Saying and Praying: Christian Holiness and the Practice of Theology

Abstract

St. Evagrius Ponticus declared, "If you are a theologian, you will pray truly. And if you pray truly, you will be a theologian." 1 This maxim seems to equate the theologian's knowledge with the knowledge embodied in the saint, which is to say, in a life transfigured by divine charity in works of mercy, fasting, and contemplation. But such a statement surely raises more questions than it answers. For instance, is saintliness a reliable marker of articulate theological knowledge? Or should we doubt or dismiss non-Christian engagements in theology? Christian thinkers in every generation have been drawn to two specifications of Evagrius's maxim that answer both such questions in the affirmative. The stronger, which I will call the conflation thesis, treats the life of prayer as a necessary and sufficient condition for theologysanctity and sanctity alone fits us for theologizing. Its weaker cousin, which I will call the vestibule thesis, treats the life of prayer merely as a necessary condition for theological practice; even if not all saints can be theologians, all theologians must, at least aspirationally, be saints. The first commends checking one's doctrinal claims by finding some really holy person and asking her what she thinks of them; the second suggests that a Buddhist or an unrepentant adulterer cannot engage in Christian theology. Each of these theses, I will argue, rests on a basic set of confusions about the relationship between the only minimally overlapping cat