluralism:
Nothing could illustrate better the collapse of Hick’s realism and monotheism into vacuity. The pluralism that aims at a total inaccessible reality will collapse into something surprisingly like relativism. A monotheism that cannot even proclaim the oneness of God immediately contradicts itself. The admission that we cannot even be sure that the universe contains purpose or is ultimately good, let alone that the root of all things is personal, undermines the foundations of monotheism.
On the other hand, Tracy does not argue that a pluralistic attitude means “anything goes.” We need to demonstrate a “responsible pluralistic attitude,” and there are criteria of assessment for a judgment of relative adequacy other than the openness to new religious possibilities. He states, “There must be criteria to assess the coherence or incoherence of any possibility with what we otherwise know or, more likely, believe to be the case.” This implies that some religious interpretations are better or worse. This demand for criteria of assessment distinguishes Tracy from being a pure religious relativist. He states that “any good pluralist should always be able to discuss the differences between good, bad, and downright awful interpretations.” In sum, “all we can hope for is some relatively adequate interpretation,” which is a reasonable interpretation.
This requires interreligious dialogue that is meaning- and truth-oriented. In that dialogue, we find analogies between the religions, for example, between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam regarding a theology of creation. This dialogue involves the “plurality of interpretations of religion” as well as “resulting conflict of interpretations.” Again, the “great pluralists of religion are those who so affirm plurality that they fundamentally trust it, yet do not shirk their responsibility to develop criteria of assessment for each judgment of relative adequacy.” At the root of the varying interpretations is a “fundamental trust in, and loyalty to, the Ultimate Reality disclosed . . . in one’s own religious tradition.”
But this reality seems inaccessible, as I argued above.
Missing in this dialogue is, then, the question of competing truth claims between the religions; they are explicitly at odds with each other. The fundamental concepts of truth, rationality, and objectivity, as well as reality and reference, are necessary to account for the justification of religious beliefs. The Catholic philosophical tradition affirms a cognitive and ontological realism. The former means that reality is knowable, while the latter means, in the words of Roger Trigg, “true theories are true in virtue of the nature of objective reality. Truth has its source in reality.”
The notion of truth here is a realist one. Realism about truth holds that a proposition is true if and only if what the proposition asserts is in fact the case about objective reality. Otherwise, it is false. The philosopher-Pope John Paul II is also a philosophical realist regarding a philosophy of knowledge that is a scripturally directed epistemology, one that can be of service to the Gospel, orthodoxy, and theology. It must affirm the “human capacity to know the truth”—that is, “to come to a knowledge which can reach objective truth by means of the correspondence between thing and intellect (adaequatio rei et intellectus).” (Fides et Ratio, §82)
Reality or “Reality”?
Against this background, we should understand the point raised by the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.
To say that the other religious traditions include elements of grace does not imply that everything in them is the result of grace. For sin has been at work in the world, and so religious traditions, notwithstanding their positive values, reflect the limitations of the human spirit, sometimes inclined to choose evil. An open and positive approach to other religious traditions cannot overlook the contradictions which may exist between them and Christian revelation. It must, where necessary, recognize that there is incompatibility between some fundamental elements of the Christian religion and some aspects of such traditions.
Given Tracy’s emphasis on criteria of assessment, does he hold that our best interpretation of “Ultimate Reality” tells us the truth about that reality? Definitely not, given his distinction between “Ultimate Reality” and ways of construing that reality. We certainly must consider the claims to meaning and truth of the different religions. Consider the committed Christian who justifies the beliefs he holds to be true in light of the authoritative sources of the faith, or what Tracy calls the “religious classic” of that tradition. This justification involves the retrieval of the meaning and truth of those sources, critique of my present self-understanding in order to address properly the questions raised against orthodox Christianity—say, against conjugal marriage and for “same-sex marriage”—and resistance to any interpretation as the final one. And interpretation is never free from “finitude, contingency, and faults.”
In this view, do the assertions of the Nicene Creed disclose the meaning and truth of reality? Is Tracy a religious realist? No, he holds that divine truth is elusive and inexpressible (see Dominus Iesus §4). This position puts objective reality and hence the truth about that reality at risk because Tracy limits what is real to what is real for human beings; in other words, treating reality, as Trigg states, to be “totally irrelevant to questions of truth.” Tracy explains:
Reality is what we name our best interpretation. Reality is constituted, not created or simply found, through the interpretations that have earned the right to be called relatively adequate or true. . . . Reality is neither out there nor in here. Reality is constituted by the interaction between a text, whether book or world, and a questioning interpreter. The interaction called questioning can produce warranted assertions through relevant evidence.
Tracy adds, “‘Reality’ is the one word that should always appear within quotation marks.” Why would he put the term in such quotes? Because he seeks to distance himself from what the term ordinarily means. Thus, warranted assertions do not give actual access to reality, and so we cannot know the truth about reality, say, the definitive and complete character of the revelation of Jesus Christ. Tracy fails to distinguish the conditions under which we know that something is true from the conditions that make it true. My knowing that something is true is not what makes it true; objective reality does that.
John Paul II disagrees with Tracy’s anti-realism. He writes:
The interpretation of this word [that is, the Word of God] cannot merely keep referring us to one interpretation after another, without ever leading us to a statement which is simply true.” (Fides et Ratio §84)
As then-Cardinal Ratzinger comments on this passage from Fides et Ratio and the hermeneutical position that Tracy seems to endorse: “Man is not trapped in a hall of mirrors of interpretations; he can and must look for the way out to the reality that stands behind the words and manifests itself to him in and through the words.” In sum, pace Tracy, we can know the truth about reality.
The content of the concepts informing the propositions that God is Triune, and that the Second Person of the Trinity is God Incarnate, is meaning invariant, is fixed and hence determinate, having a dogmatic conceptual hard core, and that meaning does not change precisely because it is true to reality, to an objective state of affairs. This position is consistent with Vatican I and II, the 1973 CDF document Mysterium Ecclesiae, the International Theological Commission 1989 document The Interpretation of Dogma, and John Paul II’s 1998 Fides et Ratio.
Without that contact with reality, dogmatic relativism is unavoidable.
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As Dr Echeveria articulates Fr David Tracy, his [Tracy’s] religious pluralism is dogmatic relativism. Truth, in its essence established in God, his existence the only true, absolute truth – is by its nature intellectually apprehended as a simple equation, this is true. As it occurs when the intellect apprehends subject and predicate in a singular act.
Otherwise, that is, to reason otherwise as if it were to speculate on possibles as if from a transparent optical prism our understanding of truth diffuses into variables. For religion, religious pluralism becomes reality here synonymous with truth. Aquinas would correct this in his definition of certitude which occurs as said above when subject and predicate are apprehended in a singular act of knowing, this the definition of apprehending first principles. We may infer from the first principle to further knowledge but never to the diminution of that first principle.
That is why the intellect’s apprehension of the Trinity is first of all a revealed truth, an absolute first principle that is assented to by faith from which the human intellect cannot infer otherwise than what is revealed. As is the case with the only true worship, religion, revealed by Jesus of Nazareth the Son of God.
From the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, we read: “It must, where necessary, recognize that there is incompatibility between some fundamental elements of the Christian religion and some aspects of [other] traditions.”
The core difference is that the Triune and Christian religion is FAITH–in the “person” of the incarnate and historical Jesus Christ; while the other religions are essentially mixed BELIEFS in true and false “ideas” about God.
And, since Echiverria’s fine critique mentions Islam, might we jump out of the theological silo and appeal to the reality–or not?–of history? The historical origin of Islam is that of a venerated folk hero who does arrive at a distinct monotheism, but largely by a process of subtraction. Allah is the surviving residue of an earlier pagan and multiple deity consisting of Allah, his wife (Al-hat), and three daughters (Allat, Menah, and Al Uzza). Found in the so-called “satanic verses” in the Qur’an.
Small wonder that Muslims regard the supposed Triune God of Christianity as a polytheistic regression from the Islamic original unity of a severely monolithic, inscrutable and even deterministic God–the infidel Trinity consisting of the Father, the Son, and Mary (!). There is no Holy Spirit. Instead: “How can He have a son as He has no consort?” (Qur’an 6:101/102)? Consort? The Trinity is viewed through a residual pagan lens surviving into the collage-like and even pluralistic Qur’an…with its selected elements plundered from the Jewish Pentateuch, the Christian New Testament, residual paganism (the continued pilgrimage to a sanitized Ka’ba in Mecca, a partly restricted access to polygamy), all coalesced around Muhammad’s subjective biography and intertribal history.
SUMMARY: The symmetrical interreligious comparison with Islam (etc.) is not between the two scriptures, but rather between the “incarnate” person of Jesus Christ (“the Word made flesh”) and the divinely “dictated” Qur’an (“the word made book”). And, the pluralistically circular Fr. David Tracy remains in the dark because his head is “where the sun don’t shine”: the penultimate reality.
In the interest of possible intercultural DIALOGUE toward international “peace,” we might consider the self-understanding of Islam, from the cited source: “Islam adopts a positive view of human nature, insisting that the original human condition (‘fitrah’) is good and ‘muslim’ in character. There is no conception of original sin…”.
The CONTACT POINT for interreligious and intercultural dialogue—(and all political conflicts are ultimately theological in origin)—might be to see Islam as equivalent to Rousseau’s man-in-the-mythical-state-of-nature (Western fitrah!)…But, then, with cosmic peace and harmony imposed from above and communally by submission to the divinely dictated “Qur’an.” Rather than enforced by civil membership under Rousseau’s humanly constructed “Social Contract”?
About the larger REALITY of both nature and gratuitous grace, St. John Paul II offered this about Islam (as well as to counterpoised secular rationalism in the West):
“Whoever knows the Old and New Testaments, and then reads the Koran, clearly sees the process by which it completely reduces Divine Revelation. It is impossible not to note the movement away from what God said about Himself, first in the Old Testament through the Prophets, and then finally in the New Testament through His Son. In Islam all the richness of God’s self-revelation, which constitutes the heritage of the Old and New Testaments, has definitely been set aside . . . . Some of the most beautiful names in the human language are given to the God of the Koran, but He is ultimately a God outside of the world, a God who in only Majesty, never Emmanuel, God-with-us. Islam is not a religion of REDEMPTION. There is no room for the CROSS and RESURRECTION. Jesus is mentioned, but only as a prophet who prepares for the last prophet, Mohammed. There is also mention of Mary, His Virgin Mother, but the tragedy of redemption is completely absent. For this reason not only the theology but also the anthropology [!] of Islam is very distant from Christianity” (“Crossing the Threshold of Hope,” 1994, pp. 92-93, CAPS added).
SUMMARY: In the 21st Century, and with regard to both Islamic regimes and the secularist West, the perennial Catholic Church might yet serve as a mediator, if it can now transcend the fragmented incrementalism of its own “provisional agreement” with the Chinese regime.
Fr. David Tracy remains in the dark because his head is “where the sun don’t shine”
I’m glad such an articulate scholar of the faith like you said what I was thinking, so I didn’t have to say it.
Philosophy- the futility of a cat chasing its tail. Neither man nor cat reach their end; and both end up more exhausted than when they began. But both do it just because they can! 🤭
Philosophy, the love of wisdom is for men who acknowledge their creation in God’s image, whereas futility is the fare of men who think with the perspicacity of cats.
About “creation” and the “perspicacity of cats” and such, in one of his more reflective moments some dead white dude named Charles Darwin said this: ““I feel most deeply that this whole question of Creation is too profound for human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton!”
Yes. And insofar as Darwin choosing dogs instead of cats for possible insight into Newton, while dogs appear to be more intelligent than cats, cats unpredictable, elusive experts at guile and seduction are suspect of disguising their brilliance. T S Eliot hinted at this in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.
Br. Jacques, it would not be right to put philosophy in a purely negative or suspect light or as permanently deficient. The Magi give proof of how precious philosophy is, even merely through only one of its branches. And while “the love of wisdom” admittedly would on its own always have its limitations, the good philosophy is the first to admit this.
Philosophy is also most useful in the indubitable and irrefutable Thomist way; or according to St. Francis of Assisi, as like to, the way of water.
So many people out there and still to arrive, give it a bad name or a bad rap.
Robert Heinlein has the image of a cat that passes through walls which image he uses to name one of his fiction works; in which he explains that the cat, named Pixel, is too young to know how impossible that action is. The animal also has the knack to be wherever the narrator is at every turn, corroborating the mess of ideas and purpose of rationalizations at work in the particular book.
On the weekend I saw the movie Nothing but the Truth with Bekinsale, Alda and Dillon. One of the critics of this movie later asked, what is the point of the movie. It lacks reasoned sense since it would have been nothing to reveal that the information came through the innocent revelations of a child. The purported heroine Armstrong aggressively pursued the lead via another source who eventually provides a waiver; but she holds out on telling her “real” source. And it gets the main CIA agent killed, begging the question of what the merit was in exposing her in the press.
Well, if we put no thought, or too little, into something, it will show.
‘ Sam Adams of the Los Angeles Times criticized the film for its approach to the subject matter, stating that it was “pasted together like a ransom note,” and questioned what the film was ultimately trying to say. ‘
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_but_the_Truth_(2008_American_film)
Tracy must have been “great” if the New York Times lauded him. I thought he had died years ago, and I had forgotten that he was a priest. A true martyr for contraception and devotee of the Nazi Heidegger, he was a modern man, a true forwardist. (Acts 2:40)
Islam gets very uptight about 1. God being anything other than “a singularity” and about 2. God “condescending to become man”.
The singularity constrains Islam from “turning to other deities” and from polytheism; this is a “divine protection” and is therefore against any other “conception” of God including Trinity. Implicit in this is a claim that God preserved Hebraic religion purely for Mohammed’s sake and for religion to attain perfection on this one mere man.
The never condescending to become man is a curious composite. This is held to as an abhorrent idea both to God and man as well as a uselessness to God anyway.
It is also a phantom for man since in the order of creation, man is made to appreciate God according to the natural happiness for which God made man. There is nothing further for man and man’s appreciation, after what is given in Islam.
But in addition, it amounts to an idolatry since it would mean worship due to a man if God became man.
It too derogates from the singularity. It can be noticed meanwhile that it simultaneously denies God’s omnipotence and can’t recognize the defectiveness of “singularity”.
The two precepts relate systematical self-containing restriction asserting to be highest theology.
Islam means “submission” to that, a submission encapsulating this sense that there is only one God so that it is to him alone that the submission is owed and in this alone that submission is true.
This is held to as greatest fact that was to be established for man; presented “faithfully” via Mohammed, professing as God’s most important and most illustrious prophet and the last of prophets, in view of the culminations reached.
Since God “always promised to provide for Ishmael”, God used Islam to round out “the people of the book” and show who got the superiority.
Christians “misled themselves away from prophet Jesus” in a misunderstanding, concocting the New Testament, God-Man and Atonement; and the Jews were made humbled ultimately dependent on God’s preference for the Ishmaelite line.
Supposedly consistent with the feelings in Abraham’s breast initiated thus in his first fatherhood.