Memoria Passionis

Memoria passionis is a central feature of Johann Baptist Metz’s “postidealist theology,” a theology that is founded in practice and knows its own historical embeddedness. For Metz, this doesn’t just involve memory of Christ. For moderns, it’s equally the memory of Auschwitz.

In A Passion For God, he recalls that “the way Auschwitz showed up—or did not show up—in theology” made it “clear to me how high the apathy content in theological idealism is, how incapable it is of taking on historical experiences” (39). Theology cannot turn its back on Auschwitz, pretend it never happened, if it wants to insist on truth in history, on meaning, on a God of history whom we can worship. If theology is not to become an escape from history, “these catastrophes must be remembered with practical and political intent” (40).

Metz is drawing on Benjamin, but Milbank (Theology and Social Theory) claims that he doesn’t follow Benjamin far enough. Benjamin’s “non-forgetting” includes not only the memory of innocent suffering but also memory of “happiness,” or those “fragments of justice and true human life.” On this basis, we can construct “an image of ‘redemption.’” Metz omits this aspect of Benjamin, and thus also fails to move back from Marx to Hegel, as Milbank suggests, insofar as there is “no appeal . . . to Hegelian Sittlichkeit or to a substantive anticipation of the future community” (239). Metz leaves out the memorialization of happiness, and thus fails to provide a foundation for a community gripped by a redemptive counter-memory.

What matters to such communities is “the past saints and holy communities in their lives and modes of their deaths: the provocations which they gave to injustice, and not merely their passive enduring of it.” For Milbank this too is part of the memoria passionis: “Why should one remember Christ, beyond all others, if his provocation were not recognized as supremely great? The memoria passionis has its context in the memory also of Christ’s deeds and words” (239).