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Building on Erich Przywara’s reception of Augustine in the previous chapter, this chapter explicates Przywara’s own use of rhythm in arguing for the doctrine of the analogy of being. Przywara uses rhythm to describe a doctrine of analogy that is not observed at a remove but glimpsed through movements in which the human creature is always already embedded. After parsing out the intersections between these various movements, the chapter argues that Przywara’s use of rhythm includes both synchronic and diachronic perspectives and, therefore, also includes movements of both harmonization and interruption. While both are operative, Przywara methodologically privileges the diachronic, intra-creaturely perspective, thereby proposing a doctrine of analogy that does not succumb to the critiques typically made of other articulations of the doctrine, as well as imagining a new approach to the practice of theology more generally.

In contrast to the previous two chapters, which theologically engage rhythm in continental philosophy, this chapter examines Augustine’s explicitly theological approach to rhythm and its various receptions. The chapter uses Przywara’s scheme of intra-creaturely and theological analogies to frame Augustine’s treatment of rhythm in chapter six of De Musica. While Agamben represents an intra-creaturely perspective, Augustine represents a theological perspective. The degree to which this synchronic, theological view, which envisions rhythm as that which binds metaphysical layers of reality together allowing for communication between them, is problematic depends on the degree to which it is uncoupled from an intra-creaturely perspective like that of Agamben. Proponents of Radical Orthodoxy who propose an Augustinian musical ontology represent such an uncoupling, leading to a total order that betrays creatureliness. Erich Przywara’s interpretation, in contrast, retains the tension in Augustine between both the theological perspective on reality as harmonious and the intra-creaturely experience of interruption.

Chapter 2 builds upon the constructive account of an ecumenical approach to Kierkegaard’s writings, to assess briefly the wider Catholic reception. It surveys the Catholic reception of Kierkegaard’s writings across the German-, French-, and English-speaking world to argue that there is significant engagement in the twentieth century, which coincides with the beginnings of theological renewal in Catholic theology and the dissemination and translation of Kierkegaard’s writings in Europe. Major figures involved in the Kierkegaard Renaissance in Europe are treated, including: Theodor Haecker, Romano Guardini, Erich Przywara, Erik Peterson, Jean Daniélou, Yves Congar, James Collins, and Louis Dupré.

The chapter serves both as a brief biography of Balthasar and a protracted bibliography of his work. The consideration of Balthasar's monumental opus (The Glory of the Lord, Theo‐drama, and Theo‐logic) provides a critical “system” in which to read texts and begins to illustrate Balthasar's unique contribution to current discussions about the intersection between theology, history, philosophy, and narrative art. The chapter demonstrates that not only is Balthasar one of the most important Catholic theologians of the twentieth century, but also his work has practical contributions to make to discourses in critical theory. Like critical theory, Balthasar's work is theological, literary, anthropological, philosophical, psychological, political, and historical, which are critical theory's main components. In the spirit of the ressourcement theology that shaped him, Balthasar is primarily interested in renewing attention to older sources in order to critique the idealistic excesses of modernity. In this sense, Balthasar reveals a postmodern temperament: he too is concerned with issues of language and difference, with aporia, with plurality, with surplus, and with horizons of meaning, to name a few. The difference between Balthasar and the majority of critical theorists resides in ontological and theological orientation: it is therefore a difference of imagination and of grammar. The chapter elaborates on these and other dynamic relationships.

This chapter examines (anti)metaphysical philosophies, primarily those of Gilles Deleuze, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger, which, following Emile Benveniste’s definition, use rhythm as a way to describe reality as a fluid and improvised whole. Rhythm is called on to mediate the challenge of differentiation, and even strife, as immanently generative of a harmonious whole. These thinkers adopt a synchronic perspective on rhythm as a fluid form that comes to stand in for the whole of reality, thereby mediating between differentiation and unity. The chapter then considers two different theological responses to this approach, one affirmative—that of Catherine Keller—and one critical—that of Erich Przywara—and concludes that a Benvenistian, synchronic approach to rhythm is insufficient to the requirements of Christian theology and human experience.

This chapter examines an alternative approach to rhythm within continental philosophy, represented by Giorgio Agamben and Julia Kristeva. These thinkers are interested in the role of rhythm in the creation of a non-traditional subjectivity, rather than in reality as a whole. As a result, they view rhythm from within, in relation to the socially-constructed systems that govern everyday life. These concerns enable a more diachronic perspective on rhythm as a feature of human experience, and, moreover, as an interruptive feature to be leveraged in challenging human conceptions and structures. As in the previous chapter, the current chapter then turns to consider both critical theological responses by adherents to Radical Orthodoxy and similarities between Agamben and Kristeva and theologians Erich Przywara and Jean-Luc Marion. These resonances demonstrate the theological significance of Agamben’s approach, in particular, as the openness to interruptive encounter required for creatureliness.

If doctrines of creation are, in part, descriptions of the cultural-natural confluence of rhythms mediating the God–creature relationship at particular times and places, then doctrines of salvation are different prescriptions for how those rhythms ought to be formed. As chapter six, this final chapter considers the role of rhythm in salvation from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. The synchronic concerns the harmonizing and interruptive effects of salvation on the rhythms of creation, gleaned through Erich Przywara and Giorgio Agamben in contrast to alternatives proposed by Robert Jenson and David W. Congdon. The diachronic concerns the relationship between church and world as the concrete, temporal nexus of these movements in which new interruptions and new possibilities for ecclesial harmony continually emerge.