When the Divinity School at the University of Chicago decided in 1968 to add the first Catholic priests to its very Protestant faculty, they fastened on two young professors at the Catholic University of America: David Tracy and Bernard McGinn. At the priests’ request, their job interview took place at a Georgetown bar. But it almost never happened because the interviewer kept looking for two men in clerical garb. Finally, the bartender pointed to a table where Tracy and McGinn, dressed in trousers and sport coats, were quietly nursing their drinks. “There’s your priests,” he said.
Only thirty-one years old at the time, Tracy immediately found himself teaching alongside world-class scholars like Paul Ricœur, Mircea Eliade, Paul Tillich, and Wendy Doniger. But long before his death on April 29 at the age of eighty-six, Tracy’s own body of scholarship had won him worldwide recognition and influence. In addition to his teaching and books, he served on the editorial boards of eight scholarly publications. He was one of the very few Catholic priests elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1999 he was chosen to give the prestigious Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh University in Scotland.
With its Great Books curriculum and emphasis on interdisciplinary study, the University of Chicago was a perfect fit for Tracy. He was also well prepared. The priests at his high-school seminary in New York City provided a strong foundation in Greek and Latin classics. Among his classmates there were future scholars like John Meier, Joseph Komonchak, and McGinn, who is now regarded as the foremost historian of Christian mystics and mysticism. At the Gregorian University in Rome, Tracy earned his doctorate under the renowned Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan, whose hermeneutics influenced Tracy's own interpretive methodology.
In his first book, Blessed Rage for Order (the title is from a poem by one of his favorite poets, Wallace Stevens), Tracy welcomed the inherently pluralistic nature of religion in the modern world and laid out his own method of inquiry into “meaning, meaningfulness and truth,” on which all theologies rest. The book may have been a slog for the average reader, but in retrospect it was Tracy laying the groundwork for the other books he would go on to write. Over time, he became famous for his discursive footnotes: like Russian nesting dolls, they sometimes contained footnotes of their own.
At the university, Tracy taught a variety of subjects in several disciplines. He taught Greek tragedy and Shakespeare with the poet Richard Greene, another course on Stevens and Emily Dickinson with the poet Mark Strand, and American Religion with historian Martin Marty. At the Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, he taught alongside an impressive array of professors, including the novelist Saul Bellow, the Polish historian and philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, and the classicist Allan Bloom. David was the only theologian invited to serve on the university’s highly selective Committee on the Analysis of Ideas and Methods.
The impact of this intellectual and institutional variety found expression in Tracy’s second major book, The Analogical Imagination. In it, he defended the “public” character and relevance of theology, based in part on three “limit experiences” all human beings face: nothing lasts forever (transience); we cannot control what may happen to us (contingency); and we must die (mortality). Tracy then identified three different “publics” that, in different ways, theologians should address their work: the Church, as a body of believers; the academy, as a community of scholars; and society in its political, cultural, and “techno-economic” realms. For example, the emergence of liberation theology developed as a practical response to a lack of social and economic justice in Latin American societies.
Much of Tracy’s own work was, understandably, directed toward the academy. His frequent conversation partners included European philosophers like Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. But his most substantive work was directed at “the church,” a term inclusive of all Christian religious communities.
An important early contribution was his radical reworking of the very idea of religious traditions by introducing his theory of “the classics”—the basic elements of a tradition that disclose transcendent truths. Every tradition, he argued, is shaped by founders (Abraham, Jesus, the Buddha, the Prophet Muhammad); events (the Exodus, the Crucifixion); and texts (the Bible, the Qur’an) that are so rich in meaning that they can never be exhausted by reinterpretation. On the contrary, the classics of religion live by reinterpretation, commanding the attention of subsequent generations and setting standards by which adherents judge themselves and their times.
For Christians, Tracy wrote, the source of all subsequent traditions is “God’s definitive self-manifestation in the person of Jesus Christ, as witnessed by the New Testament.” But even the New Testament, he noted, contains diverse interpretations of Jesus by St. Paul and the four gospels. Christian tradition also includes as classics secondary texts such as Augustine’s Confessions and Calvin’s Institutes; symbols like the cross; rituals like the Mass; and works of art like Dante’s Divine Comedy, Michaelangelo’s Pietà, and Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.
Tracy’s emphasis on the classics had a number of implications. The most important was the transfer of theological focus from abstract formal doctrines that demand assent to texts and practices that solicit understanding. Tracy also recognized that artistic and cultural forms are potential sources of theological insight. Finally, he illuminated the way that events like the Holocaust—as opposed to theoretical moral claims—disclose the reality of transcendent evil, demanding theological analysis and moral response. Like Cardinal John Henry Newman, whose books he constantly reread, Tracy was more than a theologian. He was that rarer and more comprehensive figure: a Christian humanist.
Tracy’s vast erudition awed his students, but it was his humility and little acts of kindness that many of them remembered last week at his funeral. He rarely wore clerical garb—in fact, he rarely wore coats and trousers that seemed meant for each other—but he always exhibited the self-disregard of a good priest. He often said Mass for Catholic students, giving homilies that sparkled with polish and wit. Among friends, and especially around the dinner table, he exhibited what the Romans called “hilaritas”—an almost giddy joyfulness in good conversation that issued, I’ve always felt, from his sheer love of learning and the deep pleasure it brought.
For all his interest in music and the theater, Tracy acknowledged that theologians like himself remain “largely a word-oriented bunch.” That much could be deduced from the thousands of books that covered his living-room walls and adjacent hallways, and filled up the nether parts of his house. It became evident, too, during a ten-day trip to China we both took in 1981 as part of delegation of Catholic college and university presidents. When, on the last day, we finally arrived at China’s Great Wall, David bought himself a square fur hat, mounted the wall, surveyed its serpentine length, and posed for a picture. But in fifteen minutes he was back in the museum store reading a book he’d bought on the Great Wall of China. Somehow the wall wasn’t real enough to him until he could read about it.
After delivering the Gifford lectures, Tracy began framing his “big book”: a three-volume sequence on God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit. Years passed and no volumes appeared. There were two reasons for that. First, as he explained in a 2019 Commonweal interview, he had hit upon that idea of “the infinite” as the primary name of God, ahead of previous names like being itself and the ultimate good. That required rethinking his project, figuring out how to move from the infinite as a mathematical, scientific, and philosophical concept, to the God who is infinite love, and from there to the persons of the Trinity. The second reason was his health, which was never robust. A stroke a few years ago and diabetes were part of a medley of afflictions that he had to fight through—and that kept him home-bound and mostly out of communication during the final year of his life.
What his friends did know was this: David had long been absorbed by the sheer ineffability of God, and by the absolute need to speak of God nonetheless. May he rest in that peace that surpasses all understanding.
